Category: bread

Peanut Butter Bread, new favorite breakfast

Peanut Butter Bread

My housemate, Christa (of the Turkey Chili Rice fame) gave me a wonderful old cookbook for Christmas: Good Housekeeping’s Book of Menus, Recipes, and Household Discoveries, from 1922. The binding is delicate, the pages yellowed, and it has the great musty old book smell that I would wear as perfume if I could (um, maybe). It offers recipes for every day of the year (as long as you don’t mind eating cold boiled tongue and buttered asparagus every Sunday in May), and I can waste hours perusing the pages, awed by the odd ingredients and the minimal instructions. It’s clear reading this that back in 1922 it was unnecessary to explain every step of a recipe because the woman reading it (and yeah, it was almost always a woman) already knew more cooking basics than most people do today. I’m totally fascinated by this cookbook.
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Quintessential Summer Dinner: BBQ Chicken, Potato Salad, Corn, and Biscuits

Barbecue Chicken

I told you I ate a lot of great food in San Diego. The best part of my trip was being able to enjoy awesome meals with my family and friends. There is something perfect, something I miss everyday living here in Boston, about sitting at a table with people I love, sharing food and conversation. I grew up in a house where family dinners were important: I remember waiting every night for dinner until everyone was home from work and school and practice and whatnot before we sat down to eat, and now that I’m an adult (ahem, ha ha) I realize how great, and perhaps uncommon, it is that my parents brought us up like that. So, thanks ma and pa. You guys are rad.

The last night I was in San Diego, my aunt and uncle and their two kids came for dinner, and we cooked up this way-too-classic summer dinner: barbecue grilled chicken, corn on the cob, German potato salad, and buttery biscuits. The only thing missing, perhaps, was apple pie. But we had vanilla ice cream with strawberries instead, which is pretty perfectly summery itself. And this dinner was truly a group effort. I made the barbecue sauce and biscuits, Mom made the potato salad, my brother’s grilled the chicken and corn, and Dad entertained us all, the goofball.

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King Arthur’s Blitz Bread, or Ghetto Foccaccia

Blitz Bread

Most of the time, I enjoy cooking projects that are complicated, things that involve many steps and often bewildering instructions. I did recently try to make sourdough from my own starter, which, sadly, was an utter disaster. I’ve been dreaming of making croissants for awhile (I hear this is a three day process), and I have in the past tackled tortillas, chicken mole, homemade pasta, tortilla espagnola, paella: foodstuffs which have a (sometimes) deserved reputation for difficulty. But I have always stopped short of breads that involve making a biga or a poolish. I mean, just look what happened with my starter! Whenever I see a bread recipe that reads “add 1 cup biga” I tend to run the opposite direction, which is a shame, because that stuff is what makes bread really really good.

I am trying to get over this pre-ferment fear, but in the meantime, I’ve discovered a way to make foccaccia without a pre-ferment.
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Sun-dried Tomato and Caramelized Onion Scones

There is a little bakery across the street that consistently makes the Jamaica Plain’s Best list as the best local bakery, and frankly, I have no idea why. Sure, they make vegan cupcakes, and JP is just the sort of neighborhood where people will swoon for a vegan cupcake. And yes, there is a shortage of places to get a cup of decent, non-Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. But nothing, I tell you nothing about this bakery has ever impressed me. The pastries and pies look sloppy: I could frankly do a better job in my own kitchen. The croissants are not proper croissants, but more like bread dough shaped to masquerade as croissants. I ordered a sandwich once and the bread on which it was served was stale. At a bakery! And I won’t even get into the abysmal service.

For reasons unknown to me, however, I still occasionally visit this bakery, as though somewhere I can’t give up hope that my previous bad experiences were flukes, each and every one. I can’t account for my actions sometimes. What is they say about crazy people? On my last visit (the visit of the stale sandwich), I noticed some roasted red pepper, spinach, and caramelized onion scones in the display case, and the hamster wheels in my little brain immediately started spinning. “What a brilliant idea!” I thought. But I was not about to buy one of their scones (vegan, of course) only to be disappointed. No, I decided to go home and make my own.

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Semolina Wheat Bread

Semolina Wheat Bread on my new cutting board

Baking bread is one of those things that is really hard to find time to do when you’re in grad school. I am very rarely home for more than two hours at a time, and even the famed No-Knead bread requires some pretty tricky timing maneuvers. So, since I’m on spring break this week and have all kinds of time, instead of buying a fresh loaf of bread for my morning toast-and-peanut-butter breakfasts, I decided to bake myself up a loaf of something tasty. Well, something hopefully tasty. My skills with all things dough-related tend to vary widely, but yesterday I was up for a gamble. And thankfully, despite the fact that the dough was a pain in the arse and the bottom of the loaf stuck to the pan and tore clean off despite having oiled said pan, this bread is something of a triumph.

I first got the idea of using semolina flour bread from Panera, actually. When I was in San Diego at Christmas, I went to Panera for the first time so my mom and I could buy bread for dinner. I was immediately intrigued by their semolina loaf, so we bought it, and were not disappointed. The texture was perfectly grainy and the flavor was just a little different, and a lot delicious. Ever since then, semolina bread has been in the back of my mind, but the aforementioned grad school responsibilities kept me from semolina experimentation. But isn’t that what spring break is for?

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Only the blog has been neglected, my stomach remains satisfied

Bean and Corn Soup

Oh the neglect. I must apologize to whatever readers remain. The past few weeks have been stressful, exciting, busy, exhausting, fantastic, and terrifying. This being a student again thing is turning out to be more intense than I expected. My previous educational experiences stand out in my mind as a series of thrilling days full of joyful learning. I didn’t remember the hard work parts. I’m remembering them now. Don’t misunderstand. It’s freakin’ great, but I am tired.

I finally got a chance to talk to the Lady Crystal today (oh thank god, I needed that) and her plaintive sighs about missing my cooking and my blog are what brought me to the ‘puter tonight. It’s about time, and I swear, I will do my best to not let so much time elapse in the future. Especially because I really have been cooking things. I’m not subsisting on take out and frozen pizza, I swear!

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What to eat with meat? Potato Salad and Cornbread!

Picnic Salads

It took me weeks to decide what to serve alongside all that meat at our cookout party on Saturday. I pored over all my cooking magazines and did numerous epicurious searches. There are so many picnic options I was having a hard time committing–I knew I wanted to make some kind of pasta salad, but I wanted it to be different. And potato salad is one of my favorites, but it’s usually so predictable and boring. What to do, what to do? My option paralysis was setting in and I almost threw in the towel and told everyone else to bring something, but at the last minute, inspiration struck.

Inspiriation was inside an old issue of Bon Appetit, where I glimpsed a recipe for Potato Caesar Salad. I had been thinking about making caesar salad anyway, but this sounded almost like divine intervention. I love potato salad, I love caesar salad, and I felt pretty sure this was not a picnic table standard. I didn’t follow the recipe exactly, because I wanted to try a very traditional caesar dressing (and yes, I know raw eggs are generally bad news bears at a picnic, but we were very conscientious about keeping it refrigerated.) And it was a knockout–even people who said they usually hate potato salad luurved it. And I love it when that happens.

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Better Bread: The Experiment Continues

Lovely Loaf

After my last disastrous loaf, I knew I just had to get back on the proverbial horse and try again. This time around, I decided to continue the project I began last winter and try to learn the fundamentals of bread making. Without a solid foundation, I figured, I would just end up with many, many exploded loaves. And no one wants that.

Barring running out and buying a new bread book (which I want to do, but the bank account says stop buying books), I searched around on the interwebs and found a great bread lesson series at The Fresh Loaf. I stumbled upon this site last winter, and then promptly forgot all about it, as I am wont to do. Despite the fact that this wasn’t actually my first loaf of bread, I decided to follow the lessons from step one, because I am just that kind of orderly, rule-abiding lady.

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Aish bel lahm and broccoli bil banadura

Aish and broccoli

The Middle Eastern Cookbook has been sitting on my shelf virtually untouched for many, many months. Everytime I’m tempted to experiment from its pages, I’m put off by the ingredients I don’t have and, frankly, the less than appetizing pictures. I mean, the photograph of Kofta on page 71 is enough to put a person off food for a couple of days. But last weekend, tempted once again by an unfamiliar cuisine, I cracked the book’s spine and immediately my eyes fell on a recipe for Aish bel lahm. The picture looked like something I’d had before. Something I’d had and loved.

When I was in college my friend Sarah’s father, an Armenian man who’d moved to the States from Lebanon many years before, would occasionally bring her some frozen flatbreads, topped with either delicious meatstuffs or a tangy herb paste. I could never get the name right, but I loved them, and when we both moved away from Santa Cruz and I couldn’t remember what the damn things were called, I wondered if I’d ever get to try them again. When I saw the picture of Aish bel lahm, it was like running into an old friend. An old friend I was going to eat for dinner! Mwah hah hah! Ok, sorry.

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