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Brunching, and a confession about milk

I may have just eaten the best brunch of my life.

Okay, maybe not the best brunch of my entire life, but damn near close. And it was so, so, so easy. I mean, like, I was ravenous and it was still entirely worth it for me to wait on these few pieces to come together.



This is quite possibly the most delicious tomato I've eaten in a long time. Everyone keeps giving me their garden bounty, and how can I refuse such heartfelt gifts? I cannot.

This heirloom was exquisite. Meaty, slice-able, and so juicy. Plus mushrooms and a little spice from a poblano pepper, all under pools of decadent garlic cream sauce. Add poached eggs and some of that bread and that, dear, means Saturday started out well.

Sauteed vegetables with garlic cream sauce and poached eggs

I mean, this is not even a recipe. You know how to saute vegetables. The ones I used were:

shallots
mushrooms
poblano pepper
that beautiful tomato

in olive oil. You know.

To make the cream sauce, I chopped and sauteed three cloves of garlic in olive oil until they turned brown. Probably a tablespoon of olive oil.

Then, because I am a cheater and so lazy, I made (please don't make fun of me (this is the confession part of this entry and you should treat me delicately)) instant milk--like, the powdered kind. One cup of it. I mean, I guess you could do it for real with real whole milk, but I never drink it all so I can't really keep it in the house and powdered milk works just fine for recipes. I wouldn't drink it as a beverage. I mean, I don't really drink cow milk as a beverage either way. (This is the end of the confession.)

Anyway, keep on stirring the garlic in the oil and turn the heat waaaaaay down. Slowly, slowly whisk in the milk. Keep on stirring. I let this simmer for a good five minutes, maybe longer, adding salt and pepper and tasting. It was still thin at this point. Then I added (slowly, slowly, stirring, stirring) about a tablespoon of flour. And then a few grates of some nice white cheddar I found in the fridge. Maybe an ounce? And stirred and stirred and then strained it because there were lots of garlic bits that I didn't actually want to eat.

Then you poach the eggs. I do it--again--the lazy way, where you put a little water in the bottom of the pan and then crack the eggs on top and then put the lid on until they are done.

Then you pile everything all together on the plate and douse it in garlic sauce and then just die of happiness. I wish there were pictures of how pretty the vegetables were before they got all sauced, but that meal is so gone.



Onward to dinner. Mandy is coming over and we are getting serious about the eating. I love today.

Loafing

Oh hey, it's August.

Due to extreme busy-ness and not feeling like cooking after things like two hour commutes, I bring you lots of empty space between posts!

I mean, I haven't even made bread in a month. It was high time. Like to the point where Mandy, who lives an hour away from my kitchen, even said, you know, it's been a long time since you've baked bread. Never fear. I am back with something of a vengeance.

This delicious sandwich bread comes to you from my desire to use all kindsa flours and to finally make something worthy of breakfast toast. I want nice slices, I want no large holes (which are what I am usually after, for sopping up illicit amounts of olive oil), I might even want to make a sandwich out of this baby. Try and stop me.


In the pan, after the second rise. Pretty.

Oat Bran and Flax seed sandwich bread recipe
Loosely adapted from this bread. You'll note I cut the sweetener way back and added more flours.

2 1/2 tsp active dry yeast
2 tsp agave syrup
1 1/4 cups warm water
1/2 cup oat bran
2 tbsp ground flaxseed
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour, plus more for dusting
1/4 almond flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour

Mix the yeast, 1/4 cup water and the agave in a bowl and let it sit for ten minutes. Add the remaining water and remaining flours. Stir together until it comes together as a nice sticky dough. Turn dough out on a lightly floured surface and knead for about five minutes, until smooth. Place in a lightly greased bowl, cover with a dish cloth, and let rise for an hour, or until doubled in size.

Turn risen dough on a floured surface and gently deflate. (This is always the saddest, hardest part for me. Why would I squish something so big and beautiful? WHY? Because we must. Sigh.) Then sort of fold it like a letter going into an envelope, in equal thirds, so the top is smooth. Tuck the edges under and place in a greased loaf pan. Sprinkle the top with some flour. Cover with a dish cloth and let rise again, around 45 minutes.

Heat the oven to 400 degrees. I always start heating the oven about twenty minutes before I want to bake the bread. This is a new-ish oven for me and I'm not confident that it's as hot as I want it to be. So. Heat early, and know your oven. I keep meaning to get an oven thermometer to see if it's actually as hot as it should be, but I haven't bought that yet. Birthday gift?

Anyway. Oven should be hot. Make a few slashes in the top of the loaf with a knife. Then bake for 35-40 minutes or until browned on top. The house will smell AMAZING about twenty minutes in, at which point, if you're me, you begin obsessively checking the loaf of bread, opening and closing the oven a million times, slowing the baking process. I will never learn, apparently.

Remove bread from oven. Cool on a wire rack--cool completely before cutting, or you'll smash it, and get that too-dense part at the bottom.

Top a think slice with almond butter and wonder how this lazy month could possibly get any better.




Voila. Somehow, magically, a soft crumb, grainy sandwich bread, ready for the munching.

Math Party

So, one of the perks of living at the new place is that I was folded into a group of fantastic people who have just begun getting together for dinner parties. All of them are grad students except me; most of them are involved in heartier fields than mine--math and health care--so in my head I've started calling them math parties.

So, we are hosting the math party tonight and in honor of said party, I made bread and pie.





The bread is from our dear friend Jim Lahey. It's the recipe for Stirato, or essentially, an Italian baguette.

I love baking bread, and my fall-back method for the last year has been the five-minutes a day way, but I just don't have space in the fridge, or the stomach, to keep around six loaves worth of dough. Those recipes make a LOT of (perfect, beautiful, artisan) dough.

Enter Jim Lahey, who uses the overnight rise method as well, but only one or two loaves' worth. And this fancy "bake in a pot" idea.

I don't have a cast iron pot, so I had to make a few adjustments, but I'd have to say that I am quite pleased with the results.

Stirato
Loosely adapted from Jim Lahey's recipe

3 cups all purpose flour plus extra flour for dusting (the Lahey recipe calls for bread flour, but alas, I am out)
1 1/4 tsp. table salt
1/4 tsp. active dry yeast
1 1/2 cups of cool water

Stir together the flour, salt, and yeast. Add water and mix with a wooden spoon until a wet, sticky dough comes together. Cover and refrigerate for 12 hours. Remove from the fridge and let rise for an additional 2 to 3 hours, until the dough is room temp and the surface is dotted with bubbles. The dough should have doubled.

Dust a work surface with flour. Scrape the dough out with your wet hand or a spatula. Dust the dough with flour and nudge it into a rectangle, roughly 8 by 10 inches. Lift one long side of the rectangle and fold it over to the center. Then fold in the other side (like folding a letter to go into an envelope). Cut this "envelope" into two equal pieces.

This is incredibly difficult, because the dough is extra sticky and wet, still. I kept adding more and more flour to the work surface, but I didn't want to really knead any into the dough. Because it might break the gluten strands? Or something? I don't know. Just note that this step is quite messy.

Dust the two loaves with a little more flour and then cover with a tea towel to rise for 30 more minutes. You know they're done when you can poke a finger into the dough and the impression stays. If the dough bounces back, let the bread rise 15 more minutes.

Half an hour before the end of the second rise (aka, right after you cover the loaves), preheat the oven to 475 degrees and put the pizza stone on the middle rack.

After 30 minutes (I suppose you should check the oven temp to make sure it's exact--I don't have an oven thermometer yet, so I don't do that. But you should.), carefully transfer ONE loaf to the pizza stone. Stretch it out so that it vaguely resembles a baguette shape. From the photos, you can tell how well that didn't work for me the first time. Whatever.

Cover it with an inverted 9 x 13 METAL pan. Bake for 20 minutes.

Remove the pan from the bread and let it bake for 5 to 10 more minutes. Repeat with the other loaf. Cool on a wire rack before serving.


Pretty. Ugly. Or at least, one is distinctly more baguette-looking.

Pie recipe to come. Happy party.

Summer Herb Pesto

I may be the only person I know who cannot grow mint.

Mint, hardy herb though it is, is one plant that I cannot keep alive. I don't know how, considering that it runs rampant through most people's gardens--in my father's backyard, it just keeps growing and growing, despite numerous attempts at cutting it back and transplanting it other places. It just keeps thriving.

Not so at my house. Mandy and Dan gave me a mint plant that I promptly killed within a week, even though it was treated with the same loving care that all my other living plants receive.



However, with the addition of a back porch in my life, I thought I'd give herb growing another go. So far, it has been a successful venture. So successful, in fact, that if I don't use up some of this oregano it's threatening to take over the window box. Thus, pesto.

This pesto combines a bunch of herbs--not just basil. And I subbed in walnuts for pine nuts, because they were what I had on hand. The method is loosely based on Heidi Swanson's post on how to make pesto like an Italian grandmother, though after another look at her photos, mine is decidedly more "rustic"-looking. I don't think the pasta salad will suffer.

Summer Herb Pesto

1/2 cup each fresh oregano, basil, parsley, spinach, walnuts
3 cloves garlic
a few tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper

Heidi recommends using a mezzaluna, which is a half-moon shaped pizza cutter. I chopped everything by hand. It didn't take terribly long--I had slightly under a cup of pesto in about twenty minutes--from picking the herbs to packaging the pesto.

Quite simply, just chop everything. I started with the garlic first, and then added in the parsley leaves. Once I had a sizeable pile on the cutting board, I scraped it into a bowl and chopped some more ingredients. I did the walnuts last, but I don't see a strong reason for that. I think the chop, scrape, chop method lets the different sizes of the herbs come through, rather than pulverizing them into uniformity in the food processor.

Once everything is chopped, make a little cake of the herbs (I "caked" my pesto into the bottom of a small container) and then drizzle a few tablespoons of olive oil on top--just enough to cover it.

I added salt and pepper to the ingredients list but I didn't add any into mine. Add both to taste. Store the fresh pesto in the fridge for about a week--or freeze it in an ice cube container for future use.

Freedom radishes

The first time I ate a radish was maybe only eighteen months ago.



I was at a cringe-worthy work gathering. Someone in my department had decided that the four of us communications kiddos should get together and watch the movie Office Space while snacking and relaxing on a Saturday evening. And, though I have seen that movie more times than I care to admit (and I don't want to see it too much, because it is just like my life sometimes), and because you can't really say no to a work "social event," I had to bedgrudgingly show my face. But at this party, there was a silver lining--a delightful spread of crudites, which included the lowly radish.

I was astonished. I had no idea that this beautiful, red-and-white slice was all crispy and peppery-delicious. I had no clue that biting into a radish created such a satisfying crunch. No one told me how my salads could benefit from the cheery and healthy addition of these little red bulbs. Later, I sang the praises of this humble root to my mother for much too long, before she finally shut me up by saying that the reason why I had never eaten a radish is because she would not tolerate them. Would not have them in her home.

Oh.

Well, anyway, I liked them. And I am forever changed and since then have been happily crunching radishes every chance I can get.

But I bought a TON of them at the farmer's market. A TON. And I was just getting tired of slicing them and dunking them in hummus. So I pickled them instead.

This is the first time I've pickled anything, so that in itself is quite exciting. It also means I had no idea HOW SMELLY the kitchen would get. Very, very smelly. But the vinegar-y brine odor is dissipating slowly, thanks to the intricate system of fans placed strategically throughout the house.



This is the brine. I had to adjust the amounts because I had a full jar to fill with radishes and not nearly enough brine the first go round. So this recipe actually makes more brine than you need.



Picked Radishes
cobbled together from several cookbooks

1 bunch radishes
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup sugar
2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. black peppercorns
1 dried bay leaf
1/2 tsp. dried mustard seed

Rinse the radishes and then slices them as thinly as you can. Use a mandoline if you have one. Put the sliced radishes in the jar you'll use for pickling and then put the jar in the fridge.

Mix together the other ingredients and heat over medium heat, occasionally stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat and let cool for about five minutes.

Get the radishes out of the fridge and then pour the brine over the radishes.



Let the jar cool on the counter for about twenty minutes before covering it and putting it back in the refrigerator. Let the radishes pickle at least overnight before eating. They should last around a week or so.

Ta da! That's all.

Please note that this recipe made extra brine. To use up the rest of it, I ended up pickling a red onion. We'll see how that tastes tomorrow.

Also, happy fourth. I have to be up early tomorrow, so I'm hoping the sound of fireworks will die down any minute now. Also, hey, these radishes might be perfect on top of a big, fat veggie burger. With some feta cheese and spinach and tomato. Welp, I know what I'm bringing to the picnic at my dad's house tomorrow.

Goodnight.

Settled? Another egg supper

I've been here since Memorial Day weekend, and I must say, things are going swimmingly. Other than just regular life stuff sort of falling into place (except boxes, there are always boxes), the kitchen is fantastic.

We've had a few dinner parties that have come and gone undocumented. Two pizza parties, with the phenomenal overnight pizza dough from Peter Reinhart, and one vegetarian dinner extravaganza. The pizza dough will probably have to make an appearance here, but I'm not sure I can recreate the other one. Basically, lots of marinated zucchini, eggplant, and other vegetables served with a delightful (non-dairy) garlic cream sauce. Plus whole wheat pasta tossed with olive oil, caramelized onions and basil from my mini herb garden. Yes, this is the good life, at least where food is concerned.

This breakfast-for-dinner meal comes to you from my deep desire to get food in my stomach after a rather exhausting run, as well as from an abundance of wax beans that I picked up at the farmer's market the other day. Easy, fast, delicious.


Roasted wax beans with slow-scrambled eggs

roughly half a pound of wax beans

1/4 cup sliced almonds

1 Tbsp olive oil

1 tsp balsamic vinegar

3 heads of green garlic (or scallions)

2 fresh eggs

fresh mozzarella (optional)

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Wash and trim the green beans. Chop the green garlic in to small pieces, the same way you'd chop scallions to top baked potatoes. Add green beans, green garlic, sliced almonds to a 9 x 13 roasting pan. Toss the veggies with the oil and vinegar. Roast on the middle rack for ten minutes. Check halfway through, stirring the veggies to make sure nothing sticks to the bottom of the pan.

Spray a pan with cooking spray or add a teensy bit of butter or oil to the bottom of the pan. Crack the eggs into a bowl and add a touch of water. Mix them up. Put the pan over LOW HEAT and pour in the eggs. Stir them around a little, but try not to touch them too much. Basically, I just let these slowly turn yellow and stir them around every so often, until they're barely cooked--this is about the only way I will eat scrambled eggs.

Serve yourself a big, fat helping of green beans and eggs. I sliced up a few balls of mozzarella in the middle just to make the plate pretty and to satisfy my eat cheese every day mantra.

Eat up, preferably on your new back porch, watching the city go by and throroughly enjoying your late Saturday afternoon.