V2K!

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Second Verse

much the same as the first: chicken stew over brown basmati rice, with masses of okra (home-grown and CSA).

Chicken Stew

With onions, ginger, butternut squash, collard greens, peanut butter, and a haphazard melange of cumin, turmeric, and cinnamon. Over brown rice.

Fritatta

with brown rice and red peppers, with beautiful pale green and purple-speckled pole beans.

Spiral Pasta

with butternut squash and mustard greens.

Whole Wheat Sourdough Miche

Delicious, delicious bread. But I confess to tearing up when I took it out of the oven because I can't, no matter what I try, get it to burst and split in the oven like I see other people's loaves doing. Eating a few pieces of it cheered me up a bit.

For dinner last night we had lamb chops, okra, and curried (disgusting, watery, flavorless) acorn squash.

Sweet Potatoes

with okra and salad.

Grilled Salmon

with quinoa and wilted arugula.

Hawthorne

Oh how I love a scarf! This is a very popular pattern right now, and it's easy to see why: it requires only moderate effort for pretty results. Now if only it weren't in the nineties every day...

Scrappy Sourdough

I planned to make my usual whole wheat version, but realized I was low on whole wheat. Instead I ended up with 200g whole wheat, 100g rye, and 200g bread flour. Delicious, and not so different from what I planned, as it turns out. I was without oven power for about a week, and I really missed the bread. Thank goodness everything's working again.

Lamb Chops

with okra and homemade bread (see above).

The Best Darn Sweet Potatoes

I've ever had. They came from the farmer's market, and I don't know what made them so different from the usual, but I had two and wished for more. We had them with okra and salad.

Curried Squash

with fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, and salad.

Grilled Salmon

with quinoa and sauteed mei qing cabbage.

Leyfi Sweater

This sweater was a fast knit, because it has a large gauge. (Gauge=stitches per inch. Confusingly, the fewer stitches per inch, the larger the gauge, but you can see how it's faster; if it only takes four stitches to make one inch of sweater, as here, that's a lot fewer stitches over all than say, six stitches per inch. The "large" refers to the size of the stitches themselves.) Anyhoo, I'm happy with it, though I shortened it by a couple of inches after I took this picture. The color, by the way, is a combination of the two yarns (one a thick, clear poppy, the other a thin variegated purple and green) that I held together as I knit.

Seared Tuna

with okra and brown rice.

Coconut Curry

with butternut squash and field peas, over brown rice. With the first CSA salad since the spring!

Curried Acorn Squash

with okra and fried potatoes. Dinner is so strange; sometimes I labor and plan and it all looks like it's going to be great and then it's just ok. And then, rarely, as last night, I throw it together with moderate hope and it turns out to be *sublime*.

Chicken Hash

sort of: leftover roast chicken, brown rice, and wilted arugula.

Baked Sweet Potatoes

with okra and scrambled eggs.

The Pirates of the Caribbean I, II, & III

Yo ho, yo ho, Johnny Depp as a pirate for me. I still remember the joyful shock of the first movie. I heard that they were making a movie about a ride at Disneyland and laughed for two days. Then it turned brutally hot so I went to see it in the theater, where it turned out the air conditioning was broken—and I didn't even notice, because the movie was so much fun. To say that these movies are better than they have any right to be is not saying much, since they have exactly no right to be any good at all. But there's Johnny, giving the performance of a lifetime, surrounded by an excellent supporting cast (hi Mackenzie Crook!), working from a witty script, wearing eyeliner that should have been nominated for an Oscar all by itself. I hear they are making part IV; I may not see it in the theater, but I'll gleefully add it to my DVD hoard.

Lemon Thyme Chicken

with brown rice and brussels sprouts. My apologies to my vegetarian friends; perhaps meat-lovers will agree with me that this is an appetizing bird. (The lemons are Moroccan preserved; salt-lover's heaven).

Chocolate Sour Cherry Bread

For the record: we had a brussels sprout and potato frittata for dinner. The real story, however, is clearly the pictured bread, which is from a recipe in Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery. It's really just a normal sourdough, with the addition of cocoa, chocolate, dried cherries, and a little butter. It's delicious, and will, I predict, be better in a few days when the chocolate has bloomed. I like Silverton's book a lot, but wish she'd given measurements in grams rather than ounces. Bakers go metric for the same reason drug dealers do: when accuracy matters, it's the only way to fly.

Sesame Seed Kamut Levain

This loaf has 50% kamut flour, 45% bread flour, 5% whole wheat, and is filled with sesame seeds inside and out. It is extremely good today, and I think will be better tomorrow and the day after. I dearly love sesame seeds. I also love kamut flour, and don't understand why the recipes I read call for (in my opinion) cautious amounts of it. Berenbaum recommends 6% (!!!). I'm sure she has her reasons, and they probably have to do with maintaining authenticity in her recipe for pain au levain, but luckily for me I don't care about authenticity. I care about using lots of kamut. This is a good way to do it.

Missoniesque T

I have been working on this 4-Eva. It's the project I picked up in between other projects, so it never got long stretches of attention. Moreover, it's knit with fine wool on small needles, so there are a *lot* of stitches in it, and I didn't have a pattern so I had to take breaks to figure out what I wanted to do and how to do it. I'm reasonably happy with the result, and encouraged to wing it more often.

Impromptu Stew

of squash, peppers, field peas, onions, garlic, peanut butter, coconut, and curry. Delicious over brown basmati rice.

Tuna

pan-seared; I mean, that's what it was supposed to be. I envisioned clear ruby fish-flesh but we ended up eating barely pink tuna instead. Actually, it was pretty good anyway. We had it with brown rice and okra (in case you haven't noticed, we are overrun with okra these days, as we are every August.)

T-Bone Steak

grilled, with wilted arugula and brown rice.

Frittata

of quinoa, onions, and field peas; with roasted cauliflower and shiitakes.

Grilled Steel Head Trout

farmed! I am ashamed. With okra and quinoa.

Whole Wheat Sourdough Miche

This is a really reliable loaf. I love the way the crust darkens, and then darkens again when I toast it.

Fritatta

of leftover vegetables from last night, with added field peas. With pan-roasted okra, ours and our CSA's.

Grilled Halibut

with roasted potatoes, sprouts, and red peppers. Sounds good, right? Ick. The fish was bitter, the vegetables underdone.

Sweet Potato Omelette

with wilted arugula and sourdough toast.

Grilled Amberjack

with quinoa and curried squash.

Weekend Round-Up

A lot of cooking has happened here lately. When I thought back I realized that in one twenty-four hour period I produced, in addition to regular lunches and dinners, two loaves of sourdough (pictured), a double batch of waffles, several dozen chocolate chip cookies, and a big bowl of potato salad. I don't know what came over me, but it all seemed pretty natural at the time. The bread is mighty good; both loaves used the same starter, but the loaf on the right has about twenty percent kamut flour, while the one on the left has rye and whole wheat. Let's call them identical (conjoined!) twins raised in different environments. The pictured okra family represents our first harvest.

Grilled Steak

with Indian spiced okra and sweet potatoes. My reaction to eating sweet potatoes is almost always "man; I should eat more sweet potatoes."

Okra Flowers

Until I moved to the south I knew nothing of okra (except that I found it slimy), and until this summer (when my husband planted some) I couldn't imagine what kind of plant it grew on (okra trees?), and until yesterday I had no idea it produces flowers of incredible delicacy and beauty. Needless to say, along the way I learned that it can be *delicious*.

Grilled Salmon

with sauteed arugula (peppery enough before cooking to bring tears to my eyes) and black rice.

Scrambled Eggs

with Indian spiced okra and the pictured French Country Boule. I think it's fair to say that this is the best bread I know how to make, and one of the best I've eaten. It's pretty simple (white, rye, and whole wheat flours), and, in my experience, hard to mess up. If I had to quibble with this loaf I'd say I over-salted just a wee bit, and I still haven't mastered oven spring, but on the whole, if this is as good as my bread gets, I can happily live with it. I learned two things this round. The first is that I dislike a starter made with all whole grain; both the spelt starter I made a while ago and the whole wheat starter I baked with last week made a bread that was too tangy for my taste. Even in a whole grain loaf I prefer a starter fed mainly white flour. The second is that preheating the oven and using a baking stone are both unnecessary steps. Following the advice of a number of posters on The Fresh Loaf (link to the right) I baked this in a cold oven, on a baking sheet, and it is both delicious and indistinguishable from loaves I baked on the traditionally recommended searing-hot baking stone. Since I always found pre-heating to be just that one extra step that turned the whole thing into a chore, this is big news for me.

Buffalo Filet

with corn on the cob and okra. I made the okra following a recipe in the recent Food & Wine; I sliced it in half lengthwise, fried it in very hot oil, then seasoned with cumin, fennel seed, turmeric, and coriander. It was delicious; I'm doing it again tonight.

Hat!

Behold, the fruit of my swatching. I'm very pleased with this hat, not least because it used up yarn I've had hanging around for years.

Blueberry Cornbread

with roasted summer vegetables.

Quesadillas

with cheese and tomatoes. With sauteed okra.

Pas de Valse

For some reason I seem to have spent most of this summer knitting in wool; no doubt I'll be glad when November comes around. This is "Pas de Valse," a pattern from Twist Collective, the hottest online knitting magazine in town. A good bit of it was accomplished during jury duty.

Mosaic Knitting

This is a knitting technique invented by Barbara Walker, who invented a lot of what we know as modern knitting. Why have I always resisted trying it? For no good reason, that's for sure, because it is easy and beautiful. Glad I finally got on board.

Roasted Summer Vegetables

I opened the bag from our CSA and simply chopped up and roasted everything in it: eggplant, okra, onions, red peppers, and orange cherry tomatoes. We had it with big hunks of blueberry cornbread.

Grilled Salmon

with quinoa and green beans.

Second Verse

more or less same as the first: the remainder of the field peas from last night, with fresh tomatoes and black rice added. With sauteed okra.

Field peas

with bacon, onions, and cherry tomatoes. Also okra and blueberry cornbread.

Tomato Pie

with okra, and fresh figs for dessert. All from the farmer's market.

Grilled Salmon

with roasted new potatoes and sauteed peppers and broccoli.

Whole Wheat Spaghetti

with fresh tomato sauce (pink, red, and yellow tomatoes, garlic, and basil [if I'd actually remembered to add it, which I didn't]) and sliced up red and yellow peppers.

Omelette

with cheddar cheese and leeks; with roasted new potatoes and shiitakes.

Hash

of black rice, leftover corn, and leftover ribs, diced up. With a tomato, cucumber, red onion salad.

Now We're Getting Somewhere

Round two of the Kamut Levain. I did everything exactly the same, except for one thing: during the bulk fermentation stage (when one lets the dough rise for about four hours) I did two "letter fold turns." This involves dumping the dough out, stretching it into a rectangle, folding it in thirds, and returning it to the rising container. My internet research assured me that this would lead to better oven spring, and the internet was right. The oven spring was nice, and the crust color better, and I swear the bread tastes better too. So: letter fold turns. Not a dispensable step.

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?)