Monthly Archives: February 2009

So.  I’m a breadmaker, or rather, I fear not the whole yeasty/kneady/loafing thing, and I make all our bread.  I *love* to knead, too.  But I mentioned Jim Lahey’s bread a while back and, like most great ideas, his No-Knead Bread and variations have really caught on.  I wish Jim well, really I do, but I found an even easier recipe that you guys should try.

Considering I have more time on my hands in the winter, you’d think shaving minutes off my plush schedule wouldn’t be a priority, but hey.  It’s my duty to serve YOU, especially all of you who claim you’re too pressed for time to bake bread.  This is very similar to the kneadless bread, but… you simply make a bunch of dough and leave it in the refrigerator (for up to 2 weeks) until you’re ready to bake some of it.  And just like the kneadless recipe it’s not the best on the 2nd day, but because you’re making a lot of dough, it’s easily parceled out for smaller loaves.  It does require a bit of a thaw before it goes in the oven (enabling its final rise), and it helps if you have a pizza stone (the underside of a cast-iron skillet also works) and a pizza peel (a lipless cornmeal-covered cookie sheet works too).  The recipe suggests you leave the dough in a covered plastic bowl.  We’re anti-plastic around here so ours lives in a glass bowl with a tightly-fitting plate atop of it.

This recipe works fairly well too to simply pull a hunk or two out to bake in the morning.  I’ve rolled out cigar-sized pieces and covered them in cinnamon and sugar, and I’ve made a kind of English muffin with them too.  Because the dough stays cold, it tends to use my whole-wheat flour to best advantage.  So, well, give it a try!  The weekend is coming, spring’s not here yet, and you should still have time!

The Master Recipe:  The Boule (Artisan Free-Form Loaf) from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois

Makes 4 1-pound loaves

3 cups lukewarm water
1 1⁄2 tbsp granulated yeast (1 1⁄2 packets)
1 1⁄2 tbsp coarse kosher or sea salt
6 1⁄2 cups unsifted, unbleached, all-purpose white flour
Cornmeal for pizza peel

Read the rest of the instructions HERE or HERE.  See their blog and more recipes HERE.

Family portrait in the smoker’s lid

I have a bit of a confession to make.  Actually, it’s not much of a confession to anyone who knows me, but…meat ain’t really my thing.

This is said with somewhat clenched lips, with a slight sucking-in of breath:  meat, after all, is what we are told to crave.  It’s what’s for dinner if you believed the hype, and if you grew up in 50s-80s America, its nightly presence normally took up most of your plate.   THIS household became omnivorous only recently: Oct. of 2007, to be exact.  I put meat back in the diet when we began to find humane sources nearby and then last year to raise our own.  The girl wanted it, the husband wanted it, and, in reality, it’s a fairly low-impact source of nutrition if you live a locavore’s life in a snowy place like Michigan.

Molasses-glazed bone-in pork shoulder, a-smoking over our apple wood

I am much more in love with meat when it remains off the center/majority of the plate.  As a condiment, as a flavoring, it’s really quite exemplary, and really ridiculously easy too.  (Frankly I think my ho-hum reaction to that full freezer is that the preparation of meat requires very little of me.  Not quite heat-and-serve, it’s still not much of a challenge to cook if you’ve been used to the alchemy required of vegetarian cookery.)  So when I saw a recipe recently for “bacon” made with smoked pork shoulder, I told Tom to get out the smoker and let’s get cooking.  I can use the “bacon” in many meals, bean-y, vegetable-y meals, for the whole week.  And after a little skillet frying, it makes this weeknight’s serving of breakfast-for-dinner a little more smokily special.

Riced potatoes, salted and peppered and ready for some flour

I had a friend in graduate school who, during one of our late nights in the studio, asked us to answer this one question of ourselves:  Dairy?  Vegetable?  Meat?  or Bread?

Undoubtedly, I selected Bread, with Vegetable as runner-up.  I am complex-carbohydrate obsessed, or at least I certainly was back then to handle the late nights of grad school.  Now, well, now I like to diversify.  But I have always made a mean gnocchi:  heavenly little potato dumpling-like pasta.  And hey, with this one little dish I do hit the two main categories, bread and veg!  And then of course you can serve it in a butter, cream and meat sauce…my favorite treatment of course being stinky melty blue cheese.

Someone asked about the potato ricer I mentioned in my last post.  Here it is, and notice, there’s that very intriguing CRANK.  (I think it’s Crank Week here at Old Vines, seeing as I have brought out my old beater, the old meat grinder and now the ancient ricer all within a calendar week.)  I figured it’s time for one of my favorite dishes, NeeOHkee. They’re pretty easy to make.  You don’t necessarily need the ricer but it certainly helps make airy and light little puffs, and makes the most wonderful mashed potatoes too so it’s a fairly useful tool.  Having a light touch with the kneading (you don’t want to overly glutenize either the flour or the spuds) AND with the flour too is helpful, not to put too much pressure on you or anything.  Anyway, the recipe is in the comments.   Bon appetit.

A little mixy, a little kneady, a little rolly…then chop and shape/roll with a fork.  Let dry slightly, then into a pot of boiling salted water they go.  Then, once they float, drain them and serve.

So, tell me:  Dairy, Vegetable, Meat or Bread?

Sausage/leek soup with potatoes and carrots

I have lately been in the habit of making sausage.  It’s not hard to do, frankly, and like nearly everything else (breadmaking, soups, etc.) sausage is a vast and deep category, accepting thousands of variations.  Mostly, with all the meat (1/2 pig, 1/4 cow, 40 chickens) in the freezer, I am in serious need of uses for the less-than-prime pieces of it, and sausage is a great outlet for the tougher bits of flesh.  I find that getting out the hand grinder is a meditative task, and like the pasta roller or potato ricer or even the food mill, using the crank is so appealing that even the five year old here stays interested enough to complete the task.

But soups:  save the ubiquitous chicken soup, our weekly soup is usually a vegetarian affair.  It’s a habit, frankly, borne out of 16 years of vegetarianism:  I just don’t think to grab a hunk of flesh to sex up my soups, you know?  Entirely unnecessary.

Until, that is, you make about 3 lbs. of sausage that you can’t refreeze:  how about using some of it in soup?  Indeed.