Christmas Resolutions

I have been horribly neglecting this poor blog. I am hoping that I will update this more in the coming year. I am actually, for the first time in my life, making a list of things I want to do, preferably before I die. Some I hope to get done sooner rather than later, such as learning how to lead-climb. Others are going to take much longer, like seeing the Northern Lights or going to Tibet.  I thought about adding "keep up with my blog" to the list, but I don't know where life will take me and frankly, it is much more a list of doing things rather than recording them.

Anyway, to get to the food-related business at hand! I got a cookbook from my Mom for Christmas this year.

Deb's blog (of the same name) is one of my favorite food blogs. It is a great present! We actually made something from it for Christmas dinner (we had Christmas on Christmas Eve). Sadly, I have no pictures to share of it, so next time I make it I will try to remember to do that.

Since my last post I moved to a new apartment. I am living a city life of sorts. I am living just outside Boston but on the Red Line of the T, so really, I consider it Boston. I never thought I would live in the city, but I love, love, love it! More than I ever thought I would. Anyway, the reason I mention this is because my kitchen is amazing. There is a double oven, a gas stove, and TONS of cabinet space. So I have gotten back to cooking a lot. I just have to get back to posting about it.

So we'll see how that goes.

Merry Christmas from Simcoe and I!

Seasonal Soup and some Homebrew

Yes, I eat pumpkins. And they taste amazing.

Specifically, pumpkin soup. If you're really adverse to eating pumpkins, you can do this with any winter squash, though I don't know why you would want to.

"Winter Squash Soup"
This recipe comes from Laurel's Kitchen which my mom gave me :) Makes about 7 cups of soup.

Pumpkin soup simmering with the roasted seeds in front.

5 cup cubed raw winter squash or 3 cups cooked winter squash
2 1/2 cups vegetable stock
1/4 cup chopped onion
1 Tbsp oil
1/2 cup parsley (I actually omitted this and used some sage instead)
2 tsp salt
1 tsp basil
1 cup dried skim milk (I use more like 1/2 or 1/3 cup)
1 Tbsp torula yeast (same as nutritional yeast flakes as far as I can tell, which is what I used. And I used at least triple that because I love it)
Optional: 1 pound fresh spinach, a couple tomatoes, a red pepper, or whatever you feel like adding.

If you're using raw squash/pumpkin, cook it in a large pot in the broth until it is tender, then blend it until it is the consistency you want.

Saute the onion in the oil until soft, then add parsley. Cook just long enough to soften the parsley, then add, along with the seasonings, to the squash in the soup pot.

Add the milk powder and yeast and blend in well (the book suggests taking out a cup of the squash and mixing all this together in a blender, but I don't do that). Bring the soup to a simmer. Add the spinach at the very end. I also use the pumpkin seeds by roasting them in the oven with some oil and salt and then adding them on top. It gives it a nice texture.

Pumpkin soup with spinach and red peppers. Get in my belly!

I also brewed some beer with a couple friends a little over a week ago. I wasn't sure I was ever going to homebrew again, but it was fun to brew with some new people. And I used some of my grain share rye! It will hopefully be a delicious rye IPA style beer. We put about 3 pounds of flaked rye in and a ton of hops.

Whole hops, I love how you smell!

None of us had ever used raw grains before so we chatted up the people at the homebrew shop, who were extremely helpful. Even though I had flaked the rye it had not been heated up in any way, so I needed to cook the rye, which we did by boiling it in a gallon or so of water for 15 minutes and then added all of the water and cooked rye to the brew kettle (which contained the rest of the water).

Malted barley on the left, rye on the right

It will be transferred to the secondary fermenter this weekend, then bottled a week or two after that! I am so excited to try it!

From Berries to Belly

I got my flour mill/flaker in this week so of course I had to spend some of this weekend trying it out!

Hello Grain Mill!

I also had my second grain share pick-up last weekend. This was supposed to be the last but since we had a pretty wet end of summer, the corn and beans aren't dry yet, so those are yet to come. However, we got a lot this week: 15 lbs of oats, 10 lbs of rye, 10 lbs of barley, and about 10 lbs of popcorn! The popcorn is still drying on my table and won't be ready to pop until the end of the year/beginning of next year.

In the meantime, it does look nice!

I flaked some of the oats while I was there so I could have my oatmeal for breakfasts. I had run out just before the pick up so it was great timing. My mill has a flaker attachment so I will never have to go without oatmeal (the horror!).

I think my biggest challenge for me as far as using the grain is concerned is the rye. I am not a big fan of the flavor of rye. I'm trying to talk a friend of mine into taking it to make whiskey and/or rye beer. But I have to look into that more because neither of us have any idea what is involved in that. But in trying to figure out something to do with the rye, my friend suggested the following recipe, which looked good enough for me to give it a try...and it was worth it!

Rye Honey Cake
1 cup rye flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup granulated sugar
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp grated nutmeg
1/8 tsp ground cloves
2/3 cup honey
2 eggs
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup water

The recipe also calls for 1 tsp orange zest and an optional 1/2 tsp crushed anise seeds; both of which I omitted because I don't really like either of those things.

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease an 8x8 inch baking pan.

Stir together dry ingredients, then add honey, eggs, oil, water. Mix until ingredients are incorporated, but not overmixed. Pour batter into prepared pan and bake for 30 minutes, or until a knife comes out clean 1/2-inch from the center. Cool the cake for 10 minutes in the pan and then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Rye Honey Cake...Mmmm....

Super easy recipe once you get all the ingredients measured out. It is a very moist cake so the batter is super wet. It tastes really good with some hot tea!

Of course, to get the rye flour, I had to grind up my rye berries. Here's what that looked like:

Rye berries

From berries....

Flour mill in action!

...to flour....to cake....to my belly. Rye never tasted so good. I will have to make a bunch of this to use up all my rye berries though...

Time for some more tea and cake! Happy Halloween!

Simcoe and I wish you a Happy Halloween!

Peanut Butter Kick

Apparently I'm on a HUGE peanut butter kick. I have been eating it every day. It's amazing I haven't gained a million pounds. I don't recommend this diet by any means, however, if you are looking to put a little peanut butter into your diet in some interesting ways, I have some recipes to share!

All of these recipes are made using my grains from my grain share, in case you were wondering (I know you were).

"1927 PB Bread"
from "As the Mill Wheel Turns: Tasty, Traditional Biscuits & Breads" by Patricia B. Mitchell (I picked this up in Lexington, MA at one of the historic homes gift shop).


Yeah, that's peanut butter in bread. Yes, it's as amazing as it sounds. It makes an awesome breakfast bread. The milk adds makes it taste creamy, like eating a peanut butter cookie with milk all in a bread. I didn't even put anything on it, but my housemate tried it with jelly and reported it was worth doing.

2 cups whole wheat flour
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt (I omitted this since my PB is salted)
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup peanut butter (I used chunky which gave it some interesting texture)
1 2/3 cup milk

Mix the dry ingredients. In a different bowl combine thoroughly the remaining ingredients. Stir together the two mixtures. Spoon into a loaf pan, the inside bottom of which has been greased, and bake at 350F for around 45 minutes, or until firm (a knife inserted doesn't really ever come out clean because of the PB).

This bread does get a little dry and crumbly (at least it did for me) the longer it sits.

Chunky Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

1.5 cups all-purpose flour (this was not from my farm share)
1/4 cup oats (this was!)
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt (again, I didn't include this because of my salted PB)
8 oz (1 cup) chunky peanut butter
6 fl ounces mild honey
4 ounces unsalted butter (at room temperature)
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 large egg
1 Tbsp. vanilla
6 ounces semi or bitter sweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350F.
Mix 1st 4 ingredients in a medium bowl. Set aside.
Beat PB, honey, butter, sugar, egg, and vanilla in large bowl until well blended.
Add dry ingredients into PB mixture and beat on low speed until well blended
Add in chocolate chips and mix.
Portion out cookie dough 3 inches apart onto parchment lined or buttered cookie sheet.
Bake for 12-15 minutes until tops are golden brown.

These are the moisest, most delicious PB chocolate chip cookies you will ever find. I think I'll try using my whole wheat next time. They were gone in no time.

Finally, there's this: from my own recipe arsenal:

Peanut Butter and Raspberry Hot Cereal
This is my go-to breakfast these days

1/2 cup flaked wheat berries
1 cup of milk and/or water (or any combination of the two, milk substitutes also work fine)

Cook these on high in the microwave in an individual-sized bowl for 4 minutes. Since all microwaves are a little different, I would suggest keeping an eye on it the first time to make sure it doesn't boil over because who wants to clean up the microwave first thing in the morning? It the oats are too chewy/hard for you, cook it a little longer.

After it's cooked, add about 1-2 Tbsp (or whatever you want) of chunky peanut butter, raspberries/blueberries/whatever fruit is in season or in your freezer, honey/maple syrup (to taste), chia seeds, nuts, raisins, whatever else you want! It's super fun to play around with ingredients. I recently made some applesauce and added that along with my peanut butter instead of raspberries and it was Amazing. My housemate adds an entire chopped apple to the grain before she puts it in the microwave along with some cinnamon. Unsweetened cocoa powder along with some honey or brown sugar and your favorite nuts is a great dessert-like way to enjoy these grains.

Yeah, I think that about covers all the PB-related things I've been eating. I've been eating more grains in the last few weeks than I have in the last couple months I think. Some of those recipes will be up here shortly...

First Grain Share Pick-Up

As you could probably gather from the title, today was the first pick-up for my grain share. 40 pounds of grains to be exact (this is less than half of the total ~150 lbs I will be getting!). 30 pounds of wheat and 10 pounds of spelt. If anyone knows of any good recipes using spelt, I'd be happy to hear them. Spell check doesn't even recognize the word and I have certainly never used it before! I hear it makes good pizza dough though, I guess I'll have to give that a try. I also need to buy a flour mill. Like this one that I used today:

Well, you can't see much from that view and apparently I neglected to get a better shot of it. But it is a small, relatively quiet table top mill. The grain all aligned itself to march down into the flaker. Take that entropy!

When the grain came out of the flaker it looked like this:

Flour on left, flaked wheat on right.

The flour is to the left, the flakes on the right. The small flaker machine also grinds flour, but since there were so many of us there to grind some of our flour we used this beast:

It was totally bad-ass. It's on/off switch was pulling the power cord out of the outlet. It worked great but I'm pretty sure my housemates wouldn't be okay with one of them in our kitchen. Sad.

We also took a little tour of the farm in the form of a tractor-pulled hay ride. It was out in Western MA and it was a beautiful day so we lucked out.

Farmer Adam driving the tractor

I am not entirely sure what I'm in for now that I have all of this grain. I hope I'm not in over my head with this one. It seems like a good idea in theory....

While we were out in Western MA, I also stopped in at my FAVORITE bar ever/The Greatest Place on Earth and had a couple beers.

The Moan and Dove aka Heaven

This place has not changed at all since I was in school and visiting this place on weekends (and maybe a couple weekdays). I have so many great memories here. I wish I lived closer!!

OK, the art has changed.

All in all, pretty much a perfect Sunday. I don't think I would have changed a single thing.

This also happened this weekend:

Grape jam

I spent pretty much my entire Saturday afternoon making grape jam, and I only got these 4 little jars out of all that work. I am pretty sure I will never do that again.

It started with picking the grapes off of my old house's grape vine. This involved a ladder and a good amount of time in and of itself. Next you have to separate the skins from the pulp. This took a tremendous amount of time as well. I mean, just think about it: "Skinning grapes", it pretty much sounds like a torture method.

Skinning grapes: hours of my life I'll never get back.

Then I had to cook the pulp and skins, strain out the seeds, combine the pulp and skins and cook down until it runs off a spoon in sheets. This means that the jam will set properly and not just be juice. I'm not sure mine would have ever gotten to that stage because I'm pretty sure I didn't have enough unripe fruit (which contains more pectin, the stuff that makes it gel) to properly set my jam. I also didn't have any pectin so I called it good after about an hour and a half or so. Meanwhile, I was preparing the cans and lids. Then spooning it into the jars and boiling them for 10 minutes.The jam I scraped out of the pan with a spoon is super tasty, but these days you can buy great jam at the store/farmer's market that won't take an entire day out of your life.

Jam boiling away my Saturday!

Good weekend, looking forward to using my flour and flakes in something awesome this week!

A Tale of Two Breads

 I have been on a mission to make all of our bread from scratch as I get prepared for our grain CSA from White Oak Grains in Belchertown MA (what an unfortunate name that town has) that will be coming at the end of next month or so. This means experimenting with bread recipes so that I am able to actually use the grains that I get from this farm (50lbs!!!).

I have tested out 2 wheat recipes in the last couple of weeks. One from King Arthur Flour called "No-Knead 100% Whole Wheat Bread" and another from a food blog called Tammy's Recipes called simply "Homemade Wheat Bread".

The King Arthur Flour recipe (with my adaptations) is this:

• 1 1/4 cup lukewarm water
• 1/4 cup melted butter
• 3 tablespoons maple syrup
• 2 teaspoons dry instant yeast
• 1/4 cup nonfat dry milk
• 1 1/4 teaspoons salt
• 3 cups King Arthur whole wheat flour

Directions:

1) Grease an 8 1/2" x 4 1/2" loaf pan. This loaf tends to stick, so be sure to grease the pan thoroughly with non-stick vegetable oil spray.

2) Combine all of the ingredients in a large bowl. Beat the mixture vigorously for about 3 minutes.You should have a very sticky dough. It won't be pourable, but neither will it be kneadable. Scoop it into the prepared pan.

3) Cover the pan with lightly greased plastic wrap, and let it rise for 60 to 90 minutes; it should just about rise to the rim of the pan, perhaps just barely cresting over the rim. While the dough is rising, preheat the oven to 350°F.

4) Uncover the bread, and bake it for about 40 to 45 minutes, tenting it with aluminum foil after 20 minutes. The bread is done when it's golden brown on top, and an instant-read thermometer inserted into the center registers between 190°F and 195°F. Remove it from the oven, and after 5 minutes turn it out onto a rack.  It says to wait until it cools to slice it but really, who does that? It smelled so good I couldn't resist and dug in after about 5 minutes. It was super wheaty, really moist and delicious. Problem was, it didn't rise very well in the oven: Not the best picture ever, but it gets the point across; there was little rising going on here.

This, of course, made the bread very dense and not very pliable. But it was tasty.

The next recipe looks like this:

Ingredients: 

1 cup warm water (110-115 degrees F)
1 tablespoon milk
2 tablespoons oil
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

2 teaspoons instant active dry yeast

Instructions: 

1. Combine first 6 ingredients in a large mixing bowl; stir.

2. Add flours and yeast, and knead until dough is smooth and elastic, about 10-15 minutes. Place dough in a greased bowl, turning once to grease top. Cover with a clean towel and let rise until doubled, about 40 minutes.

rising dough

3. Punch dough down; knead for a few minutes until smooth and then form into a loaf. Place in greased loaf pan and cover.  Let rise in a warm place until almost doubled in size, about 30 minutes.

4. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. 

5. Remove bread from oven and allow to rest in pan for a few minutes. Remove to a wire rack and cover with a cloth. Slice and enjoy while still warm! Leftover bread can be stored in an airtight bag or frozen until needed.

The finished product

This one had no trouble rising and yielded a lighter, airier, more flexible bread than the KA recipe. Which could very well be due to the fact that it's only half whole wheat.

I still had some of the King Arthur recipe bread left, so I thought a side-by-side comparison would be useful:

Tammy's recipe on the left, King Arthur on the right

 Here's a shot of the tops of the loaves. The KA bread on the right is only smaller because we'd eaten a bunch of it, they were probably the same length coming out of the oven since I used the same bread pan.

The moral of the story is that today I am remaking Tammy's recipe. I would like to work on the KA recipe or try some other 100% whole wheat recipes but I was too lazy to look that up this morning.

Also, I finally made it over to Mead Hall in Cambridge, MA (as of this post their website is STILL not up, but I thought I'd include it anyway). I had heard some really mixed reviews about the place but it seems that it is finding it's footing a bit now. I had 2 really good beers. The first was a porter from Finland called Sinebrychoff Porter. This beer has won numerous awards and is considered one of the best imported beers in America. And I'd never had it before this! Unacceptable!

Sinebrychoff Porter at Mead Hall. Look at all those taps! And that's less than half of them!

I have to say it was pretty darn tasty. Slightly sweet, balanced well with the bitter roasty flavors, chocolate, coffee, this beer has a lot going on. I would definitely get it again.

The next beer I had was pretty different. It was Pretty Things (a local brewer) Jack D'Or mixed with a raspberry lambic (I think Lindeman's framboise?). It was interesting, lots of flavors going on since the Jack D'Or is brewed with plums. It was good, but I'm not sure I would get it again. If you're in the mood for something fruity and slightly sour with a bunch of that Belgian funk going on though, this is it.

The Pretty Things glasses are crazy. I always feel like the stem is just going to snap, it's so thin.

 The bread is calling to be put in the oven...mmmm...warm bread. I don't care how hot it is, homemade bread fresh out of the oven is always irresistible!

Garden Update and some Pickles!

I haven't posted any pictures of the garden lately so I thought I'd change that this morning. The weather has been really great for growing vegetables this year. Lots of sunny warm (and hot) days with plenty of rain mixed in. Our kale has recovered well from the mystery creature and has really taken off lately.

Curly kale. Almost enough to start eating it!

I'll probably end up using some kale this week in something since it is starting to get huge and I didn't buy any cooking greens at the farmer's market this week.

Our rainbow chard is also coming along nicely. It has some brown spots on some of the older leaves but I'm hoping the newer leaves will be spared.

Also, you get a nice view of our creature-proof fencing...

Our zucchini and squash went from grow-as-many-leaves-as-you-possibly-can mode to produce-as-much-fruit-as-you-possibly-can in about a week. I was starting to wonder if they were going to flower at all and all of a sudden BANG:

This happens:

zucchini

 butternut squash and my hand for scale

They're so cute with the flowers still attached and all miniature. 

I wasn't as worried about the tomatoes since they were at least flowering. Now I'm a little worried about what we're going to do with all these tomatoes. I think there is a lot of salsa and pasta sauce in my future.

Mmmm...heirloom tomatoes!

Here's a nice before-and-after shot of our peas/peppers/butternut squash bed:

Before (July 4, 2011):

After (July 23, 2011):

That squash is just going crazy in just 20 days! And my ornamental sweet peas have flowers all over the place and the peppers are much bigger. Pretty amazing really.

My other big achievement this weekend was completing my first attempt at canning! I made plain old dill pickles. I followed the easiest recipe in this book: Ball's Complete Book of Home Preserving. I did a little tweaking but not much since I am in unfamiliar territory here. At least I finally used up those pickling cukes I got last week at the farmer's market!

They look nice at least! Hopefully they won't kill anyone.

It wasn't too much work, and doing a small batch let me work out some of the kinks. I definitely need to start simmering my jars (for the pre-fill sterilization) much earlier next time! My next project will be pickling the zucchini. I also got a bunch of summer squash (the yellow kind) at the farmer's market this weekend so I might throw that in with the zucchini if that is doable so I get some nice green and yellow squashes in the jars. I also bought some more raspberries this week. I just can't help myself!

No tomatoes at the market this week...I can't wait to make some salsa and pasta sauce!

Also, I baked some more wheat bread....but more on that later I hope. That's all for now.