Sunday Dinner

In one of my classes, one of the students asked the professor why, if Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, do we make our biggest and most complicated meal our Sunday dinner. Isn't that a lot of work to go to for a meal on what is supposed to be a day of rest. The professor agreed that it was a bit much. He also commented that in the Jewish culture, Sabbath begins and sundown the night before and goes until sundown that day. The big meal is eaten for supper after sundown when the Sabbath begins, so the work for the meal would have been done before sundown. He said the leftovers from that meal could be used to eat at lunch time on the Sabbath, so it was easier to keep from unneccessary work. He said that our culture celebrates Sabbath from midnight to midnight and eats the big meal at lunchtime most of the time, so the student was right in saying that there was a bit much unneccessary work going into that meal.

I understand the idea, but I think that they are wrong in saying that Sunday dinner requires a great deal of work to be done on Sunday. Here's how you can do Sunday dinner and do VERY little work on Sunday:

Saturday night:
-Salt, flour, and brown your roast and put it in a roasting pan, dutch oven, or crock pot with some water and carrots if you desire. (A word of warning: Carrots will leach the iron from an iron pot and take on a somewhat unpleasant metallic flavor. They will not hurt you. The extra iron is probably good for you, as most of us have at least some level of iron deficiency, but if carrots stay in that pot for very long at all, they will taste terrible!) Some people like their potatoes in with their roast, and if you do, that's fine, but Arthur likes them seperate, so that's how I do it. Anyways, if you cover the roast and put it in the oven at about 250 degrees F, it will be done by lunchtime tomorrow! The roast is completely taken care of, with the exception of possibly adding a little water to the pan Sunday morning. What's more, slow cooked like that, it comes out wonderfully tender.
-Peel and quarter your potatoes. Put them in a pot of COLD water. This will keep them from turning brown. Salt them, cover them and sit them on the stove. Do not turn the stove on. Just leave them there until tomorrow morning.
-If you have frozen veggies, put them in the fridge to thaw. We usually have corn.
- If you like homemade rolls, you can mix the dough up tonight and put it in the fridge. You can even mix it Thursday or Friday if you wish and have perfectly acceptable dough. I will include my recipe at the end. If you have a nice mixer with a dough hook, you can mix the dough up in about 5 or 10 minutes!
- Go to bed.

Sunday Morning:
-Check your roast and add water if necessary.
-Turn the burner on under your potatoes.
-Pull the roll dough out of the fridge. Punch it down, pinch off roll-sized pieces and put in a greased baking dish or cookie sheet. This should only take a minute or two. Set the dish by the stove and cover it with a towel or greased plastic wrap.
-Get ready for church.
-Turn off the burner under the potatoes before you leave. They should be mostly cooked and can be reheated on the stove after church.

After Church:
-Pull the roast out and put it and any veggies with it on a platter. Set the pot on the stove heat it with water and cornstarch to make gravy.
-Turn the oven temp. up to 400 and put the rolls in for 10 or 12 minutes.
-Put the corn or other veggies from the fridge or a can into a saucepan and put on the stove or warm them in a bowl in the microwave.
-Turn the heat back on under the potatoes, and once they are hot, drain and mash them with butter and milk.
-Pull the rolls out of the oven, put everything on the table and enjoy!

All of the difficult work for a Sunday dinner can be done the night before so that all that is left is to set out and cook the rolls, heat up the veggies, mash the potatoes, stir up some gravy, and set the table! All of that takes less time than it would take you to make hot dogs and mac-n-cheese! I agree it would be a labor intensive meal if you started the roast and peeled the potatoes Sunday morning, but that is entirely unnecessary.

Here is the roll recipe, which I love. It is soooo easy.
Ice Box Rolls:
-Dissolve 1 cake of yeast or 1 package of dry yeast in 2 cups of warm water (not hot enough to burn you but not too cool).
-add 1/2 cup of sugar, 1 1/2 tsp salt, 1 beated egg, and half a cup of flour and mix (About speed 2 on a mixer or just mix by hand).
-Add 4 Tablespoons of vegetable oil or shortening and mix (the oil is MUCH easier to do)
-Add about 5 or 6 more cups of flour. The dough will be fairly sticky, but it should still not be too hard to pick the whole thing up in a ball. Knead this lightly or mix with a mixer and dough hook on speed 2 until the flour is mixed in and the dough forms a ball. Lightly grease a bowl and trasfer the dough. Roll it in the bowl to grease the top then cover with plastic wrap and put in the frige overnight. If I use my mixer, the whole process up to this point will take me less than ten minutes.

The next day or whenever, punch down the dough and make the shape of rolls that you want. I usually just pull the dough off in balls, but it makes nice crescents too if you wish. If I'm just doing balls, this takes me about 2-3 minutes. Let the rolls rise until double (an hour is usually enough if you're in a rush, but I generally let them rise for 2 or 3 hours while I'm at church, and they do just fine). Stick them in the oven at 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes.

The dough will keep in the refrigerator for 5-7 days. I just pinch off as much as I need and put the rest back. It will last us several days. It makes about 40 rolls. I love being able to make my Sunday rolls several days before. I can have fresh hot bread coming out of the oven without having gone to any hassle that day. It's especially nice if you're just two people like we are. A big batch of dough is unreasonable for two people if it needs cooked all at once, but like this, we can have fresh hot rolls everyday of the week if we wish and only have to mix the dough up once. It's also handy to have in the frige if you have company, because you already have plenty of dough ready and don't have to wait for it to rise twice. You can decide an hour before dinner to have company and set out enough rolls for everyone. In case you didn't notice, I like fresh hot bread, and this recipe is nearly foolproof. It's very easy. Having never tried to make yeast rolls, I got very edible results the first try. I got a bit too much flour the first try, but the rolls were still very good. By the second try, I'd figured out to use a little less flour and they were delicious! I've since realized that the reason I needed a little less flour is because I wanted to do crescent rolls and therefore would add flour to the dough when I rolled it out. I still got good results, so I'm convinced there's not much you can do to mess these up! Give this recipe a try and enjoy!