Food – Page 27 – Hobbits In Rivendell

Apricot-Orange Scones

June 19, 2007

2:12 am

I’m going to present two methods to the following recipe: one for those who’ll be using a sourdough starter, and those who’re simply interested in making scones. If you’re not using the starter, you’re still going to be OK, because using a sourdough starter doesn’t add any mass to the party – it simply means that you’re going to let your starter play around in the flour & filtered water for a bit, and then you’re going to remove the same portion as you’d added. So, using a sourdough starter results in zero added liquid or solid to the recipe (we’ll ignore the bacteria and yeast). The sourdough changes the equation very little, except in terms of time, so it’d probably be easier to do this recipe without the sourdough … but, if you’re like me, you’ve got a starter sitting in the fridge, sulking, and you use it every chance you get, because baking bread twice a week is a bit much, but that’s what keeps the starter happy.

Apricot – Orange Scones:

Sourdough Starter

5 C Whole Wheat Flour

5 C Whole Oat Flour

1 C Oat Bran

1 tsp Salt

2 Tbsp Baking Powder

1/2 tsp Baking Soda

2 C Filtered Water

1 C Unsweetened Soy Milk

1/2 C Sugar

3 Tbsp Molasses

3 Tbsp Honey

3 Tbsp Maple Syrup (substitute Honey if you don’t use Maple, and vice versa)

2 Tbsp Olive Oil

1 tsp Vanilla Extract

2 tsp Almond Extract

Zest of 1 Large Orange, Chopped

1 C Dehydrated Apricots, cut into ribbons

2 Tbsp Ginger Powder

2 Cardamom Pods, seeds only, ground

1 tsp Cloves, ground

1 tsp Cinnamon / Cassia, ground

1/4 tsp Nutmeg, ground

2 Tbsp Fennel Seed, whole – don’t grind

    If you’re using sourdough starter, go through feeding & prepping step:
    Add filtered water to sourdough starter; add wheat flour to hydrate enough so that your starter can “feed” for several hours. After starter has fed, mix in enough wheat flour to bring it to the same consistency it was when you removed it from its home; remove same quantity of starter back to its home.
    Continue, or if you’re not using sourdough starter, simply start here:
    Mix dry ingredients, spices, fruit, and zest in one bowl, reserving some of the flour so that you don’t end up too dry (you can always add it, you can’t ever get it back out). Mix wet together in a separate bowl (sugars count as “wet” in this game). Add the wet to the dry and fold to combine, as you would biscuits. Turn out onto a floured board, knead briefly until the dough just comes together, then roll into a sheet approximately 1 inch thick. Sprinkle tops with sugar. Cut into triangles (I use a pizza cutter, cut into squares, then run through on the diagonal), place onto an oiled baking sheet, and bake at 400°F (205°C) for approximately 12 minutes, being careful not to overbake (you can always toss them back into the oven). Remove to cooling racks … or, you know, to your awaiting plate.

Disclaimer: this recipe was something whipped up today without a “base” recipe, and, thus, quantities listed are rather approximate (except for the baking powder & soda). This works for us because we can feel our way through. I strongly encourage you to reserve quantities of flour out, or to add more flour if needed, because the addition of flour to things in our household involves tipping a 5 pound sack and stopping when it looks to be a goodly amount.

This recipe yielded about 40 scones. They lasted a day – most were given away, but there were casualties. Be warned.

Apricot Windfall

by David T. Macknet

June 17, 2007

11:08 pm

7 Comments on Apricot Windfall

Food

It’s occasionally nice to have friends and relatives who are picky about food, because we end up with such things as all of the apricots we could pick. They’d started to fall from the tree, so we hurried over with a long stick & helped them along, giving us nearly 10 pounds of apricots (yes, I weighed them). Now, we could have eaten them … but that would probably result in all sorts of intestinal distress, as they were nearly all ripe, and the half which weren’t ripe when we picked them were ripe a day later. So, instead of gorging ourselves into illness, we dried them.

I don’t have any pictures of the little dried up halves, but I must say that they get really flat when you dry them cut-side down. The ones you get in the store have had the pits removed & have been dried whole, but I don’t own a pitter (I keep meaning to pick one up – for olives, mostly). So, it was a choice between ending up with them curling in upon themselves, and being wizened little nubs of apricot, or having very flat discs. Flatness won out, primarily because I think that we’ll be using these in fruitcakes, rather than just eating them. With fruitcake in mind, we dried them out until they were nearly crisp, so that they’ll keep over the summer without having to go into the deep-freeze.

Coffee vs. Tea

by David T. Macknet

June 12, 2007

7:21 pm

6 Comments on Coffee vs. Tea

Food, Miscellany

It’s been two or three weeks now since I’ve had coffee. Yes, shocking, isn’t it? Me, of all people, with my deep love of French Press coffee, whole beans mail-ordered from Alaska. Coffee has a down side, though, if you’re one of the unlucky few. And I am one of those few. If you don’t have issues with cholesterol, then feel free to pass this post on by. Otherwise, well, you may need to take a look at your coffee drinking habit, and reconsider a bit.

For some people, cholesterol isn’t controllable by diet alone. My brother falls into that category … not that he’s tried controlling his with diet, mind you, but … well, he’s going to be one of those people, simply because he’s unwilling to change his diet. For me, though, I’ve made the changes. I don’t eat any saturated fats, except for the occasional bit of coconut. I eat a diet high in oat fiber, high in fiber overall, and pretty much vegan. The sole exceptions to that vegan-ness is that I like salmon every now and again, which should actually work in my favor, and that I’ll very rarely have some milk product (more rarely than salmon).

But, I drank coffee. Unfiltered coffee, specifically. If you drink Turkish coffee, French Press coffee, Espresso, or coffee which is “filtered” through one of those Gold filters, then you’re still getting all of the oils. Which are, pretty much, straight saturated fat. The only way you don’t get those oils is if you use paper filters for your coffee.

I switched to tea. After you’ve been on French Press coffee for awhile, filtered coffee is just brown water.

We’ll see where the numbers are in a few months. I’m certainly not at any risk of dying of this or anything, but it’s one of those things like brushing one’s teeth: if you ignore it for long enough, you’ve got issues.

The switch? It takes about two quarts of tea to drive the headaches away, and that’s one in the morning & one in the afternoon. Have I said that I liked coffee? If my 1 mug of coffee was the equivalent to 2 quarts of tea … and then some, ’cause I could skip a day when on coffee. Well, that’s strong coffee. I will miss it.

Bagels 1.0

by David T. Macknet

June 10, 2007

4:35 am

6 Comments on Bagels 1.0

Food, Recipe

I don’t know what it is that led somebody to poke a hole in a perfectly good roll, boil it, then bake it … but they’re tasty, I’m told, despite the labor involved. I’m sure that our kitchen will recover from the spatters and splashes, and I’m sure that I’m sucker enough to try it again.

I started with the basic olive bread recipe (see “What Goes Into Bread”), but instead of putting diced onions I went with onion powder, and I backed off on the seeds a bit, so that the dough would be a bit more bread & a bit less … “stuff.” From there, it was a matter of forming things into little doughnut-esque things and letting them rise … and then beginning the insanity.

After you’ve got enough of a rise out of them, you boil each bagel (I worked in batches of 4) for 5 minutes, with at least one “turn-over” in that period. I used the handle of a wooden spoon along with a large “spider” (one of those things you use to fish stuff out of the deep-fry). After their requisite 5 minutes of boiling, you place them onto an oiled pan in the oven at 500°F. The oil is important, ladies and gentlemen. I used canola spray … starting with the second batch of 4, of course, ’cause … well, just ’cause I wasn’t really thinking about it.

After they go into the oven, they’ve got to bake for about 15 minutes. You could go 20 – and I did, on a few – but 15 seemed to do the trick for me, as I wanted them to be a bit soft. I figured that you can always toast them, but you can’t un-cook them, so it was better to go a little underdone. I’m sure that nobody’s out there complaining.

But wait. Did you see it, friends? Did you see the fatal flaw in this whole mess? Let me hint at a bit more: you boil for 5 minutes; you bake for 15 minutes. What happens to the third batch of bagels that you threw into the boiling water? Oh, you mean, you’re going to reach into the (very steamy) oven, pull out a tray of partially baked bagels, skooch them over so that you can fit four more on there, and then keep on doing the same thing for the next, oh, hour or so? And what, pray tell, happens when you end up with four batches going, all underdone, and another batch coming off of the boil? Because unless you’ve got an awesome oven, one rack is going to cook differently then the other, and with all the opening and closing, there’s no chance you’re going to get things to cook according to some mathematically-possible scheme. (I did the math … and then did the thinking to determine why the math sucked).

Suffice it to say that I need a larger oven & to do a bit of pre-planning on this next time. I believe that this is why some recipes say to dunk your bagels in cold water after you’ve boiled them. You could probably float them all in the cool water bath & then load them into the oven all at one time, if you were smart. Or if you thought about it. Or if you planned to try this more than once.

Next time. Next time, it will be different.

Garam Masala

by David T. Macknet

June 10, 2007

1:01 am

4 Comments on Garam Masala

Food, Recipe

Shown here is our first (photographed) effort at making Garam Masala. We generally use this mix in something we’ll call chai … but which is actually just hot soy-milk, this spice blend, & a little sweetener. The quantities shown are what we used in this latest mix; each spice is labeled on the Flickr site, if you follow the link. You can also use this Garam Masala as a spice for black tea, to give you that authentic chai flavor, but with ingredients that you trust.

Laying out the spices like this is actually kind of important, if you want to know what you did, so that you can either duplicate the mix or change it later. In this mix I’ve incorporated slightly more anise-flavored elements, to provide more natural sweetness, and also tried to balance out all of the different flavors, so that you’re not overwhelmed by the cassia / cinnamon.

If you’re using this in a savory dish, you could add onion powder & garlic powder, and perhaps some hot pepper / capsicum. I tend to like the option, though, so leave this powder “plain.” With this mix, I’ll run it through the coffee grinder & then through a fine sieve / strainer, repeating several times until I’m sick of trying to grind dust. I’ll then take the coarse (leftover) bits & put them in one container, and the fine goes into another. We’ll use the coarsely ground pieces in spiced apples or something, as it generally has more of the ginger / cinnamon / allspice bits, which don’t really like to break down.

Note: I tend to avoid using too much of the actual licorice root, because it closely resembles – and behaves like – the hormone aldosterone; aldosterone regulates the body’s salt levels, and playing with that system tends to raise your blood pressure.

More PBS, Less Rachel Ray

by David T. Macknet

June 7, 2007

9:51 pm

4 Comments on More PBS, Less Rachel Ray

Food

I don’t know if anybody out there had noticed, but we tend to like to cook around here. We like to make things, to see how things are made, to understand the why behind things like the growth of yeast, the respiration of yeast, the reproduction of yeast. Because of this, I release this plea into the universe: More PBS Chefs, please!

To the rest of the world, who may not have been subjected to the likes of The Food Network, I give you Maureen Johnson’s post entitled Now We’re Cooking. Read it (or down a ways in it, where she starts off “Now let’s talk about Food Network” if you’re not interested in the fact that she’s written a book which has just come out, and that’s what allows her to provide you with this rant). Understand that the person she’s talking about there is about the worst that the Food Network has to offer, but also that she’s not so far off when it comes to the rest of the “chefs” there, either. True, there’s at least one (Alton Brown) who actually still continues to provide something meaningful in the way of television (when he can be bothered to produce a new episode, at least). The rest of them?

You know, everybody’s got channels on their televisions which don’t get watched, ever? I’m sure you know the one – the Military Channel, that weird channel that’s always got Kirk Cameron on it, or the one which always has somebody shark fishing or something? I’m not talking about the one that you occasionally watch merely for the sheer spectacle (e.g. Rural Farm Development channel), but those which you constantly wonder why you haven’t removed from the lineup, which you skip over until the next time you get to reprogramming your channel lineup (i.e. never)?

Food TV has just entered that list of channels – the first list, that is. I believe that I’ve watched every single episode of Good Eats there is, and they’ve stopped playing the real Iron Chef (not that damned knock-off with Bobby Flake). So, I skip the channel. And I skip the channel. And it truly irritates me, in a way that the Military Channel never did. Because it once had potential, but has now been subsumed by the “Reality” TV craze.

Jacques Pepin, Ming Tsai, Tommy Tang (‘though he should let his guests talk & should stop with the innuendo), and all the rest of the PBS Chefs: keep it up. You’re all that’s teaching anybody how to cook!

Pumpernickel 1.0

by David T. Macknet

June 4, 2007

9:14 pm

8 Comments on Pumpernickel 1.0

Baking

Last night’s experiment was in Pumpernickel Bread. If I’d read the Wikipedia article beforehand, I might have gone out and bought some rye flour and spent another day at it. As it was, though, I believe that, for a first experiment, I’ve ended up with a nice, American-style Rye.


After final knead	Divided

I basically started with my regular sourdough starter, fed it & let it run wild all day on the counter, removed out the piece which goes back in the fridge, and started adding crazy things to it. The crazy things were: lots of molasses, cocoa powder, fennel seeds, caraway seeds, and dill seeds. From there, it was a matter of working in more whole wheat flour, a fair amount of oat bran (2 cups, as opposed to my usual 4 cups of fiber), and some white flour, just for good measure. Oh – and some olive oil, because one of the consistent features of all of the recipes I examined on the web was that they included fat of some kind, be it shortening (!), butter, oil, or olive oil.


15 Minutes into the rise	1 Hour into the rise

After an exceedingly long rise (about 1:20), I felt that they’d finally achieved the amount of rise needed to go into the oven. I don’t know what’s up with that long rise time, but I suspect it’s because of the oil, molasses, and chocolate all acting as inhibitors to my yeast’s growth. In any event, in they went, to come out when they were almost 190 degrees F (probe thermometer). I pulled them early, because I figured they’d carry over, and I wanted a more tender bread.

All Done!

I’m told that it’s a milder flavor than other Pumpernickel, which may or may not be a good thing. I think that, next time, I’m going to go for the sourdough Rye thing, and the long bake time which is characteristic of German Pumpernickel. Just, you know, to see what that’s all about. And also because I found it truly difficult to part with all of that cocoa powder. Really really difficult.

Leftovers Become Gelato

by David T. Macknet

June 1, 2007

9:08 pm

5 Comments on Leftovers Become Gelato

Food, Recipe

So last weekend we had some friends over, and we ended up with some leftovers. Now, I’m not talking about the little bits of prepared food which would soon be eaten (and were), but about leftover, perishable, raw ingredients such as a half-gallon of whole milk, and a couple of avocados. So, what to do? Gelato!

There really wasn’t much of a recipe, but … well, I’m going to try to document it, as it’s marvelously green, tasty, and a good use of ingredients. So here goes:

1/2 Gallon Whole Milk

16 oz Large (bubble-tea size) Tapioca pearls

2 Vanilla Bean Pods

2 Avocados, just ripe

Zest and Juice of 10 “key” limes

Assorted sweeteners (xylitol, honey, sugar, maple syrup) to taste

3 Tbsp Ginger powder

1 Cup Candied Ginger, chopped

4 Tbsp Soy Protein Powder

Soak tapioca pearls in the milk overnight.
Add Vanilla Bean Pod guts, sweeteners, and soy protein powder, then bring to a rolling simmer (doesn’t make sense unless you’ve done tapioca – in which case, it makes sense) in a pan which looks too large for the purpose (you’ll need the room, for the rolling simmer).
Simmer, stirring constantly, until you get sick to death of standing there or until the tapioca doesn’t taste raw any longer.
Remove from heat, strain out the bubble tea bits and … dispose of as you see fit, as they’re no longer needed.
When liquid has cooled to a reasonable temperature, apply your stick blender to it & incorporate the rest of the ingredients except for the Lime Zest and Candied Ginger.
Fold in Lime Zest.
Cool overnight.
Fold in Candied Ginger.
Pour mixture into your (running) ice cream machine and let it run until the dasher sticks.
Remove mixture to a suitable vessel & thence into the freezer for at least four hours.

Yes, there are some ambiguities in there. And, yes, we probably could have achieved the same thing by using the tapioca flour sitting in the pantry, rather than using the bubble-tea tapioca pearls … but we didn’t know that when we started. You see, the decision to strain out the tapioca was made after we’d been all the way through the cooking process, at which point we determined that they were … well, just too strange to want to have frozen. So, we pulled them out. It works.

The one difference in the above recipe from what we did is that I incorporated the avocado earlier in the process … and I wouldn’t recommend it, as it makes it really difficult to taste for sweetness & flavor, as hot avocado really is an acquired taste. As it was, we played it safe by holding off on adding more sweetener & more lime until we had a chance to taste it chilled, and we’re glad that we did. Hot avocado throws everything off, so I recommend adding it when your mixture has cooled somewhat. Or not, you know, ’cause it’s your freezer that’ll be full of gnarly green goo, not mine.

Strange Days in the South-land

by David T. Macknet

May 31, 2007

4:51 am

2 Comments on Strange Days in the South-land

Food, Recipe

My friend Susan mentioned her love just the other day for all foods Southern, and the addition of the phrase ‘pimento cheese’ brought my childhood back to mind.

My Mom raised us as vegans a lot of the time… then there were those days when she did not. Born just outside of New Orleans, Mom wasn’t even raised vegetarian herself, so it was a hard transition for her when she moved to San Francisco in the sixties and got into what everyone else was doing – sprouting wheatgrass and whatever other kinds of grass they could get their hands on. Growing up, we had basically schizophrenic dietary habits that veered from full-on vegan to lacto-ovo vegetarianism. I can’t say that I ever suffered from this – I managed to be a tubby little thing regardless – but it did mean that we sampled hundreds of the most …unique recipes imaginable. Sometimes they were awesome. Other times… well, we love ya, Mom, but just about every kid goes through the lamentable phase of straight up tossing their school lunch into the trash… Me, on the argument that not even kids in Africa didn’t wanted soggy mashed tofu on sprouted wheat bread. (That was one of her misses. To her credit, she only made it without lettuce once or twice. The bread holds up a lot better if there’s lettuce protecting it.)

Just finishing a novel set in 1940’s Alabama-Iowa-Georgia and then a present-day cross-country trip to the South, I’ve been steeped in the particular food things that go along with the South… Grits. Black-eyed peas. Pimento Cheese. Susan got me thinking — about what pimento cheese actually IS, to those people who didn’t grow up at my house. I looked up pimento cheese, and understand now what the real stuff is: cheese. And cream cheese. And mustard. And hot sauce and pimentos and roasted pimentos and some people put in nuts. Mom’s pimento cheese was really, really, really good, but it didn’t contain any cheese at all. Mom’s recipe went something like this:

2 C. raw cashews

3-4 T. brewer’s yeast

1 C. water

1 C. oil

1/2 t. salt

1/4 C. lemon juice

2 t. onion and garlic powder

1/2 c. pimentos

2 T. soy “milk” powder (optional)

Basically, all that’s left to do is blend everything up, adding the oil last, and make a kind of cashew mayonnaise. Sometimes Mom added about 5 tbsp. of agar flakes to her pimento cheese. Agar gels, so it created the illusion of a more ‘solid’ spread.

When she used agar, Mom stirred it into boiling water, simmered it for five minutes, stirring frequently, and then when it was cooked, she added it to the other ingredients in the food processor. All ingredients were then blended for about three minutes, then poured it into whatever mold and put it in the fridge overnight.

There are a lot of variations one can do with pimento cheese, too – adding chopped green olives, or toasted sesame seeds or caraway or dill… the list goes on. Sun-dried tomatoes and basil is quite good, or you could add onion flakes…

On the face of things, Mom’s recipe seems pretty good, but since I never do know when to leave well-enough alone, I have a few thoughts I’d like to try. For one thing, doesn’t this sound like something that would taste great with the addition of Vegemite? Why use a powdered yeast when you can use the brown glop in the yellow can? And it seems to me that silken tofu should somehow play into this. ‘Cause doesn’t tofu go with everything?

If nothing else, I’ve enjoyed plumbing the depths of my back-brain, and remembering one of Mom’s more random recipes that worked. If only I could figure out a way to make cashews less than 157 calories an ounce, I’d eat this every week…

What Goes Into Bread

by David T. Macknet

May 22, 2007

1:32 am

5 Comments on What Goes Into Bread

Baking, Food

I finally broke down and bought myself an industrial quantity of Oat Bran. I’d bought a 25 pound sack of whole oats, because I could throw most of them in the freezer, and because we have a penchant for steamed oats for breakfast, but this? This is a commitment to baking (although some of us have eaten the stuff as a hot cereal, that’s just not normal).

So, the industrial quantity of bran, because the sourdough starter has just … well, exploded. I don’t know what’s up with it, but I’m having to bake about twice a week now, just because the stuff really wants to escape from its jar. I’m having to stir the stuff at the very least every other day, or else it pressurizes the jar and leaps out when I open it.

Into every batch of bread goes the same quantity of Fiber. Not that many of the batches are the same, or even mostly the same, but that the fiber provides the … anchor for it all. Two cups Flax Seeds (golden, because they’re more attractive in bread) and two cups of Oat Bran. From this, and lots of other stuff, will eventually come four loaves of bread. Could be sourdough (these days even my sweet breads are), or it could be otherwise, but this provides the anchor, and is why people love the stuff, I believe. You see, despite people’s fear of fiber, I think that they really want a hearty, crunchy, hefty bread. Not that this amount of fiber will kill the bread, by any means, but that it’ll give a good … heft to it all.

In today’s case, we’re making a Triple-O bread: Onion, Olive, Oregano. Also in there, playing bit parts, are rosemary, sage, thyme, mustard seeds (brown only, ’cause I’m out of yellow), sourdough starter, whole wheat flour, and a small bottle of Moscato wine. Sometimes I’ll go with Merlot, but lately it’s been Moscato, because of the sweetness, and because the Merlot makes it a bit too dark in color if I’m feeling like making a sourdough which could pass as anything other than whole wheat. The Merlot will make it kind of pink; it will enhance the color of the whole wheat flour, where the Moscato will leave it light in color.

Rather than go for the fancy wooden peel, I’ve been sticking with cardboard rectangles. Notice the little splash of cornmeal visible there underneath the loaves? That’s to make it easier to get onto the stone, which is heating away in the oven, which is set at 505 degrees F. (No – I don’t know why 505 and not just 500; it’s just the way I do it, and it makes me happy.) I discard the cardboard after a few months, or when it starts to suffer from having been sprayed with Olive Oil, which has been the case today. Sometimes it’s flour for the tops, if I’ve been using a white flour, but sometimes it’s just oil to keep the plastic from sticking to the tops while they rise.

So, after the long tortuous wait, it’s off of the stone and onto the cooling racks, where it’ll be covered with towels and will wait overnight, to be sliced up and shared with friends. We’ve found that it’s better to let it settle overnight, so that its moisture content can balance, and so that the glutens can really set up. It’s much easier to slice, and you’re less likely to indulge in that “half-a-loaf by way of sample” trap, which was getting way too common for us.

Glasgow:
NY:
Grinnell:
Roswell:
Berkeley: