A Busy Week

 

   It's been a busy week here on the south fork of the Roseau River. I say that facetiously. With only nine hours of daylight, it's hard to get anything done. I fight the temptation to hibernate. There's a claim that back in pioneer days, grandma and grandpa used to sleep the winter away in a cold bedroom. It seems like a good idea, but it's probably just a story.

   I did have a breakthrough this week in my goal to equal the cinnamon rolls at Nelson's café. For years Teresa and I would meet Teresa's sister Becky and husband Jack at Nelson's café one morning a week before work. It's a clamorous place, filled with many competing conversations, but I put up with it because Larry, one of the owners, made the best cinnamon rolls in the world. I'm serious.

   Larry's rolls were big and tightly wound. I never brought a tape measure, but I'm sure that laid out flat they'd measure well over a foot and a half. They were filled with cinnamon and sugar and had a delicious white frosting that some people scraped off in the delusion that they were somehow staying faithful to their diet.

   After we retired, Teresa and I continued our cinnamon tradition. Jack preferred the caramel rolls, but I stayed faithful to cinnamon. Then Covid hit. Everything shut down. We fought back by making muffins and meeting at the Bead Gypsy, Becky's shop across Main Street from Nelson's Café.  After a while, Nelson's opened for takeout and we were able to order rolls the night before and enjoy them at the little coffee nook in Becky's shop.

   Then a horrible supply chain issue came up: Larry retired. He and his wife Donna finally sold Nelson's. The new owners offered rolls but they weren't in Larry's league; not even close. Plus they raised the price. Unbelievable! I had known this day was coming and had been trying to make cinnamon rolls at home with disappointing results. Now that Larry had downed tools, I got serious about my baking.

   I turned to the Internet for help. There are hundreds of women and a few men with cooking websites. The sites have names like Clarabelle's Little Oven on the Prairie. The hosts are amazingly chirpy. They make good money by allowing ads on their sites; dozens of ads. I felt bad installing an ad blocker, but I could hardly find the recipe in the cacophony of flashing ads. Each cook feels compelled to give a lengthy intro on how fabulous this recipe is and how even their hubby who never eats dessert scarfed down half a pan of these cinnamon rolls.

   Some of the cooks put a link at the top of the page that lets you jump directly to the recipe and skip all the falderal. The websites have dozens of recipes and there's always one for cinnamon rolls. The sites all claim their recipes are super simple. Yes the recipes seem simple and they use ordinary ingredients, but they cannot convey their technique on a website. For that you need YouTube.

   YouTube is another whole world of home cooks, but at least the ads are gathered in one place. The blather problem remains. How can one video devote thirty minutes to making cinnamon rolls and another can do it in five? I watched them all. Then I started baking. I was all over the place. Some batches were better than what replaced Larry's, some were worse. My guinea pigs, Teresa, Becky and Jack were gentle with me. "Dense, but edible" was how one batch was described.

    Failure was as instructive as success. I gradually cobbled together a recipe that worked. One insight I gained was that caramel rolls were just ciannmon rolls turned upside down into a caramel bath. Easy. But I still had trouble getting my rolls rolled tightly. Then I came across an amateurish video of a guy at a Cinnabon preparing a batch of rolls. I think he was somewhere in Quebec. There was no blather at all as he spread on the brown sugar and cinnamon filling then rolled the big sheet of dough into a log which he sliced into rolls. I noticed he stretched the dough away from himself before making each incremental roll towards himself. I watched this part many times.

   I wasn't perfect at the new stretching technique. My dough tore at times, but I'll get it eventually. On Thursday morning at 8:30 I presented a batch of warm rolls at the Bead Gypsy. Jan Carr, my former supervisor at the hospital had just retired and I invited her to stop by for a sugar and carb bomb to start her day. It was thumbs up all around. It felt good, though I knew in my heart I'm still no Larry.

Larry, where art thou?