Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way

(Apologies for my blog’s disappearance yesterday. For a couple of hours, my server was offline because of a network outage. I did publish a Q&A post before it went out, though, so if you missed it yesterday, just scroll down.)

Last week, on a rainy, rainy day, I was just about to start making the dough for some buns when our electricity went out. Bummer.

This meant that I couldn’t use my stand mixer, but that was ok with me…I’m quite capable of mixing and kneading bread dough by hand. I do it every Sunday when I make bread for communion, actually.

No, the main problem was that I needed to melt some butter and heat some milk, and with no stove and no microwave, I was sort of low on options.

I was planning to make a grilled chicken Caesar salad for dinner that night, so I decided to grill the chicken breasts, since (yay!) the grill operates off of a propane tank.

Then it occurred to me that maybe I could use the heat from the grill to help me heat the milk…

and the butter.

The milk didn’t get quite as warm as it would have on the stove or in the microwave, but it worked just fine, and we had a lovely pan of rolls to go with our salad at dinner (the power came back on before I had to bake them, thankfully. I don’t think my grill would work too well for baking rolls!).

I was actually trying to replicate the buns they serve at Fuddruckers, using a recipe from the internet. The buns were lovely, but they weren’t at all the size or shape of the Fuddruckers buns (not for reasons having anything to do with my unusual heating method!), so I will try again. When I figure it out, I’ll share with you. 😉