Recipe: 30 minute dinner rolls and Crockpot Buffalo Chicken Sliders

Who doesn't like homemade dinner rolls? Fresh out of the oven, warm, with a slab of butter in between. I mean - YUM right?

The problem is they take forever to make. You have to make the dough, let it rest, knead it again, let it rest some more - depending on the recipe the resting could last as long as overnight!

This weekend I was craving buffalo chicken wings, but I didn't want to order from the local American restaurant (Warsaw friends - Bert and I have tried every place for wings during football season. Jeff's is the only place that has decent wings!). I had chicken breasts, dry ranch dressing, and Frank's wing sauce (yes - you CAN get Frank's here at the international store. Sure it's probably $10 bucks for a small container of it - but sometimes, you just gotta pay the money!) and I just knew I could make a decent chicken buffalo slider from that, as long as I had rolls.

Rolls are impossible to come by here in Warsaw. I have yet to find the frozen kind you can just pop into the oven. Convinces like frozen rolls or clothes dryers (don't even get me started on clothes dryers) just don't exist in Europe. So I have to make them myself. So far, in the year that I've lived in Poland, I have attempted dinner rolls 3 times. Once, during football season, when I decided to make sliders. Once during Thanksgiving, and Saturday. Each time I used a different recipe,and each time they turned out incredibly dense except for this last time.

Granted - they weren't perfect. According to my good friend Joy who is a professional pastry chef and all around bad ass expat wife, I was using the wrong type of flour. (You can check out her amazing award winning food/travel blog here: My Traveling Joys). In Poland they categorize their flour based on a number. The amount gluten in the flour dictates the number on the flour. I am not a baker (not much of a carb fan), so I didn't think it really mattered. But it totally does. Here in Poland I need to use a flour that is over 500. Then apparently I will have the fluffiest rolls imaginable!

This recipe is awesome though, because it takes 30 minutes to make them - from start to finish. It is an easy recipe too! Perfect if you decide last minute you want homemade dinner rolls (or in my case - buns for sliders!). Sunday morning I also used them as biscuits (because they were a bit dense from the wrong use of flour) and were AMAZING.


 30-Minute Dinner Rolls

Picture credit: Kitchenmeetsgirl.com

Ingredients

• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons warm water
• 1/3 cup oil
• 2 tablespoons active dry yeast
• 1/4 cup sugar
  
  
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 egg
• 3 1/2 cups flour (either bread flour or all-purpose will work)

 

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. In the bowl of your stand mixer, combine the warm water, oil, yeast, and sugar. Allow the mixture to rest for 15 minutes.
3. Mix 2 cups of the flour, the salt, and the egg into the yeast mixture using a dough hook. Add the remaining 1 1/2 cups flour 1/2 cup at a time.
4. Shape dough into 12 balls and place in a 9x13 pan. Let dough rest for 10 minutes.
5. Bake for 10 minutes or until tops are just golden brown.

Crockpot Buffalo Chicken Sliders

Ingedients:

• 2 chicken breasts
• 1 bottle of franks hot sauce (I used 1/2 a bottle because my husband is not a spicy food fan)
• 1 package of dry ranch mix
• 1/2 stick of butter

Put all ingredients into a crockpot and cook on low for 6 hours. Shred the chicken in the crock pot before serving.

Crock pot Chinese Beef and Broccoli

One of the hardest things about living in Poland is the lack of Chinese food.

Let me rephrase that - One of the hardest things about living in Poland is the lack of good American Chinese food.

You know the type I'm talking about - you order it from your neighborhood Chinese restaurant in mass proportions. It's greasy and delicious and full of MSG but you don't care, because it just hurts SO good. You eat your yearly calorie allotment with just one egg roll because its covered in sweet and sour sauce.

Yeah, THAT kind of chinese food.

                           (As long as it is cheap, fast, and covered in soy sauce no questions shall be asked.)


We don't have that here. What we do have is some kind of weird hybrid between polish and Asian that just doesn't bode well. They have something here called calabash which is a pickled turnip of sort and they put it in almost every Asian dish they can find. It is vile. This is not to be confused with an actual Calabash which is a melon type of plant found in more tropical locations (and their gourds were used as water containers) which I am sure is much more lovely.

To be fair, I'm not even sure if its called Calabash. I'll have to get back to you on that.

Anyway, we don't have good Chinese food here. Which KILLED me, because back home 250% of my daily calories were donated to this type of culinary cuisine.

But have no fear! Pinterest ALWAYS has an answer to what woes you.

With that I give you my first SoCo Deep (it's my street name) approved recipe:

Food.com's 

Crock Pot Beef and Broccoli 

(credit:Ebonyloveandmarriage.net)

Ingredients:
1 lb boneless beef chuck roast, sliced into thin strips
1 cup beef consomme (I can't find that here, so I just used beef broth)
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon sesame oil (Didn't realize I didn't have this. I just used vegetable oil and it turned out great)
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 bunches fresh broccoli florets (I used frozen - takes a little longer to cook in the end, but easy and tasty!)

Directions:
1. Place beef in a crock pot.
2. In a small bowl, combine consomme, soy sauce, brown sugar, oil, and garlic. Pour over beef. Cook on low for 6-8 hours.
3. In a cup, stir cornstarch and 2 tablespoons sauce from the crock pot until smooth. Add to crock pot. Stir well to combine.
4. Add broccoli to the crock pot. Stir to combine.
5. Cover and cook an additional 30 minutes on high (the sauce has to boil for it to thicken).
6. Serve over hot cooked rice.