English Muffin Loaf
December 7th, 2011by Caroline
What’s not to love about a community cookbook, a crowd-sourced collection of family recipes from a school, church, or the local Junior League? I have a small collection of them, some from our preschool and churches my Dad has served, and some I’ve picked up at tag sales because the cover or layout appealed. This recipe comes from a cookbook I don’t actually own (yet!), the Cate School Community Cookbook, and I’ve eaten the bread often visiting our cousins who live and teach at Cate School. It’s one of those rare and wonderful finds: a quick, no-knead yeast bread. You can stir it together, pre-coffee, in your morning haze, and enjoy a piece with your second cup of coffee.
English Muffin Loaf
adapted from The Cate School Community Cookbook, 2002
5-6 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons yeast
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons salt
2 cups milk
1 cup water
cornmeal for dusting the pan
Butter two 8×4 loaf pans and dust with cornmeal.
Preheat the oven to 400.
Combine 3 cups of flour, yeast, sugar, salt and soda in a large bowl.
Heat the milk and water until warm and then add to the dry mixture. Mix well. Stir in remaining 2-3 cups flour, to make a stiff batter. Spoon the batter into the loaf pans, sprinkle the tops with more cornmeal, and cover with a damp cloth. Let the bread rise in a warm place for 45 minutes.
Bake at 400 degrees for 25 minutes. Remove promptly from the pans and let cool on a rack.
These loaves freeze well, and make delicious toast.
The Sweet Life
December 6th, 2011Caroline is definitely the baker on this blog, but once in while, we bake over here. Mostly for birthdays. Mostly involving my husband and fondant. You might remember the Lego Cake or the Volcano Cake. Not long ago, Finn had a birthday, and he requested a Hexbug cake. I made the yellow cake from this Smitten Kitchen recipe, which tastes just fine, but is not the best for working with fondant, still Kory managed. The colors were selected by Finn. The design is all Kory’s.
And then, my lovely daughter (again with her dad’s help) decided to surprise me with a cake from Whole Foods so we could celebrate finishing this book.
Right now, life is sweet.
Homemade Ramen Noodles
December 5th, 2011by Caroline
At some point this summer, I picked up the inaugural issue of David Chang’s new food magazine, Lucky Peach, and then, overwhelmed by work on this book, I let it drop to the bottom of my reading pile. Because this is not the kind of food magazine you flip through, tearing out recipes, and then toss in the recycling; it’s a reading magazine, and I was doing enough reading about food — in the amazing essays by our contributors — that I really couldn’t handle any more.
But this weekend (having submitted the manuscript; hurray!), I pulled it out and read it. I read the journal of David Chang and Peter Meehan’s trip to Japan, I read the story about the New Yorker, Ivan Orkin, who’s opened a ramen shop in Tokyo, I read about the invention of instant ramen and I studied the map of regional ramens. I read Ruth Reichl’s instant ramen taste test (she spent $80 on ramen noodles, so you know it’s thorough) and laughed at the recipes, like Instant Ramen Cacio e Pepe, which reminded me of the Instant Ramen Stroganoff or the Instant Ramen Primavera my college housemate and I used to make. And finally I read Harold McGee’s fascinating piece on alkalinity and alkaline noodles and I learned what gives ramen noodles that slippery feel in your mouth: alkaline! And I discovered that it’s really not too hard to make homemade ramen noodles. So I did.
I probably wouldn’t have been so drawn to the recipe if I weren’t living with a couple of young scientists who are fascinated by the chemistry of food and cooking, and who had just recently asked me why acids get so much more play in the kitchen than alkalines. I won’t go into the science of it all here — just go find a copy of Lucky Peach and read Harold McGee’s piece — but any recipe where you start by baking a pan of baking soda is kind of fascinating, don’t you think? After that, though, it’s not so different from making pasta:
rolling out noodles
mise en place
dinner
Slurp
On Cashews
November 28th, 2011by Caroline
This quiet week after Thanksgiving and before the happy rush of Christmas events begins, Lisa and I are collating and copyediting the final manuscript of this anthology to submit to Shambhala. I haven’t read some of the essays in a while, and I love reading them all together, one after the other, and spotting new connections between the stories. We all have so many food stories, and this weekend I acquired a few more, which I will share when I have more time to write.
But for now, since I have so little time for writing (or cooking, actually), I will leave you with someone else’s words on food. Not one of the amazing Cassoulet writers, whose stories I look forward to your reading next year, but a little essay dictated by Ben, years ago when he was five, I was working on my first book, and he asked me what an essay is. I told him, an essay is a piece of writing that tells people what you think about something. And this is what he offered:
Cashews
You can eat them. They taste like salt. Maybe they have salt sprinkled on top of them, like saltines do. When you eat them, they’re not there any more.
Deconstructed Minestrone or, Beans & Greens
November 23rd, 2011by Caroline
The other day, this is what I pulled out of my CSA share:
It was bigger than my head. The slip of paper in the box told me that it’s Pan de Zucchero, and that I could treat it like escarole or chard or any cooking green. So without giving it much thought except that it wouldn’t fit in my refrigerator, I chopped the whole thing unceremoniously up, tossed it in our biggest cooking pot with some water, and steamed it until the leaves were tender. Tony walked by at one point, looked at what I was doing, and commented, “That’s not my favorite kind of greens,” effectively telling me I was on my own with this one. I pointed out the greens would be great in a minestrone, but in the next breath acknowledged that minestrone was not going to happen anytime soon. So I drained the greens, stuck them in a glass container, and put them in the fridge, punting them for another time.
So, the next day, lunchtime, hungry, I open the fridge and start to rummage. I see the disdained greens and think again, longingly, of minestrone. I see some leftover tomato sauce and remember the can of cannellini beans in the pantry. Who needs minestrone? I warmed the greens and beans in olive oil, gave them a squeeze of lemon juice, and then spooned the warmed sauce on the side. I even made myself a nice piece of toast. So simple, so obvious, so delicious.
Igloo Meatloaf
November 22nd, 2011Last week, when I made this chive meatloaf, I made double. I rolled and froze the second batch, and took it out last night for a quick dinner. I baked it in our convection oven on the self-timer early in the day, around 3 pm.
But I also had mashed potatoes left over, and so when the meatloaf had cooked and cooled, I molded the potatoe into a little igloo over the loaf. I used my hands. Then, I suddenly remembered something from my childhood. Cheese in mashed potatoes ? Cheese on twice-baked potatoes? I quickly dumped some grated cheddar and monterey jack all over the potatoes, then baked everything at 350 degrees for 2-25 minutes.
The cheese crust turned golden and slightly crispy, and the kids were a little baffled, but then they tasted it and thought it was one of the best things ever. Finn ate two helpings and Ella just kept saying, “These potatoes are so good.” And she’s not much of a potato eater. Really, it’s the definition of comfort food, and it made for a very happy, easy dinner. In fact, the only thing more fun for the kids than this, which they thought was a totally new meal, was playing Finn’s new game, “Who Am I?” while they ate.
In this case, he is most definitely not what he is eating.
Fall Fruits & Cucumber Salad
November 21st, 2011by Caroline
It’s not that often my kids come to the farmer’s market with me anymore. Our neighborhood market is Sunday morning, and it’s easier if I stock up in an early strike mission on my way home from a run, before the boys are even out of their pj’s. But we all went together recently, in combination with a stroll through the local block party, and Ben noticed the information booth stocked with recipes. He grabbed one for pumpkin pie (which I have promised to make for Thanksgiving), and then also this salad recipe. It was ages before we had all the right ingredients, ripe and ready at the same time; first we had the apples and dill but unripe pears, and by the time the pears were ripe the dill was gone and we didn’t have a cucumber. But finally, today, we had a proper alignment of produce and Ben and I shared this for lunch. It’s sweet and crunchy and delicious.
for the dressing:
2 tablespoons mustard
2 tablespoons chopped dill
4 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
4 tablespoons olive oil
Pinch of brown sugar
Whisk together in a small bowl and set aside.
Core and slice, leaving the peel on for color and flavor:
Two crunchy tart apples
One ripe pear
One small seedless cucumber
Toss with the dressing and serve.
In Which the Husband Saves the Day
November 18th, 2011by Caroline
I had a little meltdown the other day.
It had been a day in which various bad things and mistakes piled up, and when my kind, dinner-cooking husband asked if I wanted a stir fry for dinner, I didn’t take it well. We’ve been eating a lot of stir fry lately, but that wasn’t the problem so much as that I suddenly couldn’t make a decision at all. Lisa and I are making dozens of decisions, big and small, every day about the book as we ready it for the press; Tony and I are making even more as we read foundation applications. My kids haven’t stopped being their clamorous, questioning, fabulous 6 and 9 year-old selves just because I have two big deadlines. I shut down.
“I want dinner,” I said, “And I don’t want to cook or make a decision about it, and I know this is totally selfish, but I want something new, too.”
Half an hour later, Tony was back from the market, chopping and stirring, while I ignored supervised the kids’ homework and emailed with writers. “Everything is cooking,” Tony announced, “but I don’t know what I’m making.”
An hour later, we were sitting down to dinner. Nothing fancy — steamed green beans with lemon and sliced almonds; jasmine rice; lentils with caramelized shallots — but it was tasty and different, and I didn’t cook it. Tony even had it in him to set the boys a challenge (to eat their rice without soy sauce), so the boys accessorized with squeezes of lemon and lime juice. Eli declared it “definitely probably the best dinner I’ve had this month and the last month.” I’d have to agree.
Walnuts
November 17th, 2011One of the contributors to our book, which is just a few weeks away from being sent to the publisher (!), is Jeff Gordinier. He’s written for a lot of places, but these days he makes his home at the Dining Section of the New York Times. He recently sent me a link about harvesting walnuts in France.
It’s a beautiful post, and as I read it, it made me happy to know that we, too, so far from France and big, sustainable gardens, also had a big bowl of walnuts, a bowl for shells, and a cracker out on our counter. Of course, we don’t harvest the nuts ourselves, but we do get them fresh from an orchard that’s about an hour away from where we live, and every year we say the same thing: We can’t believe how good they are. Fresh, flavorful, tender, sweet. Our whole family eats them all day long. A nut here, a nut there, they’re like little nuggets of fall. Ella will crack a few while she’s waiting for breakfast. Finn will ask if he can some after lunch. (I always say yes.) I’ll have some before dinner. The shells are thin and easy to crack. The nuts are so solid and compact, and they make little musical clicks as we sort them. Really, everything about them sings. They’re a fast, healthy snack that you have work a little for, which isn’t a bad thing. And for me, because we only have them this time of year, they’re just one more thing that reminds us of the present moment. That, and the nefarious way a certain medley of carols keeps being sung over, and over, and over….
The Seurat Burger
November 16th, 2011by Caroline
One of them is eating a burger, I'm sure of it
My kids are incredibly lucky with the food at their school (it’s good enough that I go out of my way to volunteer in the lunch room) and their art program (let me know if you need a 2012 calendar…) but I’ve never seen the two come together. The other day, though, Eli and I were at the park, playing our usual game of catch between his dismissal and his big brother’s, and I learned how very the deeply the 1st grade arts’ curriculum has penetrated his thinking.
He was telling me about the veggie burgers Chef Ric made for lunch, and that he thought there were some ingredients in them that he doesn’t care for, like peppers and onions. “But,” he said, “they were chopped up so small, they got all mixed in; it was like Seurat, you know, Mama?”
I wish I’d gotten to eat one of those Seurat burgers myself.
Maybe that's not a powder puff, but a burger bun...