Frenchish Bread Roll

This was this, take 2, and without the heat, because it was super nice out and the heroic air circulator fan managed to not fall off the window sill enough to keep the kitchen cool despite having the oven on 425 for a loooong time.

Since last time the second rise was mostly a sideways instead of lengthwise expansion, this loaf got rolled out and rolled up, in an attempt to prevent a reoccurrence of the Big Sideways Blob Problem. It didn't rise as much as it needed to have to not look silly, but BOY you should have tasted it! Giovanni's batteries died before I could get a picture of the crumb, but the rolling that created the silly flap in the picture above was actually visible in the crumb of the bread, and for many slices, you could actually unroll it! The crust, due to the special treatment discussed here, was nice and hard, and the middle felt like a pillow. If only we could have a bathtub full of bread insides to sleep on!

Tomato Basil Soup

All the tomato basil soup recipes I found online involved more complication than I felt like dealing with, so I did what I always do and made it up. It ended up being sauted garlic, boiled tomatoes, lots and lots of fresh basil leaves, and 1/2-3/4 c (I didn't measure) half and half.

I ate it with a piece of Italian bread at the bottom of the bowl, soggified and tomato-basilified by the soup. Delizoso!

Impromptu Banana Bread

The secret to banana bread is to measure the amount of mashed banana you have. Since this interesting fellow

somehow magically refused to freeze during his night in the freezer, and then squirted out of its sausage case-like peel the consistency of baby food, I had no choice but to make banana bread immediately. Poor me.

This is why you always keep the recipe handy, with the half and quarter recipes already written out. Or you just memorize it. :)

A Perfect Loaf of Bread

Double batch. Absolutey unbeatable. In fact, I should quit right now, because nothing will ever top this. SO worth every once of sweat!

Experimental (Moosewood) Banana Bread

In retrospect, I don't know why this seemed like a good idea, but I was having a brief spell of actually being able to follow recipes, so I decided to give the Moosewood recipe for banana muffins a shot.

It looked innocent enough to begin with, and actually tasted fairly good.

It was similar to my normal recipe, but had a whole egg, and egg white, and half a cup of yogurt (= sour milk). It turned out to be, predictably, wayyy too moist. I may need to continue the experiment and put it back in the oven.... It still looked innocent, and oats on top are super cute. I loved the cracks in the top of the loaf.

Moral of the story: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Untitled Improvisations

Here are two delicious fast things to do with a saute pan. They're somewhere between risotto and stir-fry, and have infinite flexibility. The 28th and 29th saw improvisational cooking at its best.

Day 1:

Saute some of the minced garlic in olive oil until fragrant, then add chicken. Cook until just brown on the outside and set aside. Saute more minced garlic, then chopped onion, carrot, and celery (about a cup each?) and saute some moe. Without adding water, add about 1 c chopped tomatoes and boil with 1 tsp oregano, dried basil, rosemary, thyme, and a bit of black pepper.

Add chicken and rice (how much depends on how many veggies you use). Cook, stirring often, until the chicken is cooked through and everything is nice and hot and well blended. Serve with heavy whole wheat bread. :)

(Sorry it's a crappy picture; the flash was misbehaving and I was hungry!)

Day 2:

Brown the chicken in sauted minced garlic like day 1, but with the addition of Famous Dave's Country Roast Chicken Seasoning. Remove, add more olive oil and minced garlic to the pan, and saute the already cooked broccoli for a minute, then add cooked brown rice and browned chicken to the pan. In lieu of canned cream of whatever soup, I added a 1/4 c (skim) milk and about 3/4 c grated cheese (mostly cheddar, but also some romano to use it up), and lots more of the chicken seasoning.

(Easy, efficient way to grate cheese. These guys are infinity times better than the box kind.)

(This guy reminds me of  Gavroche singing "Little People" from Les Mis)

Cook, stirring often, until the chicken is cooked through and everything is nice and hot and well blended to creamy deliciousness.

Bruschetta & Roasted Zucchini (& Heavy Pasta Estate)

Lesson learned: bell pepper has a nasty way of taking over everything. And unless you're prepared to use too much oil and salt, let the zucchini stay out of pasta. Actually, I think tonight taught me that I should stop trying to put things in pasta besides spices. (I was pretty disappointed with the pasta, so someone please come eat the leftovers for me! If you want to know what I did, leave a comment.) At least I can make food look dang good!

The proper way to prepare zucchini (imho) is as follows: wash zucchini, slice 1/4 slices, place in bowl big enough you can comfortably stir them, with olive oil, salt, and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Put on greased cookie sheet and roast at 450-475 for 10-15 minutes (but watch them in case your oven is different). Devour.

The tomatoes in the photo are the only decent store-bought tomatoes around. They come from Arizona but somehow taste exactly like they're freshly picked from the backyard. They're absolutely mind-blowing. So was the bruschetta I made with them, superfruity olive oil, fresh garlic, and the basil my plant donated:

(I dried out my leftover Italian bread with the zucchini I roasted, it got reaaally dry. The tomatoes softened it up perfectly however, and it was interesting rubbing the garlic cloves (I cut them in half first to use the inside of the cloves) on the very dry bread because the bread was so hard it was like rubbing garlic on a cheese grater. Now I know the best way to make really legit garlic bread!

Bruschetta recipe:
Slice bread, put plain bread on ungreased cookie sheet and bake/roast at 450ish for 10-15ish minutes. When cool enough to touch, paint with superfruity olive oil with a pastry brush (or your fingers). I put the olive oil in a small dish to make it more accessible and to avoid having to pour it (because I would accidentally pour too much). Then scrap bread to taste with the cut side of a (crushed) garlic clove, and top with tomato basil mixture. (Tomato basil mixture = roughly chopped tomatoes, torn fresh basil leaves, s&p&olive oil to taste, refridgerated for a while to marry flavors (I actually used the the freezer to cool it faster). Keep away from you roommates unless you want it all gone very quickly!

Hummus & Veggie Sandwhich

It was the perfect Sunday lunch. It was also the messiest sandwich I have eaten in my entire life. (Not that I let that keep me from reading while I ate it!) It also reaffirmed my belief that the key to the perfect hummus & veggie sandwich is hot hummus on crusty bread. If your bread isn't crusty and your hummus isn't hot, just put the whole thing in a panini press, which will make it also compressed enough to not break your jaw eating it.

I used the Italian bread because I was out of wheat (I'm supposed to make more this afternoon but am getting tired of being sweaty...) and stuck it in a 500 degree oven for 5-7 minutes to try to toast a bit. Next time I'm toasting it with olive oil in a frying pan (like how you make grilled cheese) and hopefully that'll work better. In assembly, you use the hummus to hold down the garlic sprouts and shredded (I gleefully recently discovered how well the big round holes on the cheese grater work for shredding baby carrots!) carrots. Then you sandwich the tomato slices in the lettuce to keep them from soggifying the bread. I recommend making this kind over overstuffed un-panini-pressed sandwich with fresh, strong bread that won't fall apart.

Just like I wanted to say last week that there's nothing like cleaning up the homemade sauce on your plate with homemade bread, there's REALLY nothing like a hummus and veggie sandwich on homemade bread, with homemade hummus, and homegrown veggies. Someone please make my tomato plants hurry up!

One Hot Night (Part 2 - Pasta & Successful Sauce)

 (Isn't it cute! And the knife is my one and only - it can do anything!)

I caught another culprit. (The onion has been behind bars in the sauce-making sense, so we needed some excitement.) The culprit this time is the tomatoes. I am sadly resolving to stop making pasta with fresh tomatoes, because the tomatoes aren't near flavorfull enough. This time I just sauted a bunch of minced garlic in olive oil and dumped in a 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes (I was expecting crushed tomatoes to be analogous to crushed garlic, and was wrong. Now what I need is someone to explain the difference between crushed and purred tomatoes). I added about 2 tbsp of dried basil and 1/2 tbsp dried oregano. Finally my faith in my ability to make Italian food was restored.

And the leftover bread I made last week? Perfetto per facendo la scarpetta!

Fatto!

One Hot Night (Part 1 - Bread)

They say it tastes better if you have to fight for it. Let's add, or sweat your brains out for it. I was perfectly justified in skipping the gym the next day (especially after biking 40 miles over the course of the weekend, getting happily soaked)!

Even though the temperature outside was having a race with the temperature in the oven (thankfully it never quite caught up!), not having sandwich bread is not really acceptable. While I was at it, I decided to make a loaf of white Italian bread to eat with pasta. It took a lot of self-restraint to not put in all sorts of extra healthy stuff like I do for the "normal" bread. I found a very simple recipe (2.33 c flour, 1 c water, 1 tsp yeast, 1 tsp salt, 0.25 tsp sugar) online and added a few tablespoons of dried basil to the dough. Here it is being slathered with olive oil before the first rise:

It rose like crazy. Here's before and after being punched down:

It went crazy again during the second rise:

(It rises under a wet towel so the outside doesn't dry out. The oil on the pan is to keep it from sticking and to give it a golden bottom.)

(It also sprouted dried basil on top! How did that happen!?)

One of the great things about finding recipes online is you get the added wisdom of the commenters. I learned this way to take the bread out of the oven (no happy feat, considering it was 450!) every two minutes for the first 10 minutes of cooking to add water. This colors the crust and also keeps it from forming too soon, and reducing oven spring. At first I didn't think it was working and almost gave up, but the crust came out beautifully rustic.

I was even more speechless tasting it than looking at it!

P.S. I also made a loaf of my hearty whole wheat bread for sandwiches. After kneading it, the Italian bread was practically zero effort to knead; I had never kneaded bread so white so I didn't know what a big difference all the whole wheat flour, bran, flaxseed, etc. has on the toughness of the dough. I love the smell, color, and texture of the dough ball.

(In the lower left corner, you can see the strands of gluten. The finished bread was full of them. Anyone know what that means? I'm wondering if it could have risen more - it was extremely dense, but yummy and filling!

The Best Bread

I make the best bread. (Feel free to disagree, just save us both the time by not telling me if you do.) This is the perfect bread for sandwiches, nutrition, taste, and eating with soup, and for facendo la scarpetta. :) Such a pleasure to eat plain, with butter, soup, gnats from the hot weather, anything.

wheat loaf

1.5 water

1 tbsp oil

3 tbsp brown sugar

2 tsp salt

2 c whole wheat flour

1.5 c total your combination of wheat bran, wheat germ, rolled oats, ground flaxseed, cornmeal
(I used 1 c oats, 1/2 c bran, germ, flaxseed)

1/2 c vital wheat gluten

Notes:
- Proof the yeast in 1/2 very warm water with a pinch of white sugar. Be careful when mixing the wet ingredients that you only add 1 c water (not 1.5) because the half cup used to proof the yeast counts.
- Add flour when kneading if dough is too wet, but be careful not to add too much. I found that if I kneaded very quickly and really kept the dough moving it wouldn't stick.

• After mixing, knead 20 minutes, slather with olive oil, and leave at 80-90 degrees F to rise (if it doesn't quite double in size it's ok); shape, slather with oil again, let rise, and bake a bit below 340 until done.

white(r) loaf

(I mean this to be super white artisan-type Italian bread, but added too much wheat germ and wheat bran and it ended up almost whole wheat)

1 c water + 3 tbsp

1 tbsp oil

2 tbsp white sugar

1.5 tsp salt

2.25 tsp yeast

3 c total flour, oats, wheat germ, wheat bran, wheat gluten, flaxseed, etc.  
(I used I think 1.75 c all-purpose flour, 1/2 c wheat germ, 1/2 c wheat bran, 1/4 c wheat gluten.)

For more information on the bread-baking process, visit

http://wallacecookingcircle.blogspot.com/2010/05/bread-baking-extravaganza.html