Hobbits In Rivendell

Whole Spices

June 22, 2007

1:11 am

I don’t know if you all have figured it out yet, but we buy whole spices.

Other people go to the warehouse stores for food … we order from an herb & spice importer. Not only do we get a tremendous discount over what we’d pay at the supermarket, we get fresher, higher quality herbs & spices. We also get forced into using a whole lot more herbs & spices, because, really, who can afford not to use them in profligate amounts when they’re taking up cabinet space?

I’d finally run out of brown mustard seed (it took me about a year), so I ordered two pounds this time. It’s truly irritating to run low on such a staple. Yes – mustard seeds are a staple, because they go in just about every batch of sourdough bread, to the tune of about 4 Tablespoons. Same with yellow mustard. The caraway seeds are by way of experimenting, as are the celery seeds and psyllium husks (we’re going to try to incorporate those into protein bars, so that they’re not so … slow in the system).

All this is, of course, by way of sharing the sheer quantities of spice we buy, and because I was told that our recipe for scones was intimidating in its sheer number of ingredients. When you’ve got a pound of whole cloves, a pound of star anise, a pound of fennel seed, and 1-pound bags of just about every other spice which might go into a recipe? Well, you use them! And you get familiar with them! And you learn how to balance them against one another, and you experiment more with them, and cooking becomes much more fun.

Now, to reorganize the cabinets, because we’re out of room. And out of spice cannisters. Sigh.

Apricot-Orange Scones

by David T. Macknet

June 19, 2007

2:12 am

3 Comments on Apricot-Orange Scones

Baking, Recipe

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.

Of COURSE he was born in SF. Aren’t all the great (hah!) knitters?

by David T. Macknet

June 12, 2007

10:33 pm

2 Comments on Of COURSE he was born in SF. Aren’t all the great (hah!) knitters?

Knitting

The Alaska Daily News carried a piece on the big public knit thingy this past weekend, and while they were discussing the fact that more and more guys are knitting, they mentioned one Kaffe Fassett, apparently a rather famous male knitter. I hadn’t ever heard of him, but always wanting to keep score with the boys, I looked him up.

Um, okay. Wow.

This sweater is gorgeous. Monsieur Fassett is excellentwhen it comes to textile designing – (Can you imagine doing this by hand? Can you imagine the HOURS!? Why am I assuming he did this by hand, though? I’m sure a knitting machine was involved, or else he did not finish for AGES…) – not to mention his needlework, mosaic, patchwork, and painting designs as well.

For the record, the article also points out “Rick Mondragon, editor of Knitter’s Magazine (can you believe they sponsor a knitter’s SUMMER CAMP!?); Brandon Mabley, author and designer with Rowan Yarns; Jack Lewis, creator of “Real Men Knit”; and Japan’s Knitting Prince, Mitsuharu Hirose,” (The site is all in Japanese, but you had to see the guy – he’s apparently quite the heartthrob in Japan, and partially responsible for this huge knitting renaissance. Hee!) as being among the many modern men who are more than making their mark with the art of knitting.

Though I am always knitting in public, this weekend is probably the one weekend I didn’t, being involved in a 48 Hour Book Challenge contest (which I accidentally won. Still not sure how that happened.), but I hope everyone else had fun. Cheers!

"And Love For All…"

by David T. Macknet

June 12, 2007

8:04 pm

2 Comments on "And Love For All…"

Miscellany

Love begets love, love knows no rules; this is the same for all. – Virgil

The reason for all the hearts today is that it’s a holiday. – Yes, Hallmark didn’t announce it, so you may not have known, but it is LO VING DAY – the day of a landmark anti-miscegenation case in which an ugly law was struck down in Virginia in 1967.

‘Virginia is for Lovers’ is what it says on all the tatty t-shirts and mugs. Well, maybe, but it wasn’t for Loving, for quite awhile. Ms. Mildred Jeter (an African American lady) and Mr. Richard Perry Loving (a Caucasian gentleman) were residents of Virginia who married in June of 1958 in Washington DC, leaving Virginia to evade a state law banning marriages between any white person and a non-white person. When they returned home, they were charged with violation of the ban, pleaded guilty, and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. They left… but they decided not to leave it at that. (If you want to play with an interactive map of American history, that lets you see dynamically when States became free to marry, check this out!) The über cool Chief Justice Warren‘s statement on the day that the Lovings won the legal right to marry has just the right tone:

“Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

And, that, boys and girls, is why today a few savvy people (you now among them!) celebrate the right to love anyone they choose.

There are some who labor under the misapprehension that Loving v. Virginia was the last anti-miscegenation case struck down. Not so, dear people. Though the U.S. Supreme Court ruling made it illegal to hold that law, the last anti-miscegenation law (and incidentally, that word is SO made up – as are all words are, yes, but we savvy American English speakers like to create new ones when the words we have don’t sound positive enough, pseudo-scientific enough, or negative enough. Think about it: carpet bombing. Soft plush fibers vs. many people anonymously dead. Whoever coined that one is probably rich.) was struck from the books in ALABAMA in the year 2000. (Yes, you heard me.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Alabama joined the 20th.

A lovely state, I’m sure, and no offense to anyone there. You’ll all just excuse me if I don’t ever visit.)

Some interracial couples and families are leery of the idea of another “fake holiday” (Heh, heh, Kwanzaa, anyone?), but the fact is, everything is made up and nothing springs organically intact from the Earth. Why not have a day to celebrate the right to love anyone, without the luridly hypersexed drama of the martyred Saint? On the day that the right to love anyone becomes REALLY true, in the GLBTQ community as well, there will be that much more to celebrate.

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.

Strange Nature

by David T. Macknet

June 11, 2007

5:14 pm

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.

Nest of Evil … or not.

by David T. Macknet

June 9, 2007

1:55 am

1 Comment on Nest of Evil … or not.

Critters

If you look very closely you’ll see a head, inside the mouth of the gourd. It almost looks like I spliced it in there, because her head’s turned sideways, looking … somewhere. But I didn’t, I promise! Finally, somebody has inhabited the gourd!

Of course it’s Pippi, with her evil nature, but I figure that someday she’ll get over herself a bit, and will possibly decide to lay some eggs in there. So, it’s a happy occasion. I’m just glad that she’s young enough to try new things, ’cause the others have been running in terror of the gourd for a couple of weeks now, while Pippi is just strange enough to bite everything, so she’s made herself a nest. Nobody shares it with her yet, which is fine, because this has the added benefit of making for a more peaceful cage, all around.

Glasgow:
NY:
Grinnell:
Roswell:
Berkeley: