simple sandwich bread

November 22nd, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

I probably shouldn’t admit how quickly this apartment goes through loaves of bread — we eat the stuff as fast as I or B. can bake it. (Our record is three loaves of pretzel bread, which is B.’s specialty, demolished in less than twelve hours. Almost no loaf makes it more than 24 hours, or 36 at the outside, around here.) So when I was on vacation a while ago, and had some spare time, I made some extra batches of a basic white loaf and stuck most of the dough in the freezer. It’s all gone now, and I’m going to settle down to some serious kneading and shaping again so I can stick to the habit of thawing the dough in the fridge overnight and baking it while I’m drinking my morning tea and catching up on RSS feeds. (You do know you can get A Very Uncommon Cook delivered to your virtual doorstep in a feed, right? I am just looking out for your welfare, folks!)

bread dough

photograph by timlewisnm

(This recipe, I should note, is adapted from King Arthur Flour.)

Ingredients

1 ½ cups warm milk
1 heaping tablespoon honey
2 ¼ teaspoons yeast
1 ¾ teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons soft butter
around 4 cups all-purpose flour

Equipment

2 mixing bowls
1 nine-inch loaf pan
baking rack

Recipe

Pour the warm (not scalded! just warm) milk into a large mixing bowl. Add the honey and yeast, and stir to dissolve. Let rest two to five minutes. Add salt and butter, and stir to distribute. Add three cups of flour and mix. Add the last cup-or-so of flour gradually, kneading in between additions, until you have a smooth, elastic ball of dough.

Oil or butter another large mixing bowl and put the ball of dough in. Roll the dough around so the exterior is a little greasy. Cover with a hand towel or plastic wrap (loosely, in the latter case; don’t make it entirely airtight). Leave in a warm still place (I like the top of the refrigerator) for up to an hour and a half.

Grease a nine-inch loaf pan. When the dough is puffy, deflate it gently. There’s no need to slam your fist into it like it’s done you personal injury; if you want that, I suggest a boxing gym. Shape it into a log that will fit in the pan. Cover the pan with the towel or plastic wrap, and leave it in the warm still place for another hour or so. After an hour, turn the oven to 350°; when it’s preheated, remove the towel or plastic wrap and put the bread in.

Bake for twenty minutes, and then drape some aluminium foil over the top. Bake another ten to fifteen minutes, or until golden brown, and cool on a rack.

XXXIV (You are the daughter of the sea)

September 22nd, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

by Pablo Neruda

Eres hija del mar y prima del orégano,
nadadora, tu cuerpo es de agua pura,
cocinera, tu sangre es tierra viva
y tus costumbres son floridas y terrestres.

Al agua van tus ojos y levantan las olas,
a la tierra tus manos y saltan las semillas,
en agua y tierra tienes propiedades profundas
que en ti se juntan como las leyes de la greda.

Náyade, corta tu cuerpo la turquesa
y luego resurrecto florece en la cocina
de tal modo que asumes cuanto existe

y al fin duermes rodeada por mis brazos que apartan
de la sormbra sombría, para que tú descanses,
legumbres, algas, hierbas: la espuma de tus sueños.

fresh oregano stalks on a white plate

photograph by cookbookman17

trans. Stephen Tapscott
You are the daughter of the sea,
oregano’s first cousin.
Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;
cook, your blood is quick as the soil.
Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.

Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;
your hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell;
you know the deep essence of water and the earth,
conjoined in you like a formula for clay.

Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,
they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.
This is how you become everything that lives.

And so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms
that push back the shadows so that you can rest -
vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.

“Human happiness seems to consist in three ingredients; action, pleasure and indolence.” -Hume

July 22nd, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

This post is more for me than it is for anyone else, but that would be why my name is in the URL.
I’m hoping that this move will be my last for at least a year, maybe two. Because seriously, I could give up having refined my pantry list to its most elegant, eloquent form if it meant that I could stop packing up my kitchen and moving house. Ahem.
In no particular order, this is what you will find in my kitchen on any given day (and if you don’t, and you’re visiting, yell at me until I go grocery shopping). (What do you have in your itchen, and consider a necessity, that I don’t? Give me a peek!) » Read the rest of this entry «

Food for Risen Bodies, by Michael Symmons Roberts

April 24th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

Food for Risen Bodies

by Michael Symmons Roberts

On that final night, his meal was formal:
lamb with bitter leaves of endive, chervil,
bread with olive oil and jars of wine.

Now on Tiberias’ shores he grills
a carp and catfish breakfast on a charcoal fire.
This is not hunger, this is resurrection:

he eats because he can, and wants to
taste the scales, the moist flakes of the sea,
to rub the salt into his wounds.

guilty pleasures

March 25th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink

Every now and then, a spate of posts go around the foodblogosphere about guilty pleasures. The objectively gross foods you love that aren’t local or sustainable or nutritious (Easter Peeps come up a lot, for some reason); the foods that break every food resolution you’ve got (I know at least one person who calls herself a baconaterian; she’s a vegetarian….plus bacon, because bacon is “the food that makes other food worth eating”); the foods you would never, ever admit to buying or eating, in the company of your fellow foodies.

I can’t link to those posts because I didn’t delicious them; I generally don’t open them in my browser when they come through my RSS reader; when I stumble across them in my day-to-day surfing the web, I close the tab as fast as I can. My attitude toward those posts can be summed up very simply:

Fuck. That. Shit.

A partial list of my fuck-that-shit-I-love-this-and-I-refuse-to-be-ashamed foods includes:

  • candy corn, straight out of the bag (the ones made with honey taste like honey, and that is all wrong)

    • closeup on candy corn
    photograph by Muffet

  • overpriced Sabra’s hummus
  • bubble tea (there’s a place in Boston that makes taro bubble tea, it is bright purple and it tastes like strawberry shortcake and I swear they lace it with hallucinogenic substances; every time I drink it, I emerge blinking and bewildered and utterly satisfied)

    • plastic cup of taro bubble tea, ie an opaque lavender liquid with dark globules of tapioca pearls visible at the bottom
    photography by scaredy_kat

  • Freihofer’s chocolate-chip cookies, heated in the microwave for fifteen seconds
  • Stewart’s Fireworks ice cream (this is so disgusting, the ice cream is creepily gummy, but it is vanilla ice cream with Pop Rocks mixed in, and it is so much fun to eat, and it tastes like childhood to me)

Watch: as soon as I hit “publish” for this post, I will think of half a dozen things I should’ve put on that list and forgot. But I will not go back and edit it, for the simple reason that this post is all about giving the finger to the idea of “should” — specifically, what we should want.

3/2/1 soup

March 13th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

I am a huge fan of Mark Bittman‘s work; his move from the Dining to the Op-Ed sections of the NYT is dreadful news for those of us who relied on his Minimalist column (and videos), but the essays he’s been writing since the move have been excellent. As a belated gesture of “yay Bittman, I will miss you on Wednesdays” and as a way of using up some of the three quarts of milk we had in the fridge, I made a quick batch of cream of carrot soup, using the 3/2/1 recipe that Bittman provided several years ago and which I have relied on ever since.

It’s much the same idea as in Michael Ruhlman‘s Ratio (I get no benefit by linking to this book on Amazon) — the idea that proportion is the important thing to understand about creating food, and once you have that down, the contents can be modified freely.

You remember those SAT analogy questions, the “bird : nest :: beaver : dam” ones? Think of this recipe as a grown-up, practical version of those — “broth : vegetables : dairy :: 3 : 2 : 1″.

carrot forest at a farmer's market
photography by Robert Couse-Baker

So when I made a big batch of this, I gently sautéed half an onion and a garlic clove in some olive oil, and then dumped in four cups of chopped carrots and potatoes before pouring six cups of chicken stock (you could use vegetable stock or even plain water with a bouillon cube if you had to) into the pot, brought it to a simmer, covered it until the vegetables were tender (about ten minutes), and then blended it with M.’s immersion blender, and kept the whole thing warm until everyone was home. Then I added two cups of milk, mixed to combine, salted and peppered as required, and served with some croutons made out of the heel-ends of the bread we had finished off that morning for breakfast. It was a pretty big hit, if I may say so, sweet and creamy and filling from the potatoes that added bulk to the broth.

I haven’t made this in a while, and I suddenly cannot remember why not. It’s a fantastic weeknight dinner, and I will probably be inflicting it on my flatmates again soon.

Advice to the Young, by Miriam Waddington

February 8th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

Advice to the Young

by Miriam Waddington

1

Keep bees and
grow asparagus,
watch the tides
and listen to the
wind instead of
the politicians
make up your own
stories and believe
them if you want to
live the good life.

2

All rituals
are instincts
never fully
trust them but
study to im-
prove biology
with reason.

3

Digging trenches
for asparagus
is good for the
muscles and
waiting for the
plants to settle
teaches patience
to those who are
usually in too
much of a hurry.

4

There is morality
in bee-keeping
it teaches how
not to be afraid
of the bee swarm
it teaches how
not to be afraid of
finding new places
and building in them
all over again.

asparagus in the morning dew
photograph by Joi

turkey and dumplings

February 6th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

I came down with a nasty, nasty cold recently. Or, more accurately, S. gave me a nasty, nasty cold. On the plus side, when I was lying in bed, moaning pathetically about how my eyes hurt and every muscle in my body ached and how much I missed breathing, she offered to make me chicken and dumplings in recompense for infecting me.

No fool I, I promptly wrote up the recipe and gave it to her, and a few hours later, there was chicken and dumplings for me to eat, and I hadn’t had to touch a single ingredient. (Which was doubly good, because it meant that everyone could eat it, rather than having to quarantine the pot.)

Chicken soup is a classic cold remedy, and it seems that SCIENCE! backs up the claims of Jewish grandmothers everywhere. My mother never made chicken and dumplings, but I’ve grown to love it, now that I’ve figured out how to make light, fluffy dumplings, and decided that I prefer turkey to chicken in this case. It’s more flavorful, and when you’re stuffed up, tasting anything is hard enough.

chicken and dumplings, dished and peppered
photograph by KellyK

Ingredients

Boneless chicken or turkey thighs, diced
Onions, sliced
Garlic cloves, sliced
Carrots, cut into discs (or baby carrots)
Celery stalk, sliced into thin half-moons
Russet potato, diced
Salt, pepper, parsley, etc., to taste
1/2 package frozen baby peas, thawed
Dumpling dough (below)

Heat olive oil in large pot over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add sliced onion. Sauté until soft. Add sliced garlic, sauté one minute. Salt and pepper lightly. Add carrots, celery slices, and potato, stir, sauté two minutes. Add diced chicken or turkey, stir, sauté until the outside of the chicken does not look raw. Barely cover with cold water, chicken stock, and white wine, in whatever combination pleases you. Cover pot. Bring to boil, lower heat, simmer 45 minutes. Taste broth, adjust salt-and-pepperness. You may need to smush up the potato bits with a fork on the back of a wooden spoon; they’re in there to make the broth thicker. Drop dumpling dough into simmering stew by heaping teaspoons, covering the surface. Cover. DO NOT UNCOVER FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES. Dumplings should be dry on top, or you can check with a toothpick. Serve hot.

Dumplings

2 cups all purpose flour
2 tablespoon baking powder
¾ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons softened butter
¾ cup milk

Combine flour, baking powder, and salt. (if you’ve got stray parsley, this is a good place to use it, rinsed & chopped.) Add butter and milk. Mix until just combined (overmixing will make the dumplings tough).

sour cream pancakes

February 3rd, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

La Chandeleur — Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple — was yesterday, and while I don’t actually celebrate Christian holidays , I understand that it is traditional to eat crêpes upon the occasion. Well, okay. If I must. Thanks to Smitten Kitchen, I was able to leap into action and make pancakes with very little prior warning.

When I was attending boarding school in England, the food was as terrible as reputation suggests; the only things they made that were edible were the Friday fish and chips, lemon shortbread, and jacket potatoes. But there was one glorious glorious day when there were pancakes for dinner. I have never been so thrilled in all my life. I suspect it was for Shrove Tuesday, rather than Candlemas, which is more an Eastern Orthodox than an Anglican festival, but nevermind.

macro shot of a stack of pancakes
photograph by rcstanley

Three of the three people I fed these sour cream pancakes to said they were fantastic, and I trust their judgment. These are tender and light and take maple syrup beautifully. They come together in the bowl very quickly — no messing about with sifters and pre-melted butter and whatnot — while they are not true crêpes by any stretch of the imagination, they require less adeptness with the spatula, and I am pretty much always in favor of things that taste awesome and don’t demand fantastic reflexes.

Ingredients

1 scant cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups Greek yogurt or sour cream (I used about half of each)
4 eggs
vanilla extract to taste, at least a couple of teaspoons

Recipe

Preheat your oven to its lowest setting and warm your serving platter in there. (If you give people pancakes on their plates as you make them, they will eat them all, and the hardworking cook will not get any, and that would be tragic.)

Combine dry ingredients (the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt) in a medium bowl. Add yogurt/sour cream and lightly mix in with a fork. In another bowl, beat the vanilla extract into the eggs. Combine the vanilla-egg mixture with the dairy-flour concoction, and do not overmix. Leave lumps and streaks of yogurt in the batter.

Heat a skillet, cast iron or nonstick, over a medium flame. When warm, brush with melted butter or canola oil. Pour a quarter to a half-cup of batter onto the pan; most pans fit around three or four pancakes comfortably. (I say most for a reason. Use common sense, damn it.) When the pancake’s top is bubbly and you can slide a spatula under it easily, flip it to the uncooked side; it should be lovely golden brown. Do this quickly and with confidence; if any batter spills out, nudge it back into the pancake-mass with the spatula. When both sides are brown, remove from the pan and put it into the warm plate in the oven. It can be held there for up to an hour. Continue this process until you have no more batter left.

This feeds, well, it’s hard to say; my capacity for pancakes is kind of…this amount of batter (I’ve doubled Deb’s recipe) fed four people, and we probably could have eaten more. I’m just saying.

twice-baked potato with egg

January 28th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink

Because some days I know I should eat breakfast, but I’m not hungry at 6 AM, and also, uh, my hand-eye coordination is maybe not the best at that moment. Obviously, the solution is to shove a Russet potato in the oven, whence the smell of hot, fluffy carbs will unfurl throughout the apartment for the next hour, and make myself a hot drink containing enough caffeine that wielding a knife doesn’t make me a public menace.

This is totally-not-home-fries and poached eggs. For lazy people.

a broken egg in a small saucer
photograph by avlxyz

Bake an unpeeled, scrubbed russet potato until done — I tend to assume it will take about an hour on 400° F — and leave the oven on when you take the potato out. Either slice in half lengthwise, or if you’re feeling dexterous, remove a section of potato skin from the side you deem the top, large enough to crack an egg into (an inch and a half long by half an inch wide should do it). Scoop the interior of the potato out into a bowl. When the potato shell is empty, put it back in the oven to crisp while you handle the rest of this delicate, subtle operation.

Mash the potato with whatever probably-dairy-related product takes your fancy — the last time I made this, I used grated Parmesan and Emmenthaler cheese, but have had great success with Greek yogurt or sour cream. Add bacon bits or turkey sausage! Chopped chives! Wherever your morning madness leads you. (This is also an awesome lunch, I’m just never home for lunch any more.) Scoop the flavored potato flesh back into the crisped shell, leaving space in the middle into which you can crack an egg. (I suggest building a sort of wall of potato around the space so the egg white doesn’t ooze out.) If you’re nervous about cracking the egg directly into the potato, you may want to use a small pitcher so you can fish out any bits of shell (rinse the eggshell before cracking it, and use the broken shell to get the chips out; I don’t know why this works, but it does, normal cutlery is useless) or swear a lot if the yolk breaks. I don’t recommend using a egg with a broken yolk for this, and believe me, saying that causes me pain: it is not your fault if the yolk breaks. Eggs are tricky.

Once you have the egg tucked safely into the potato, put it into a loaf pan or onto a baking sheet and back into the oven. Turn the heat up to 500°F, and let it bake for ten to fifteen minutes, or until the white of the egg is set and the yolk is still a little runny. (If you are pregnant, have a weakened immune system, or are otherwise at risk/concerned about salmonella, obviously, cook until the yolk is firm. I am not a doctor and do not play one on the internet.)

When done, remove from oven, salt and pepper to taste, and eat hot.

Just typing this recipe up made me hungry.

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