Steak and…Not Rolls

We have in Crested Butte many things that we don’t have in Nashville, majestic mountains, innumerable wildflowers, trout-filled rivers, and highs in the ’70s. Sadly, there are a few things we don’t have that, as a southerner, I take for granted – like Sister Schubert’s dinner rolls. If you are unfamiliar with Sister Schubert’s, and you live east of the Mississippi, I encourage you to go out and buy several pans just to keep in your freezer. I know there are at least three in my freezer in Nashville, which did me no good at all when we had to take a dish to a pick-up lunch at church last Sunday.

Evans and I attend All Saints, a tiny Episcopal church here in Crested Butte. We like to belong to a church family and have made good friends. We are too small to have our own building so the UCC lets us use theirs after their Sunday Service. When we have a priest (which, at present, we do not), we share them with Good Samaritan Episcopal in Gunnison. But, even with a supply priest only once a month, twelve to thirty of us show up most Sundays. Last Sunday was the annual meeting followed by a light “pick-up lunch,” which I guess means no forks. 

Baking at 10,000 feet above sea level is always an iffy proposition, so I ruled out sweets of any kind. I can usually manage a cobbler, but that requires a fork. Cheese biscuits didn’t seem substantial enough for lunch, and I wasn’t sure how Coloradoans would respond to pimento cheese and/or cucumber sandwiches, so we settled on tenderloin with rolls. Evans makes delicious tenderloin. It is always expertly seasoned and cooked to perfection. All I needed was dinner rolls.

I knew it was a longshot, but I looked in three stores for pans of Sister Schubert’s. I was willing to settle for any kind of dinner roll. Nope. King’s Hawaiian now makes a savory roll that is pretty good, but they don’t even sell the regular sweet ones out here. I finally found a couple of bags of frozen dough balls. 

Saturday mid-day, I took the bags of frozen dough out of the freezer, coated them with butter, and put them in two pans to thaw. By dinner time, they weren’t yet soft. I rechecked them when I cleaned up after dinner, and they were thawed but had not begun to “double in size.” Then I sat down to watch the Olympics and promptly forgot about them. 

About ten o’clock, I remembered I needed to bake the rolls. No problem. It was late, but they only had to cook for fifteen to twenty minutes. I went into the kitchen and found the blob that had begun to eat my counter. Each of the seventy-two rolls had quadrupled in size. They had risen past the Saran Wrap, over the edges of the baking dishes, and onto the counter. 

Let me clarify that this is ten pm in Mount Crested Butte. All grocery stores within one hundred miles are closed. (I am not exaggerating.) Salvaging this blob was my only plan. I figured I could maybe cut them apart when they came out of the oven.

Remember how I coated everything with butter? That butter dripped off the part of the dough that was oozing over the pan, straight onto the burners in the oven, creating smoke and setting off all the fire alarms. I turned on fans while Evans raced around dismantling fire alarms because we live in a townhouse with neighbors on both sides. 

The only thing to do with the baked result was to take a picture of it and laugh. We turned it out of the pan as instructed, not that we have wire cooling racks out here. The outside was charred, the middle was quickly deflating, and the edges were doughy. It did smell good. I will give it that. 

On Sunday mornings, Crested Butte has a farmer’s market. The most popular booth is a bakery from Paonia. There is always a line. I was in that line thirty minutes before the market opened. As the line grew behind me, I watched the bakers set up loaves of bread, croissants, pastries, and pies. I didn’t know what I was serving with that tenderloin, but I knew where I was getting it. When I finally got to the front of the line, I explained my debacle to the young man, and he sold me a loaf of herb-olive focaccia and a loaf of onion rosemary sourdough. It wasn’t rolls, but it would have to do.

I raced home, cut the focaccia and sourdough into small squares, and packaged it up on trays.

Once lunch started, I realized I could have set saltines next to Evans’ tenderloin, and no one would have cared. Toward the end of the gathering, one of our fellow parishioners just stood next to the tenderloin, spread dijonnaise on slices, and ate straight from the tray. Ok, that was utterly inappropriate, but it tells you how good the steak was. 

That night for dinner, I salvaged what I could of the roll/loaf/debacle and had my own version of steak and rolls for dinner. It was a long way from Sister Schubert’s, but it wasn’t bad.