Dark and Soft Dinner Rolls

Cold winter weather seems to inspire me to tuck into a nice bowl of soup, and nothing goes better with soup than a nice, homemade bread.  My hubby and sons made these rolls to pair with my wonderfully chunky sweet potato soup.  My boys loved helping daddy shape these rolls, and all day long my three year old kept informing me, "We are making rolls and they have Chaaaaaaaaacolate in them."  I hated to break his heart and tell him I didn't think they were what he was thinking.  I was pleasantly surprised thought that there are faint chocolate notes.  This one was adapted from the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking Book.  I am sending this post over to Susan at Wild Yeast for her YeastSpotting event.  Have fun baking!

Dark and Soft Dinner Rolls adapted from King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking Book

Ingredients:

2 1/2 tsp. instant yeast

1 cup lukewarm water

1/3 c. orange juice

4 Tbls. unsalted butter, cut into 6 pieces

1/3 c. honey

9 oz. whole wheat flour

9 1/2 oz. all purpose flour

1 3/4 tsp. salt

3 Tbls. sugar

2 Tbls. Dutch-process cocoa

Directions:

1.  Combine the water and the yeast in a small bowl and set aside.

2.  In a heavy duty stand mixer with a dough hook, combine all remaining ingredients.  Mix together.  Add the water/yeast mixture.  Mix until very smooth.  You will have to scrape down the sides of the bowl.

3.  Cover bowl and allow the dough to rise in a warm place for 1 to 2 hours until not quite doubled.

4.  Gently deflate the dough.  Divide into 10 equal pieces and shape the pieces into 5 inch x 2 inch oval rolls.  Place the rolls on a non-stick baking sheet.  Cover and allow to rise in a warm place for 2 hours.

5.  Towards the end of the rising time, pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees F.

6.  Uncover the rolls and bake them until the bottoms are slightly browned, 25-30 minutes.  Remove the rolls from the oven and cool on a rack.

Weight Loss Weekly

Weight loss weekly is a collaboration between me and three other bloggers where we ask ourselves questions relating to weight loss, and discuss our successes and failures. Join me every Monday to tune into this ongoing collaboration.  This week we are discussing our relationship with the scale.  This topic actually causes me a lot of anxiety and I am tempted to just say, "My relationship with the scale is tenuous at best.  The End.", but I think discussing WHY it is tenuous, will help me in my further weight loss journey, and that is where I will begin.

Before I begin, let me introduce the other three bloggers.  Check out snippets from their posts below.  They are:

Nurit from 1 Family. Friendly. Food

Sunny from That Extra 20 Pounds

Giyen from Bacon is my enemy

I think my relationship with the scale began about eight years ago when I started going to Weight Watcher meetings.  If you have never been to a meeting, each week you go, get weighed in, and then go to the meetings which are on various aspects of nutrition.  The first few months, I did fabulous.  I lost weight every week and the leader would remark, "Oh!  You had a good week!".  After about 4 months though, I hit a plateau.  It was so hard to go week after week and gain and lose the same 2 lbs.  The leader was always supportive, but in my head I would be thinking, "Ugh!  Bad week!"

I got pregnant soon after and went to monthly weigh in's at my obstetrician's office.  I regarded the scale with apathy since one is supposed to gain weight while pregnant.  After my son was born, I still regarded the scale with apathy since I assumed the weight would come off easily with breast feeding.  (It did not)

When my second son was 2, my relationship with the scale started again.  I knew my "baby weight" had not come off.  To top it off, I had a feeling I was slowly gaining weight as my size 18 pants were starting to get a little snug.  I decided to bite the bullet and buy a scale.

What I saw, I intuitively knew, but seeing that number was so disheartening.  "How could I ever lose that much weight?"  I asked myself.  It was during this time that I found the book French Women Don't Get Fat.  In it, the author Mireille Guiliano, recommends only occasional weigh ins as the way your clothes fit and feel make a much sexier approach to gauging weight loss.  While this was appealing, the American in me wanted concrete numbers and so I weighed myself weekly and lost 34 lbs. in about 6 months.  Then, I again hit a plateau.

All of a sudden, my weekly weigh ins weren't as fun anymore.  Of course, it was slightly different now as I could see that I was maintaining my 34 lb. weight loss and that is extremely commendable in my mind.  The weekly weigh in became less about patting myself on the back and more about maintaining peace of mind that I was not letting the weight creep back on.

With the start of Weight Loss Weekly though, I have been paying more attention to my diet, and have broken through my plateau.  I am again losing weight.  I knew intuitively that I was losing weight because my jeans that had become a tad snug over the holidays were suddenly feeling very loose.  Now, I wanted the pat on the back at the weekly weigh in.

This past Friday, I stepped on the scale and had lost two pounds.  I was disappointed.  Crazy huh?  But my clothes had been feeling so loose, I thought I had lost more.  Why did I focus on that instead of celebrating the two pounds lost?  I don't know.  I think for me, the scale distracts from my day to day, meal to meal resolve to eat healthier by reminding me of benchmarks rather than the journey.  I have a harder time finding an equilibrium when I step on the scale after say, a few pieces of pizza, and see I have gained water weight, rather than just realizing I overdid it with the pizza and compensate by eating lighter the next day.  The equilibrium isn't what I focus on achieving when I weigh myself, it's the failure of having the pizza.

To be frank, I don't know what my relationship with the scale is.  I know it does have it's place, but if it distracts me from my goals of eating healthier, perhaps I should take it out of my bathroom and hide it in the closet only to be used once a month?  Maybe never?  Could I give it up?  I'll let you know. 

Weight Loss Weekly appears every Monday on my site.  It is a collaboration between me and three other bloggers struggling to lose weight like me.  Snippets from their Weight Loss Weekly posts as well as links to their blogs are below.  Check them out!  We all discuss the same question so it's interesting to hear different perspectives.  

Joie de vivre's Weight Loss Weekly post from 1/26/09

My fellow Weight Loss Weekly bloggers are Nurit, Sunny and Giyen.  Check out their posts below!

Nurit from 1 family. friendly. food:

"Truth is I don’t have any special relationships with the scale. I don’t love it or hate it. I just don’t use it very often and I pretty much ignore it. I did take it out of the closet and moved it next to my side of the bed, but I rarely use it. Why is that?" Click 1family. friendly. food. to find out.

Giyen from Bacon is My Enemy:

"If bacon is my enemy, the scale is my nemesis." Read more here.

Sunny from That Extra 20 Pounds:

"I must say...I love the scale! Is that weird?"  more at That Extra 20 Pounds

Imagining Avignon

Joan over at Foodalogue has been hosting a wonderful food event titled, "A Culinary Tour Around the World".  Each week, she and participants travel virtually to other countries through the food.  They "meet" people along the way as they dine their way through the country.  Joan started this event not only to satisfy her traveling bug, but to bring awareness to organizations that help fight hunger such as BloggerAid and World Food Programme.  I am so honored that Joan asked me to join their group in France this week.  I had so much fun imagining myself bicycling through southern France and sitting at farmer's tables, that I plan on joining them again.

When Joan and the others caught up with me, I was in a little town in southern France called Avignon.  Avignon has a long history, however, it is probably most famous for the Palais des Papes.  In 1309, Pope Clement V declared Avignon to be the residence of the Papacy instead of Rome.  Seven popes eventually resided in Avignon, however when Gregory XI moved the papacy back to Rome in 1376, a schism occurred in the Catholic church and a small band of cardinals declared a second pope, an antipope, in Avignon.

The Palais des Papes

Today, Avignon is a beautiful town, perfect for wandering through, and a base for exploring Provence.  It was here that I "met" my wonderful guide, a gardener named Michel.  He was the caretaker of a small castle in a little town called Charmes sur l'Herbasse.  It was an hour or so drive to the north, so I settled into his little Peugeot and watched the countryside pass.  The fields of sunflowers and lavender were in bloom (in my imagination, it is always summer) so the time passed quickly and I used it to get to know Michel a little better.  Michel's castle was owned by a rich Parisian couple who spent two weeks in the summer and two weeks in the winter in Charmes sur l'Herbasse.  The rest of the year, Michel and his wife, Aurelie, cared for the castle and it's grounds.

When we arrived at Michel's home, Michel's brother, Benoit, and his family were also there for Sunday lunch.  Benoit gave me a two cheek kiss in greeting and invited me to join a game of petanque.  As he looked like he took it very seriously, and I am not really a sporty type, I politely declined to see what Aurelie was up to in the kitchen.  Aurelie was preparing a simple sandwich called Sardines Grillees Croutes on homemade baguettes.  I found an approximation of her recipe in Rick Stein's French Odyssey.

Grilled Sardine Croutes adapted from Rick Stein's French Odyssey

Serves 3

1 tin sardines, in olive oil

Extra Virgin Olive Oil

3 chunks of baguette

3 romaine lettuce leaves

1-2 nice tomatoes, cut into very thin slices

1 jar roasted red peppers

1 small red onion, very thinly sliced

3 hard boiled eggs, peeled and quartered

6 anchovy fillets, in olive oil

Directions:  

1.  Open the sardine tin.  There should be three small chunks of sardines inside.  Open each chunk up by cutting down the middle.  Put the sardines on a cookie tray and broil for 3 minutes.

2.  Begin assembling sandwiches.

3.  Open up each chunk of baguette.  On the bottom halves of the baguette chunks, lightly drizzle with extra virgin olive oil.  Lay romaine lettuce leaves, tomato slices, red onion slices and roasted red pepper pieces on in that order.  Top with sardines and anchovies.

4.  Serve top half of bread alongside.  Also serve with 4 hard boiled egg quarters.

5.  Eat with a fork and knife.

For dessert, Aurelie unwrapped a chunk of Saint Andre cheese, a triple creme cow's milk cheese, and placed it on a communal tray with some prunes.  We also had Aurelie's freshly made yogurt alongside.

After eating, we toured Aurelie's garden.  She had lots of raised vegetable beds, fruit trees, and even a bee hive from which Michel extracts honey in the fall.  It was a very pleasant day in the sun.  We eventually settled in watching Benoit and Michel play a couple of very serious rounds of petanque while sipping on a nice Burgundy.

All too soon, it was time to head to the big city of Grenoble for my flight out of France.  Joan and her travel buddies are off to Portugal next week.  I had been planning on meeting them in Ethiopia in three weeks, but I had so much fun on this adventure that they may see me before that.  If you are interested in joining Joan and crew yourself for their culinary tour, just click on the Foodalogue badge above.  Until then, A bientot!