Hot Heaven

The craving began when I read one of the staff blogs at the local on-line newspaper site about favorite meals. I've never craved a red bean burrito and would not even think to put it on the list, but my mind happily ran through the leg o'lamb dinner, with mashed potatoes, gravy, broccoli with hollandaise sauce, and mint jelly made from the mint that always grew well around the leaking faucet in the backyard. Or the payday dinner, sirloin steak, broiled medium rare, with baked potatoes loaded with butter and pepper, and just about any veggie fresh from the garden except yellow squash. Or homemade noodles wallowing in beef stroganoff (with mushrooms) with just a touch of sour cream stirred in, a far-too-rare treat best made by my former roomie's mom way back then. I can still taste her stroganoff and the homemade dinner rolls she made from scratch (yeast rolls) and served with a whole cube of butter. Scandinavian heaven!

Liver with onions intruded into my mental meanderings, the one food item that I always refuse. The slimy sight of it makes me nauseous, and the smell of it cooking stimulates my gag reflex. There is a family story associated with liver, onions, and my dinner being tossed off the second floor porch. When I say I won't eat it, I really mean I WON'T EAT LIVER no matter how long someone thinks it'll take to make me change my mind. I also od'd on casseroles during my youth and early marriage, so I try to avoid those whenever possible. Separate the ingredients, put them on plate and I'm fine, but stir 'em together in the same baking dish and it's just repurposed left-overs. Sorry, but there it is. Don't even start with scalloped potatoes and ham. Give me ham and potatoes and I'm there, but do NOT mix them with milk in a baking dish: PLEASE. And no, it does NOT improve the flavor of either the ham or the potatoes to sprinkle bread crumbs and cheese on top before baking: it's disgusting.

Yeah, there are favorite meals to enjoy and others to avoid, but there are also favorite foods, most of which begin with the letter "junk," that I stay away from more often than I indulge, but the seed was planted with the "favorites" blog. I first began the cinnamon roll splurge when the kids were young because the rolls come in the poppin' fresh packaging, and back in the day it was a novelty to pop the tube and bake the rolls. The cinnamon rolls with the orange icing, that is. My kids and I baked up two tubes of the rolls because we enhanced them into sinful by adding finely chopped walnuts and rolling two of the curled cinnamon strips together to make one ginormous hot cinnamon orange goodie. Somehow, it was better to eat just one big roll than several smaller rolls, but the bottom line is that every one of our rolls could be either two or three of the smaller rolls redesigned for devouring, depending on just how frisky we were feeling when the spirit moved us to pop the tubes of dough.

I don't bake during the day as it's too hot to heat the oven, but today I made an exception and enjoyed a huge hot cinnamon and walnut roll topped with orange frosting, along with a fresh cup of coffee and my feet perched on the edge of the coffee table. It doesn't get much better than that ... unless it's knowing that there are still three rolls for the taking and no one else around to beat me to them!