Kamut Levain

This is the Kamut Levain from Local Breads. It is extremely delicious; my spouse declared it my best yet and the best bread he's ever had. He's a man who is generous with his praise, but still; I'm pleased. The only thing is that it had pathetic oven spring, and I don't know why. Over-proofing? Flour without pep? I know the levain itself is nice and active, so I guess I'll just keep playing. I've reached the beginner's plateau where I've stopped being delighted when the bread works at all and have started to worry about how to make it work *right.* Good thing wrong bread tastes so good.

Leftover Chicken

(thanks mom!) with corn on the cob and broccoli.

Chicken and Tomato Sauce

Made by my mom; with mushrooms. basil, and cheese. Very good. We had it with black rice and green beans. For dessert a failed blueberry-peach pie: crust too dark (and soggy on the bottom), filling un-gelled. Of course even a failed pie is delicious, and I stuffed myself with this one.

Toasty Feet

Roasty feet right now, but good for the winter. The top photo shows the back of the heel, which I though came out especially pretty.

Whole Wheat Chia Seed Sourdough

This bread shows both how much I don't yet know about making bread, and how totally forgiving and rewarding a learning process bread making is. I followed (I use the word loosely) this recipe. I was interested because I'd had a bag of chia seed in my fridge for about six months; I bought it and then never figured out how to use it. It turns out that chia seed can absorb incredible amounts of water, and turns into a gel; added to bread dough, this results in a lot of moisture and nice flavor. Because I was winging things I ended up with a lot more water in my dough than I meant to have, and I clearly have no idea how to shape or slash a wet dough. Hence the blobular batards I ended up with. But so what? They taste wonderful.

Field Peas

with cherry tomatoes and red onions, over black rice. With sauteed okra.

Pesto Burgers

with quinoa and a giant sliced tomato. I used dark and light quinoa mixed together, but in the end I think I prefer light by itself.

Whole Wheat Mash Bread II

My first sub-par loaf of bread! Two things changed: I used a new brand of flour, and I only used half the starter I was supposed to. The problem is undoubtedly the second of those things, and basically what happens when one bakes on too little sleep. Bakes half-baked, so to speak. Never mind; even sub-par bread is still pretty good. We had it last night with grilled hake and a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, and red onions.

Quinoa Pasta

with a sauce of simmered fresh tomatoes, garlic, and basil. We had it with these funny little yellow and green summer squashes. They were so cute that I ate them even though they tasted like (the despised, the dreaded) zucchini. For dessert more brownies.

Potato Frittata

with tarragon and chives, and sauteed cabbage. For dessert, spectacular brownies: we used the "Cakey" recipe in the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion, cutting the sugar in half, using white whole wheat flour, and adding a chopped-up dark chocolate bar. I ate two and could go right back and finish the pan.

Buffalo Burgers

with pesto; also wilted escarole, corn on the cob, bread, and tomatoes and carrots from the garden.

Whole Wheat Mash Bread

This is my first recipe from Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads. It is also my first use of a "mash" in bread baking: a mash is a gelatinized mass of flour that has been hydrated and kept warm for a few hours until various enzymatic activities have had time to do their work. The bread also uses a nice big bit of starter. Let me tell you something: this is a crazy good loaf of bread, and you would never guess it's entirely whole wheat (a good thing). The color balance is off in the top photo; it is much more golden than it appears here (as you can see in the bottom photo).

Happy Father's Day!

We celebrated with homemade English muffins. I found the recipe here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/handbook/whole-wheat-sourdough-english-muffins. The dough was very wet and (for me) kind of hard to work with, but it didn't matter. As usual, no matter how many things I did wrong, the end result was delicious for this starter-raised bread.

Egg Noodles

with pesto. Salads composed by the spouse, and as delicious as they look.

Field Peas and Corn

in a sort of ragout, with sauteed onions. Also potato salad and crispy kale.

Grilled Steak

with quinoa and crispy kale. The latter was delicious: leaves of kale tossed in olive oil, then crisped in a 500 degree oven for about 8 minutes.

Quinoa Pasta

with leftover roast chicken and diced up summer squash and tarragon. With steamed green beans. For dessert, many, many chocolate chip cookies, from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion. We were out of chocolate chips so I chopped up a bar of super-dark chocolate.

Zucchini Gratin

from Richard Olney. Delicious; we had it with corn, tomatoes, and salad. One of the nicest unintended consequences of my breadmaking is that I now leave my baking stone in the oven full time, which results in beautifully even heat distribution in everything I cook. Makes a huge difference.

Clapotis Four

I may never stop making this scarf pattern. I've made three winter versions in wool; here is my first summer version, in silk.

Linen T-Shirt

All ready for summer.

Roast Chicken

with tarragon. We had it with a salad and the pictured pain au levain, even better than the first batch.

Eggs

Fried eggs (Miss Sue's, so very flavorful) with brown rice and roasted vegetables (cauliflower, broccoli, carrots).

Pain Au Levain

In my opinion, the best bread yet. Stiff dough starter, nice beefy percentage of whole wheat and rye flours, and oven spring that resulted in beautifully cylindrical batards. I think I am persistently slashing too shallowly, but other than that I have no fault to find with this mouthwatering bread. We had it with friends; I made a Swiss chard quiche (pre-baked the crust this time, which made all the difference in the world), salad, and banana bread for dessert (all-purpose, whole wheat, and amaranth flours).

Cheese Omelette

with sauteed okra, corn on the cob, and bread and butter.

Long-Cooked Broccoli

over whole wheat spinach pasta, with salad. The broccoli recipe is from Alice Waters The Art of Simple Food, a book about which I have mixed feelings.

Grilled Hake

with green beans, salad, and sourdough bread.

Whole Wheat Sourdough Miche

A very, very good loaf of bread. This is the first one I've made that I would say is genuinely sour. It is tender and flavorful, but its real glory is its crust: deeply caramelized and delicious. It was also the occasion for a discovery. I had to use all of the starter I'd made for it, saving none to ferment the next batch. For fun I decided to mix a new starter in the old container, which had a few clinging shreds of starter in it, and lo: a whole new batch of starter, no problemo (and for that matter, problem solved). I'm learning that wild yeast is strong.

Quiche

with spinach, onions, and gruyere. I made the crust with the aptly named "Foolproof Pie Crust" recipe from Cook's Illustrated. Though I did in fact out-fool it: "I won't bother to pre-bake it" I thought. "It won't matter" I thought. Next time I'll pre-bake. We had it with salad and the pictured carrots, harvested by my spouse.

"Whole" Spelt Loaf

"Whole" is in quotation marks because in fact I ran out of spelt flour and had to top it up with whole wheat (maybe 20%). This is what my spelt starter did; as you can see, it had oven spring that, once again, made a mockery of my slashes. I think it's a beautiful loaf, and has a deep, complex, tangy flavor I like. Unfortunately, only I and one of the household toddlers like it, so it may not get made again for a while. Will have to find another use for spelt starter (fragrant library paste?)

Chicken Sausage

with turnips and brown rice. I had to douse the sausage in olive oil to make it worth eating; not enough fat.

Spelt Starter

I am nurturing a new starter, still in its infancy. It took me a minute to place its current aroma, but once I did it was unmistakable: it smells *exactly* like gazpacho.

Potato Salad

with little herbed hamburger patties, and arugula salad. Potato salad is shaping up to be my dish of the summer. Last night's had some tarragon in it, which really came into its own this morning, after sitting in the fridge over night. I'm having it for lunch today and can hardly wait.

J.M. Coetzee

I'm not sure if books are the kind of thing we talk about here anymore, but in case anyone's wondering I am in a deep Coetzee phase. In the last two months I've read Summertime, Disgrace, Foe, and The Master of Petersburg; I'm reading Elizabeth Costello now. I am wholly absorbed, can't, it seems, get enough. He can do anything he wants with me once he starts.

Kale Soup

Made of one onion, one red pepper, a can of Great Northern beans, two cobs' worth of corn, half a box of chicken stock, and a big bunch of kale.

French Country Boule

These are from Local Breads. If I have to quibble with bread this delicious, it would be to say that I prefer a higher percentage of rye and whole wheat flours than these called for. But seriously, why am I quibbling? There's nothing not to like here. For one thing, these babies had oven spring to spare. They laughed in the face of my wee slashes and almost burst themselves in half as they rose in the oven. I attribute this muscle to my use of bread flour; up until now I've been using all-purpose. I'm a convert.

Bacon and Mei Qing Fritatta

with salad, and the remainder of the baguettes.

Old World Baguette Redux

Definitely a life lesson here. This bread looks nothing like the bread described in my book, and no stage of its preparation went as predicted, and I suffered great frustration along the way, and when I went ahead and baked it I came up with one of the best pieces of bread I've ever tasted. I'm beginning to understand that there are not many ways to mess up bread made from a levain. The picture does not do justice to the opalescence of the bread's chewy interior.

Quinoa Pasta

with pesto, and sauteed garden turnips.

Grilled Red Snapper

with roasted sprouts, shiitakes, and new potatoes.

Potato Salad

from Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food. It is extremely delicious, mainly, I think, because I used rice vinegar which doesn't really taste like vinegar to me (not that I dislike vinegar). We had it with sauteed cauliflower and steamed broccoli from our local farmer's market. Super yum.

Crab Cake

We only had one, so I split it. Also a salad and massive helpings of buckwheat batard with Danish butter.

Buckwheat Batards

Or as I affectionately think of them, "li'l buckwheat bastards." My second recipe from Local Bread. These are just as good as they look, and particularly gratifying because the omens during their making were so uniformly unpropitious (insufficient water, texture not at all as described in the book, dubious rising of the levain). I was cheered a little bit when I realized that the recipe itself had some significant errata, so the difference between my dough and the one it described was inevitable. Two things on which I did make progress this time were proofing (I didn't overproof) and slashing (I used a razor blade and boy, does a truly sharp blade ever make a difference.)

Grilled Salmon

with raw sugar snap peas, sauteed Swiss chard and spring onions, salad, strawberries, and les flutes. All around great meal.

La Flute Gana

Voila, my first recipe from Local Bread. It involves commercial yeast and a little bit of corn flour, plus a long refrigeration of the proofed dough, called "retarding." If only someone had asked me what I was doing yesterday I could have answered, "retarding the flutes!" In any case, they are terrific. Very delicious, with a crust so deep and strong and crisp-yet-chewy that my jaw ached as I finished my first bites. True, they are oddly shaped; I blame over-proofing, a too-cool oven, and a not-perfectly-sharp dough scorer. I can fix these things, and in the mean time, will enjoy this bread.

French Country Boule

Well, this is a revelation. This is a delicious little loaf of bread; chewy, moist, wheaty with just a touch of sourness. And nothing in it but flour, water, salt (not quite enough, I think), and time! I followed the recipe and instructions in the Bread Bible, and used my stiff starter. I feel I have crossed a threshold.

Fridge-Clearing Frittata

of brown rice, farro, broccoli, and corn. With roasted cauliflower and shiitakes.

Raised Waffles

The first fruit of my starter! I made Marion Cunningham's Raised Waffles, from Rose Levy Berenbaum's Cake Bible, using some of my starter instead of yeast. (I also replaced about half of the all-purpose flour with rye flour). These waffles are extraordinary; their surface is as delicate and crisp as the best tempura you've ever had, the interiors moist and light as a feather. They have a mild sour flavor, though might not have if I'd used any sugar. I thought they were just about perfect with a little maple syrup. Tomorrow I'll make my first starter-leavened bread; I am encouraged.

Cherry Fizz

This scarf has been done for some time, but I'm behind on my knitting documentation. I love this pattern; easy and just right for one skein of yarn.

Double My Fun!

What we are looking at here is a starter that has doubled in bulk a few hours after feeding and that, my friends, spells success. I'm baking with it tomorrow and we'll see what's next. The container comes from the paint section of Home Depot, which is appropriate because the starter smells exactly like fresh paint.

Whole Wheat Fettuccine

with sauteed mei qing cabbage, tuna, and capers. With salad. I could have eaten bowls of it.

Starter Update

The whole-wheat based starter is more active than the rye so far (though both are bubbling away) and smells like an overripe peach.

Grouper

pan-fried in butter, with brown rice and farro, and first CSA salad of the spring!

Meatloaf

Ground beef, an egg, tarragon, chives (with flowers), preserved lemon, and quinoa. With broccoli rappini and corn on the cob.

Progress?

It's a shame I can't post this picture in Smell-O-Vision, because if I could you'd know this incredible fact: both batches of starter smell exactly like sourdough bread! Unfortunately, they aren't growing in volume at all. So what the heck is up? My awful-smelling starter rose like it was supposed to; my wonderful-smelling starter seems to have no rising mojo at all. I'm just going to keep feeding it and hope for the best.

Turnip Time!

I do love spring turnips. Tonight we had sauteed tiny turnips with sauteed turnip greens and a potato-and-tarragon frittata. Wonderful all around.

I Can't Get Startered!

My second attempt at sourdough starter was not much more successful than the injera starter. You see it on day three. One problem is that it has a big dried spot on the surface, which happened because I disregarded instructions to keep it tightly covered with plastic wrap. "It needs to breathe!" I thought, wrongly. Another problem is that whereas my book predicted it would emit "a faint citrus aroma" it in fact exudes "an assertive dead-cat-in-the-basement" aroma. I threw it out and started two new batches, one with rye flour, one with whole wheat. I think one issue is my lack of a place to let it sit at the proper temperature. My book recommends 55 to 65 degrees, but where is that to be found in my house, chock a block with room-temperature rooms?

Happy Birthday to Me!

Spaghetti and Meatballs

Whole-wheat fettuccine with Rao's tomato sauce and beef meatballs: ground beef, an egg, some garlic, and fresh oregano.

Soup

Today's fridge-cleaning soup contains:

1 lb. Yellow Indian Woman beans
1 Moroccan Lemon Chicken carcass
1 bulb of fennel
1 onion
2 red peppers
1 big piece of ginger

Super yum over leftover brown rice.

Banana Bread

with ginger. About a week ago I had a Thai banana fritter, which had ginger in the batter and was scrumptious. So a few days ago I threw a big spoonful of ground ginger into my banana bread batter thinking: "frittery good!" In fact it was nothing at all like the fritter, but still pretty good.

Crab Cakes

with quinoa and sauteed turnip greens (young juicy ones from the big pots of them my husband is growing).

Lamb Chops

broiled, with spinach and quinoa.

Injera

Catastrophe. The worst cooking disaster of my life. A friend and faithful reader told me a while back that teff flour, which I'd bought without knowing a thing about it, is the basis of injera, the delicious Ethiopian sourdough flatbread. I love injera, and Ethiopian food in general, so I filed that information away in my "to-do" neurons. About a week ago, I don't know why, I got fired up about it and did some internet research that resulted in a week of tending a teff-based sourdough starter, and tonight I made it into injera. In Ethiopian restaurants injera is spongy and sour and compulsively eatable; in my kitchen it was gummy and faintly gritty and tasted (I'm quoting my husband) "worse than dirt." He was right; it was repulsive. Clearly, I have a lot to learn about starter. And I plan to persevere! But this time I'm going to try regular sourdough starter without the teff element, to see if I can get some basics down. I'll let you know how it goes.

Potato Frittata

with roasted cauliflower and shiitakes.

Meatball Soup

with chicken stock, onions, herbed meatballs, whole wheat egg noodles, and baby turnip greens.

Crab Cakes

with spinach and black rice.

Mo Banana Bread

Two loaves. The flour was a blend of buckwheat, teff, and coconut, the fat was butter, and I threw in a half teaspoon of ground nutmeg. The nutmeg overwhelms the banana, but I love nutmeg so it's ok by me. I did, by the way, make Maida Heatter's Cuban Banana Bread last week. It calls for a cup of bran cereal (I used All-Bran), and to my taste this introduced too much salt and hard-to-identify processed something or other flavor.

Moroccan Lemon Chicken

with black rice and sprout-shiitake slaw.

White Bean Soup

I realized as I was putting this soup together that my soup-making has evolved into a game with one rule: I'm not allowed to buy anything specifically for the soup. I suppose I cheat in that I usually keep things like beans and chicken stock on hand, but the moment of making is spontaneous, and I use whatever is already in the house. Yesterday that meant:

1 lb. mayacoba beans
1 squishy box chicken stock
1 big badly sprouted oninon
a few chunks of country ham
2 ancient butternut squashes
some fresh sage
garlic

The soup is sublime. I am finally getting a handle on the texture of bean soup. Realizing that the secret to thickness is blending some of it up and adding it back to the pot was a big step. That's the thing about being self taught (at cooking or, I suppose, anything else): you gain a lot of confidence at the expense of some startling holes in your repertoire.

Happy Easter!

Every year I say it: I should dye all our eggs, I find them so cheering. Below is my daughter's Easter to-do list.

Spaghetti and Meatballs

or sort of: whole wheat fettuccine, broken into pieces, with sauteed red bell peppers and buffalo meatballs (ground buffalo meat, brown rice, chives, and a spoonful of preserved lemon).

Grilled Buffalo Filet

with broccoli and brown rice. The last of the marmalade gingerbread for dessert. Next up: Cuban Banana Bread.

Baked potatoes

and roasted vegetables (cauliflower, shiitakes, red peppers).

Marmalade Gingerbread

I find few things more relaxing than throwing together a quick bread, and I'm always interested in new ones. Tonight I made the Marmalade Gingerbread from Maida Heatter's Cakes, and it's as good as it sounds (if you like marmalade, that is). The recipe, with my tweaks, is as follows:

1C whole wheat flour
1C amaranth flour
1/2 t salt
1 t baking soda
1 t ground ginger
1/2 t nutmeg
zest from 2 lemons
2 t vanilla
1 C coconut oil
1 C lime-ginger marmalade (homemade by my aunt's boyfriend, thank you so much Loy)
2 eggs

I put it all together in my stand-up mixer, then baked at 350 for 50 minutes (though next time I'll try 45). I had a piece warm and, before deciding on seconds, had to let all my brain's pleasure centers calm down after it brought them screaming to life.

What do I really eat?

When I have no one but myself to please? Let's observe: last night's dinner was four mashed up sardines stirred into brown rice along with some sea vegetable kim chi, finished off with two fried eggs on top. Yum. Accompanying this I had a handful of peanuts, an orange, and a banana, and that's more or less what I'd always eat if left to my own devices.

Grilled Sheepshead

That's the fish, not actual sheeps' heads, thought the latter might certainly have made for a more lively post. In any case, we had it with baked sweet potatoes and tiny little brussels sprouts sauteed with minced country ham.

Crab Cakes

with quinoa and salad.

Jacket, At Last

I started this project in August of 2008, and here it is, not quite two years later! It is a reasonably tricky pattern, and somewhere in the middle I just lost steam and put it aside. It's hard to go back to something once you've done that, but I'm glad I did: I not only have a beautiful sweater to show for it, but I have cleared some major dust bunnies out of my subconscious closet as well. Onward and upward!

Knitting Catch-UP

Ok, First I have to get over the difference in photo quality as the images appear here and as they would appear if you were looking at them on my computer. Why does Blogger degrade them?
Never mind. Here are the fruits of the last couple of months' worth of knitting: a sweater I love and the third iteration of a scarf pattern I adore. The sweater required some advanced knitterly techniques, so not only do I like it but it makes me feel comfortingly skilled as I remember its making.

Fried Polenta

with sauteed sprouts and prosciutto.

Grilled Amber Jack

with cheesy polenta and sauteed red peppers and fennel.

Cabinet Pasta

You know when you open the fridge and the void stares back at you? That was my plight this evening. Thank heaven for things that keep forever. We had whole-wheat fettucine with a "sauce" of shredded and wilted romaine lettuce, a can of tuna, some chopped up olives, a tablespoon or so of capers, and a big spoonful of preserved lemons. I found it delicious.

Oscar Dinner

We had a wee gathering in honor of the awards ceremony held for people we don't know in movies we for the most part hadn't seen. It was fun! One guest brought a big pot of delicious red beans and rice; I made a veggie casserole. I used for my inspiration a recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook, but I erred freely, ending up with a compendium of the following:

2 onions
1 lb. mixed mushrooms
1 head cauliflower
1 bunch rappini
4 C cooked farro
2 C grated cheddar
Several large spoonfuls of Moroccan preserved lemons
1 egg

I chopped up the vegetables and sauteed them until soft, then mixed everything together and baked it for half an hour at 350. It was very tasty. I also made some brownies (the fudgy kind from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Book) with buckwheat flour.

Frittata

of mushrooms, red peppers, and prosciutto.

Corn Bread

Corn bread with cheddar cheese and scallions, actually; if I normally pig out on cornbread, I suppose what I did last night was hog out, or something. We had it with some (undistinguished) pan-grilled steak, and pan-roasted red peppers.

Crab Cakes

with farro and roasted sprouts, shiitakes, and red bell peppers. I almost didn't even tell you what vegetables we had, but the peppers made them look and taste so different in real life that I thought I'd risk boring you in this digital report.

Bean Soup

over farro for me. Just back from a trip to LA where I ate dim sum (heaven) and the best steak I've ever had in my life (NY strip, aged, with mushrooms, rappini, and spinach on the side, and bone marrow flan to start). The steak was at a super hot (in the happening sense) restaurant with giant pictures of actors on the walls and menus, and women in four and five inch heels all around. I, with my parents and wearing my Danskos, enjoyed it hugely.