And spring.

And spring. Even here in this rented Vermont house with clod-covered nails, gravel and clay out the backdoor, I scratched today on the earth and dropped seeds into it, chard, kale, cilantro, romaine, with the hope and certainty of sunlight, warmth, and rain.

This burst of warmth brings so many woodland flowers into bloom, and on a sweet hike today we saw trout lilies and bloodroot, and many others whose names I don’t know but whose color brightens the damp forest floor in these early days of sunlight.

Last week I saw the excellent documentary Chasing Ice by James Balog, who’s tracked glacial retreat using time lapsed photography to show the staggering loss of some of Earth’s most significant glaciers in mere years, photographic certainty of massive climate change. I left the film feeling really cynical because even among the people who recognize the central importance of climate change, few of us are doing anything about it. Sure, we might buy our lettuce at the co-op, or carry canvas bags, but every morning in this small town of 6500, I’m in a crush of traffic as all of us who know that climate change may fundamentally alter life on Earth drive our kids to school, pick them up, drive them to tennis or swimming or soccer practice, ad nauseum. We want fuel-efficient cars so we can continue to drive as wantonly as we do, with no impediment to our routines. “If only those climate-change deniers recognized that they’re wrong!” we think, as we wait for the red light to change. We’re hoping for a big policy that will make the difference for us, but it’s not going to happen. Reversing climate change is not like banning DDT.

The Clean Water Act did a good job of curtailing point source pollution (the kind that comes, for the most part, from a single point, like a factory), but we’ve learned in the intervening decades that non-point source pollution (the kind that comes from everywhere – your lawn, your neighbor’s cows, the runoff from a parking lot) is just as malign, and its ubiquity makes it even harder to regulate or reduce. So, while Lake Erie’s water quality improved when some of the biggest polluters were forced to clean up their discharges into the lake, many of our nation’s other rivers and lakes have continued to deteriorate. And you and I are the non-point sources of increased carbon dioxide emissions, and it’s not until you and I and many, many others change our own habits that complement and strengthen any hoped-for policies that we should expect to see atmospheric C02 decrease.

So here I am with my sourdough bread, glad that I’ve nurtured wild yeasts in my starter. I wrote in my last post, after thinking about what a sour ferment is, that if food is alive, we have to pay attention to what it’s doing, not what a recipe is telling us to do. Working with a live culture necessitates that we pay closer attention to the thing we’re making. For me, this doesn’t mean I have to drop everything when I’m making a loaf of bread, but the usual four cups (or whatever) of flour a recipe calls for may not reflect how the starter is absorbing the new ingredients.

I’ve used a Zojirushi bread machine for three years and didn’t utilize its versatility until I started making sourdough. Lately, I’ve sometimes stretched rising times to twelve hours or more, incubating those wild yeasts in a warm, stable environment. Other times I’ll knead the bread for thirty or forty minutes and in that time the bread turns into a sponge-like batter and I have to add another two cups of flour to the mash. I continue to experiment with times and ratios, and my kids have complained a lot more this year as their peanut butter sandwiches are sometimes made on bread sour enough to be traded for an Atomic Warhead. Other times a loaf comes crashing down after rising to zeppelin heights, or remains gummy no matter how long it’s worked. Bread is alchemical, and making it without commercial yeast lets me appreciate the long history of nurturing food cultures that shared knowledge and starters and cultures when there were no stores to provide for us.

Sour

A sourdough starter is a magnificent thing. Mine lives in a half gallon pickle jar, which gives me enough room to grow it, stir it vigorously, and ferment it. Its consistency is somewhere between pancake batter and porridge, but the bright, pungent smell of sour immediately identifies it as a sourdough starter. Depending on one’s olfactory experiences, its aroma can be off-putting or enticing. A healthy starter seduces my taste buds with a clean, sharp pungency that contrasts so nicely with the crusty earthiness of a well-cooked sourdough loaf.

We’ve heard so much about food borne illnesses and pathogens lurking in our kitchens that we react to sour smells with mistrust and apprehension. In part because we’ve been bombarded by advertising that conflates sterility with healthy, anything that’s pungent is suspect, and we cast a skeptical eye on a ripe, fermenting vat of sourdough, throwing away anything that doesn’t look perfectly preserved.

A good sourdough starter works like a compost pile, digesting raw materials and preparing them for their next use. The wild yeasts and bacteria that inhabit my starter are alive, and that’s the biggest obstacle wild starters have in gaining acceptance in our modern kitchens.

We have an explosion of cookbooks, food magazines, cooking shows, and food blogs that will make sure that any time we want to cook something, there’s a recipe to make sure it won’t go wrong. Someone else has tested it and fixed its flaws and all we have to do is follow the recipe, and it’ll turn out. And if it doesn’t, there’s a healthy dialogue in the comments section following every online recipe, where the next great chef will declare that he used 2/3 tsp basil instead of the ½ tsp called for, and everyone raved about it for months and begged for the recipe. The last thing most of us want in the kitchen – especially when we’re about to entertain, or we have an evening of kids’ activities – is unpredictability, because it will wreak havoc on our need to get dinner at our prescribed time. And the idea that we’re in a relationship with our food, that it can be temperamental and fickle, is not something that appeals to most people most of the time, because in the short term sterility is easier – we come in, cook, eat, and are done with it. If food is alive, we have to pay attention to what it’s doing, not what a recipe is telling us to do.

I replenish my starter nearly every day. After I take a cup or two out for a new loaf, I add white or whole wheat flour, bread crusts, leftover oatmeal, and once in a while a scoop or two of brown rice. The water from my tap is chlorinated, so I leave a jar of it out for twenty-four hours before I use it in a fermenting starter because I don’t want the chlorine to kill the microbial life that is so active in the starter. I then use a wooden spoon to give the mixture a good stir, which exposes it to air, and the next day the bubbling ferment is ready for the next loaf.

On the brink of Christmas

Here we are, on the brink of Christmas, the cookingest time of the year. Christmas cookies galore, a pork roast in the icebox with its rub of kosher salt and crushed juniper berries, a ham waiting for tomorrow, and a few undecided choices for Christmas breakfast. My siblings and I have been reminiscing about our delight in sneaking Christmas cookies from the downstairs freezer when we were kids, and how even today we all enjoy them frozen. I just told my sister in Alaska that I still prefer a Christmas cookie that I’ve sneaked, even from myself!

Tonight the kids and I will bake our last batch for the season, and tomorrow we’ll start eating them. While I have no remorse about pilfering Christmas cookies relentlessly, I abstain until Christmas Eve dessert, the traditional start of Christmas cookie season. It’s only after we’ve tucked into the ham that our anise-laced cutouts reach their full potential, and the gingerbread men are best as we near the Epiphany. So for now, although the tins, canisters, and wax paper-lined shoeboxes are packed to the gills, I still have to scavenge for a little dessert. Luckily there’s still a little of that delicious sesame-honey crunch we bought in Greece. Merry Christmas!

Pasties

A savory Cornish-style pasty turns a bleak, ill-humored day and resolves its blurred memories of unwellness into a well-fed, content family, despite the grey-edged rain upon rain.
I've got half a pan of headcheese and I want to eat it with everything, so I made a rich crust with a stick of butter and a big spoonful of rendered duck fat.  No need for salt because this duck fat was already used to make confit.  I divided the dough into five discs of unequal sizes and chilled it while I prepared the filling.
I also had a small plastic bag with kidneys and hearts that I wanted to use, so I cut them up and sauteed them with an onion and a little more duck fat.  A few tablespoons of brandy started sizzling and I scraped up the little meaty bits on the pan.  I still have a lot of thick, gelatinous stock from the headcheese, so I added a few hunks to the kidneys and let it cook down.
After peeling and slicing a few potatoes and an onion (we didn't have any turnips, another common ingredient,) the pasties were ready to be filled.  I rolled the dough into 5" - 8" circles, and put in a bit of 'taters and onions, as well as a crumbled slice of headcheese.  My wife and I got the kidneys and hearts, too, and the pasties were folded over and sealed, the once-open edge rounded up to keep any liquid from escaping. Head cheese is great for making pasties because of the gelatin that softens into a rich, flavorful broth in the oven.  Halfway through the hour-long cooking, I used a funnel to pour a bit more of the rich stock into each half-moon pasty, sealed all around its edges.
A rich, flaky crust with a piping hot interior was the result, and everyone loved the novelty and the taste.  Diced and shredded pork - and that's essentially what headcheese is - is a fantastic filling for a pasty like this.   And the gravy that keeps everything moist and enriches the crust?  I'll be making this again soon.

Onion tart

Winter weather has arrived too early, a days-long deep freeze that ended the gardening season quicker than the Yankees dispatched the Twins, alas.  So, for a school potluck this evening, I thought an onion tart would be good.  My daughter thought otherwise - she wanted me to bake a dessert, and when I told her what I was making she complained, "Aww, only the adults are going to like it!"
I love how much onions change when they're slow cooked, and a good tart showcases them perfectly.  Tarts are good for an appetizer, a first course, or an easy dinner, and depending on what kind of pan or tray they're cooked in, they can be elegant or rustic.  I use a bit of whole wheat flour in the crust so it has a nice color and texture.  Cooking the onions takes a bit of time, but the recipe is pretty simple.

Crust
1 cup unbleached flour
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons duck fat
3 tablespoons butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
ice water

Mix flours in bowl, add salt and fats, mix with fingertips until pebble-sized.  Add egg and mix.  Add enough ice-cold water to hold dough together, mixing long enough before further additions of water to ensure that liquid is absorbed and distributed through flour.  Form into ball, flatten slightly, wrap in plastic (I put it into a sandwich baggie) and refrigerate.

Tart
3-4 tablespoons butter
3-4 large onions
pinch saffron
salt and pepper
2 eggs
3 tablespoons sour cream

Melt butter over low heat in cast iron or other heavy-bottomed pan.  Add thinly sliced onions and cook until soft, stirring occasionally, thirty minutes or longer.  Crush saffron threads and mix with a little hot water.  After onions have softened and the exuded liquid begins to evaporate, add the saffron and mix well.  Add salt and pepper.  When all the liquid is gone and the onions glisten with butter and feel thick, turn off burner and remove from heat and allow to cool. If you're in a hurry, put in refrigerator (or out the back door, if it's October in Minnesota!)

Preheat oven to 375°F.
Sprinkle flour onto your rolling surface and flatten your dough a little.  When a ball of dough it first rolled out the edges sometimes begin to break and separate; I use my hands to keep the edges together and whole, the way a potter centers a new hunk of clay.  Roll the dough to fit the pan; I use a standard tart pan with a fluted edge and removable bottom.   Sprinkle the bottom of the pan with a little cornmeal and fit the dough into the pan.

Put cooled onion mixture into bowl and add 2 beaten eggs.  Mix well.  Add sour cream and mix in.  Pour/scrape onion mixture into tart pan, using fork to spread evenly.  Bake for about one hour, or until top begins to brown slightly.  The tart can be served at almost any temperature.  If served as part of a sit-down dinner, it can be served hot - forks will be needed.  As an appetizer or potluck contribution, serve at room temperature so it holds its shape and can be stacked up next to a good Minnesota hotdish or macaroni salad.

Shortbread

Shortbread is made with butter, flour, sugar and salt. It's as plain as plain can be. I like to shape the dough between my palms into a small ball and flatten it with the bottom of a glass, one-quarter to three-eighths of an inch thick. When the ball is flattened the edges break open asterisks-like, with stubby rays. These edges bake nicely in the oven, leaving the center a pale, off-white luminescent disk.

My wife and daughter like their shortbread with cornstarch, a new-fangled ingredient that adds lightness to the dough. My feeling is that corn starch flattens the flavor considerably, making an inferior baked good. We decided to have a Valentine's Day bake-off and decide as a family which shortbread we liked best. Luckily, we're an odd-numbered family.

After extensive negotiations to determine fair rules for a blind tasting, my daughter and I set to work. With softened butter at the ready, the dough takes only minutes to make. We both use our hands a lot, and once all the ingredients are in the mixing bowl we use our fingertips and hands to achieve the proper dough consistency, pressing and squeezing it into a manageable form.

We fortunately allowed decimal points into our voting, because fragments of numbers were all that separated our two entries. Had we used whole numbers only in our judging, a tie would have ensued. We learned that we like our preferred styles – we partisans all picked along party lines, even with our eyes closed! The outcome? When I'm baking, no cornstarch will be used, but when my daughter runs the kitchen, she'll do it her way.

1 cup butter, softened
2 cups flour
½ cup confectioner's sugar
¼ tsp salt
(Optional – ¼ - ½ tsp vanilla. I like vanilla, but even a small amount darkens the color of the dough and moves the flavor from a traditional shortbread into a different baked good.)

Cream butter and slowly add sugar. Add remaining ingredients and mix. Shape into 1" balls and place on cookie sheet. Flatten with bottom of glass. Bake at 350° F for 20 minutes or so. The edges should just be brown – don't overcook. Cool on a rack.

Swedish Tea Log

 

Christmas night after the kids are in bed and the dishes washed, and I feel pulled in different directions by tradition. We make traditions in our family, and follow older ones as well. We've been eating a Swedish Tea Log on Christmas morning since I was born, and I have passed this on to my children. My wife, though, doesn't like coffee cake or pastry for breakfast - it's too sweet, she thinks. So this year I made her an egg bake. I was happy to make it because I just finished curing pancetta for the first time and I thought it would be a perfect addition. I added a lot of bread from a loaf we made for the dish, but my wife thought it tasted too much like bread pudding. However, as I fried the pancetta last night, she went to far as to sop up some of the grease in the frying pan with a crust of bread! (More on the pancetta later.)
The Swedish Tea Log has gotten better over time. I no longer add the raisins called for in the recipe. And I've changed the walnuts to almonds and doubled the amount used. Half of them I chop and the other half I grind into paste and add to the nut/butter/brown sugar mixture that gets spread over the rolled out dough. Here's how I make it:

Soften 1 packet yeast in ¼ c warm water
Sift together:
2¼ c flour
2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
Cut in ½ c butter until particles are fine.
Add ¼ c warm milk or cream, one egg, and yeast. Form into ball, wrap in plastic, and chill several hours.

Cream together:
¼ c butter
½ c brown sugar
¾ tsp cinnamon
1 c almonds: half chopped and half ground into paste

Roll out dough into large rectangle. Spread with filling and roll up. Form into crescent and cut almost to the pan at 1" intervals. Cover with cloth and let rise. Bake at 350° for 15-20 minutes.

When cool, glaze with mixture of:
2 tbsp soft butter
1 c confectioners sugar
½ tsp vanilla
enough warm milk to make it spreadable (1-3 tbsp)

Serve warm.

Henry's Sourdough Pumpkin Rolls

 

Henry and I spent Wednesday evening baking and preparing for Thanksgiving dinner. After making two pumpkin pies we had a few extra cups of pumpkin and wondered what to do with it. I love yeast rolls and decided to combine the pumpkin with a sourdough starter from the icebox.
Henry and I especially like sourdough breads; our favorite is sour rye. We let starters sit out for long periods of time and they acquire a very sharp tang.
We brought the starter to room temperature and added warm water, flour and a little yeast. About a cup and a half of pumpkin remained, so Henry scooped it into the bowl, along with one-third cup brown sugar and a teaspoon salt. The dough rose twice and we baked them in a 400°F oven for about 20 minutes.
They made a great dinner roll - chewy crust with a tender interior, and a holiday taste that reminded my wife of hot cross buns, although these contained no spices. Last night's turkey sandwich was made even better on one of these rolls, and today's lunch attested to their staying power.
Henry loved inventing a new roll, so it carries his name.

Birthday cake

My oldest child, who's about to turn 11, doesn't have a favorite birthday cake. For her birthday party sleepover last weekend I made a lovely three-layer white cake. I covered it with sweetened whipped cream, added coconut and slices of strawberries between the layers, and made a pretty design on the top. She loved it.

The girls ate nearly two pounds of bacon and a quadruple batch of pancakes for breakfast; too bad there wasn't any snow for them to shovel after that hearty meal!

Pie

Pie. A perfect word. And what says spring like rhubarb pie? We had a long winter, really, and the colors and smells this spring remind us why we love, why we procreate and celebrate life. Earlier this evening, looking at a stupendous crab apple, its pink-white blossoms laid across a newly leafed-out maple tree, both of which were thrown against intense blue sunshine-filled sky.
Last weekend I made pie crust dough, planning on making a pie. Well, the weekend got busy and I didn't have any time. Making a pie crust takes ten to fifteen minutes, and there's no substitute for good pie crust. I make mine with a variety of fats; for this one I used four or five tablespoons of butter and a few dollops of duck fat. I used unsalted butter so the salt in the duck fat (which is fat that's still preserving a large batch of confit) was just right for the dough. Two cups of flour and a little more than a quarter cup of ice water and that's it.
This morning I bought strawberries and when I got home I went outside and picked rhubarb. That quick snap of a stalk releasing from the ground is a good feeling. We are right to lament how our diet no longer revolves around local and seasonally available foods, because rhubarb is a testament to the goodness of food that's only available when it's fresh and in season; eating rhubarb every spring is as perennial as Easter. Sugar, a pinch of salt, a little lemon and a sprinkle of cornstarch is all I use. I don't usually use cornstarch but strawberries shed so much liquid that I wanted to hold a little of it together. But, I let it all sit while I rolled out the crust, and I scooped the fruit into the shell and didn't pour the liquid, so it wasn't too runny.
So I called a friend and asked if she and her family wanted to come over and eat pie tonight. She invited me and my kids for dinner, instead, and said they were having brats on the grill. I said sure, and let her know I had a big bottle of heavy cream, too. Sitting in my fridge was a 2005 Toni Jost Barcharacher Hahn Riesling Kabinett, and I knew it'd be perfect for the evening's dinner. So, after cleaning up after a day of heavy chores (my wife is out of the country and I want to get a lot of house/yard projects done while she's away) I showered and we all walked over to our neighbor's yard, where early evening sun still forced us to squint at times. We just indulged ourselves, sitting around, talking and radiating the joy of real spring, drinking our local Summit Maibock, happy to be where we were.
Sandy cried out "What is this?" when she drank the riesling, and raised her hands and eyes to the sky. She took the bottle home (empty of course) because she wants more of it. Enough acidity to keep you awake, and fruit galore: apple and melon (and peach?) and when I lean over to take another sip my nose is pulled into the wineglass because it smells so alive on this late May late afternoon. A finish that feels full in the mouth.
And so we ate and laughed and talked and ate pie. Our kids made a marble maze that rivaled a roller coaster and we watched them roll their marbles down the precarious, well-engineered course. We sat around into the evening, sharing food and friendship, begun earlier in the day with a phone call and a simple word: pie.

Mother's Day

Friday was the second anniversary of my mom's death and I miss her a lot. Happily, around fifteen years ago my brother compiled the recipes my mom used when she was feeding her eight children, and printed up a little cookbook called Cooking with Jane. A few years later the second edition, More Cooking with Jane, hit the street, and it also had recipes by us eight kids and our spouses. All of us use it for classics like meatloaf, beef stroganoff, lasagna, salad dressing, and spice cake with caramel frosting, my perennial birthday cake.
This morning, my two oldest kids pulled out the family cookbook and made a large heart-shaped oatmeal scone with a big 'M' cut into the middle of it for their mother. We put it on our red "You Are Special Today" plate and brought it upstairs with coffee, the Sunday newspaper, cards, and a present.
For dinner, I made my wife's favorite dessert, pound cake. I make a very simple pound cake, with butter, sugar, eggs, a little salt, and flour. I usually add a teaspoon of vanilla but with spring in the air I added a bit of lemon zest instead.
After a good dinner of grilled steak, home fries cooked in bacon drippings, and sauteed bok choy, we all sat around the dinner table eating thin slices of pound cake, everyone with their favorite way to nibble the buttery edges on the way to the softest, finest crumb found on any cake.
Happy Mother's Day to my sweet wife.

Hot Cross Buns: Good Friday

Just as fresh vegetables and fruits mark certain seasons, hot cross buns mark Good Friday as strongly as any food/holiday combination. Even though it's snowing hard and four or five inches of snow cover the ground and each tree branch, spring is here. Last night, as I ground cloves in my mortar, and as I kneaded the egg-rich dough laced with cinnamon and nutmeg, the zest of lemons and oranges, I felt like a kid again. Easter is almost here! I put the dough in the large stoneware bowl I always use for dough, covered it and let it rise overnight. I woke up early this morning and punched down the dough. A few spice aromas lingered in the air as I kneaded and then cut the dough into smaller and smaller pieces.

The kids hovered by the oven to see them come out and to claim the one that looked just right for them. We quickly put them onto a cooling rack and put the next batch into the oven. Our glaze was enhanced with a little more lemon zest and a bit of lemon juice, and enough confectioner's sugar to make a decent cross on each bun.

And that's how I end my Lenten abstinence of sweets and baked goods. The kids and I ate a few together, and then I put on my boots and winter coat, and walked to work eating a still-warm harbinger of spring.