My spice rack

Many areas of my life are not at all organized. But I do have a bit of (undiagnosed, probably colloquial in nature rather than clinical) ocd. When the world is falling apart, I get some relief from having certain things organized. Alphabetical books in the bookcases. Pens organized by color. Clips in their appropriate bins by size. Silverware, stationary etc. separated by type and organized in appropriate places in their appropriate drawers.  When I went into work and the supply cabinet was kept stocked, I would make sure the teas were organized by type (caffeinated one shelf, greens together, etc… after one botched restocking, I explained to the student workers the system I had put in place. Luckily they like me!). Many of these things are things you can’t see and maybe it doesn’t matter that I have piles of work papers all around me optimistically organized by vintage (newest stuff on top).

One of the things that must be organized alphabetically (and that makes me yell “Who has been messing with my system?!?” when it gets out of order) is my spice rack. Back when we were living in an apartment, spices lived alphabetically on set of cheap shelves in the living room because our kitchens were tiny (or, for two years, shared). When we moved here, I decided I wanted a rack like I’d seen on the backs of doors. Our pantry has enough room that we didn’t need to put it on the back of a door– this is screwed into the wall. I picked out wire rack modules at Home Depot and DH installed them.

Here are the top few shelves (currently I don’t have any little spices sticking out on top– we used up a few of the containers we had duplicates of [like Northwoods seasoning which is my favorite replacement for spice mixes like Emeril’s, blackening, cajun, etc.] so I was able to spread things out.)  The holes in the wall above the spice rack pre-date us.  I’m not sure what the previous owners had here because whatever it was they took it with them.  (They used the walk-in pantry mostly as alcohol storage!)

Here are the bottom three shelves where we keep bagged spices, also in alphabetical order.  It’s mostly Penzey’s but they were out of ground cardamom when we needed it (cardamom is one of my favorite spices) so I got some from nuts.com.  (In the jarred spices we’re mostly Penzey’s but I don’t mind having different jars so long as they’re about the same shape/size and, importantly, everything is in alphabetical order.  We have mostly Penzey’s not because I need all the yellow labels matching but because they have excellent quality spices at reasonable prices.  We are not getting paid to say that and they don’t know we exist.  It’s just a wonderful company in so many ways.  Pick up some of their Northwoods seasoning, and if you like things hot, their Berebere mix. Try their mixed seasonings to make flavored roasted nuts or put them in sour cream for a fun veggie dip.  *love emoji*)

You can see each shelf is connected to the wall by brackets that came with the shelf.

Here you can see that the shelf is modular– it’s composed of multiple sets.  You can also see the envelope we use to list the spices we’re going to need to get on our next Penzey’s run in The City.  Or, since the pandemic started, our next Penzey’s order.

I know these are not very pinteresty pictures– I think I had the light off and the pantry is a bit dark and I was too lazy to play with the lighting, but you get the idea.

To forestall people who question whether we can use all these spices before they go stale:  not always, but I would rather have a spice available and stale (meaning we have to use more of it) than to not have it at all.  We do go through our regular spices pretty quickly.

And… this is not all our spices.  We have a box on the floor to the side that is just different kinds of dried chiles (also alphabetical). On the shelves to the left in between the cereal bars and the crackers I keep different kinds of seeds and fancy salts.  On the shelves to the right between the chocolate bars and candied fruit we keep extracts and waters (and would keep food coloring and cake decorations if DC2 weren’t allergic to red dye).  Cocoa powder we keep in the back shelves with the flours.  Peppercorns are shelved, oddly, in front of the chocolate bars, but I think that’s just because it’s really easy access.  But still, a place for everything and everything has its place.

How do you keep your spices?  How do you self-sooth when the world is going crazy?

Stress Baking R Us

With DH’s company going under and all their work mostly being done, DH has had a lot of time for stress baking. Also he’s gotten a couple of dessert books (including one on cookies that MIL got him for Christmas!) (All Amazon links are affiliate)

Fruit and nut powerpack from Home Baking by Alford and Duguid.  This was a hearty dried fruit and hazelnut bread.

Nigella-date hearth bread from Home Baking by Alford and Duguid. I have decided I love nigella seeds–they taste like everything bagels all by themselves. This bread was soft and sweet and oniony and I loved it SO much. It doesn’t really need the dates, but it definitely needs the nigella seeds. (Also called charnushka if you’re getting them from Penzey’s, I think.)

These are chocolate tuilles from DH’s new cookie book that he got for Christmas: Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy by Alice Medrich. I found them a bit overly sweet. They were super crispy day one and still crispy day 2, but kind of got sad day 3. They’re really the kind of cookie I expect with something like ice cream or pudding at a fancy restaurant, but not on its own, you know?  They were also a bit of a pain to make so halfway through DH gave up and just made two giant sheets.

This is Pane con Pomodori e cipolle rosse from bread by Treuille and Ferrigno. OMG I loved this one so much. It’s a tomato onion bread, which meant DC1 refused to even try it, so it lasted a couple days. It was still good at the end! It’s I dunno, it seems more like a meal than bread. It’s savory and wonderful and very good with melty butter.

These are coconut sticks from Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy by Medrich. My notes: Wonderful, amazing, coconutty but not too much. What the coconut cookie in the Danish tin wishes it could be.

I think this is just a plain white loaf from Treuille and Ferrigno, which may be the first recipe in the book. DH was looking for something not ostentatious that would be a good vehicle for jam after doing a bunch of fancy breads. He’s made this one a few times, but not as twisty. I could be wrong though. This could be some other bread. Who knows!

Gorgonzola and Walnut Pizza from Pizza by Williams Sonoma. It’s advertised as a savory dessert pizza and I think it would do very well. It’s super easy to make too and quite impressive. Like, just pizza dough, blue cheese, walnuts, and some kind of citrus zest on top. Super easy and very fancy.

DH woke up one morning and said, what if I made snickerdoodles but with cardamom instead of cinnamon? So he made snickerdoodles from the Old Fashioned Cookbook by Jan MacBride Carleton and half of them had cardamom sugar and the other half cinnamon sugar. It was a brilliant idea. Cardamom sugar works really well with a snickerdoodle dough. Try it sometime!

Zopf, which is a swiss braided loaf from bread by Treuille and Ferrigno. DH notes, “Great, but it’s really just challah.”

Doesn’t that hot gooey mozarella/gorgonzola mixture look amazing? It was. This is Foccia Farcita from bread by Treuille and Ferrigno. It was spectacular. This is how much was left after I got out of class. Luckily they saved both pieces for me (I had one for lunch and then one the next day.)

I think this is a modified bean bread that DH made from the Laurel’s Kitchen Bread book. One of my work colleagues knows I really like red bean paste so sometimes she drops some off with me, and this time DH made bread with it.

Hot cross buns from The Old Fashioned Cookbook by Jan MacBride Carleton. These are so good. Like, if I got them at a super expensive bakery in the city I would not be disappointed at all. They’re rich with nutmeg and the dough is just perfect. There are little presents (but not too many) of candied fruit and dried fruit (thank you nuts.com) inside. They’re just wonderful. These are the unfrosted version.  (You can see the red bean container in the back there with the green lid.)

Hot cross buns with frosting. The frosting itself is a wonderful complement but I can’t have too much. Generally what I did was take an unfrosted bun and scrape off a little frosting from the pan where it dripped. These are so so good. Unbelievably good.

… some kind of bread. Probably from Treuille and Ferrigno, but some of them look alike after a while.

What a lovely looking bread that DH made on October 28th. Do I remember what it was? Nope!  Maybe Pain de campagne from Treuille and Ferrigno?

Focaccia con olive from Treuille and Ferrigno. This was super yummy. Very soft and fluffy. Did not last long.

Well, what a nice looking loaf this is. Do I recognize what kind? Nope. Is this from back in October, yep. I would eat a slice now. I bet it is good with butter.  AHA!  It is South African Seed Bread from Treuille and Ferrigno.  It was good with butter.

DH made one of the fruitcakes in the Old Fashioned Cookbook. This was the only one we hadn’t made yet because it was pounds and pounds of candied and dried fruits and nuts and it just seemed like a lot. Boy was it a lot. But DC1 took a liking to it and it disappeared in a few days. I prefer a fruitcake with a bit higher bread to stuff ratio. I found this one a bit overwhelming. (Don’t get me wrong, I love fruitcake, but this one wasn’t my favorite.)

This is probably irish soda bread. DH often gets a hankering for it and just bakes it. We have three different recipes he rotates between, but I’m not sure which one this is, other than I don’t think it’s the one from the old fashioned cookbook which looks lighter.

Pumpkin cookies from the recipe DH’s mom uses (probably from the back of a pumpkin can several decades ago) in their unfrosted state and some kind of onion flatbread I’m not immediately finding in Treuille and Ferrigno.  But maybe it’s a pizza from Williams Sonoma?

Barefoot Contessa brownies.

Pretty sure this is a pizza from Pizza by Williams Sonoma.

Pumpkin Pie. We used the old fashioned cookbook recipe because that’s my go-to. I think I actually made this one, though DH did the pie crust.

Pain aux Noix, from Treuille and Ferrigno. This is Walnut bread.

DH bought himself a cake book. This does not have any chocolate in it, but it is from a book called Chocolat by Alice Medrich. It was pretty amazing. This is an apricot souffle. It was a multiple step process.

This is what a slice of the apricot souffle looked like.

French Apple tart from Home Baking. Yum.

An olive hearth bread from Treuille and Ferrigno. This did not last very long.

Pumpkin bread from Treuille and Ferrigno.

Italian Cherry Torte from Chocolat by Medrich. This is the unfrosted version.

This the frosted version.  We loved it and said it was even better day two.

Chocolate hazlenut torte from Chocolat by Medrich. Divine.

Some kind of fruit crumble but we can’t remember where it was from. Maybe Cook’s Country? September is a long time ago.

Cornbread?

This is tea sandwich bread from made in a pullman loaf pan from an online recipe. (Which we got one year when I wanted English tea really badly but could not get it.)

 

What looks good?  Do you have anything exciting planned for Thanksgiving eating?

Ask the grumpies: Recommendations for Bread books (with some bonus other baking books)

Natka asks:

It looks like your husband uses a mix of on-line recipes and cookbooks… Any recommendations for tried-and-true bread books (especially sourdough) for amateurs?

Bread by Treuille and Ferrigno has a lot of explanation of different bread-baking processes and a number of their recipes involve a starter and they explain how you can modify any recipe to use a starter in the intro. I got a copy for my sister because it explains so much. (There are multiple editions– we have the 2004 one.)  I can’t think of any dud recipes we’ve made from there.   I think we started with the Stromboli recipe (so did my sister, actually) and are currently going through it somewhat in order, skipping recipes that require ingredients we don’t have (I keep telling DH we should just get malt extract, but our local brewing store only sells it in gallon increments…)

If you’re into whole grain only breads, The Laurel’s kitchen bread book is the one you want. It explains how whole grain breads being thirstier means they are treated differently. I’m sure at least one of those mystery breads listed is a bean bread from Laurel’s.  These have all been good and there’s some discussion of things to look out for while making the breads which is helpful.

Ok, so those are our two books that are both tried-and-true bread books and good for people who want a little more guidance.  We also have a number of other baking books.

Baking with Julia doesn’t have a lot of bread (it does have some though!), but it is a fantastic teaching book for other baked goods.  This is how DH mastered the pie dough, for example.  It’s an all-around fantastic book.

Home Baking by Alford and Duguid is a wonderful book taking you around the world and helping you make different breads.  There’s not so much detailed how-to as in the Treuille and Ferrigno book, but we’ve found it pretty easy to make things like pita bread from their instructions.  And the pictures are gorgeous.  For a long time it was our coffee-table book.

If you want to up your sourdough game, Flour Water Salt Yeast is where to go.  I personally don’t have the patience for this one, but DH does.  We also have Artisan Bread in five minutes a day, but DH quickly got tired of it.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe the Jim Lahey original no-knead recipe is just good enough.

We talk a lot about Pure Dessert.  This is mostly a desserts book, but it has our favorite brioche recipe in it.  The recipes are generally pretty simple but often call for unusual ingredients that we have to special order.  (Nuts.com, not a sponsored link, has a lot of them.)

Simple by Ottolenghi isn’t a bread book, but it does have some quick breads in it. So far we’ve been astonished with how good a lot of the recipes are.

And, of course it is no longer anywhere near in print, but I taught myself baking from the Old Fashioned Cookbook by Jan McBride Carleton which remains one of my favorite cookbooks of all time.  The bread section is especially wonderful, particularly all the Christmas breads.  (Likewise the cake section, and the stews… really it’s just an all-around fantastic book.)

(All amazon links are affiliate links.)

Grumpy Nation, what are your favorite baking books?  Do you bake bread?  Where do you get your recipes?

More of DH’s stress baking

I can’t believe I haven’t done one of these posts since June! My uploading says there have been 64 items, though a few of those tell the story of DC2’s birthday cake or are different angles of the same item (I have deleted some of these). Still, there’s a lot of fry breads and other daily things I didn’t get pictures of.  When we’re eating these things I think I can’t possibly forget what they are, but then months pass and… I kind of do?

Buckwheat strawberry shortcakes from Pure Dessert. It was good, but no better than most strawberry shortcake recipes. We actually liked the buckwheat shortbreads better without the cream and strawberries. (They were good together, but better separately.)

Bagels from Bread by Treuille and Ferrigno. DH says, “nice standard bagels” and DC2 notes that zie “loves them.” These are genuine bagels complete with boiling water.

Some kind of meringue, but I’m not sure if it’s one from Pure Dessert or just one we made using the standard overnight kisses recipe to use up leftover egg-whites. I love meringues but they’re really too sweet for my metabolism to handle, so I either have to drink apple cider vinegar after or just not partake (or feel icky).

Some kind of bread… don’t remember what…

More bread!

More breads!

Yet another mystery bread.

This is a fry bread! Using leftover starter.

Scones from Pure Dessert.

I’m guessing bread?

A half recipe of Brownies from the Barefoot Countess. They are dense, rich, chocolatey brownies with a deep flavor enhanced by powdered espresso. Usually we only make them for company, but DH had a hankering and its been a long time since we have had company.

Strouds cinnamon rolls from Cooks Country magazine. These are incredibly sugary and buttery. You roll them in cinnamon sugar butter before baking and then you pour cinnamon sugar sludge over the top after they come out. I preferred without the sludge, but the kids love it. DH notes that these were more of a pain to make than expected.

Banana bran bread from an internet recipe. We had leftover bran from DHs bran muffin cravings. I liked it! It was not too branny and made the banana bread seem heartier than standard.

Pane de ramerino, aka rosemary raisin bread from Bread. I liked this a lot. DH says nice and the rosemary is interesting but to try the variation with figs and almonds.

DH had a day off and made this amazing brunch item from Simple by Ottonleigh. The bottom is brioche from Pure Dessert which we have decided is our favorite brioche by far, then it is baked with a seasoned butter. Then topped with seasoned roasted portobella slices, fresh basil, and a poached egg. These were to die for. I love him so much. DH, not Ottonleigh, though Ottonleigh does have a special place in my heart these days.

Brioche from Pure Simple. Our favorite of our … 5? brioche recipes. Probably because it has the most butter of all of them and is thus difficult to over bake.

Chickpea Spice Bread from Home Baking. This was really good with a complex flavor that includes bay and cinnamon. It was non-trivial to make, and took about 3 days with rough timing between rests.

A full picture of the Chickpea Spice Bread from home baking during its final rest– after all that work we had to wait to eat it!

Marie! The baguette! Actually: Pain Ordinaire from Bread. It was inoffensive and very good with jam.

I wanted to cry this one was so good. Those dark olive-like things are black grapes. This is schiacciata con l’uva from Bread. It tastes like a combination of Christmas and summer. Sweet but not too sweet, all around wonderful with raisins and grapes and fennel and brown sugar. So amazing.

DH had two grant proposal deadlines in short order. I think this is the only shot of those muffins to the left that are actually biscuits. He says it was just an online drop biscuit recipe.  (Usually we do drop biscuits from the old fashioned cookbook.)

Double chocolate chip cookies, but I’m not sure where the recipe came from.  He says it’s his standard recipe from when he was perfecting chocolate chip cookies back in grad school (but with some of the flour swapped out with cocoa powder).  Those were good times.

Overnight kisses with chocolate added. DH does not recommend putting chocolate powder in a meringue recipe, instead look for a meringue recipe that has cocoa powder in it.

Anise “bagel” from Home Baking (I think), but they’re really more like a cookie than a bagel. They’re a lot like the anise ring cookies you can get from some European bakeries, but with a bit more chew and a tiny bit less crunch.

This is a slice of cardamon cake from an online recipe. It is very one-note cardamon, but I really like cardamom, so…

I think this is a bran muffin.

Cornbread with cheddar and feta from Simple

Another shot of the Cornbread from Simple.

An irish soda muffin. (Not sure which irish soda bread he used– we have several that we like)

Herb fritters from simple

Some kind of misshapen bread that was still delicious.

DH accidentally made 10lb of rye bread. This is one five lb boule.

We made these in August… we think they were savory empanadas using pie dough and some kind of leftover stew.

smores cookies from cook’s country magazine

schiacciata con le cipolle rosse e formaggio: schiacciata with roasted red onions and cheese. This made two enormous schiacciatas. They were yummy and had great flavor and texture. Also I think they were beautiful.

DC2 requested a chocolate mint cheesecake for hir birthday. DH got this far with an online recipe and then I took over. (Really, he did all the hard work. But… this did not at all look like the picture online even without the green food coloring.)

Flattened out the “rosettes” then sprinkled andes mint bits and placed strategic andes mints and a single mint oreo (leftover from the crust) in the center.  Sometimes simpler is better. DC2 was very happy.

Another plum tart, but this variation has sour cream and sugar on it, so it’s a bit cheesecakey.

vanilla cupcakes with chocolate frosting (for DC2’s minecraft party– we dropped them off at houses)

Fig and thyme clafoutis from Simple

Cordon rose banana cake from The Cake Bible.  I really enjoyed the flavor contrasts– sweet and tangy.

Another version of the Cordon rose banana cake from The Cake Bible with a citrus glaze.  We liked the chocolate frosting better.

I’m guessing… bread?

More challah.  My notes say, “DH’s grant wasn’t even discussed so he made challah”

Because sometimes you just want challah. You know?

Mixed berry pie. (Made at the same time as the next bread.)

All my notes say for this bread is, “DH has been very stressed out.”

Pound cake from pure dessert, but I’m not sure which one.

I’m not sure what this is. Carrot cake? But surely I would remember carrot cake…

Grand marnier cake, I think from The Cake Bible.

Panforte nero from Pure Dessert, which is really more like a candy. It’s super chewy chocolate fig with nuts. Not actually that sweet. It lasts a long time and is very Christmassy.

Plum tart from Home Baking.

I’m pretty sure this is a raspberry rhubarb crumble from an online recipe.  The grocery store had rhubarb which I LOVE and is rarely available.

We’re blanking on this one, but we’re going to guess that it’s bread. DH’s guess is that this is a stromboli, possibly from Bread, but with WW or rye flour instead of all purpose.

I mean, this is an apple cake, but which apple cake? Some kind of apple upside down cake. Oh, June, you are so far away. Our memories are far away.

We’re thinking this is some kind of cinnamon bread. What kind? Who knows! Summer is but a fleeting memory.

This is beet bread from Simple. I LOVED it.

Have you been continuing quarantine baking?

Simple meals that feel really fancy: Brunch at home edition

It has been a LONG time since we’ve been able to go to a fun brunch place in the city.   DH has been baking up a storm, which helps with the bread situation, but even if he wasn’t, one of our groceries in town makes decent bread from its bakery (not great bread, but you know, decent), as does one of the sandwich shops that does delivery.  With decent bread it turns out it’s relatively easy to make a few restaurant quality, or at least nice coffee-shop quality, foods that I often pick when I’m ordering from a trendy place in the city.

The first super easy thing is Ricotta toast.  A nice thick slice of bakery quality bread.  Then a thick smear of Ricotta from the dairy section of the grocery store.  Then I will usually put on a nice jam.  (We have been eating a LOT of nice jam).  That’s all there is to it, but it feels really fancy and it tastes so good.

Avocado toast.  We have been buying a LOT of avocados because they’re a way to up the fanciness of a ton of different foods.  Even the simplest version with sliced avocados on a piece of regular sliced bread toast is delish and indulgent.  But you can fancy it up by adding salad/tomato/cheeses/fancy seasoning/fancy sauces/eggs/etc.  There are tons of suggestions on the internet for things to add.

Burrata with tomatoes or grapes.  One of our local grocery stores finally started carrying burrata and I am in heaven.  (I got addicted to it in paradise and for a long time only got it at a couple of the fancy restaurants in town when we had speakers or job candidates.)  If you’ve got grape tomatoes, you can quickly cook them until their skins burst with some salt and balsamic vinegar, then place them next to the burrata on a plate and finish with some nice olive oil.  Or roast grapes for a different experience.  Then eat with nice crackers or breads.

Roasted vegetables and starches.  Roasting vegetables and potatoes and sweet potatoes etc. is just GOOD.  And when you have leftover, you can add them to other foods to fancy them up.  Leftover beets or eggplant or even roasted potatoes just add a special something to comfort foods that elevate them to something you’d pick off a restaurant menu.

Fancy grilled cheese.  Plain grilled cheese is great (especially dipped in tomato soup), but you can fancy it up just by adding things to the sandwich before grilling.  Put in your favorite veggies (especially roasted, or maybe a thick chunk of fresh tomato and/or avocado, or fresh herbs).  Fruit or jam is another direction to go.

Fancy quesadillas.  Same idea as the grilled cheese, except in a tortilla wrapper.  DC1 recently added fried potatoes and that was pretty amazing.

Random stuff in a pita.  Scalzi puts things in burrito wraps, but you can do the same thing with a pita and suddenly it becomes fancy.  Leftover vegetables (I often have beets) with feta, hummus or tahini or even just yogurt tend to go really well in a pita sandwich wrapper and just taste good.

Bake stuff on flatbreads.  Which is a fancy way of saying make pizza without baking pizza dough.  But if you use a nice flatbread and add herbs and a cheese and a vegetable (tomatoes, roasted eggplant, etc.) or onions or cooked potatoes.

Fancy salad greens with a fancy vinegar.  Grocery stores just sell fancy mixed greens that all you have to do is wash.  Add fresh mozarella and sliced tomatoes while tomato season is still upon us.

Flavored fizzy water.  Get some syrups, or if you don’t want the extra sugar, order fancy balsamic vinegars (with the money you’ve been saving not going out to eat…) to add to carbonated water.  Elderberry syrup is another good addition that is sometimes hidden in the homeopathy part of the grocery store.  Or just increase your La Croix and related beverages consumption.  (Bonus fanciness points for using a metal straw.)

Loose leaf tea.  Sometimes maligned as not being a cure-all, but loose leaf teas are usually better quality than tea bags and there’s a lot of flavors to try.  I like mixing hibiscus and mint, but my new favorite tea is definitely Tulsi (aka Holy Basil).

You can also just add things to your regular meals.  Open up your fancy spreads and dips.  Experiment with fancy hot sauces.  Now is the time to open random bottles that you’ve been saving in your pantry or the back of your fridge for the right meal or the right guest.  The right meal is now and you are the right guest.

Add avocados and beets and pistachios to things.  Or fresh herbs— we’ve been doing a lot of buying of cilantro and parsley since only mint seems to stay alive in our garden.  Parmesan flakes also elevate foods.

None of these things take that much time– they’re quick weekday style meals (even if we usually eat them on weekends out) and make great breakfasts and lunches (or quick dinners).  But they’ve been helping me when I feel like I’m missing out on eating out in the city.

What fancy quick meals do you recommend?  What have you been eating?

Our stand mixer broke!!!

Wailey Wailey woe.  Tragedy struck while making pumpernickel.

AND not only are kitchenaids scarce knee deep into a pandemic (just like sewing machines!), they no longer come in the color that just magically matches the blue we already had in our backsplash and that we chose for our knobs.  (Cobalt blue, how I miss you.)  That mixer really tied everything together in a way that I normally wouldn’t care about but now that I’ve seen it, I’m having a hard time giving up.

So….

We bought a new stand mixer.  Specifically, a KitchenAid 6-Quart Pro 600 Bowl-Lift Stand Mixer.  In Nickel Pearl because that was $190 cheaper than any other color, though now it looks like their other colors are on various sales, and from a random website called Everything Kitchens.  (If all prices were the same, I would have gotten a plum one from another website, but those really were at sticker price.)  It came, new in box, and works just fine.  The dough hook is a little different.  Everything has interchangable parts, so it fits with the older 6 Qt blue mixer.

But… it still isn’t cobalt blue.  And DH’s forays into painting things have not gone … as expected, and I didn’t want him to do what he did to his microphone to something in our kitchen.

So DH said, well, let me see if I can fix it.  So he opened it up and found where a gear had been ground down.  He bought a replacement part for that gear, which fortunately still fits with the motor (if we’d had an even older model stand mixer we would have had to buy a new motor as well).  He ordered the motor and some food-grade grease (after a discussion with his brother who works on engines for a living) because the motor area is literally and liberally coated in grease.

While cleaning the old grease out in order to put in the new gear, he found two seemingly random ball bearings.  That was traced to another part where two washers holding some ball bearings had come apart, letting the little balls go free.  We do not know the whereabouts of the remaining 6 or 7 bearings– we’re hoping they fell out with the grease.

So DH ordered those parts and a couple of additional washers.

And put them in.

And added grease.

And now we have TWO working stand mixers.

We put the cobalt blue one back in its place of honor in the kitchen.

We decided to put the new one in the dining room on the granite counter bureau where DH makes pasta and pie dough.  We will probably give this one to DC1 when zie has hir own kitchen in however many years.  Maybe cobalt blue kitchenaids will be manufactured again!

Things DH has baked during the quarantine

I know this seems like an inappropriate post during these times, and I do have more appropriate posts… in drafts.  But if those posts don’t get finished until the news media has moved on, that’s not such a bad thing either since this will most likely continue to be a marathon movement punctuated by too-brief sprints rather than one and done.  We will need to keep fighting even after people change their twitter names to something else.  In the meantime, have a self-indulgent post that explains why I currently only fit into one pair of my non-sleeping shorts.

To start:  I apologize for the number of pictures in this post.  It was a manageable amount when I started the post, but then I put off uploading pictures and suddenly I had to upload well over 30 which is overwhelming.

So…. we recently bought 50lb of flour off nuts.com. We had been completely unable to get whole wheat flour at the grocery store, and we’d ordered a pasta roller. So because they were sold out of smaller packages of flour, we got a 25lb case of Whole Wheat and a 25lb case of Durum flour. At the rate DH has been stress-baking (even with him trying to cut down on stress-eating) we think we’ll be able to use it up before it goes bad, and I’ll be able to stop trying to play a losing battle of grocery store roulette with the WW flour.

This fruit tart from the Barefoot Countess was my birthday cake this year!

You will see a LOT of these. Eventually DC1 and I were like, could we have something that’s not sourdough? This was the first attempt from Flour, Salt, Yeast, Water and includes a dried yeast boost.

Technically not baking, but DH made these Russian dumplings from scratch.

Jamaican meat pies from Cook’s Country. These were extremely popular.

This one had an accident…

Olive Oil and Sherry Poundcake from Pure Dessert. This was really sophisticated and a little boozy (less so the second day). A++. Would eat again.

Baked yogurt tart from Baking with Julia

Sesame seed cake from Pure Dessert

Walnut sponge cake from Pure Dessert. This is one of the most wonderful things I have ever eaten in my entire life. It’s light yet dense with a wonderful chewy nutty flavor. The top is whipped cream. It’s like eating a dream.

Breton Butter cake– this is a rustic version of a kouignaman but huge. From Home Baking by Alford and Duguid.

More sourdough

Rustic fruit tart

Rock cakes

Will it ever stop?

Simplest apple pie from Home Baking. We didn’t get the topping right– it’s supposed to be more of a crumb topping than a dumpling, but I still loved it. DH prefers less apple presence, but I loved the way this was so apple forward using shredded apple and not much sugar and a splash of lemon.

DH’s grandma’s rolls (half whole wheat variation). Note that several got eaten before I could take a picture. Such is the way of DH’s grandma’s rolls.

Simple french bread that we made so DC1 could make garlic bread. From Bread by Treuille and Ferrigno.

We think this is a kind of herb bread. We can’t remember.

Cranberry muffins. (We were supposed to use frozen cranberries to free up some freezer space, but DH used dry cranberries instead so we had to make another batch.) Using the Old Fashioned cookbook.

Chocolate chip cookies

Chestnut pound cake from Pure Dessert cookbook (We special ordered chestnut flour from nuts.com for it because why not?)

Caramelized crepes filled with fresh cheese from Pure Dessert. These were a lot more work than regular crepes (with a LOT of waiting time) but only marginally better than just making crepes and filling them with cheese.

Red bean buns– we use the love feast bun recipe from The Old Fashioned Cookbook and fill them with red bean paste. Very popular.

Banana nut muffins because I don’t eat bananas 5 days a week when I’m not going into work. (Not shown: other banana breads I didn’t take pictures of.)

Blueberry muffins (made when we realized we didn’t have any more frozen cranberries left) using a cake-like cranberry nut recipe from Bread by Treuille and Ferrigno.  There were more but I wasn’t fast enough with the camera.

Challah from Bread

Chocolate Prune Bread from Bread

German Apple Pancake from the internets

Spinach Pie from Barefoot Contessa (TWO POUNDS of spinach)

 

Danishes from Baking with Julia

Fillings include: pastry cream, prune, and almond paste

DH’s grandma’s cinnamon rolls but without frosting and with cherries in the center instead of crushed pineapple

DC2 demanded apple dumplings, so these are from the Old Fashioned Cookbook, except DH didn’t do the thing where you bring the four corners of the square to a point at the top (or brush with cream and big sugar crystals)

I made this pineapple upside down cake for DH’s birthday

These hot cross buns have coffee flour in them because we were running low on regular flour and we never had used that impulse buy from TJ’s however many months ago. It worked out pretty well.

He also has made several of these trenchers when attempting to make sourdough bread, we think from the dough being too wet, but it could also be that the ratio of sour flavor bacteria to yeast bacteria is out of whack and the yeast needs more boost.

More information on trenchers here.

There’s also some things he made that I didn’t take pictures of– there’s more baguettes and there’s a Daktyla and several fry breads that didn’t make an appearance in my phone.  He also made Fan Tans right before quarantine started but I figured that didn’t really count.

Have you or yours baked anything fun?

When you cook together, how do you figure out who does what?

Growing up, I was always sous chef.  One of my parents would direct me to clean or chop or get ingredients ready while they did the planning work.

When I first married DH and got him started on his cooking journey, I would have the same set-up– I would be the directing chef and would make him sous chef.  Except his chopping was so slow sometimes I would give up and do the chopping.  We would try to switch roles, but he was terrible at delegating… he would just do everything himself.  During his cooking class, he learned the concept of directing/planning, etc. but he just could not do it in practice.  So I’d stand around the kitchen waiting to be told what to do and that would never come.  I’d have to either be the managing chef or I’d have to actively take over whatever sous chef task he was doing.

These days we’ve settled into a pattern that isn’t sous chef/managing chef at all.  Basically, we both look at the recipe.  I get out the ingredients while he reads through the recipe itself for any surprises (like hour rest/refrigeration times).  Then we both check the recipe and see what needs to be done next and pick and choose what to wash or chop sort of in order, but sometimes I know I skip things I’m not crazy about to let him do it, unless he delays them too long and I end up chopping that onion myself.  There are some jobs that he always does– he’s 100% in charge of any deep fat frying, for example.  I ALWAYS burn myself with splattering grease when I try, and he’s got a protective coating of fur.  Similarly, anything requiring the top oven goes to him because I am too short to use it without burning my arm.  But generally we both chop, we both stir, we both mix.  Sometimes we pour things out of heavy pots together with one holding the pot and the other getting stuff out.  This method is pretty similar to the inefficient but equitable way we handle most things in our household– we’re both responsible so if something gets forgotten or messed up we’re both at fault.  It works for us.

Though, when I cook with my kids, I am the managing chef and they are sous chefs (already DC1 is a fast and uneven chopper!).  For DC1’s one meal a week, zie does everything on hir own following the recipe with some assists from parents as necessary.

Do you cook with someone else?  How do you separate out the responsibilities?

People (men, kids, etc.) can learn to cook

My DH is a crazy accomplished chef.  He cooks amazing desserts.  He’s been playing with making his own pasta.  He’s mastered sourdough from a levain.  He’s got the best all-butter pie crusts around.  He can do pretty much anything. He’s done in depth studies about what makes the best chocolate chip cookies using lab notebook techniques. If there’s a recipe, he’s game to try it.

It wasn’t always this way.  When we got married, he could make bread using the breadmaker that his grandma had gotten him when we went to college and that was about it.  He’d also made pizza (using dough from the bread maker) a few times in college.  He mostly lived on day old bagels and I’m not sure what else.

One day during our first year of graduate school and married life, DH asked if I could make my chili for dinner and I suddenly realized that he needed to learn how to cook.  Otherwise I would be in charge of all the meal stuff every day for the rest of our lives.  Or maybe until I got one of our future children to take over (I did a lot of the cooking at my parents’, especially during summers).

So I showed him how to make chili.  And how to make spaghetti, which is pretty similar.  And various egg dishes.

Then he started getting into recipes.  He wasn’t very good at substitutions and his knife skills drove me crazy because he was SO SLOW getting perfectly even cubes instead of just doing a rough cut.  But we managed.

Three years after getting real jobs, I sent him to a semester-long cooking class and that really improved his knife skills.  He can take down a raw chicken with ease.  And carrots get diced quickly and imperfectly with no second-guessing.  He can even cut an orange so it looks fancy!

He’s now been cooking for nearly 20 years and can make substitutions on the fly.  He can adjust recipes for weather conditions or flavor preferences (DC2 isn’t into spicy, I hate goat cheese, etc.)    It didn’t take 20 years to get to this point.  The cooking class was only really necessary to get his knife skills up to speed (honestly, I don’t know what the hangup there was).

My little sister also didn’t know how to cook until she was well into adult-hood.  She hated doing it growing up and my parents had me, so there didn’t seem to be any reason to force her.  They already had someone to chop potatoes.  (In fairness, my sister’s existence meant I never had to mow a lawn since my mom assumed my sensitivity to heat and general clumsiness would result in me mangling a foot or two if I tried.  I do have faded cooking-related scars on my hands and arms, but I never actually lost a limb doing it.)  Since hitting her 30s, she’s been learning a lot more about cooking– most of the Christmas and Birthday presents she’s been requesting have been cooking related for the past 10 years or so.  She’s currently really into Ottonleigh’s Simple book* and in the Before Times was baking breakfast things for early morning meetings for her Team once a month or so.

DC1 has also been upping hir cooking skills– zie made a few complicated dishes from a fancy sushi cookbook without complaint.  Though, due to the lack of ability to get sushi-grade fish, zie has switched over to the Help! My apartment has a kitchen! cookbook and has started mastering simpler things like garlic bread and shrimp cocktail.  Zie is currently on the “make one dinner a week for the family” plan.  Both kids are in charge of their own breakfasts (cereal, fruit, leftover baked goods) and lunches (leftovers, quesadillas, sandwiches or cheese and crackers/rice cakes).

Who does the cooking in your place?  When did you learn how to cook?

*Disclaimer:  We got a copy of this book and Ottonleigh has six definitions of “simple” (one for each letter in the word Simple, get it?) and it is debatable how many of the recipes are anything like “quick and easy”, though they are labeled with what kind of simple they are.  Also they’ve all been delicious.  But we haven’t noticed them being any simpler in range than the ones in the Jerusalem cookbook which we would recommend over Simple.

What to do about the yeast shortage

I don’t really understand *why* there’s a yeast shortage because it like… just grows.  I assume this is probably something to do with supply chains and maybe manufacturing the non-yeasty parts (jars?).  If you want to bake yeasty things and your grocery store has been out, this post is for you.  (Now, if your concern is the flour shortage, we just got 50lbs from nuts.com and wandering scientist just bought 25lb from central milling.)

If you have SOME yeast left

Starter

Make a starter and put it in your fridge.  Feed it every time you make bread and occasionally (at least once every two weeks) if you don’t make bread.  My quick google search on this is not at all helpful– everyone wants you to make a sourdough levain, which is a type of starter, but not the best choice if you have any active yeast in your house.  (I will explain later.)  So let me dig up one of my bread books and get more detailed instructions for you.

1.  In a glass jar (or quart/gallon ziploc if you don’t have a suitable jar) that you can keep in the fridge that will hold at least 3 cups of flour, put yeast (either one packet or the equivalent) and half a cup of warm (warm to the touch, not too hot) water.  Let it sit until the yeast dissolves.  Then stir in 2-3 cups of flour.  It doesn’t have to be exact.  You don’t have to have any specific kind of flour so long as it’s some kind of gluteny flour.  So all purpose flour or whole wheat flour are great.  Rye is fine if that’s what you’ve got, but it may limit what you use the starter for.  Then let it sit at room temperature for 2 days before using, or put it in the refrigerator for two weeks (you want it to have some room temperature time for flavors).
2. Every time you make bread, use one cup of the starter in place of water/yeast/one cup of flour.  Replace what you’ve taken out with a heaping cup of flour and half a cup of water, give or take. In theory you should let it sit at room temperature for 12-24 hours before putting it back in the fridge, but unless you’re making bread every day or two you can ease up on this.
3.  If two weeks have passed and you haven’t made bread yet, go make bread and go back to step two.  Otherwise throw out a cup of starter and add in a cup of flour and half a cup of water.  This is called feeding your starter.  You will need to feed your starter every two weeks if you don’t make bread.  In theory you should let it sit at room temperature for 12-24 hours, but unless you’re making bread the next day you can just stick it back in the fridge.

IIRC, if you leave it a long time, sometimes some of the liquid separates.  This is normal.  You can either stir this back in or pour some of it out, whatever.  The starter itself should be liquidy but thick… gloppy I think is a good description.

The starter will generally not be a sourdough if you use this method so it will be fine for brioches and other light sweet breads.  It will gain flavor over the months (and years) you use it.  We’ve found the flavor to be more of a warm yeasty almost beery flavor as it matures, but it may be that there are different iterations… we’ve done this a finite number of times.

Old Dough

Make bread dough as you normally would.  After the first rise (or second if you forget), grab some dough (or just don’t make the bread and keep the entire dough).  Wrap it in wax paper and then in tin foil (and if you want to be really fancy, you can put it in a ziploc).  This will keep in the refrigerator for 2 days or you can freeze it.  Whenever you want to make bread, thaw some dough (“walnut size”), let it rest at room temperature for 2 hours, and then incorporate it with the new bread dough as you mix it.  When you start running out, repeat the process of grabbing dough (or grab some for freezing each time you make bread).

If you have NO yeast

Bread without yeast

Discover the joys of quick breads.  There are many Irish Soda Breads well worth making.  Try different varieties.

Does your grocery store carry pizza dough or frozen dough?

Instead of using (all of) it to bake, save some for the “old dough” method above.

Make a levain

A levain is a sourdough starter made with ambient yeast.  DH has tried this at several points in our life and only the most recent one, using the technique from Flour Water Salt Yeast was successful.  This is what we currently have in our refrigerator.  AS A WARNING:  Getting this started WASTES flour.  Maybe waste is the wrong word, but when you thought you’d stocked up on flour before the stay-at-home order and all of a sudden you’re facing a flour shortage, it is easy to give this levain a side-eye.  I had to put a stop to it and we converted the levain to a starter by using the “put your levain to sleep” method and then treating it like a regular starter (see above).  I suspect that you still need to throw out a ton of flour at the beginning, but once it has settled down to regular use you should just be able to use the starter and replace with flour and water as above.  At least, that’s been working for us so far.  ANOTHER WARNING:  Some of the smells early in the process are TERRIBLE.  Awful vinegary awfulness.  But that’s the way they’re supposed to smell?  One of the nice things about the book is that he tells you what it’s supposed to smell like at each step.  So you’re like, why yes, this is supposed to smell terrible.

One of the interesting things in the book was how it talked about that even though there are different ambient strains of yeast across the country and there are different ways people start these (there’s a grape skin version in Baking with Julia), none of it really matters because it’s the same yeast that survive no matter where you are in the lower 48 in the US.  We’d always thought this hadn’t worked when we lived on the east coast because their yeast sucked.  But no.

The process is too lengthy to type out here and there’s probably copyright infringement, but here’s someone’s blogpost about living through making the levain.  There are a lot of other levain/sourdough starter recipes out there, but be aware that they might not work out.

This levain starter is a sourdough and has a pleasant lightly sour flavor.  It is great for making no-knead breads.

Maybe you can try this Oregon trail yeast?

We still have a little of this free Oregon Trail yeast in our freezer.  We made a starter with it maybe a decade ago and it was amazing until it got too sour even for DH and we sadly let it go (knowing we still had some in the freezer).  But it’s a high quality yeast.  It’s free with a self-addressed-stamped-envelope, though it sounds like it might take up to six weeks to get to you.

Borrow in a social distancing safe manner from a friend who is rich in yeast

And then make a starter!  Or old dough.

What are you guys doing for yeast?  Do you have any left?  Does your grocery store?  What would you do with 25lb of whole wheat flour and 25lb of durum flour?