One Contessa Recipe, and a few others

I made Ina’s Israeli Salad from Cook Like a Pro, and it was a nice, fresh touch. I’ve made a version of this salad for years – tomatoes and cucumbers with some kind of light, acidic dressing. This salad builds on a base of homemade hummus, and adds onion (I didn’t have the red onion the recipe called for, but I did have scallions) and bell peppers. I used all of my lemon juice in the hummus, so I added a splash of white wine vinegar in the salad dressing. In addition to the fresh mint, I julienned some fresh basil, too. The whole dish was a colorful and fresh addition to the table.

In addition to sourdough baking, there’s apparently another pandemic quarantine trend, to make Chrissy Teigen’s banana bread. She now-famously traded half of a loaf of it for some romaine lettuce during the beginning of the quarantine, and I was delighted to see that the trade happened in the parking lot of an Episcopal church. I’m pretty devoted to the New York Times recipe for banana bread from Julia Moskin, but I had to give this one a try. Most banana bread, if we’re being honest, is more like cake than like bread, but Chrissy Teigen’s recipe doesn’t even apologize for it. I eliminated the coconut but kept the chocolate. It was, like most things involving a packet of instant pudding, amazing.

Last week, I merged Samin Nosrat’s buttermilk-brined chicken with the Smitten Kitchen’s  Roast Chicken with Schmaltzy Cabbage, with my friend Jacob’s trick of throwing in some beans under the roasting chicken with the cabbage, all to delicious results. I’m going to try it again tomorrow night, but I’m brining the chicken in whey (a byproduct of homemade Greek-style yogurt-making) instead of in buttermilk. We’ll see how it turns out! In the meantime, I’m looking over all of my Yotam Ottolenghi cookbooks for vegetable-centric recipe ideas, on the theory that we might have a meat shortage, and it can’t hurt to reduce our meat consumption even if we have plenty.

We planted a garden under the guidance of my mom, who watched my grandparents garden for years, and more importantly, reads the directions on all the seed packets I ordered in a frenzy several weeks ago. We have sprouts for broccoli rabe, red cabbage, leeks, onions, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, chard, carrots, and collards. I’m not sure what will “take,” but it’s used up our compost that’s been collecting for several years, and it’s given us something other than our anxiety to tend. While we wait, and even if nothing grows reliably well, we’ve continued our farm share with Plant it Forward, which trains and employs refugee farmers here in Houston. They’ve distributed a record number of farm shares in recent weeks, and they’ve kept us supplied with fresh vegetables in a safe, socially distanced way. I’m entertaining the thought of throwing some of their collards and carrots under the whey-brined chicken tomorrow night…

Completed/remaining: 757/198

 

 

 

 

 

I can’t keep track any more.

OK, it’s been a minute or two.

We’ve been in quarantine for seven weeks, I think?

In a lot of ways, it’s going better than I might have imagined it would. I guess that’s the benefit of very low expectations?

We’ve gotten into a routine with the kids’ distance learning at school. We have one third grader and one sixth grader. The school district canceled slowly for a while, and then just called it for the rest of the academic year. I’ve never been more grateful for kids who like learning and still like each other. I’m sure we’ll feel the effects of this eventually, but for now, they seem to be ok. My husband and I have both transitioned to working at home, and we’re so grateful to be employed and to have jobs we can do remotely.

In the meantime, speaking of gratitude, I’m so glad I like to cook. We caved and got takeout a few times last week, but other than that, the kitchen has been open a lot. The washing machine broke on the day after Easter, which put an end to our paper towel embargo. (The laundry room is now operational again, thank GAWD.) The dishwasher broke the next week, and every ten days or so, we get a message that someone is ordering parts for it, or thought about ordering parts for it, or heard that it needs parts to run. I would like a refund on the last month of pandemic, please. That hasn’t stopped us from cooking, of course.

Even so, we’re not commuting and parking and packing lunches before dawn. I wouldn’t exactly call this restful or “sabbath” or any of the other malarkey that’s been peddled in my direction. But it hasn’t been 100% awful, either. We adopted a cat, or rather, it adopted us, I guess? It just showed up on the same day the washing machine broke. She has a clean bill of health from the vet, and she hangs out on the little porch on the driveway side of our house where the recycling bins live. With three seventy-pound dogs in the house, she’s not super eager to be inside. We named her Feast. We like to feast here. Also, there’s a part of the liturgy in the Episcopal eucharist service, where the priest says, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us,” and the people respond, “Therefore, let us keep the feast.” The kids and I had to press hard on Neil to let us keep the cat, so she became Feast.

Like I said, I’ve been cooking a lot. I set a New Year’s resolution this year to read 100 books, swim 2020 yards, and try 50 new recipes. I’ve just completed the 72nd new recipe of the year, I’m on track for the 100 books, and let’s just not talk about the lap swimming. I’m afraid I’ve lost track in the last year or two of which Barefoot Contessa recipes I’ve been cooking, because when I thumb through the cookbooks, I could swear I’ve made some that I haven’t recorded. OOPS.

I made Samin Nosrat’s “Big Lasagna” with homemade noodles. I’m still making new things with sourdough discard every week, and about four loaves a week for our family to eat. I made homemade flour tortillas from the Homesick Texan. Twice. I roasted Rancho Gordo vaquero beans under a chicken. I made homemade Hawaiian rolls and homemade bagels. Ben picked out a recipe for lamb chops from a Turkish cookbook, and we made a whole Mediterranean meal around it. I’ve brined whole chickens in feta and in buttermilk. We made Alton Brown’s popcorn for a Culinary Chemistry assignment for Rowan. We made two birthday dinners and cakes (for Ben, and then for my dad). We celebrated Palm Sunday with donkey ears for the dog and the Easter Vigil with a fire on the front lawn. We dyed Easter eggs and managed slightly less-than-hard-boiled eggs (perfection) in the pressure cooker. I’ve rediscovered the cookbook, Dinner: A Love Story and have dug deeper into the cookbooks written by my favorite New York Times food columnists. I’ve burned rosemary because Alice Waters’ daughter mentions it, like, a lot in her memoir.

The New York Times Cooking app is almost always open on my phone. I’m a tiny bit obsessed with buying whole chickens from Texas farms. All of this is honestly the best distraction I could find. My job is stressful. A global pandemic is stressful. Economic collapse is stressful. Lasagna is not all that stressful, or maybe just stressful enough to keep my mind off of the other stressful things. I’ve heard that other people find this kind of zen in extreme exercise. That’s nice for them. My family has to eat, and I can get lost in my own mind a bit when I’m in the kitchen. I don’t know what the coronavirus death toll is this week, but I know how many eggs we have in the refrigerator.

I found some recipes in Ina’s Cook Like a Pro that were low-hanging fruit for an easy lunch. The Tuscan Bread Salad uses a half-pound of sourdough bread, which we happen to always have now, along with some cherry tomatoes, fresh basil, and fresh mozzarella, which we also happened to have. I billed it to the nine-year-old as “pizza in a bowl,” which it basically is. I thawed two pounds of shrimp because I needed room in the freezer for homemade chicken stock, and I would say that this is my life now, but quite frankly, this has always been my life. So, with my thawed shrimp, I made Shrimp Louis (also from Cook Like a Pro). I’m not a shrimp sauce person (there was an unfortunate incident at Dairy Queen in the late 1980s), but I liked the plain, roasted shrimp. Neil liked the sauce. Miraculously, the only ingredient I was missing was horseradish, but I think the chili sauce and the sriracha provided enough heat to make up for it.

 

Completed/remaining: 756/199, but let’s be honest, I don’t really know any more. I also pre-ordered Ina’s new cookbook, set to be published in the fall, which she likes to do as soon as my “remaining” count dips under 200. I’m writing a cookbook, too, and it’s called WHATEVER, INA.

Preparedness is Not the Same as Panic: A Brain Dump

My brilliant friend Robin said it best.

If that doesn’t convince you, watch this. Please.

Brace yourselves – this is going to be a hodgepodge of my stream of consciousness, along with some practical tips for cooking from your pantry. On the upside, you don’t need to leave your house to read it.

Like the rest of the world, we’re watching and waiting to see what will happen with the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m already an anxious person by nature, especially about sickness, and I soothe my anxiety with cooking. When health officials advised that people prepare for social distancing by stocking up on a few weeks’ worth of extra food, I felt like this was my moment. There seems to be a fine line between stockpiling and preparing, too. I haven’t bought hand sanitizer since 2014. I haven’t bought any more than our usual amount of toilet paper. I’ll ‘fess up to adding a few extra weeks’ worth of eggs to the cart a few weeks ago, because I have some Hurricane Harvey PTSD when eggs weren’t available anywhere for a while. In the past few weeks, I’ve made sure our freezer and pantry are stocked, but I haven’t bought anything that we wouldn’t use up anyway. If you haven’t already stocked up and you’re looking for advice, don’t buy something that you wouldn’t be excited to eat on a normal day. Quinoa and beef jerky, I’m looking at you.

Also, a plea from our friends who have a baby in the foster system. If you can, leave the WIC-eligible items on the shelves for those who need them. People who use these services often can’t stock up, and they cannot substitute for a different item. So, if you are able, leave those items and choose a substitute. These items are usually clearly labeled on the grocery store shelves. While you’re at it, think about your local food shelf if you’ve bought canned goods in bulk. As with everything else, the population who uses those services will be disproportionately impacted by this event.

As of right now, the grocery suppliers are telling us that there’s no reason to believe that supply chains will be interrupted. I haven’t been to the store in over a week, thanks to the pantry and freezer stores we’ve built up over time. But even for those of us who like to cook, it’s an adjustment to not be able to rely on a quick takeout meal or a restaurant break, especially if we are still maintaining a regular 8:00 am – 5:00 pm working schedule and adding a few kids (who are usually at school) to our days. It’s kind of a lot.

I grew up in the country in Wisconsin, which didn’t feel like the middle of nowhere at the time, but it was pretty much the middle of nowhere. Our only neighbors were Amish people. It took at least 15 minutes to get anywhere by car. If we got snowed in, we were kind of stuck. Add to these facts that my dad was a grocer and a hunter, and we had a perfect recipe (heh) for cooking from stored food. Hurricane Harvey was a good example of cooking with what we had. I made enough granola to fill all of the potholes in Houston because I had oats and nuts on hand.

Why ARE people so fixated on toilet paper? Again, I think Robin gets it. Here’s a bonus recipe of her mom’s meatloaf.

I’ve started to think about what it might be like to be without fresh fruit and vegetables for a few weeks. We usually have a good stash of frozen vegetables, and I picked up a few packages of dried fruit and canned mandarin oranges. They’re not as much of a favorite as fresh berries and apples, but they’ll do. One of my kids loves smoothies, so I’ve already prepared him for that possibility instead of his usual apples and bell peppers. I bought herb plants and repotted them. I don’t have the greatest luck with gardening, but if we have fresh herbs for a few more weeks than we otherwise might have, this will be a success. Also, this is a good homeschooling lesson, I guess?

I made this Provençal Greens Soup from Martha Rose Schulman. I tried a small bowl before freezing it, and it has amazing flavor.

I also take the greens from carrots, beets, and radishes, and anything that comes with something that we’re not going to eat right away. I add that to whatever odds and ends I keep in a zip-loc bag in the freezer – usually onion skins and the cores of onions, garlic peels, etc., and add them to chicken stock. My grandmother would say that it’s not the same as eating those greens raw (and she was probably right), but at least we are getting some of the nutrients and saving them from going directly into the compost if they wilt.

We had a huge amount of citrus from our last Community Supported Agriculture haul, so I preserved some to use in recipes over the coming months.

I have stocked up on ultra-pasteurized milk, which keeps longer than regular milk, and I’ve bought some shelf-stable almond and oat milk in case we are quarantined. I don’t know if we’ll drink it straight up, but it might keep me from drinking my coffee black. Small comforts, people.

I’ve been experimenting with making yogurt. I use it to make overnight oats. I used the whey that was separated from some strained yogurt to make pizza dough.

Now is as good of a time as any to assess your regular consumption. We compost, not so much for gardening (although we should), but to reduce the amount of waste that goes to the landfill. I’ve been more conscientious recently about composting more, to prepare for a time when our garbage collection services might be reduced, or in case we run out of garbage bags. This is a good practice anyway, but our mindfulness about, well, everything has made me focus on it more lately. That, and being in the kitchen more means more kitchen refuse. I’m trying to cut back on our paper towel usage, and when I do use a paper towel, I compost it. We’ve used cloth napkins for over a decade now, including in the kids’ lunch boxes. Using less means having to go out to buy less, and it’s less waste that needs to leave the house. (Honestly, I haven’t minded the extra laundry – we do laundry so much anyway, that I haven’t really noticed the napkins.)

OK, so how can you live like a hermit and eat like a king?

Here are some of my favorite supplier’s websites. Right now, they are still delivering, but of course, things are changing day-by-day.

Boxed.com and Costco.com for shelf-stable goods. Sometimes, Boxed is available through Zulily, which I access through rakuten.com (formerly known as ebates), which is a long way of saying that I will click through a lot of websites to save four dollars.

Lush for bath products. Their stores are closing, but they still have an online presence for now. Their catalog is the most diverse marketing I’ve ever seen, and their products make the entire house smell amazing.

1915 Farm for meat and poultry. This is a farm based in Richmond, Texas, and it was recommended to me by local friends when the federal government started talking about deregulating meat processing plants. That makes me nervous, and it should make you nervous, too, even when there isn’t a global pandemic. I have ordered from 1915 Farm a few times, and everything always comes completely frozen solid on dry ice. The quality is outstanding. You may pay a little more, but it is available and shipped to your door. I highly recommend them. If you don’t live in southeast Texas, you can search for a farm closer to you. This is a great way to support local farmers and maintain the grocery stores’ shelves for those who can’t order from a farm like this.

King Arthur Flour for baking goods. This is an employee-owned company, and I can’t overstate the quality of everything I’ve used from there. They are still shipping, so stock up on flour now.  The recipes and guidance on their website are also outstanding. If you are local and you want some of our sourdough starter, send me a message and I will hook you up. So far, our original King Arthur starter has birthed babies that are being distributed all over Houston: to a social worker, an epidemiologist at M.D. Anderson, a school board member, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, clergy spouses across faiths and denominations, a chess master, and another priest. We’re just getting started! I’m instituting a porch pick-up system, so we’re not face-to-face with the adoptive parents of these new friends.

Penzey’s Spices is still shipping. They have great coupon deals, and they are vocal about their corporate social conscience. I love this Wisconsin company, and their products are amazing. You might want to use their spices to make your pantry items a little more interesting. Do you want to know what to buy? Julia Moskin from the New York Times wrote How To Stock a Pantry, which might give you some ideas of the things you might want to use.

Who Gives a Crap is a paper products company with a mission to be environmentally and socially responsible. They don’t use any plastic in their packaging, and their mission includes building toilets in less advantaged parts of the world. Unfortunately, they are currently sold out of their products, but once their stock is replenished, check them out.

Now… what to cook?

If you comment with your cooking conundrum (too many beans? Not enough eggs?), comment below and I’ll try to solve your cooking challenge. I offered this up on social media this weekend, and I was surprised at how many people took me up on my offer!

I love cookbooks, but I also rely heavily on the New York Times Cooking page for fresh inspiration and solid guidance. If you don’t have a subscription, now’s the time to sign up. It is worth it. They have an app that is easy to use.

Ina has some, but not all, of her recipes online.

Smitten Kitchen and Homesick Texan are two of my favorite websites in all the world. Use them. Buy their cookbooks, which are beautiful and useful at the same time. Comment on their pages – they like comments.

Online recipes might be the only thing online where it is worth reading the comments. Unlike with paper cookbooks, you can see other cooks’ experiences with a certain recipe, and it might give you ideas for substitutions or different techniques to use.

OK, speaking of comments. Leave yours below. Entertain me. Entertain each other. It doesn’t have to be about cooking. I have a whole brain dump of home school activities for the kiddos if anyone’s interested. Ask me your cooking and baking questions. Hit me with your best quarantine recipes. Take care of yourselves and stay at home!

 

Book Review, More Recipes

After my last post, Sam Sifton’s book was published. It is everything I dreamed it would be and more. I wrote a review for Mockingbird. It’s so good. I dug right in this weekend, starting with the Caramelized Scallops with Buerre Blanc. I’ve made scallops before, but these were on another level. We’ve just discovered that the kids like scallops, too, so I made enough for all of us, plus my parents. I’m not sure Neil’s ever been so impressed with anything I’ve made, and I’ve made him two whole people.

Last week, I succumbed to peer pressure and made Alison Roman’s chicken thighs with artichoke hearts, after seeing it all over the New York Times’ social media and email blasts. It was amazing. The only note I would make is that the red onions give the sauce a pink tinge, which can be slightly disconcerting with chicken, but once you know that the chicken is actually cooked all the way through and it’s just the sauce, you can get on with your life.

I also spent more time experimenting with (what else?) sourdough. The internet told me I can freeze sourdough discard, so I froze about 24 cups of the stuff. We use a fair amount in making pancakes or waffles and biscuits, but there was a lot going on there, so we’ll see if I actually use it. I experimented a bit with denser loaves, making a multigrain boule and a whole wheat sourdough loaf, along with the naturally leavened sourdough loaves that I’ve been making almost every weekend. I also made an oatmeal citrus loaf with some sourdough discard, which is going to be fantastic for breakfast. We made sourdough discard pretzels, and I had a lot of help with those.

So, the dishwasher has been running pretty much nonstop, but that made for a great weekend. My goal this year was to try out fifty new recipes, and I’m already at thirty, so I think I’m going to make it. I currently have some homemade yogurt fermenting in the instant pot, so I’ll be sure to update if we all survive that experiment.

More Bread, Some Lamb, and Some Valentine Chicken

Two weekends ago, we celebrated a certain 12-year-old’s birthday. I say this every year, but I don’t know how that happened. Rowan is our sweet, calm, peaceful, love of a boy. I can’t believe how lucky I am to be his mom. He is almost as tall as I am, and his shoe size has already surpassed mine. I made waffles for him and his brother and their sleepover pal, which they devoured. The boys have become little foodies in the past few months. We went to two different Japanese restaurants during the birthday celebration weekend, and then they tried (and LOVED) Turkish food this past weekend. We’re so lucky to live in a place where such a variety is so accessible.

Since my last post, I also made lentil soup with anchovies from Dinner: A Love Story. It was so flavorful and good, and Neil my non-anchovy-guy thought it was great. Anchovies feature large in a lot of New York Times recipes, and I love them for their brine-y-ness and the fact that I can pull them out of the pantry with no planning. I used homemade chicken stock, which really does make a huge difference for something like lentil soup, where a few quality ingredients can shine.

I made Merlin’s Magic Sourdough from the King Arthur Flour website, which might be the crowd favorite. It’s light and fluffy, and it has some added yeast, so it doesn’t feel like as much of a gamble as the sourdough-only loaves do. Next up, we’d like to try pretzels with the sourdough discard.

This past weekend, I made Jeffrey’s Sourdough Rye. I don’t know if the King Arthur Flour Jeffrey is the same as Ina’s Jeffrey, but the King Arthur Jeffrey is a tiny bit of a sadist. The King Arthur Jeffrey makes rye bread that takes 16 hours from start to finish, and then suggests that you wait 24 hours before consuming it. It was good, but not 16-plus-24-hour good. In trying to re-create my great-grandmother’s rye bread, I’ve found that the Russian Rye Bread recipe from King Arthur Flour hits closest to home, at least according to my parents.

I’ve had some wonky blood test results over the past several months, which have revealed that I’m ever-so-slightly anemic. A doctor friend told me that lamb is a good bioavailable source of iron, so I made Lamb Stew with Barley from Melissa Clark’s Dinner cookbook. Even though I heavily tweaked the recipe, it still turned out great. The only ingredient I fudged was that I added Worcestershire, and fooled around a bit with the vegetable combinations. Then, I cooked it in the pressure cooker to make sure the lamb got nice and tender. Then, because it was a crazy weekend and Neil was out of town, I ended up putting it in the oven. With about 8 times as much barley as what the recipe called for. So, it became kind of a lamb barley “risotto” casserole kind of thing, but it was good. I don’t know if it could even be considered the same recipe as how it started, but nobody really complained.

Tonight, I made Engagement Chicken, which is listed on the Food Network’s website as an Ina recipe, but I don’t think it appears in any of her cookbooks. The story behind the recipe’s name is that several staffers at Glamour magazine made this chicken for their boyfriends, who then proposed within a short time. I’m not relying on the chicken’s magical romantic powers, but it made all three of my boys swoon, just in time for Valentine’s Day. It’s not so much a weeknight recipe as I’d hoped it would be. For some reason, roast chicken always takes forever for me. But the pan sauce is delightful, and I can’t wait to try the chicken stock that comes from this bird and her trimmings.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST:

I’ve been reading the weekly emails from New York Times Cooking for years. I highly recommend them, even if you don’t cook much. Sam Sifton, the food editor for the Times, has sweet anecdotes, links to interesting articles (that often have nothing to do with food or cooking), and a style that makes me feel like I have a kind brother checking in on me. (I do have a kind brother, or at least a funny brother, but he isn’t the type for lengthy emails.) The weekly emails are engaging and fun, and I often exchange screenshots of them with a friend, often with a note that says, “this guy can’t be real, can he?”

He is indeed real, and I’ve mentioned his recipes on this blog on and off for years.

He has a new cookbook coming out, called “See You on Sunday.” I e-mailed him last week, virtually begging him to come to Houston on his book tour, and he wrote me back.

I told him that his turkey mushroom risotto, published in Bon Appetit years ago, may be the reason that my husband has not yet left me for a less complicated woman. I told him how much his weekly emails cheer me and have strengthened a bond between friends.

He wrote me back and told me that I’m currently his favorite person.

I die.

I don’t know if he’ll ever come to Houston, but I hope he does. I’ll refrain from saying more so that he doesn’t take out a restraining order on me before he gets here. If my sourdough starter doesn’t take over and glue me inside our home, I’ll be so happy to meet him.

 

Sourdough Baguettes + Noodles for Chinese New Year

My mom noticed that I like all of the accessories that come with my sourdough hobby. I come by that inclination naturally, as half of my cooking gear comes from them. I broke out the baguette forms that they gave me years ago, a byproduct of one of my dad’s bread baking dreams. I made the King Arthur Flour sourdough baguette recipe, using the metal forms for two loaves, and free-forming the others. The metal forms gave a nice bumpy bottom to those loaves, and may have made them a bit crisper on the bottom, but the other loaves seemed to hold their form pretty well without any help.

Then, theoretically for Chinese New Year this weekend, but really because I bought too many cucumbers for tea sandwiches for the third grade heritage project, I made the Smitten Kitchen’s take-out style sesame noodles with cucumbers. I shredded some Napa cabbage from our farm share to go on top and found a pile of other vegetables in the fridge to use up, too. I made entirely too many noodles, so I made another batch of sauce to dress them for lunches this week. Happy new year to us!

More Sourdough, Some Rye, and a Swiss Chard Tart

Someday, I will stop posting about sourdough bread.

Today is not that day.

I made the “basic” sourdough recipe from the King Arthur website this week. It was originally written as a bread machine recipe, but they’ve adapted it for a mixer and oven. This recipe calls for a loaf pan, and I’m not saying it wasn’t good, but it didn’t wow us in the same way that the free-form loaves have.

We received a handful of Swiss chard from our farm share this week. I’ve been making soup with our greens almost every week, and this week I wanted to try something different. I made the leek and Swiss chard tart from Smitten Kitchen, and it is amazing and beautiful.

This isn’t an Ina recipe, but I credit her with my habit of keeping puff pastry in the freezer for whims like this.

Last but not least, I made more bread today. I’ve been searching for a rye bread recipe that might come close to my Austrian great-grandmother’s method. She didn’t write anything down, and she knew if she taught anyone how to make it themselves, they wouldn’t need her for her most famous creation. So, she guarded her secret and left us searching for similar recipes on the Internet. First, I tried to find one that would use sourdough starter, but those take at least three days to make. As much as I’d like to pretend I’m a Ukrainian peasant woman who never leaves her humble hearth, I’m not. So, I had to rule those out. Instead, I found a recipe that uses yeast and only takes a half-day. This is Russian rye bread, and my parents swear it tastes like Little Gram’s.

I’ve become more confident with the starter, too, and so I made some naturally-leavened loaves of sourdough today, too. These have as much yeast as I have chill (which is to say, none). Ben says this is his favorite so far, and I’m inclined to agree.

These are definitely weekend loaves, but there was plenty of down time during the rising process. I swam 30 laps during one rise, and cooked dinner during another. The dishwasher’s humming along, and nobody seems to mind my new obsession, but I have found myself doing extra laundry to keep up with the tea towels and clothes I wear that get dough stuck to them. It’s worth it.

 

Food Tour + More Sourdough (What Else?)

This past weekend, we took an impromptu, self-guided restaurant tour of the Houston Heights neighborhood. The Heights are only about five miles from our home, but it can feel like a world away when we don’t have a reason to head that way, and when Houston traffic seems to conspire against us to get there. We went with another foodie family, which was the best way to tackle this kind of project. We wanted to catch up with them, and so standing in long lines wasn’t as much of a problem as if we’d gone it alone. Also, we all got to try different things. We went to Truth Barbecue, Voodoo Doughnut (brand new to Houston), Penzey’s Spices, and Jeni’s Ice Cream (also new to Houston). There were lines everywhere. The kids were such good sports, and we love that they’re now interested enough in food to find this to be fun.

Meanwhile, back at home, the festival of sourdough continues. I made sourdough pancakes and waffles from our sourdough discard, and sourdough popovers with a mixture of freshly-fed sourdough starter and some discard. At some point this weekend, I also made another batch of sourdough discard biscuits and another batch of the rustic sourdough loaves from the King Arthur Flour website. I am not receiving kickbacks from King Arthur Flour, but I feel particularly attached to their websites after just a week of this obsession. I haven’t thrown away any discard yet after several feedings in the past week, but I feel like that day will come. Each time I stir up the discard, it brings to mind the dumplings my family makes to go in chicken or turkey soup. Even though my great-grandmother’s recipe doesn’t include any leavening, there’s something about the batter that makes me think of dumplings. So, when I made turkey soup to use our leftover turkey from the weekend, I dumped together some ingredients for a pot of dumplings. I usually make dumplings in the soup broth itself, but I was afraid of contaminating a whole pot of soup if the dumplings were sub-par or didn’t form correctly. I made these in a pot of salted water. I have to say, after so many precise measurements of grams of flour and water, it was refreshing to just dump some flour and eggs into a pile of discard and stir it together until it looked right. That was my great-grandmother’s method of cooking just about everything, from what I understand. They were really good in the soup, which we had with an Ina-inspired side of sautéed cabbage with onions.

 

Next up: I’m researching some rye bread recipes to try to recreate my great-grandmother’s rye bread. It only exists in my family’s memory now, and I’m not sure a recipe ever existed on paper. I’ve told my dad to search around and find a photo of what looks approximately like hers, and I’ll try to get it right. Stay tuned! Or better yet, comment with your best rye bread recipes, especially if they came from the Austro-Czech region before World War I. (You know, like everyone has just lying around…)

Pumpkin Flan + Sourdough Bread + Arugula Pesto

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that my dad’s first profession was in the grocery business. He began bagging groceries at the age of 13 and worked his way up to owning his own grocery store by the time I came around. What it means for us now is that he still loves a good grocery deal. During the week before Thanksgiving, he found frozen turkeys on sale for 17 cents per pound. Never mind that we were going out of town for Thanksgiving and the turkey would be cooked for us: we just can’t seem to turn down a good grocery deal. It seemed that every day that week, as I was cleaning out my refrigerator to get ready to leave town, he was sneaking into my garage and putting more turkey in the freezer.

I didn’t complain.

I love retirement hobbies.

So, we had turkey for Christmas, and I decided that this weekend was as good a time as any to make another turkey before the weather heats up this spring, when we don’t want to have the oven on all day. Turkey time seemed as good of a time as any to make the pumpkin flan with maple caramel recipe from Cooking for Jeffrey.

Pardon the Christmas dishes. We’re still celebrating.

This flan was … complicated. Any time that Ina uses exclamation points (Be careful! Don’t burn it!), I get nervous. As it turns out, it was all worth it. Neil declared that he never wants to eat pumpkin pie again, at least when this is available. He’s not prone to the same fits of exaggeration as I am, so that actually means something coming from him. It was delicious. I’m glad I followed the instructions to take it out of the oven, even when it was still jiggly in the middle. That instruction always makes me nervous, but it worked, and everything was set after a few hours in the fridge. The only alteration I made was that I didn’t add maple extract. I tend not to like extract of anything, other than vanilla. This did not suffer for that omission, and there is still maple syrup in the caramel saucy layer. I recommend getting the bourbon-barrel-aged maple syrup from Costco for the caramel. It elevates everything.

Just as exciting, I made the first sourdough loaves from our lovingly-fed starter. I used the recipe for rustic sourdough loaves from the King Arthur website. It is goooooood. Check out the comments from my last post for more sourdough enthusiasm – Linda’s going to hold my hand as I work through my new sourdough addiction, and I placed an order at Williams Sonoma for more tools. (THANK YOU, LINDA.) I’m a tiny bit obsessed. Stay tuned for more recipes when I use up the sourdough discard. I have found myself thinking about sourdough more than is probably healthy. There are worse things.

Our farm share gave us a generous bag of arugula this week. Because our turkey dinner wasn’t on Thanksgiving and didn’t have the pressure of traditional side dishes, I made an arugula salad. I whisked up a simple vinaigrette of freshly squeezed orange juice, honey, and olive oil. There was a lot left over after dinner, so I tossed it into the food processor with some fresh garlic, walnuts, and more olive oil. I’ll add some parmesan before we serve it. This isn’t exactly a Barefoot Contessa recipe, but making over 750 of her recipes over the past ten-plus years, along with dozens of Smitten Kitchen, Ottolenghi, and others, I’ve gained some more confidence in throwing things together with a hope and a prayer that they’ll taste like something decent. I had nothing to lose with this arugula, honestly, because I didn’t really know what else to do with an already-dressed salad.

Completed/remaining: 754/201

Sourdough Insanity

I was nosing around online for bread recipes the other day, and I came across this King Arthur Flour recipe using something called “vital wheat gluten.” So, I ordered the vital wheat gluten, and as long as I was there, I added some sourdough starter to my online cart. My order arrived earlier this week, and I probably would have just shelved everything for the weekend, but there were instructions that I needed to feed the sourdough starter right away.

So, I did. I was nervous it wouldn’t work, because the box containing the order said PERISHABLE all over it, and Houston is a place where things might perish this week.

I haven’t used a sourdough starter since my last year in law school, almost twenty years ago. Back then, I think I was tooling around for something (other than law school) to fill my time, and a friend gave me some starter from a batch she’d had for a while. I remember feeding the starter, pouring off excess, and making way too much bread. I think it actually exploded in my kitchen one day, and then I met my now-husband, and then I spent all my time making lovey eyes at him and studying for the bar exam, and there was no more time for sourdough (sad!).

Around the same time, I read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. This was long before Bourdain’s stint on television, and he was really only a celebrity in the food world. I loved cooking before I read his book, but his book changed the way I thought about cooking and restaurants. I adored it. Anyway, in the book, there was a baker who worked at one of Bourdain’s restaurants. This baker’s work attendance was … sporadic at best. He was a really good baker, though, so they didn’t feel like they could fire him. At the same time, there was a revolving staff of other kitchen workers, who may or may not have met the elusive baker. The baker had a sourdough starter, which he affectionately called “the B*tch.” One day, after a long absence, the baker called the kitchen, and one of the new employees picked up the phone. With no introduction, the baker simply said into the phone, “Feed the B*tch. Feed the B*tch or she’ll DIE.”

How could you not be completely charmed by that story into feeding your very own sourdough b*tch?

So, even though I had kind of started off this new sourdough project accidentally, I’ve embraced it wholeheartedly. I fed the starter that first night, and I’ve lovingly tended it each evening and each morning since then. There is a process to discard some portions of the unused starter, either in the trash, or into a discard container in the refrigerator. I’ve grown attached, in possibly an unhealthy way, to this thing that I’ve tended and fed for less than a week, and so the discard pile is growing. Neil pointed out this morning that we throw away stale bread without feeling guilty, and so how is this different? “I’ve worked for this,” I told him. “You worked for the bread we buy, too,” he responded, completely reasonably. I hate it when he makes sense.

I’ve grown extra batches, too, instead of discarding all of the excess. At one point, I was up to seven batches, after having given one away. In order to avoid an intervention, I dumped a bunch of those into the discard container, and now I’m back down to two.

This is why we can’t foster puppies.

Fortunately for my neurosis, there are several recipes that use sourdough discard. I don’t know precisely how these are different from other sourdough recipes, but I get the impression that these are recipes that don’t need quite as much leavening as other bread recipes. I made a biscuit recipe last night, and they were devoured this morning for breakfast (after 30 seconds in the microwave), with eggs.

I didn’t intend to start a whole thing with this, but I have to say, there’s something nice about having something new to do in January. I have always said that Jesus is a Redeemer for giving me a January baby (almost twelve years ago!), because throwing a party gives me something to look forward to after the post-holiday let-down. Biscuits and bread aren’t quite as nice as my sweet almost-12-year-old, but they might just get us through the January slump.

PS If you look carefully, the tea towels I’ve draped over the starter have hymn verses on them. I’m completely charmed by these towels, and now buy them as gifts. You can buy them, along with prints, cloth napkins, and calendars, here.