I'd rather be baking bread...

Feed a fever, starve a fool

2006-09-26T16:43:00.000-07:00

I hate the reality of being sick. It's easy to romanticize in my mind - staying home from work, lay on the couch all day, covered in thick, soft blankets, drinking plenty of water and juice, sipping broth from an oversized mug, watching my favorite DVDs. Of course, in my mind, my apartment is clean, not the cluttered and dirty mess I'm wallowing in right now. I would also be able to watch the TV without having to root around behind it to connect the VCR with coax cable. And sickness wouldn't with a side dish of depression. Oh well. At least the broth is good.

I highly recommend that if you find yourself stuck home from work sick, you make a batch of this broth to pour over some parboiled curly noodles. Here's how you make it:
While your noodles are boiling, start by sauteeing a minced onion in a little bit of olive oil until they look translucent and soft. Add a couple of minced garlic cloves and stir for a minute or two. Then add four cups of chicken stock, and bring to simmer. While that's coming to a simmer, thinly slice three or four garlic cloves, and about two inches of peeled fresh ginger. Stem and seed a couple of jalapenos, and slice them into very thin strips. Put all those in the broth to steep for a few minutes. To serve, put some of your noodles in a deep bowl, and pour some broth over them. Good garnishes? Lemon zest, fresh squeezed lemon juice, Frank's Red Hot, flat leaf parsely. The best way to eat this is to huddle over the bowl so the steam can clear your sinuses. I actually felt it loosening the congestion in my chest as I ate it, and it's packed full of stuff that stimulates your immune system. I honestly feel a million times better after a bowl of this stuff.

Mother's Day!

2006-05-14T15:16:00.000-07:00

I cooked Mother's Day brunch for my mom and her mom. On the menu:
Maple cinnamon sticky buns...

...with an asparagus and ham frittata
Sliced strawberries on the side. So good!

Mom baked a chocolate cake for her mom that baked while we were eating brunch. When she went to cut it later, she asked me what size piece I wanted, and I told her I wanted a PI sized piece. My brother took it upon himself to cut me a PI shaped piece instead. Is it cake... or is it PI?

ouch

2006-05-13T10:37:00.000-07:00

...if you decide to make chocolate martinis with your best friend, it is perhaps a good idea to remember that they are made entirely of alcohol, before having a third or fourth...

...this has not been a fun morning...

I gave in to my cast iron skillet

2006-05-08T20:31:00.000-07:00

Like I said, the thing was sitting on my stove, all slick and beautiful. So I gave in. I bought my skillet a 12 oz ribeye, and cooked it using Alton Brown's method - olive oil, salt, pepper, into the very very hot skillet, 3 minutes per side, 5 minutes in a 350 degree oven. Then I let it rest and made a sauce with a little dry red wine, some shallots, and a pat of butter. Served with some sourdough toast and homemade roasted garlic butter.

This was seriously the best steak I have ever tasted (although it only beats out Dad's grilled t-bones by a very slim margin). This was so good, I finished it before I even started on my beautiful strawberry spinach salad. I had to stop and smoke a cigarette after this bad boy.

The salad was wonderful too, and given any other main dish, it would have been the star of the meal. Spinach, cold fresh ricotta cheese, strawberries, freshly ground black pepper, hot toasted walnuts, and a drizzle of cheap balsamic vinegar.

As it was, this provided a nice sweet/tart/creamy finish.

I hope my cast iron skillet leaves me alone for a while. I'm not sure I have the budget (or the waistline) for continued adventures in steak.

This cast iron is calling me

2006-05-08T10:51:00.000-07:00

This is the old cast iron skillet my grandma gave me a few months ago. It had been sitting in her cabinet for years. Up until today, I'd been sort of afraid to cook in it, because I've never used one before. But, bolstered by good advice from the internet, I finally broke it in. I fried some bacon for breakfast, and then fried eggs in the bacon fat. The eggs didn't stick like I had feared, and they tasted so good, I may never go back to eggs in a Teflon pan. After breakfast, I cleaned the skillet by heating some excess bacon fat, dumping in some kosher salt, and scrubbing around with some paper towels held in tongs, and then just wiping it clean. Since then it's been sitting on the stove, all black and slick and shiny, calling out to me to cook something else in it. I think I may have to give in and go buy a steak for it.

A spring omelette

2006-05-07T11:46:00.000-07:00

Weekend breakfasts are supposed to be kind of indulgent, I think. This one was inspired by the giant mess of spinach I got yesterday. More spinach than I really know what to do with.

The filling is made from diced fried bacon, onions, toasted pine nuts, paper thin fried slices of new potatoes, 3 huge handfuls of wilted spinach, and some fresh ricotta cheese. It was more than I could reasonably eat in one sitting. But I ate it anyway. Moderation is for weekday breakfasts.

Saturday at the Farmer's Market

2006-05-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

It's Farmer's Market season! I went yesterday with Mom to the City Market. They have an amazing weekend market, plus tons of cool physical stores for food, wine, plants, and knick-knacks. We had breakfast at Succotash (cool atmosphere, kind of disappointing in that the food was only average), and then shopped for produce.

I snapped some pictures as we wandered, including baskets of the largest asparagus I have ever seen, a bewildering display of greens and green onions, and a display of adorable wooden planters in the shape of little chairs and buildings.

I made out like a bandit from this trip - giant bunches of fresh spinach and baby lettuce, radishes, green onions, Andouille sausage, strawberries, grapes, zuccini, and fresh ricotta from Carollo’s Italian Gourmet Grocery. I had a wonderful morning with Mom, plus I'm going to eat very well this week. I can't wait to do this again next weekend, and I'm looking forward to adapting my diet based on what's in season. It's a win-win-win situation to buy and eat like this: local, seasonal food, directly from small farms.

Off the topic of bread for a minute

2006-05-05T17:18:00.000-07:00

I know this is a bread baking / cooking blog, but please permit me to stray from that for a moment.

I went to see United 93 on Wednesday night. This film blew me away. It was difficult to watch, but it was an amazing film. I was not expecting to see such a respectful, dignified treatment of that day. I feel strange recommending it, but I want to tell everyone I know to see it. It's extremely well crafted, and avoids politicizing or romanticizing, and simply lets the events unfold. I was crying as the credits started rolling, and so was everyone else in the theater with me. That was two days ago, and I still feel impacted by it. So if you're on the fence, go see this film.

And now back to my regularly scheduled blogging...

Challenge Recipe #6 & 7 : Lamb Steak with Greek Tomato Sauce and Feta & Roasted Eggplant with Garlic and Parsley

2006-05-03T20:09:00.000-07:00

These recipes were a set of firsts for me. I've never cooked lamb before. Never pan-fried any sort of meat. Never really did the deglazing to make a sauce thing. But I've consciously tried to make myself fearless in the kitchen when it comes to trying new things in the kitchen.

This meal started with a trip to Bichelmeyer's in Kansas City Kansas. I vaguely remembered this place from when I was in a high school science experiment class and went there to buy cow eyeballs for an experiment involving laser pointers. I've had it in my mind for a while that I need to identify a good meat market / butcher shop instead of relying on the shrink-wrapped meat at my local Ghetto-Fresh, and Bichelmeyer's did not disappoint. I wish I'd thought to take a few pictures as I walked in the door, because the meat counter case is like 60 feet long, filled with every conceivable kind of meat (and some things I've never seen before). The place has a vaguely Hispanic tilt, with some of the various cuts identified only in Spanish, but there was also row after row of cuts of meat that a sheltered white girl like me was familiar with - steaks, chops, whole chickens. I asked the very friendly butcher behind the counter for lamb chops, and he happily cut me 12 small chops.

I took the lamb chops home, and marinated them in olive oil, oregano, and cinnamon for a couple hours as instructed. The recipe suggests serving the lamb with potatoes and eggplant. Whenever I need a recipe for a very specific preparation of something (like roasted eggplant), and turn to How to Cook Everything. I didn't grow up with a copy of the Joy of Cooking in the kitchen like a lot people, but I think I use Bittman's book in kind of the same way. Sure enough, he had a great sounding recipe for eggplant, with garlic and parsley, which I always have on hand.

The meal came together beautifully. The tomato sauce is built from sauteed onions, garlic, oregano, and cinnamon, then some dry red wine, and plain tomato sauce, with a little honey to round it out. This all reduces down to a beautiful, burgandy, intensely syrupy sauce. I think I may have over cooked the thin little lamb chops some by misjudging the heat of the pan they needed, but it all came together wonderfully.

M was over for dinner, and when he sat down to the final plated dish, he made me get my camera to take a picture. It did have a very restaurant quality look. I wish I had some plain white dishes for a bit of contrast, because this looks kind of washed out. I probably wouldn't have posted this picture at all, but this is the first time M has acted so bowled over with the presentation of a dish. It was beautiful and delicious. I will definitely make this again. Particularly because I bought too many lamb chops, and I have four more in the freezer.

Vinegar is not good to put in your eye

2006-05-01T21:58:00.000-07:00

Once again I managed to injure myself in the kitchen. I wanted to break in the canning kettle I got for Christmas, and I thought I'd try Garlic Pickled Green Beans, since green beans are so cheap at the markets. Seems like these would be good in a cold salad of some kind, and plus I've never done anything pickled before.

This recipe should probably have included a warning label about the fumes produced by simmering the vinegar mixture. Or maybe I should have known. Anyway, I was simmering with a lid on the pot, and at one point I lifted the lid to check on it, and a cloud of vapor enveloped my face. I didn't really think that much of it at the time, but a couple of hours later, my right eye started to hurt, like there was grit under my eyelid. M was hanging out with me, and, voice of reason that he is, offered to take me to the emergency room to have it looked at. I was reluctant to go, because I could see fine, but the practicality of better-safe-than-sorry when it comes to MY EYES won out, and off to the ER we went.

I hate hate hate hospitals. But I was pretty impressed with the service I got at the KU Med ER. A nurse looked at my eye through a scope of some kind, and couldn't see anything wrong after a cursory check. Then she put numbing drops in my eye, and did an irrigation. This was a very uncomfortable procedure, where they swathed my entire head in layers of towels, and inserted what was basically a thick contact lens with a tube attached into my eye, and then ran 500 mL of saline through my eye. I'm really glad M was there with me, holding my legs to keep my calm. Even though I was focusing on my breathing, counting in and out, I still almost panicked several times during the four minutes this procedure took, because I couldn't really move, and I couldn't see, and the nurse kept having to swap out the towels because the liquid running down my face was soaking them. If I never have to do that again, I will be happy. After the irrigation, a doctor came in and put UV-reactive dye in my eye, and used a special light to check for abrasions. Thankfully, she didn't find anything. She said it's likely that I just had chemical irritation, and the irrigation would have flushed it out. She was right. My eye was fine after I got home.

So the moral of the story is - don't put vinegar fumes in your eye!

Bonus pics! Yes, these jars look really ugly. And yes, I do have a big crack in my kitchen wall.

I'm going to use one of these jars in a salad of some kind next week, and report back. Hopefully they're worth it.

Challenge Recipe #5 : Chickpea and Leek Soup

2006-04-29T18:57:00.000-07:00

I definitely undervalue my Naked Chef Cookbook. I've had it for ages, and most of the time it sits on my shelf like a forgotten friend. But I got to thinking about it as I was picking out challenge recipes, and I realized that 4 of my all-time favorite recipes come from this cookbook -
Simple Roast Chicken (which I make a couple of times a month, at least), Roasted Red Pepper and Tomato Soup, Cherry Tomato and Olive Salad, and Mushroom Risotto. I keep around a lot of other cookbooks that contain maybe one recipe that I make all the time. So I definitely need to give Jamie Oliver his due.

I've been on a chickpea kick lately - so this soup was a natural for this week's challenge recipe. It really is "dead simple" as Jamie himself would say. Some sauteed leeks, some cooked chickpeas and potato chunks, some chicken broth, a little puree action, and then the fantastic idea to garnish it with shavings of good quality Parmesan. This soup in a lot of ways fits my idea of an ideal recipe - cheap, very quick (once you've got the chickpeas cooked), filling, flavorful and healthy. I've been eating it for a couple days with sourdough toast and roasted garlic butter, and I've been happy as a clam for dinner. The only unfortunate thing is that this soup doesn't photograph well at all - after partially pureeing, it just looks like beige baby food. Oh well - even a near perfect recipe has to have a fault or 2.

What a wonderful lunch!

2006-04-26T15:37:00.000-07:00

Mom took me out for a belated birthday lunch at 40 Sardines. I've been wanting to go there for a while now, and it definitely lived up to my expectation!
We both started with a salad of baby spinach, grilled asparagus and artichoke hearts, and goat cheese.
Mom had bay scallops over sauteed asparagus, with a tarragon butter cream sauce, topped with micro greens:

She tried to order a bowl of seafood chowder as well, but the waiter suggested that a rich dish like that, combined with the creamy sauce on the scallops, would be too heavy since she had to go back to work afterwards. He did bring us a little taste of the chowder though, and it was spectacular. I think a nap would have been necessary after eating a whole bowl of it, so his suggestion was spot on.
I had lamb chops, breaded with ground mustard seed and bread crumbs, with eggplant ratatouille, fresh fennel relish, and a pan reduction sauce:
All in all, I enjoyed this restaurant very much. Mom said it was kind of haute cuisine, but agreed with me that there was nothing pretentious about it. The classical pairing of flavors in both of our dishes was perfect - I especially loved the crispy crusted lamb / soft eggplant / bright fennel combination. I will definitely be going back for lunch as regularly as my budget permits.

Challenge Recipe #4 : White Leaven Bread

2006-04-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

I am completely enamored with Dan Lepard's book The Handmade Loaf. (I am a little disappointed that it didn't seem to be stocked at any of the large bookstore chains in my area - thank goodness for the magical powers of the internet!) Dan is British ex fashion photographer turned semi-professional passionate home bread baker. All the gorgeous photographs in the book are of actual loaves he baked from the recipes in the book, taken by him, and are mostly unadorned loaves or slices. Almost every recipe is accompanied by one of his minimalist, straightforward pictures, and interspersed among the recipes are showcases of home bakers he met in his travels across Europe. I've been drooling over this book and working up the courage to bake out of it for a couple months now.

White Leaven Bread is the first recipe in his book, right after the formula for making a (sourdough) starter from scratch. Although that is something I will likely do at some point, I already have a functioning starter that lives in a crock in my fridge, so for this first recipe, it was a simple matter to feed it over a couple of days to the correct hydration for this recipe.

I learned some interesting things just from the feeding of my old faithful starter. I've been maintaining it for about six months, and I have always fed it with equal parts flour and water by measure, since I didn't own a kitchen scale until a few weeks ago. My measuring cups are cheap and plastic, and I've always done the scoop and level thing to measure flour. 100% hydration measured that way always yielded a thin, batter consistency starter, that started bubbling in under an hour even at cold room temperature. For this recipe, I started feeding it at 100% hydration by weight, the consistency done that way was a lot more like a very wet dough. After the first feeding, I was positive I had killed my starter, because after an hour it looked very much inert. I left it out overnight, and by the morning, it had puffed up and quadrupled in volume. I would never have guessed that 2 different methods of measuring would produce such dramatically different results.

Dan's recipe calls for a starter at 80% hydration. I simply refreshed my starter a couple of times over a couple of days at 100%, and inoculated a mix of 80:100 water:flour with a tablespoon of active starter to get the correct amount to bake with, and left it overnight. Since this is the first recipe in the book, he very helpfully lays out a timetable of steps to follow, starting with the initial mixing at 8:00 am, and ending with a bake at 5:30 pm.

Ok, now I have a really shameful confession to make. Prior to making this loaf, I had never actually had the courage to make bread entirely by hand. I have always relied on my trusty KitchenAid stand mixer to bring my dough to the windowpane stage. I don't feel bad confessing this now, because making this loaf entirely by hand may have done the trick and set me free from reliance on the machine. This recipe is made by very short intermittent kneading by hand on a lightly oiled surface (to avoid the temptation to overflour the board and lose the benefits of the very wet dough), interspersed with progressively longer rests/rises in a bowl, ending with a about a four hour rise in linen-lined baskets. Each time, the dough is kneaded for 10-15 seconds (which is about 12 strokes), then shaped into a ball before going back in the bowl. Starting out, I was positive the dough was too sticky, that it was never going to come together right. But after reading Dan's book cover to cover, and scouring his website, I had decided to just trust his recipe. This trust was rewarded. As the day progressed, the dough firmed up beautifully. His timing was perfect in a warm kitchen (I was roasting garlic, then later roasting a chicken as I was tending to the dough). By the time the dough was ready to go into the oven, it was fully risen and so strong it barely deflated at all when I scored the top.

These are, hands down, the best loaves I have ever baked. When I pulled the first loaf out of the oven and set it on a wire rack to cool, it immediately started crackling, with a sound like quietly crumpling paper. In all my bread baking to date, my loaves have never made such a distinctive sound as they started to cool. I knew immediately that I had done something right. I peeled the other loaf into the oven, and hovered over the first loaf as it cooled, listening and smelling. Somehow, this loaf, made from only flour, water, leaven, and salt, managed to smell intensely of roasted peanut butter.

This bred is sublime. The crust is thin and cracklingly crusty, the crumb is light and airy without being overly marked with giant holes, and the flavor is amazing. I'm a couple of days removed from making it now, and I still can't believe that I made bread this good entirely by hand.

Love for Le Creuset

2006-04-24T19:13:00.000-07:00

I broke in my new 5 1/2 Q Le Creuset tonight, with an adaptation of my favorite roast chicken recipe. Instead of cooking the on each breast in the oven, I seared them over high heat on the stove first, then set the chicken on it's back. I chucked in some quartered new potatoes and blanched green beans about halfway through, and had sort of a mock salad nicoise with chicken.
I think I'm in love with this pot.

Fun with portion sizes

2006-04-21T19:58:00.000-07:00

Last night, as I was eating my delicious roasted cauliflower/chickpeas/red onion over penne pasta, I got to thinking about serving sizes. Specifically how out of whack they are in this country. I've read the USDA 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and in general their recommendations seem to agree with what I consider common sense - an emphasis on whole grains, vegetables, and lean sources of protein. The sample eating plan for a 2,000 calorie diet (which is about right for a woman of my weight/height) looks like I wouldn't starve following it. But then I started considering serving sizes, specifically for things like pasta, meat, and cheese.

For pasta, the recommendation is 1 oz dry or 1/2 cup cooked. For cheese, it's 1 oz, with a recommendation that it be skim/low/non-fat. Having just recently received a kitchen scale for my birthday, I decided to weigh out a single serving of each. (Next time I have meat on hand, I'll weigh out the recommended 3 oz as well.) Here's what that looks like:

That's 21 pieces of generic penne pasta, and a 1/4 inch thick slice of a block of feta from the grocery store (I abhor low fat cheese; besides, when you're only eating 1 oz, what's the point?). That much pasta measures roughly 1/4 cup in a 2 cup Pyrex measuring glass.

Two things astonished me about this little experiment. One, last night I had eaten roughly 4 oz of penne for dinner - that's four servings! Two, tonight when I made the exact same dish with the carefully weighed serving sizes, I felt completely satisfied after eating it. Maybe there is something to this serving size business.

Random side note - as I was googling for serving sizes, it was much more difficult than I had expected to find sites listing out serving sizes by weigh. Almost every site (and all of them on the first page of search results) was full of helpful information on how to guestimate servings (a deck of cards = 3 oz meat, 1 oz cheese = 1 domino, etc.). Apparently the actual weights and measures involved are too complicated for the general internet public.

After this little experiment, it occurs to me that a documented experiment in the "Serving Size Diet (tm)" could be my ticket to fame and fortune. All I'd have to do is weigh, measure, and count calories for everything I put in my mouth, lose weight while doing it, document the whole thing, and BAM, I'm a celebrity like Jared from Subway. Of course, there's probably significantly less mass appeal in rigid meal planning, careful shopping, and portion discipline than in walking to Subway for every meal. But maybe I could appeal to people like that poor misguided fatty from Supersize Me who, after Jared came to her high school to give a speech, bemoaned, "But I can't afford to eat at Subway every day!"

As you can probably tell, I'm becoming majorly disillusioned with American eating habits across the board, and the quick fix fad diets that are marketed as the answer. I think maybe the answer may be as simple as sitting down to a dinner of 1 oz of spaghetti with 3 1 oz meatballs.

Who knew cauliflower could taste this good?

2006-04-20T20:05:00.000-07:00

I have a new addiction. After reading the multi-page discussion on roasted cauliflower over at eGullet, I've made it a couple of times, and I've been completely blown away. I wonder if every vegetable has the potential to taste this good if prepared properly. This is a seriously addictive way to eat cauliflower. I feel stupid ranting about how good it is, because people look at me like, are you serious? It's just cauliflower! But it's that good. Really.

I made a batch of it a couple days ago, adding some pressure cooked chickpeas, red onion slices, and a sprinkling of cumin. I've been enjoying this mixture heated up, with cherry tomatoes, greek olives, and feta cheese,

over spinach last night,

and over pasta tonight.

I think I'll make more when this batch runs out.

I now feel better about my bread failure

2006-04-19T17:17:00.000-07:00

This was better than therapy.

Cheaper, too...

Some breads were not meant to be

2006-04-16T20:50:00.000-07:00

I should have just left this bread alone. But I'm not one to let a loaf go to waste if it has half a chance at becoming delicous. After being roughly manhandled in an effort to get the salt integrated, this dough had a nice long nap in the fridge. I ended up having to take it to my parents' house to bake, since I didn't want to hold up dinner. It was horrendously soft and sticky- it oozed everywhere as I tried to get it into the oven. It smelled really good baking, but I was disappointed in its slipper-like shape. I had been envisioning a nice round loaf. It looked ok coming out of the oven, but I could tell as soon as I cut into it that something was wrong. The crumb was moist and dense, full of big, gummy holes. Ugh. I should have just thrown it away at that point, but I'm a glutton for punishment.

It was awful. This one will probably take a week or so to recover from.

It might be all right

2006-04-16T00:11:00.000-07:00

Last night, as I was despondently eating a bowl of pasta to try and make myself feel better about my bread failure, M had a perfectly sensible suggestion, although I was resistant to it. "Why don't you just stir the salt in now?" he asked. I tried to explain to him that I didn't that it would be possible to integrate it well enough into the dough, which had already been in the refridgerator for two hours. He insisted that I really didn't know what the result of that would be, whereas I knew for a fact that saltless bread would be awful and cardboardy. So we turned the cold dough out onto the cutting board. It was stuck to the cloth and had developed a sort of skin where it sat against the fabric. I was not hopeful, but I attempted to hand knead in 10g of salt. I'm not sure how well I succeeded, and by the end of it the dough was loose and sticking like crazy to the board. But I managed to scrape it back into it's basket with the right quantity of salt at least contained within its mass. Time will tell. It's out of the fridge now, and in four hours I'll bake it and know the result.

Frustrated with a wholemeal boule

2006-04-15T20:20:00.000-07:00

I didn't think there was any possible way to fail. I finally have a kitchen scale so that I can try my hand at baking all the recipes I've collected that don't give cup and tablespoon approximations for us backwards Americans. I have a set of very thorough, illustrated instructions from eGullet. I purchased (what I thought would be enough) whole wheat spelt flour from the bulk bins at the hippy grocery store. I figured out how to work the timing around my job. What, you ask, could possibly go wrong?

Yesterday, I made the preferment. This is the part I didn't screw up. The formula:
100g flour (white is fine, I used unbleached KAF bread flour)
100g water
1 tablespoon starter
I dutifully weighed it out, and mixed it all together. In the process, I discovered that I much prefer weighing the ingredients than attempting to measure using my set of plastic measuring cups.
By this morning when I left for work, it looked like this:

By the time I got home, it was much wetter, softer, and full of bubbles. When I peeled back the plastic wrap, I was hit by the clean, sour, yeasty aroma, reminiscent of being in a brewery. So far so good.

The next part of the formula is to mix the following for 3 minutes in a food processor:
All the preferment
500g spelt flour
350 g water
10 g salt
I had to use an oiled silicone spatula to scrape the preferment from it's container into my processor:

I weighed the (cold) water and the spelt flour:

Here was my first sign that I might be on the path to having issues with this loaf. It turns out that I have clear concept of what 500g of flour looks like, so I had, in fact, purchased only 440g of wholegrain spelt. The magic of using my new scale is that I simply added KAF AP flour until I got the desired 500g. And into the processor to join the preferment went the flour and water.

Second clue that this loaf has issues - all the ingredients barely fit in the work bowl of my 11 cup KitchenAid. Undeterred, I locked on the lid, set my trusty little digital timer for 3 minutes, and pressed [ON].

The processor started out like a champ, integrating the huge volume of ingredients almost immediately. Then it started straining, the dough climbing up over the top of the spindle and thumping around. Then it started walking along the table like my stand mixer does sometimes when kneading dough. Concerned, I turned it off and pulsed it a few times to loosen things up. When pressed [ON] again, the dough balled up around the spindle and the the whole thing rotated as one mass, before the processor finally just stopped. With the timer at 0:56. I tried pressing [PULSE]. Nothing. Crap. I've killed my expensive beautiful cobalt blue KitchenAid that I coveted for so long before receiving for Christmas.

I figured that with any luck, the motor had simply overheated and shut off before burning out. I also figured that 2:04 would be enough time, even though the formula emphasizes 3 minutes. I took off the lid, and lifted the workbowl off the base. Water from the dough had somehow worked itself between the blade spindle and the shaft of the base, so I dripped liquid all over the table and floor as I carried the workbowl to my cutting board. Then, in my frazzled hurry to turn the dough out and (hopefully) shape it for proving, I forgot to oil the cutting board. I turned the bowl upside down, and the dough oozed out, with the processor blade embedded in it, and stuck like paste to the plastic. Touching it with my hands only resulted in sticky, dough coated hands. I was finally able to manipulate it into a semblance of a ball using a heavily greasted dough scraper, then oil my hands and turn it out into a makeshift banneton (actually just a cheap wicker basket, lined with an old linen tea-towel and floured with rye flour). Once it was covered and into the fridge for an overnight proving, I turned my attention to cleaning up the floury mess I'd managed to create in my kitchen.

So, what's the third sign this loaf is headed for disaster, you ask? I got the kitchen tidied up and started a load of dished that included the processor work bowl and blade, and came to the computer to write what I hoped would be "Wholemeal boule success." As I looked at the formula, something leaped out at me:
...
10g salt
...
Even if the loaf miraculously bakes up wonderful in the morning, I know from experience that it will still taste like cardboard. I'm not even sure if I'm going to attempt to bake it. (At least my KitchenAid wasn't actually broken - it started up just fine once I let it cool down.)

Back to baking

2006-03-27T18:28:00.000-08:00

It's been about a month since I've done any serious baking. Not intentionally, and I didn't go completely on hiatus. Thank goodness for my trusty bread machine in months like this past one. I may have let myself get overwhelmed by school and work, but I still had good (well, better than store-bought) homemade bread to eat every week. Mostly 1-lb cheddar or feta loaves, and last week, a batch of maple cinnamon sticky buns for breakfast, from Whole Grain Breads, one of my favorite bread machine resources.

But I get restless and antsy if I don't take time out to do real baking. And my favorite cure for that feeling is to make the simple white sourdough from the eGullet sourdough tutorial. It's a two-day project, fermenting a sponge, mixing the dough, and then tending to it at regular intervals on the first day, then an overnight rise in the fridge, and baking on the second day. On paper, it seems like an intimidating project, but most of that first day is just being around at specified intervals to either mix, or do some stretching and folding as the dough is rising.
Yesterday, I started the sponge around 9:00 am, and then went downtown to the City Market to do some shopping. The Farmer's Market down there isn't in full swing, but under the overhangs covering the perimeter shops, vendors had piles of produce on display, and the stores themselves had their doors thrown open. On mornings when I leave bread at home in some stage of fermentation, I wander through the shops with bread on the brain. Yesterday I snagged some red peppers for roasting, and some thinly sliced prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, and pesto paste from Carollo's Italian Gourmet Grocery, anticipating sublime sandwiches on thick slices of sourdough. The rest of the day was spent tending to the bread, and puttering around my apartment. Spending a day like this is subliming relaxing. There is definitely a metaphor here, somewhere in the slow, soft, unwinding of starches in the grain, the gentle stretching of the dough to strengthen the gluten network, the inherently imperfect final shaping before putting the dough to rest in the fridge, dusted with rye and wrapped in a linen teatowell in my makeshift wicker banneton.

I baked the loaf today at 4:00pm. The good thing about the overnight refridgeration is that since fermentation is slowed (almost) to a halt in the cold, I have control over when I can bake it. That and the stiffness of the cold dough makes it very easy to slash without deflating. It baked up beautifully, even though it stuck to my peel as I was trying to slide it onto the hot baking stone, spreading slightly sideways an flattening a little. That's why it looks kind ofmisshapenn. But that's part of the charm of this kind of baking, why baking itself is the perfect foil to my professional life. I love the imperfections, the nuances that make every loaf distinct.
It's good to know that I can leave my poor neglected starter untouched in a crock in the back of the fridge for a month, and after a few feedings, it's back to full strength. It's also good to know that the refridgeration can be extended to almost 24 hours with very little impact on the finished bread. Knowing this, I could realistically bake this bread every week, doing the actual baking after my Monday afternoon classes. Bread this good shouldn't end up relegated to a once in while kind of thing.

Busy + work = meals in front of a computer

2006-02-13T17:53:00.000-08:00

Here's the culprit behind my lack of posts lately (or is this just an excuse to show off my new camera phone?):
Work. Thirty minute lunches in eleven hour days. Eaten in front of my computer. I try to pack healthy, interesting things to eat during in those precious minutes that are supposed to be entirely mine. Homemade hummus with hot sauce brings out rabid frothing in my coworkers, demands that I bring some to share. I dole out sample portions on carrot and celery sticks. I offer to share the recipe, but I don't think they'll be satisfied until I bring a big batch for the them to snack on.

D asked me to teach her how to cook. I'm flattered, but not sure where to start. This girl has a whole line of Pampered Chef goodies still in shrink wrap and boxes. She eats out for every meal. I'm not even sure she knows how to boil water for pasta. She's started getting serious about budgeting and self-improvement, so I could really make a difference here. Any suggestions?

A different kind of crust

2006-01-30T19:39:00.000-08:00

Bread and pastry are two different breeds of the same animal. I'm getting good at one, so why do I find the other so intimidating? Making a pastry crust seems more up my alley than bread. Pastry is all about ratios so finely specified as to almost be stochiometric, and precise temperature control. Bread, comparatively, is wild card. Mix your dough, and then fiddle with the amount of flour or liquid until it feels right. Throw it roughly around, abuse it, all that it asks in return is a little time to rest before getting back to the work of rising. Making pastry (specifically quiche crust this time), I always feel like I am walking in a mine field, where I won't even realize I've made a false step until the dough is ruined. It's so much harder to gauge the right feel of a pastry dough since I can't accurately determine it's characteristics until it's had a long rest in the refridgerator. At least with bread, you can tell when it windowpanes, and confidently move on.

That's not to say that I don't, on occasion, like to make an attempt. Sometimes the most satisfying utilization of the ingredients I have on hand is a quiche. Tonight it was half a bag of spinach, too many eggs, and too much bacon asking to become a spinach quiche with a bacon crust. And the stars aligned to boost my crust making powers. It's a much prettier pictures this way, done in a tart pan with a removable bottom. The last few times I've made this, the utter crust failures meant baking it sans crust entirely in a glass pie plate.

Challenge Recipe #3 : Tagliatelle with Fresh Tuna Ragu

2006-01-25T18:15:00.000-08:00

I've been big fan of Mario Batali since I started watching him on the Food Network. His ebullient passion for and depth of knowledge of Italian cuisine comes through clearly in his shows. I got two of his cookbooks for Christmas, Simple Italian Food, and the more approachable Molto Italiano, and quickly flagged more than a dozen recipes from each to try during this year's challenge.

The main ingredients of this recipe are tuna, red onion, tomato sauce, and rosemary. This may seem like a strange choice, given my vehement dislike of rosemary, but I'm always trying to broaden my culinary horizons.

After making this recipe, I'm tempted to spend the first half of this year just cooking through the rest of Batali's recipes that I have flagged. This is a marvelous pairing of a few simple, high quality ingredients (even using canned tuna in place of the fresh chunks specified). I finely chopped the rosemary first, and sprinkled it over the drained tuna, and immediately I noticed how the smell of the tuna mellowed the pungent aroma of the herb. Once I started to smell the sweetness of the red onion as it was wilting, I realized that the separate elements of this dish were going to come together quite nicely.

The final dish is a really nice interplay of flavor profiles and textures, especially sprinkled with some coarse sea salt. I can say that for the first time ever, the taste of the rosemary was not dominately unpleasant. I can actually see myself eating a much plainer tuna and rosemary dish, because I see now how the two flavors complement each other. Making this really demonstrated to me what Batali is getting at in Simple Italian Food - that understanding the flavor profiles and matches of different ingredients can lead to something that is more than sum of its parts. If all his recipes are of this caliber, I'll definitely be a Batali fangirl.

Challenge Recipe #2 : Egyptian Red Lentil Soup

2006-01-24T20:10:00.000-08:00

The Middle Eastern restaurant near me makes a wonderful lentil soup - yellow and thick and fragrant, redolent with the wonderful aroma of cumin and a pleasant grainy mouthfeel. Sometimes I go there just for the soup (and maybe some hummus) for a nice light lunch. I've been trying unsuccessfully for a long time to recreate it at home. This recipe finally hit the nail on the head.

I haven't cooked much from this Moosewood cookbook yet, and I'm really glad I decided to include this soup in my challenge. I've tended to be skeptical of and skip over soup recipes that don't call for sauteeing some aromatics as the initial step, and a lot of the Moosewood soups call for dumping all the ingredients in a pot and simmering, this one included. But I decided to go ahead and try it out as written.

This soup is delicious, and super easy. It's basically just simmering chopped up onions, potatoes, and red lentils in water for 20 minutes, then pureeing. Then the recipe takes a unique turn, and calls for sauteeing cumin, turmeric and salt in a little bit of oil before swirling it into the pureed soup. I love the effect of sauteeing the spices first - their flavor is intensified and definitely stands out in the finished soup. The potatoes and lentils pureed together give it a substantial feel and thickness. I've been eating this for lunch this week with a light cucumber salad, and some bread with yogurt cheese, which make a really nice contrast. I will definitely be making this soup again.

A funny thing happened when I was eating this at today. This soup is a very bright yellow color, and looks a bit like a bowl of baby food. One of my co-workers walked by my desk, stopped cold, and exclaimed "What the hell are you eating?!?!" I just smiled and offered her some. She declined with a shudder, and went back to her cafeteria burger and fries.

Improv for dinner

2006-01-21T19:42:00.000-08:00

I started a batch of yogurt cheese on Thursday night, and finally got around to checking on it before dinner tonight. It's wonderful - the consistency of very spreadable cream cheese with a salty yogurt tang. Why haven't I tried this earlier? My dinner plan was a bowl of leftover pea soup and some toasted cheddar bread. I decided to toast the bread, rub it with some cut garlic cloves, and top it with this wonderful spread and some roasted red pepper slivers. Such a simple combination, but I inadvertently created something I can see myself craving. Then again, I've always been a sucker for a good take on bruschetta.

Sharing the bread

2006-01-20T20:13:00.000-08:00

On a cigarette break at work yesterday, I was telling one of my coworkers about my most recent round of baking, because really, I'll take any chance I can get to talk about bread. She made the offhand comment that she'd love some cheese bread, that it was her favorite. I don't think she honestly expected me to bake for her, in fact, she probably forgot about the conversation entirely. But to me, that conversation was reason enough to bake last night.

I hate the fact that working a full time job means that I only get a chance to do my fantastic two day sourdough once a week, because I'd love to bake nothing but bread of that caliber all the time. But when the urge to bake mid-week strikes, I can turn to my bread machine, and the handful of really good recipes for it I've sifted out of the many I've tried. So last night I used it to make the dough for my cheese bread then shaped it into a round ball, let it rise for an hour, and baked it in the oven. Slashing is not as easy when the dough isn't cold from an overnight shaped rise in the fridge, but it turned out ok.

This is a recipe that I adapted from the cheddar loaf recipe in The Bread Bible. I wanted to create an easy cheese bread for my bread machine, so I scaled the recipe back a little and based it on standard ratios for a 1 lb bread machine loaf. I've tried five or six different recipes for cheese bread in the machine, but none of them had that strong, intense, cheese flavor I was looking for. In fact, most of those loaves ended up tasting primarily of yeast, with the (shredded, in most cases) cheese contributing only softness. They also almost all contained white sugar. This loaf gets its strong, lingering flavor from Dijon mustard, a tiny dash of cayenne, and extra sharp cheddar, cubed rather than grated, added partway through the kneading. I didn't realize until just recently when I started making really good sourdough that what I really like about this bread is that it has a complexity of flavor to it that mimics true sourdough. My reflection on baking Peter Reinhart's Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire sort of crystallized this in my mind. What I look for in a good loaf has always been the same - intense, lingering flavor, without the mushy softness of most commercial bread. I'm attracted to depth and texture, but also to purity and simplicity. True sourdough is the bread I've been craving in my mind since I started baking. I just had to actually bake it to realize that it was the end goal.

Philosophical musings on the nature of my bread desires aside, this bread machine cheddar turned out good. I took half of it to work today, and left it for my coworker on her desk. Later, I hear her practically moaning with pleasure, and she tells me it's some of the best bread she's ever had.

Soup from a fellow blogger

2006-01-19T17:55:00.000-08:00

I love a pot of soup in the winter. And I love peas. When I saw a recipe for pea soup over at Everybody Likes Sandwiches, I filed it in my mind to try. Tonight it hit the spot. I made it with dill, a dollop of yogurt, and flat leaf parsley. She's right when she says this soup tastes intensely green. You can't beat a soup made from pantry ingredients that's ready in 15 minutes, and tastes like a small reminder that winter won't last forever.

Challenge Recipe #1 : Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire

2006-01-17T19:52:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to try this recipe for a long time. Peter Reinhart is one of my favorite bread authors, and he waxes poetic about this particular bread more so than just about any other. So does Rose Levy Berenbaum, one of my other adopted bread mentors.

As I took a closer look at this recipe in preparation to bake it, a few things struck me as a unexpected, given the high status Reinhart gives this bread. First, aside from soaking the small amount of grains the night before, this is a very standard direct, enriched dough, with a very high amount of yeast - 1 tablespoon for for 3 cups of flour. Those packets of bread machine yeast intended for the 3 hour machine cycle use less yeast than that. This bread requires only a little more than that from mixing to pulling out of the oven. In some of my other bread books, this wouldn't seem so strange, but Reinhart spends the introduction to this book extolling the virtues of long, cool rises, extracting maximum flavor from the grain itself. This recipe has so much added sweetness (in the form of milk, honey and brown sugar) in addition to being so heavily yeasted, that I wondered whether I'd be able to taste the grain at all.

Second, the recipe does not specify an autolyse period, that 20 minute or so rest between the initial mixing and the extended kneading that has a marked impact on both kneading time and eventual texture of the finished dough.

Third, it seems very strange indeed for a recipe purporting to be "healthy" bread in a delicious package, going so far as to replace the original name of the recipe (Struan) with this particularly health conscious name, to be comprised of white bread flour. He does specify unbleached, but all good bread books, healthy or not, should specify this, because the high beta-carotene content of unbleached flour contributes highly desirable aroma and flavor characteristics to a loaf. This recipes does contain almost a half cup of soaked whole grains, but he shies away from calling for whole wheat flour.

That said, I followed this recipe as closely as I could, given the inherent variability in bread baking. And it is good bread. I shaped it into 5 little rolls, and one larger round loaf, using the smaller loaves for sandwiches at work, and slices from the larger one for dinner. It smells nice when it's toasting, but I really felt let down by this bread. I think maybe my recent adventures in sourdough have spoiled me for regular yeasted bread, because this to me just tasted like good supermarket "whole grain" bread.

I'm definitely going to try making it again, or at least take the idea of soaking whole grains overnight and apply it to some other kind of bread. I've been toying with the idea of converting some of my sourdough starter to a 100% whole wheat starter, and using some of the sourdough techniques to try to accomplish a whole wheat / whole grain bread that won't just be "pretty good for whole wheat bread." I want whole grain bread so good I'll taste it in my dreams.

Three breads

2006-01-16T16:51:00.000-08:00

It was a solid couple of days of baking. I had some requested bread for my parents and my brother, plus some bread for me for the upcoming week (because sandwiches at work don't taste as good on store bought bread).

I had to carefully schedule myself since all three of the breads I baked required at least some prep work the day before baking. Fortunately, I am an organization freak, so I had (no I'm not kidding) a schedule of tasks for the different recipes taped to the fridge. Please don't laugh at me. Or do, because I probably deserve it for being neurotic.

On to the breads!

First was 2 loaves of Cinnamon Raisin Bread from The Bread Bible. My brother had asked for this, and I happily obliged, since the recipe makes two loaves, and that meant one for me! I hadn't made this bread for a while (actually I don't think I've made it at all in the almost year I've been in this apartment), and as I was eating it as toast for breakfast this morning, I resolved to make more of it. Maybe not every week though, since it has a fair amount of butter and sugar.

Next was a loaf of sourdough with feta. Mom and Dad got a couple slices of this last week with the soup I made, and wanted a whole loaf for themselves. I dropped this off at their house today, and driving with it in the car while it was still warm and fragrant from the oven almost drove me crazy. I also discovered that not only does eating this bread run the risk of inducing weeping, simply showing it off to other people will inevitably cause them to wax poetic about bread in general, and inevitably ends with them on your (growing) list of people to bake for. W told me that it looked like the round loaves Panera sells. Since for most people, Panera is their primary exposure to non-supermarket bread, I take this as a very high compliment indeed.

Finally, bread for myself. I've been meaning for some time to make Peter Reinhart's Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire. In the intro he says this pairs very well with mayonnaise based salads, and since I was already planning on roasting a chicken for chicken salad sanwiches, this seemed like a good chance to try it. In between running errands and delivering bread to the folks today, I accidentally let it rise the first time for three hours. When I got home and checked on it, it had quadrupled in volume and was bulging against the plastic wrap covering. It behaved all right after I punched it down and folded it, so it may not be the disaster I initially thought. I haven't tasted it yet, but it smells good, so we'll see.

Too much information

2006-01-15T15:57:00.000-08:00

Amy has tagged me for a Too Much Information meme. The rules: post ten weird and random facts about yourself. At the end, list the names of the five people you tagged. It doesn't have to be food related.

For some reason this was harder than it sounded. Here's my ten weird and random facts:

It takes me a very long time to fully wake up from being asleep. In the transition between asleep and awake, I have been known to talk, walk around, drive, and work complicated calculus problems.
I named my KitchenAid stand mixer Lady Mixalot.
When I was little, I wanted to be a science fiction writer. If you were to poke around in my parents attic, you would find boxes and boxes full of bad short story drafts.
When I grew out of that, I decided I wanted to be an astronaut. At some point I came to the conclusion that astronauts have to have at least a small amount of coordination and athletic ability. That combined with the realization that I really enjoyed math and science, convinced me that what I really wanted to do was study aerospace engineering.
I'm compulsive about meal planning and grocery shopping. So much so that I normally have my meals for the following week planned by Wednesday, and I make my grocery list based on that in my palm pilot. The items are organized by section of the store. The good thing about this system is that I stick to my budget and don't impulsively buy crap to eat. The bad part is that I feel guilty if I get invited out to dinner but I already have a meal planned for that evening.
The first time I ate oysters, I was in 4th grade, on vacation in Florida. I told my dad that they tasted "like fishy snot." When I went back and tried them when I was 23, on vacation in Key West, I fell in love with them. Now I regret the fact that, in Kansas City at least, bars don't have happy hour specials that include oysters on the half shell.
Even though I now consider myself something of a good cook, I still occasionally get cravings for liver loaf sandwiches with Velveeta cheese and extra mayo on spongy white bread. My dad, however, will retch if a tube of liver loaf comes within two miles of him.
I have huge crushes on both Alton Brown and Anthony Bourdain.
I have 6 tattoos. One of them is a mathematical symbol.
I dislike rosemary. So much so that little bit of rosemary in a dish will overpower the rest of the dish for me, in some cases rendering it inedible. I really wish I could rid myself of this aversion, because I have yet to encounter any other food that I would say I genuinely dislike.

I hope those are weird and random enough.

It's all about the bread

2006-01-11T21:01:00.000-08:00

Happy birthday to my brother! Hard to believe my baby brother* is 23.

We went to dinner at Han Shin for his birthday, as has become tradition. This is such a fun place to eat, with wonderful execution of all the things you expect from a Japanese Steak House - good miso soup, that fantastic tangy salad dressing, and an overly theatrical asian chef stir frying rice, veggies, steak, and shrimp in the middle of your table.

As we ate, I noticed that in the course of our conversations, I kept focusing on bread. This happens to me a lot; I really think I'm obsessed sometimes.

To be fair, my parents steered the conversation that direction a couple of times. I mentioned that our insurance agent, who also handles all of our IRAs and such, had called me today to make an appointment. Dad suggested that I take him a loaf of bread. As he's pretty much considered a friend of the family, and I adore him and his wife both, I think that's a great idea. So I whipped out my palm pilot and made a note to include him in my weekly baking session. Then my brother asked if I'd make him cinnamon raisin bread for his birthday. Another note in the palm pilot. Then my parents asked if I'd make them a whole loaf of the feta sourdough I let them sample the other day. Another note. So somehow before we'd even gotten our salads, I had booked myself a full plate of baking for next weekend. When I realized I was lecturing my mother about the proper way to store the loaf I was going to bake for her (what do you mean you don't want to leave it sitting out, cut side down, on a cutting board?), I had to restrain myself, and help direct the conversation elsewhere.

Later, as our meat was being served (blissfully good medium rare filet and scallops for me, mmmmm....), Dad mentioned that he wanted to cook the filet mignon from Omaha Steaks he'd gotten as a holiday gift from his boss. What's my first thought? Properly cooked filets with a simple pan sauce would go wonderfully with some crusty sourdough rolls. And if there's a filet left the next day, thinly slice it on the bias, whip up a little garlic aioli to drizzle on it, pile it on thick slices of toasted feta sourdough. I actually caught myself looking down at my plate and regretting not having some crusty bits of bread to soak up the pool of sauce. At that point I recognized my madness, and distracted myself by talking to my parents about the best way to cook their filets. And resolved not think obsessively about bread for the rest of the evening.

I succeeded. At least until I was in line for coffee at the bookstore next door, killing time plotting a batch of maple cinnamon sticky buns to take to work later in the week. And then pondering the best way to convert my sourdough starter into a purely whole wheat starter as I drove home.

I need help.

*I don't call him that to his face because he's six inches taller than me, and much stronger. Plus, he's only 21 months younger than me.

Cold mornings

2006-01-10T19:22:00.000-08:00

This morning was cold. Cold, overcast, and wet. Ugh. Bed is a wonderful place to be on mornings like this. Burrowed under mounds of blankets, curled around a pile of pillows, half way between awake and asleep. Contemplating brewing a cup of coffee and fixing a leisurely breakfast of bacon, over easy eggs, and thick buttered toast. Not wrenching my eyes open to the jarring half static, half radio station my alarm is set to and realizing that I need to be showered, fed, and out the door in 26 minutes. I like to have a second cup of coffee and a cigarette after breakfast before I even contemplate getting out of my pajamas. I don't like having to pour both orange juice and coffee into portable cups, and butter some toast with one hand while I blow dry my hair with the other. Juggling toast and orange juice while driving on wet, slightly slick roads (in heels no less) should not be anyone's definition of breakfast. I suppose it could be worse. Instead of homemade sourdough toast with butter and chai tea jam, it could be an Egg McMuffin that I just dropped on my skirt. I could be burning my leg with industrial coffee that tastes like cardboard instead of coffee home brewed from fresh ground beans. Small consolation when I'm halfway to work at 6:43 am instead of home in bed, or in a warm kitchen doing some baking, which is where my mind will be for the next couple hours.

This whole having to work a for a living thing isn't all it's cracked up to be. I mean, as far as things to do to eek out a living, programming and process automation is not a bad job. It's just that sometimes (who am I kidding? All the time), I'd rather be baking bread.

A girl can dream

2006-01-09T19:26:00.000-08:00

I had a voicemail from my dad tonight, after I dropped off a pot of ham bean soup and a chunk of bread:

"Quit your job.
Bake bread.
Make soup.
That is all."

SIGH...

A girl can dream.

The fruits of lazy labor

2006-01-09T10:39:00.000-08:00

Here's the feta sourdough, fresh from the oven:

A girl could get addicted to bread like this. I'm so glad I finally worked up the courage to try my hand at slashing before baking. I was always afraid I'd do it wrong, and tearing or deflating my loaf, mangling it before it ever had a chance. But I picked up a tip that works beautifully. I spray my serrated bread knife with cooking spray. Then it's all sort of one fluid motion: invert dough onto peel, slash rapidly and decisively (it helps me to envision it as a whole-arm kind of motion), immediately peel onto the preheated stone. I got three out of the four slashes right this time (the fourth was too shallow and the knife caught a little) and I think I finally get it. Watching the dough bloom open without tearing along the first slash today, I psychologically got what I scientifically understood before. Slashing is taking control of the dough, saying you will expand where I dictate, not spread however you choose in the oven.

Anyway, some of you probably think like I do about bread, that the real test is in the crumb. I wish I could show it to you now, but I'm trying to be a good girl about this, and not ruin two days of effort by hacking into my loaf while it's still warm. But don't worry. I'm sure I'll be showing it off later.

EDIT:
I'm weeping.
This bread is so good that I'm actually weeping...
I need to get out of here before I eat the entire loaf.
For the record, putting feta cheese in an already exquisite sourdough loaf is a really, really good idea.

Lazy like a Sunday

2006-01-09T09:18:00.000-08:00

I started my new schedule last week at work, in preparation for starting my classes. This semester I'll be taking some of the last classes I need to finish my C.S. degree. Unfortunately, these classes are only offered in Lawrence. And they're in the middle of the day twice a week. Fortunately, my job has been completely flexible, so for the next four months, I'll be working Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and going to class Monday and Wednesday. Classes start 01/23, so until then Mondays are a lazy day. Lazy like a Sunday, in fact.

Today I'm making a huge pot of ham bean soup with the leftover ham bone from Christmas. Besides ham and eggs, this is my favorite thing to do with ham. The beans soaked over night, and before breakfast I covered them in fresh water and spices. The granulated garlic I got from Penzeys on Wednesday knocks the socks off the garlic powder I'm used to. The beans have only been simmering for an hour, and already my apartment smells fantastic. It's wonderful to be able to lounge around in my pajamas, eating breakfast, drinking coffee, and occasionally venturing out onto the roof out back for a dose of cold winter morning air and the buzz that's unique to smoking cigarettes in the cold. Then back inside where the warm scent of simmering soup smells like a lazy Sunday afternoon. And I have bread to bake shortly, that same beautiful sourdough from last weekend, only this time I've added some crumbled feta to the dough, to serve as an accompaniment to the soup all week. I may not even leave my apartment all day. With big plans like these for the day, why would I want to?

Time for that last cup of coffee and a cigarette. Happy Monday...

$100 worth of spices

2006-01-04T14:24:00.000-08:00

OK, so I only managed to spend $67.47 at Penzeys today, courtesy of the gift certificate my aunt and uncle gave me for Christmas. It was totally unexpected, and totally wonderful. I took S with me, because he and I see eye to eye on most things culinary, so I figured he'd appreciate it. He was more than happy to help me attempt to spend $100 on spices. We did our best, but this was all the damage we could do:

Then it was over to Mildred's Coffee House. I hadn't been there in years, probably not since I was a teenager, when I would go there to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee with my friends. The place hasn't changed at all. Still good coffee, and the same patio area, although it was a little too cold to sit out there and smoke. Actually, if S wasn't with me, I probably would have sat in the cold anyway, for nostalgia's sake.

I also finally got to try out Cupini's. I drive by it all the time, and each time I think, I'll have to stop in there and try it out. (I'm a sucker for signs advertising fresh pasta.) So after S and I had made the agonizing decision to have lunch over going to Prydes, (since he had to go to work shortly after), I suggested we try it out. I'm glad we did. We walked into the store part first, and spent some time ogling the various fresh/frozen pastas, the imported Italian cheeses, and the wide variety of various types of sausages, before the girl behind the counter pointed us to the restaurant side. Lunch was delicious. The roasted portabello panini was sublime, and any place that puts raw garlic in their potato salad gets a thumbs up from me.

Simple comfort food

2006-01-03T20:27:00.000-08:00

After my unmitigated disaster yesterday, I'm still feeling a little gun shy in the kitchen. That and today was my first day of my new 7:00am - 5:30pm shift at work. I'm actually kind of liking it. Whenever I can force myself to get up early, cool, quiet mornings and hot coffee are some of my favorite things. Working that early was sort of nice. (We'll see how I feel after two or three months of it.)

So I got home around six, and decidedly did not have the energy to tackle anything complicated for dinner. Pressure cooker to the rescue! Maybe it's from spending yesterday at my parents, but I was in the mood for an old favorite meal of mine from when I was a kid - pressure cooked chicken, noodles, and canned peas:
I didn't have any packages of Lipton chicken noodles, since at some point in my culinary evolution, I gave up on packaged foods of that sort, but I made do with some simple buttered egg noodles. (For this application, the Lipton noodles would have been much better.) And of course, mayonnaise to dip the chicken into. If my botched culinary experiments yesterday taught me anything, it's that I don't want to be a "foodie" to the point where I can't enjoy meals like this. Nothing gourmet, just good, old fashioned comfort food.

Failure and consolation

2006-01-02T20:38:00.000-08:00

It's funny, really. It was tragic at the time, but in retrospect, I can laugh.

I consider myself to be a pretty good cook (or at least I fool people into thinking that I am one by being able to meticulously follow complicated recipes and get good results), but today I was foiled. Twice. The first failure I don't mind that much. The second one really rankles.

I had planned to do the first recipe for my 2006 Challenge: Cappellacci di Zucca (essentially butternut squash ravioli) from Mario Batali's sumptuous Simple Italian Food. It seemed like a good project for a Monday off work - roast 3 pounds of butternut squash, then mix it with parmigianno reggiano and nutmeg to make a filling, then use it to fill some little ravioli made from homemade pasta (with the added bonus of getting to try out my shiny new pasta rolling attachment for my KitchenAid stand mixer). Simple, right? I thought so too. So put the squash in the oven to roast for an hour, intending to make the pasta dough while the squash roasted. I was so confident (maybe even cocky) about the success of the project that I also put some eggs in a pan to hardboil so I could get a head start on the tuna salad for work lunches.

So the eggs are boiling, the squash is roasting, and I set about mixing up the pasta dough. 3 1/2 cups of flour, 4 extra large eggs, 1/2 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil. Mix, knead, rest, and then machine roll to the desired thickness. Sounds like a snap to me. Mario Batali's recipe calls for piling the flour on a board, making a well to break the eggs into, and mixing and kneading by hand. Who needs to do that when you've got a KitchenAid with a dough hook? Into the mixing bowl it all went, low speed to combine, then turn it up to knead. Except it never combined. The more I mixed it, the more crumbly it became, until eventually I had something like pastry dough before you rest it, which is essentially the texture of moist cornmeal crumbs. I didn't immediately panic, I just calmly turned the mass out onto my cutting board, thinking I could salvage it with some hand kneading. But it turns out you can't knead something this texture - it just crumbles everywhere and makes a mess. And I couldn't add more eggs to it because the remainder of my eggs were currently cooling in a bowl of cold water.

After some time attempting to see if I could get any kind of cohesive structure out of it, I gave in to the realization that this dough was never going to become "...elastic and a little sticky." So I scraped it off the cutting board into the trash. I was still not entirely disheartened though. I figure, not many people even attempt homemade pasta, plus I can just get some more eggs and try again later in the week. So I set about peeling the hardboiled eggs to make my tuna salad. And then, the second culinary disaster of the day - I fail at peeling hardboiled eggs. I crack them against the board, and as I try to peel the first one, it splits in half and chunks of egg whites come off with crumbly bits of shell embedded in them. I try again. Same thing. Five eggs attempted and I end up with nothing salvageable. Just broken bits of shell, mangled gelatinous egg whites, and an ego as bruised as the poor egg bits on the board. That and nothing to eat, not for lunch, or dinner.

Humiliated, I call my Dad. I am hesitant to inform him of my horrendous kitchen failure, afraid it will forever tarnish his image of me as a good cook. OK, so that's a bit overly dramatic. He laughs good naturedly and invites me over for nachos. As long as I'll stop on the way over and pick up some Cheez Whiz. I tell him I have to go to the store any way to get some more eggs. Sigh. As always, Dad's cooking has the ability to perk me up. Within the hour, I'm sitting down to feast on a plate of his nachos, replete with Cheez Whiz and polyester lettuce. My parents may have never been into food and "gourmet" cooking like I'm getting to be, but they never fail when it comes to basic comfort food. Dad even managed to make me almost forget about my miserable failures in my own kitchen by making an occasion of breaking out a jar of the homemade salsa I gave him for Christmas, and lavishing complements upon it. It was wonderful on his nachos.

After lunch, I knew I would have to face up to the challenge of hardboiling some more eggs or go without tuna salad for lunch. Thankfully, my mom has a nifty electric egg-cooker that has consistently turned out perfect hardboiled eggs for as long as I can remember. I remember at one point, as I was teaching myself more about cooking, wondering why you would need a separate device to do that. Why not just use a pot of water? Now I know why. Sometimes your fragile culinary ego is so bruised that a second botched attempt at hardboiled eggs could send you over the edge. I wasn't about to risk it. I let her gadget cook my eggs while we watched an episode of the ubiquitous Law and Order. My parents are pretty fantastic, and they proved it yet again today by not only feeding me and making me feel better, but also by ensuring that I wouldn't go hungry due to my kitchen retardedness. I almost feel like making another attempt at that homemade pasta dough. Almost. There's always tomorrow.

First bread of 2006

2006-01-01T15:11:00.000-08:00

Once again, a picture that needs no words...

EDIT: OK, a couple of words. This is not the kind of bread you can leave sitting on your counter, even cut side down and loosely covered, without someone wanting a piece of it. I should have known after the way my parents tore into my last sourdough loaf that bread this good should be hidden away if I am to have any hope of it lasting all week for sandwiches at work. M asked for a piece of it after we got back here from our movie, and I obliged. He's normally a spongy white bread kind of guy; he thinks that Wonderbread is the pinnacle of the bread world. I wasn't expecting him to like this. And I most definitely wasn't expecting him to want a second piece, and then a third. But this bread is just that good. I had just a tiny little piece earlier, and I can still feel it lingering in my mouth, what Peter Reinhart calls the "thirty minute finish", where the lactic and acetic acids produced by the fermentation work their way into the sinuses, and the taste lingers so intensely that I'm still salivating. The fact that it's possible to create something that tastes so complex (or "beguiling", as Rose Levy Berenbaum puts it) out of nothing more than flour, water, and salt, is the reason why I have become such a passionate amateur bread baker. Because it really is like making magic happen.

EARMARKED CHALLENGE RECIPES

2006-01-01T00:53:00.000-08:00

Here are the recipes I'm earmarking for my 2006 CHALLENGE, listed by cookbook.

From Simple Italian Food:

Tagliatelle with Fresh Tuna Ragu (pg. 84) [Challenge Recipe #3]

From Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special:

Egyptian Red Lentil Soup (pg. 76) [Challenge Recipe #2]

From The Bread Baker's Apprentice:

Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire (pg. 187) [Challenge Recipe #1]

From The Handmade Loaf:

White Leaven Bread (pg. 28) [Challenge Recipe #4]

From The Naked Chef:

Chickpea and Leek Soup (pg. 21) [Challenge Recipe #5]

From Solo Suppers:

Lamb Steak with Greek Tomato Sauce and Feta (pg. 140) [Challenge Recipe #6]

From How to Cook Everything:

Roasted Eggplant with Garlic and Parsley (pg. 570) [Challenge Recipe #7]

From The Naked Chef Takes Off:

Couscous with Grilled Summer Vegetables and Loadsa Herbs (pg 60)
Ravioli of Minted Asparagus with Potatoes and Mascarpone (pg 114)

From Ball Blue Book of Preserving:

Strawberry Jam (pg 34)
Grape Jam (pg 33)

2006 ANTI-RESOLUTION CHALLENGE

2005-12-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

I don't make New Year's resolutions. I don't like putting artificial pressure on myself to accomplish something - it only turns whatever good thing I'm resolving to do for myself into a burdensome task, laden with undue expectations and pressure. Most New Year's resolutions are too ambitious, and are abandoned or forgotten come February anyway. Heck with that noise! This year I'm setting myself an "anti-resolution" challenge.

This challenge is inspired by the size of my cookbook collection:

I have a lot of great cookbooks, and I get more all the time. It occurred to me that as the number of cookbooks that I own grows, so shrinks the likelihood that I will cook something from any given one. (Especially now that I'm getting a lot of new recipes online!) Thus the seed of this challenge - to take advantage of the cookbooks I already own by cooking a new recipe out of one of my paper cookbooks once a week for the entire year.

So this is my "anti-resolution" challenge for 2006:
Cook 52 entirely new recipes from the cookbooks that I already own.

Recipes from this challenge are indexed HERE.

Born to cook!

2005-12-27T21:27:00.000-08:00

Culinary Christmas gifts were in abundance this year. K (one of my oldest and dearest freinds) gave me this fantastic ornament, which now hangs over the entrance to my kitchen!Is that not the most fabulous thing you've ever seen? I love it.

I wanted to post pictures of the gift my brother gave me, but I'm too terrible of a photographer to do them justice. He made me three oil painting of red, yellow, and green bell pepper, and framed them in these really elegant black frames. I was completely blown away by them.

I also now have two new cookbooks to work my way through; Simple Italian Food and Molto Italiano, both by Mario Batali. I can't wait for next weekend, when I'll have time to try a recipe or two from them.

So Christmas was wonderful, thanks in large part to the superwoman effort on my mother's part. Every year she works hard to make the day magical, from the decorations to the food traditions to the stockings. I hope she knows by now that I appreciate it all. I tried to show her my appreciation this year by giving her a crockpot, so maybe her homecooked meals can be a little less stressful. Like I said, it was a culinary Christmas all around.

Musings on bread machines and roast beef on rye

2005-12-20T00:25:00.000-08:00

After my parents and I demolished half of my loaf of sourdough last night, I needed to restock my bread supply for sandwiches, so I made a really easy bread machine rye bread tonight. It's basically my standard bread machine recipe, with 3:1 bread:rye flour, plus some dark molasses and caraway seeds added. (I once found out the hard way that if you don't add caraway seeds, it doesn't taste like rye bread.) I like my bread machine for strongly flavored breads, like the spinach-feta, or cheddar-cayenne pepper, or this rye. Bread machines simply aren't designed to coax wonderful flavor out of your basic flour-water-salt bread. The soft texture of the crumb of a plain bread machine loaf, combined with the extremely neutral dominant taste of commercial yeast makes white bread from a machine very boring to me. At that point, why bother?

But I digress. The bread machine rye is pretty good, if a bit dry. I need to fiddle with my ratio of water, because I think rye flour is more absorbent.

It did make a good looking sandwich though, and sometimes during the week, you don't have time to do THIS. You just want a serviceable bread to get you through your lunch hour. And that is the reason why I deeply love my bread machine.

Mad about sourdough

2005-12-19T19:47:00.000-08:00

So I baked a loaf of sourdough bread at my parents house last night...

...and as you can see I was pretty excited about it. Thanks to Dad being slightly overeager, we demolished about half that loaf spread with butter (well, margarine) before it even had a chance to cool. You can't smell this stuff baking and not want to hover like wolves and pounce as soon as it comes out of the oven.

Part of the remaining loaf made a delicious sandwich today for lunch:
2 thick slices, toasted
spread one slices with mayo, one with a strong Dijon mustard
about 3 oz thinly shaved roast beef
shaved extra sharp cheddar
sliced cherry tomatoes
freshly ground black pepper
a mound of green leaf lettuce + watercress

My boss saw me eating this today, did a double take, and asked me if I'd made it myself. When I told him I'd even made the bread myself, he was pretty impressed.

I don't write about bread enough

2005-12-12T21:03:00.000-08:00

...considering my blog is titled "I'd rather be baking bread..." So to remedy that, here's a big picture of the Spinach Feta Bread I baked yesterday:

Sometimes a pictures really is worth a thousand words (or in this case, a really rambling blog entry).

Tea, two ways

2005-12-09T23:37:00.000-08:00

So in the last year I've become addicted to iced tea. It's strange that it only happened in the last year, because my parents made iced tea by the gallon when I was growing up. But when I stopped drinking soda, I also lost my taste for their tea, simply because they brew it so strong, and so sweet.

I like my tea alot weaker, and I find unsweetened tea refreshing when I get sick of drinking just plain water. So my iced tea making is a simple yet specific process. Boil 1 quart of water. Pour this over 4 coffee scoops of loose tea leaves. Steep for exactly 5 minutes. Strain this into 2 quarts of cold water. Voila. 3 quarts of weak, refreshing tea. I took a picture of the setup for this process, in the hopes that someone besides me might find it interesting.

As for tea, the second way, I made some Tea Jelly the other night using this wonderful organic chai I got at the hippy grocery store. I normally wouldn't buy tea that cost $10 for 14 tea bags, but after tasting it, I had to agree that they may have indeed found the world's best tea. Obviously the logical response to tea this good is to boil it with some sugar and make jelly! I'm glad I did - this stuff is wonderful. It's like a thick, intensely sweet spicy honey. I can't wait to have it on some toasted homemade sourdough bread.

What the government has to say about our diet

2005-12-07T22:28:00.000-08:00

Fascinating reading.

Not sarcastic. I mean, I am kind of a food nerd, so I really did find this extremely interesting. I've always sort of thought that I could bumble my way to the healthiest way to eat using a little common sense, and most of what's in the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005 supports my definition of common sense. More whole grains. Less saturated / no trans fat. More fruits / vegetables. Those sorts of things. This document lays it all out.

I've been migrating towards a better way of eating this year. Living alone has really helped, because I don't have to drag someone else kicking and screaming along with me as I change me tastes and food preferences. The easiest way to do this for me has been to move towards the more "natural" option whenever I have a choice, and to focus on eating / preparing most of my meals at home. I'm at the point now where I wouldn't have to change very much if I wanted to bring myself into strict compliance with the USDA recommendations. And what do you know? I've lost 28 pounds this year in the process. In composing this report, I think, for once, a government agency may be doing something genuinely good for the American public.

The picture of health

2005-12-06T19:57:00.000-08:00

I would never say that about myself, but I would about my dinner tonight! In the ongoing quest for cheap single person gourmet, I whipped up some black bean / brown rice / tofu burritos. Sounds exciting, right? Right...? Actually, doctored up with some peppers and onions I had kicking around in the freezer, a healthy dose of ground cumin, and dollops of homemade salsa and nonfat yogurt, they were pretty good for a budget meal. It did kind of make me sad to open the last jar of homemade salsa though. No more of that goodness until tomatoes come back in season. Just plenty of winter cheapness.

Chili weather

2005-12-04T21:37:00.000-08:00

Last week at work, as I was eating my curried turkey sandwiches for lunch, I realized that with as cold as it's been lately, what I really wanted was a hearty hot lunch. What better way to satisfy this craving than by making a huge vat of chili? I found what may be the perfect chili recipe. Making this made me really glad that I bought myself the larger set of All Clad pots and pans that came with the 8 quart stockpot, because I'm not sure this volume of ingredients would have fit in any of my other pots.

This chili is wonderful - spicy and tangy. Cooled off with some grated sharp cheddar and a dollop of sour cream, and paired with some super simple cornbread, this is a great way to fend off the cold weather. I'm sure it will be wonderful all week at work too.

Although, just to not sound completely like a commercial for this recipe, I will say that M didn't approve. But he has sort of a weak digestion, so maybe feeding him a vat of beans and spices wasn't the best idea, huh? Well, he did say that it tasted delicious. And he's right about that.

Why do we go out to eat?

2005-12-03T19:15:00.000-08:00

I think that there are good and bad reasons to go out to eat. Reasons like laziness, not knowing how to cook, apathy, and poor planning, to me, fall into the category of bad reasons.

I am, by and large, a fairly cheap person. I try to stay within my weekly grocery budget, eat / prepare most of my meals at home, and go out to eat only when I make a conscious decision to do so, for what I consider good reasons. Here's what falls into my category of good reasons:

1. I like to go out to eat something that I can't make a better version of at home. When I told my dad this, he laughed and said "I guess you don't need to go out to eat much, huh?" It's true that I am becoming a pretty proficient cook, but I think this reason applies on a smaller scale for a lot people. My parents make the world's best t-bone steaks, but their method is wildly different from how steak is prepared at a restaurant. They use seasoned tenderizer, and then poke their steaks all over with a fork, before grilling them low and slow (40 minutes) over charcoal. The end result of this is a steak that's as tender as medium-rare, but completely well done. Needless to say, neither of them order steak in restaurants.

2. I like to order things out if making them at home would require purchasing a large quantity of unusual / expensive ingredients, or I'd have to make a huge batch of something and I only want one serving. Like Lidia's, one of my favorite Italian restaurants, where I can order a sampler of three different kinds of pasta, various spreads for fresh bread, and one of thier wonderful soups. Realistically, I wouldn't be able to recreate a meal like that at home.

3. I like to go out to restaurants where eating is part of a larger experience. Like going out for sushi. (Actually, I think sushi falls into every one of these categories.) I love sitting at the sushi bar and ordering five or six different kinds of rolls, then watch the chef prepare them while I savor a steaming bowl of miso soup. Even if I could make sushi at home, I'd still go out just for the wonderful experience.

4. I go out every once and a while to satisfy a specific craving. Like Papa Keno's roasted garlic feta pizza to placate a hangover.

5. Going out to eat for social reasons falls into a different category. When I'm out with a group of friends, any generic eatery can be an experience. This is good since most of my freinds don't necassarily share my views on good reasons to eat out. (I'm still looking for someone to check out this Spanish tapas place with me!)

I normally build a meal or two worth of flexibility into my meal plan / budget, so that I can make conscious decisions to go out to eat. But so many people I know don't have any kind of coherent plan as to what they're going to eat this week. So each day, they face the "what am I going to have for dinner?" dilema, and when you only start thinking about it when you're hungry, suddenly eating out becomes less of a concsious choice to be enjoyed, and more of a necessity for sustenance. My coworker B is like this for lunch at work. I've probably seen him bring a packed lunch twice in the last ten months. So he wastes $5-6 a day eating in our generic cafeteria. A little planning before the week starts lets me avoid scenarios like that, while still enjoying a good meal out for all the right reasons.

Baking for breakfast

2005-11-28T22:40:00.000-08:00

(Two entries in one day? Craziness!)
I just baked these because I never get up early enough to make breakfast for myself. I just don't have the self-discipline, especially when it's cold and gross outside and I'm snuggled up in bed under thick layers of blankets. So now all I have to do tomorrow morning is brew a cup of coffee while I shower, and then grab one or two of these rolls (and maybe slather some pear vanilla jam on them). I like being able to do something good for myself before I'm even really coherent in the morning.

Thanksgiving REDUX

2005-11-28T18:45:00.000-08:00

So everyone who cooks the big T-day dinner faces the inevitable dilema of what do with all those leftovers. I've put the mountains of leftover turkey that resulted from our feast to good use several different ways. First, while the cleanup was being done, I chucked the turkey carcass into my pressure cooker 2 quarts of turkey stock. I immediately froze 1 quart for later use, and set the other quart aside.

I cubed about 1 1/2 cups of turkey meat and made curried chicken salad, which will be lunch at work all week, spread on some whole grain rye with some nifty hydroponic lettuce I found at the local grocery store. I love the fact that a little planning can save me the $20 it would have cost me to eat in the cafeteria at work!

Then I used the remaining quart of turkey stock and some more cubed up turkey meat to make the world's easiest turkey soup. This fed me, my parents, and my brother, with enough leftover to make 2 dinners for me. It doesn't get any more frugal than that.

Thanksgiving

2005-11-27T18:27:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving was good this year. I did most of the cooking. Here is the menu. And here is a picture of our table:
The Alton Brown brined turkey is becoming something of a tradition - this is the second year I've done the turkey that way. It was wonderful, as always. If you've never brined a turkey before, this is definately a great beginner recipe. Inevitably whenever I make it, at least one person insists that it's undercooked because the breast meat is so tender! The roasted butternut squash soup didn't go over so well with the family. I think maybe it was the texture - it turned pretty thick. But I really liked it (which is good, because now I have a half batch of it left to eat, yum!). About halfway through the meal, my brother turned to me and said, "Hey sis, this is, quite possibly, the coolest looking thing I've ever seen, but I just don't like this soup." Oh well, at least the mini pumpkin bowls were a hit. The polenta sausage stuffing that I was all excited about completely flopped, as in, so bad it didn't even make it to the table. That stuffing you see in the picture is my mom's recipe, passed down to her by her mother. Sometimes you just can't do better than the tradition.

Comfort food for breakfast

2005-11-20T13:40:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, Dad used to make awesome sausage mushroom pizza. He could take a Chef Boyardee pizza kit, canned sliced button mushrooms, and a tube of breakfast sausage, and make a meal fit for a king (or at least a hungry wife and kids).

For me the best part was always the next morning, when he'd throw leftover squares of pizza into a skillet with some eggs. I still think that there's nothing better for breakfast than a hot slice of leftover pizza with 2 over easy eggs flipped on top. I love breaking the yokes with my fork and letting the delicious sauce run all over the pizza. That's what I mean by breakfast comfort food. Not only is it truly delicious, it's also wrapped in warm fuzzy family memories. Yum.

My friends (those of them lucky enough to be at my apartment for breakfast on occasion) are often skeptical about this seemingly strange mix. I don't ever make Dad's pizza myself, because I know it wouldn't be same if he didn't make it. But I do try to save a slice or 2 of takeout or frozen pizza when I can to recreate the amazing breakfasts of my childhood.

A fried rice kind of night

2005-11-18T20:55:00.000-08:00

My work schedule these days isn't very conducive to cooking dinner during the week. I work a "mid" shift (10-6:30), and I do like the whole don't-have-to-get-up-early part. The part the messes up my dinner planning is that I tend to eat lunch early in my shift, becuase my partner in crime B normally suggests it around noon, and I'm normally kind of hungry then. Not only does eating that early make the afternoon feel excruciatingly long, it also makes me ravenous for dinner before my shift even ends. Then it's a 30 minute drive home, and if I don't have something waiting for me at home that's already prepared or super quick to cook, I'll cave to temptation and either have dinner with B somewhere up by work (spending $$ I don't need to), or eat fast food (ingesting complete crap). My fried rice and egg drop soup recipes are great ways ward off tempation on nights like this. As long as I cook the rice the night before, I can be eating 15 minutes after I walk in the door. My wallet and my waistline thank me for that.

The pressure cooker gets a workout

2005-11-14T21:03:00.000-08:00

Tonight was one of those nights of cooking where everything serves a dual purpose. Obviously, first and foremost, my goal was to feed myself. But dinner prep tonight also yielded the makings for lunches to take to work the rest of the week, and a replenishment of my supply of frozen chicken stock. I feel pretty good about it (and I ate well too). On the menu tonight was roast chicken, risotto, and brussel sprouts.

I roasted a 4 1/2 lb chicken using my favorite method from The Naked Chef, which takes about an hour. While that was in the oven, I cooked up a cup of chickpeas in the pressure cooker. I just recently discovered how much better cooked dried chickpeas are than the hard, overly salty canned variety. And in the presure cooker, it's easy - I soak a cup of them while I'm at work, and then cook them for 10 minutes in the pressure cooker. So I made roasted red pepper hummus from that to use as a sandwich spread - YUM!

After I had cleaned out the pressure cooker, I put it to work again, this time making risotto. My standard risotto recipe is also a good Naked Chef recipe, and I really like the result, but I don't like the 20 minutes of continuous stirring. I was a little skeptical as to whether my trusy pressure cooker was up to the task. I scaled down a basic recipe from The Pressure Cooker Gourmet. When I released the pressure and opened the lid, I was pleasantly surprised - it had cooked up perfectly. A little butter, a little freshly grated parmigiano reggiano, and it was fantastic. I think I'm going to adopt this as my standard risotto method.

But I wasn't done with my pressure cooker yet. After dinner, I sliced the rest of the meat off the chicken for sandwiches, and then used the carcass, along with some slightly less than completely fresh veggies, and made 8 cups of chicken stock. Frozen in 2 cup portions, that should last me until it's time to roast another chicken.

Burger King blues

2005-11-12T19:35:00.000-08:00

So M an I were arguing about what to do for lunch today after I woke up at noon and found him passed out on the couch. I suggested, as I always do on lazy weekend days, that we go to Papa Kenos for pizza. Something about waking up late and hung over makes me craze a massive slice of pizza with pepperoni, roasted garlic, spinach, feta cheese, and pesto sauce. And maybe a bottle of Boulevard Wheat for a little hair-of-the-dog kind of hangover cure. But, M being the cheap, un-culinarily-adventurous type that he is, counters by suggesting Burger King, home of the $1.99 Whopper and Fries. He says his body is craving fat and salt, and that he'd rather spend $4 for lunch for two than the ~$20 we normally spend at Papa Kenos. I do that math on that one and realize that he is offering to buy for both of us. My own cheapness wins out on this one. While waiting for our food at Burger King, we examine the nutritional information poster on the wall. Displaying that information prominently where customers will stand and wait is a brilliant idea on Burger King's part. But the brilliance comes from not putting it where customers will see it before they order.
Here's the breakdown of our $1.99 delights.

Whopper with cheese - 800 calories / 49g fat.
Medium fries - 360 calories / 18g fat.
Grand total - 1160 callories / 67g fat. Yikes.

But at this point, we had already ordered and paid - nothing to do but dig in and consume almost 1200 calories while listening to the couple next to us, prompted by the light saber give-aways in the kids meals, explain Star Wars to their four children. I shudder to think about the nutritional content of the kids meals.

As I sit on the curb smoking my post-meal cigarrette, I mention to M that the food is sitting in my stomach like a brick. Ugh. Even though going there was his idea, he agreed. I've been eating pretty healthy / mostly home cooking these days, and all that grease, sodium, and fat bothered me all day long.

Sleepless and jamming

2005-11-11T02:00:00.000-08:00

It's 2 am. I made Pear Vanilla Jam tonight. To me, it seems perfectly normal to undertake a project like making and canning 8 half-pints of jam at midnight. On a week night. When I know I have to get up early for work tomorrow. I suppose I'll give myself bonus almost-normal points for not actually eating this jam out of the jar with a spoon like my deceptive picture would indicate. I think if I did that the crazy amount of sugar in it would keep me up the rest of the night.