Last night I made my classic mistake.  The one I’ve made, oh, say 8 times.  I don’t learn too quickly.  As I allow bread to rise, I usually keep it in the oven.  It’s the most draft-free place I can think of (it also keeps my cats out of things, and yes, they do enjoy bread).  There is the added benefit of keeping the oven slightly warm.  So I turn it on for a couple minutes while the bowl is in there.  But I often forget to turn it off.  I start doing other things and before I know it, there is the smell of melted plastic.  Saran wrap melting onto the bowl, into the dough.  It is a smell I know all too well.  Again and again and again I do this.

Last night’s stupidity was not treated gracefully or humorously.  It was met with a lot of profanity and self-flagellation.  And then I started my rye.  Again.

Yesterday I tried to make rye sourdough bread.  I didn’t find a recipe that I loved, so I sort of winged it. As a guide, I used my mother-in-law’s sourdough recipe, which yielded great results last time I used it.  When I followed it to a T.  I seem to remember reading that making rye bread includes a combination of wheat and rye flours, so I substituted white flour with half rye and half wheat.  Knowing that this would probably be a disaster, I at least had the sense to cut the recipe WAY down.  In fact, I quartered it.  Clearly I had no faith in my choice to abandon the script and improv.  I was right not to have faith.  Rye flour is very coarse, and even as I added it to my sponge, I knew I was weighing the dough down too much.  It rose.  And rose again.  But not much.  I put it in a loaf pan anyway.  And let it rise a little more.  I still had a tiny bit of hope that somehow it would miraculously rise enough to be edible.  It didn’t, and it wasn’t.  It was a brick.  I didn’t even cut into it.  Into the compost, do not pass go, do not collect $200.  Done.

So guess what’s rising as I write this?  Yes, another loaf of rye.  Again, I am adapting a recipe.  A no-knead bread recipe.  Instead white flour, I used a cup of rye and two of wheat.  Instead of rosemary and lemon zest, I added caraway seeds.  And I threw in a little more yeast than the recipe calls for.  I don’t have a lot of faith in this attempt either (I have already added rye bread to the grocery list), but I just have to try.

You see, I hate baking.  I do it all the time now, but I hate how precise I have to be in measuring things.  I can’t taste bread as I make it and adapt.  But I want to figure it out.  I have to find the middle ground between how I cook and how I think I have to bake.  A friend once told me that once you bake enough, you figure out how to adapt.  So I know it’s possible, and I know I’m impatient.  I also know that somewhere in a loaf of rye, I will find my answer.  And someday, I will enjoy baking.  Until then, I won’t give up.  Brick by brick, I will conquer this.

I recently left my job, and I now have a LOT of time to cook.  I have eschewed the “Meals-in-30-Minutes” trends and embraced a long drawn-out affair with ingredients and knife work.  Dinner prep has turned into a glorious 2-3 hour affair.  Not everyone’s dream, I know.  But it’s mine, and I’m living it.  Chuck often rolls his eyes as I start preparations for an 8pm meal at 4:30.  While his eyes head skyward, I think I see him licking his lips.

I also have a decent garden space now, so much of what I cook later in the summer will truly be a labor of love.  Seeds to Supper.  I have already successfully grown a couple kinds of lettuce and spinach, but most of my crops won’t be ready for quite a while.  In the meantime, I have plenty of farmer’s markets and a generous, green-thumbed mother-in-law to keep me supplied.

I’ll try to keep up with blogging, but every minute I’m writing is a minute I’m not cooking or gardening, so we’ll see.

One of my stocking stuffers this past Christmas was a dumpling press.  I was skeptical.  But I recently gave it a try, and I made some beautiful dumplings.  I made a basic Asian filling with ground chicken, carrots, scallions, ginger, garlic.  The dumpling press was quite easy to use.  Just put a round wonton wrapper on the open press, add some filling, brush the edge with egg white and press!  I froze about 4 dozen in small batches.  I steam them and finish them off in a little sesame oil for some crunch on the outside.  A quick and delicious meal after  a tough day at work.  Beautiful.

Stock Photo

Just a quick follow up to my last post.  I did indeed cook chicken wings sous vide-style.  They were tasty, but the trouble is that if you want to utilize a bone as a vehicle for getting food from a plate to your mouth, using a cooking method that makes things literally fall-off-the-bone tender is probably not the best way to go.  Lesson learned.

If woot.com and Amazon.com were a mall, my husband would be a teenage girl on a Saturday afternoon. One could say that he has a mildly concerning shopping problem. So I was not surprised to come home recently to find a vacuum sealer on my dining room table. Given the number of hours I have dedicated to watching cooking shows, I immediately knew what to do with this new toy: sous vide!

For those of you who are slightly less obsessed with food than I am and may not be familiar with this technique, sous vide is a method of cooking food in an airtight plastic bag in lukewarm water for a long time.  Sounds gross and boring, doesn’t it?  I don’t have any fancy equipment, like an immersion circulator, that the pros, use so I used a regular saucepan and a food thermometer.  For my first attempt, I bought chicken because I didn’t want to ruin anything more expensive than that.  I had pretty low expectations.  Boy, was I wrong.

I found temperature and cooking time guidelines online, and away I went!  I started by sprinkling salt, pepper and chile powder to boneless, skinless chicken thighs.  I vacuum sealed them (a process that was far more fun than it should have been!) and put them in the fridge for a couple hours.  When I was ready, I plunged the entire plastic bag into water I had barely warmed on the stove.  I worried about the plastic melting where it was in contact with the sides of the pan, but it was fine.  After adjusting the gas a few times, I finally stabilized the water temperature at 160 degrees (farenheit), and cooked the chicken for 2 hours.  When I took it out of the plastic bag, it fell apart beautifully.  I wanted to sear it to give it a little bit of a crispiness, and I added some barbecue sauce to the hot pan at the end.  It was the most tender chicken I have ever eaten in my life.

Hopefully the chicken wings I am sous-viding tonight are as successful.  I’ll let you know.  And if Chuck wants to keep shopping like a teenager, he’s got my full support.

I am just now getting around to processing some of the hot peppers I picked on the last day of our farm share in mid-October.  I had dried them in the oven shortly after picking them and let them continue to dry for the last couple of months.  I had fatalis, which at about 250,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU), is the 6th hottest pepper in the world, cayennes (~30,000 SHU) and some Hinkelhatz peppers, (~125,000 SHU).  Having handled these peppers in the past and had burning fingers for days, I purchased disposable kitchen gloves for the job.  I started with the cayennes.  I desperately need a spice grinder, and had to settle instead for using my mini Cuisinart food processor.  I had a few seeds, but I’m willing to live with that.  I then moved onto the Hinkelhatzes.  A slight burning tickled my nose.  Commence sneezing!  For the next 10 minutes…until my lungs burned.

Moving on to the fatalis, I considered wrapping a mask around my face.  And then I looked at my cat, Parma, sitting on the stool next to my work station.  And I thought that it would be inhumane to spread a fine mist of fatali powder into the air.  If peppers half as spicy as a fatalis caused me such irritation, I could only imagine what it would these kickers would do to a kitty.  So there the fatalis sit, in my food processor, in a corner of the kitchen.  Just waiting.  Waiting until I get an extension cord and take them to the porch.  Waiting for the chilly New England drizzle to stop.  Waiting for a safer time and place.  They’ve been waiting for two months; another week or two won’t kill them, right?

Our farm share encourages us to take what we will use.  I do that.  In fact, this week’s crops came in such astounding abundance, that we didn’t even take our full share, and I still found the amount of food in my kitchen overwhelming.  In an oh-so-exciting way!  But I did turn down a few items because I don’t want to waste.  However, even when I use up everything I take, there are food scraps.  So before you take those scraps to the compost, I’d like to encourage you to use them.  Yes, those garlic and onion skins, tough asparagus stalk ends, tomato peels, basil stalks, bell pepper stems, carrot and beet greens – yes, all those things you don’t use in everything else…they make incredible vegetable stock.

I’ve found that the key is not to boil them forever.  While soups often get better with a long, slow simmer, stock tends to weaken over time.  And in the middle of summer, who wants all that steam in the kitchen?  So start with your standard mirapoux – olive oil, garlic, carrot and celery. Saute for a few minutes, and then toss everything else in with water, salt and pepper.  In about 45 minutes, you’ll have a deep brown, very flavorful vegetable stock.  I drained mine through cheesecloth to weed out the little bits.   Then I froze some in small quantities, gave some away and used some almost immediately.  And after all is said and done, you can put the boiled veggies in the compost.  And feel great about having gotten the most out of them.

I often find beets to be boring and repetitive.  They are one of those foods that have such an overwhelming flavor that it seems to me that no matter how they are prepared, they just taste like beets.  They dominate almost anything you cook with them.  That being said, I love beets, and they do have a lot of great accompaniments.  I, however, have found a preparation that tames them a touch, and I am happy to share it here:

2-3 beets: I had 3 small golden beets, but any kind will do
red wine vinegar
minced garlic
olive oil

Bake beets until reasonably soft, firm but tender when pierced with a fork.  For larger beets, this may be up to an hour, but for smaller ones, start poking them with a fork at 30-35 minutes.  Once cooled, peel and then grate – the large holes of a standard box grater is fine.  Mix with vinegar, garlic and olive oil, all to taste.  Personally, I think adding some fresh parsley might be a nice addition to this recipe, so I’ll try that next time.

When I pick up my farm share each week, I often have the opportunity to buy local honey, cheese, maple syrup, wine and other locally-produced goodies.  I haven’t taken advantage of this option until recently, when I bought a couple cheeses.  They are different from the usual products I buy, but very delicious.  One of the cheeses I purchased is a goat cheese, and that’s what I used as an accompaniment to the beet salad.  I cut some chunks of goat cheese and rolled them into little balls (purely for presentation), froze them briefly so they would maintain their form while the rest of dinner (pork tenderloin and local corn) was on the grill.