Kouign Aman

  

  
I've been holding onto this set of recipes I clipped out of the paper for over a year now, because they look so delicious, and never had the guts to try it. The instructions are super complicated, and the pictures are all fancy. The article has this sidebar that says stuff like, 'Don't skip the 3 different resting times!' and 'Make sure the dough is cool, but not too cold!' and 'Don't worry if the first 7nty billion times you try it don't turn out right!' Either I have very low standards, or it isn't nearly as complex as the recipe says.

Use 1/2 recipe of the ubiquitous pizza dough. It's fine, or even better, if it has been sitting in the fridge for rather longer than you like to think about.

Let the dough sit on the counter for about an hour, lightly flour the rolling surface, and roll the dough into a mostly rectangular shape about 11" x 14". Take a stick of butter out of the fridge, and cut about 3 tablespoons worth of very thin shavings off it, and sprinkle them on 2/3 of the dough. Sprinkle a couple pinches of sugar over it.

Fold the un-buttered part of the dough over half the buttered part, then fold it again so all the butter is inside. Roll the dough out until it's about 8 x 12 inches, very lightly sprinkle it with flour and sugar, and fold it in 3 parts again.

Roll it out until it's about 5 x 10 inches, and fold it in 3 parts again. Pinch the sides of the folds together tightly, pat it into a ball, and put it on a pie plate. It'll be about the size of a baseball, but flatter. Sprinkle the outside generously with sugar, and put a bowl over it while you pre-heat the oven to 450. Once the oven is hot, cut 3 slashes in an asterisk shape about 1/3 the way through the dough, and sprinkle with sugar again to cover all the exposed insides of the cuts. Sprinkle a tiny pinch of salt on it. Bake for about 35 minutes.

 Notes:

1. I suspect that leaving the dough until it is way over fermented helps it retain its layered structure. It also tastes more interesting.
2. If you aren't sure, be more generous with the butter. The butter is the main thing that keeps the dough from merging back into one big lump.
3. Use salted butter. And go heavy on the sugar on the outside.
4. If you have time, sure, you can let the dough rest between foldings. It will undoubtedly help create layering, but it's ok if you don't.
5. It will be sitting in a pool of melted butter by the time it's done. That's normal.
6. Eat it hot! It is not nearly as good cold, although it is ok if you toast it again later.

That's kinda it. The first time I tried it, my dough was about 10 days old, and it rose a lot less in the oven. On the other hand, the layers were more distinct. The second time, it was more bready, but still quite tasty. I think I squashed the dough a little too hard, and it merged the layers back together. But so what? I gather that these things were invented as a way to use up scraps of dough, so I think that having the process be somewhat approximate stays true to the original intent of just preventing waste. The name is some weird french dialect; it means Queen Anne. The shape of the bread is supposed to resemble a little crown.

Apple Pie

 

mmmmm...pie

 I went to the apple festival at Portland Nursery the other weekend and bought 23 pounds of apples. I made a pie for my birthday. I have never been a big fan of apple pie. I prefer almost any kind of pie better than apple, to tell the truth. But, apples are what I have, and since I don't own a mixer that would enable me to make my favorite apple walnut cake, a pie it was.

My pie turned out so well that I started wondering why I thought I don't like apple pie. I do like apple pie, if it is good pie: the problem is that the world is full of middling-to-bleh apple pies. Store bought pie is almost invariably tough in the crust, which is a major strike against it. They are also horribly sweet, which is strike two. The coup de gras is usually the fact that the 'apples' in said pies are not generally recognizable as such. They are an evil combination of mushy and fibrous. There is neither taste nor aroma to indicate appleness. There is goo, and not in a good way.

This is a better pie.

Use this crust recipe. You can use part whole wheat if you like the texture, or all white if you prefer. I did all white to keep it simple.

Filling

2 lbs mixed apples. I got several kinds, I don't remember what, but they were mostly firm and tart.
about 1/2 cup sugar
a pinch each of freshly grated nutmeg and cinnamon
2 cloves, ground
a dab of butter
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Begin to peel, core and chop the apples. As you are chopping them up, drop them into a medium-hot saucepan with the the butter. Keep adding apples as you peel, and stir in the sugar about halfway through the apples. Add the spices. Stir just enough to prevent the apples from browning very much. When you get to the end of the apples, some of them will be coming apart and some of them will be barely cooked. This is a good thing. Stir in the vanilla. Cover the pan and remove from heat while you roll out the bottom crust and arrange it in a 9" pan. Pour in the filling, top it with the other half of the pastry, and bake at 350 for about an hour or until the crust is as brown as you like it, that is, until you loose your patience and have to eat your pie right NOW.

Notes:

1. Apples are about the perfect pie fruit, apparently.
2. This is because they have a large amount of pectin in them.
3. Which is important, because pectin has the curious property of gelling up when cooked with both sugar and acid.
4. That means that it's important to put at least a little sugar in the filling as you cook it, especially if the apples are tart. Not enough sugar means the pectin won't thicken properly.
5. It also means that you should cook the apples first, because if you just put the raw apples in the crust, the pastry will burn before the apples are cooked on the inside, and the apples have to cook in order to activate the pectin.

What is pectin anyway? The Wikipedia page has way more technical stuff than I want to know, but the gist of it seems to be that pectin is a kind of dietary fiber found in fruits. People use it for a lot of things, most notably in making jam, because soft fruits like berries contain little pectin and will therefore make a very thin, soupy jam without adding some in.

My pie didn't last very long. It was tart and crispy edged when it was hot out of the oven, and it was sweeter and melty crusted for breakfast and lunch the next day. There was no goo. The apples cooked into a pleasant combination of firm fruity bits and sauce, with just enough spice to snazz it up.

  

Chestnuts, or, Dude, you are so Asian

  

  
I found a chestnut tree! The kind that makes nuts you can eat! The other day I spent an hour stomping nut jackets in the  gutter outside somebody I don't know's house! It didn't seem like nearly such a dodgy behavior at the time; I think my roots were showing. My crazy chinese roots, that is. In my defense, urban foraging is a very Portland thing to do. At least scrounging a bagful of fallen chestnuts on a shiny October morning is not like scrubbing around in the grass on your hands and knees looking for ginko nuts that smell like poo in the dark and the rain.

Plus, everybody knows that chestnuts are a thing you eat, providing that you get the kind that are edible. So how do you tell the difference? Wikipedia of course! But really, it's easy to tell. The edible kind is on the left. They have zebra stripes that go from top to bottom, and a little fuzzy tassel on the end. The tassel can get broken off, so the important part is the stripes.

wood grain = wouldn't eat that

Stripes = sounds tasty to me.

The ones that you can't eat are on the right. See how they have this subtle wood grain pattern? Also, no tassel. Not even a place where the tassel would be. Smooth as a baby's butt. Those are the kind called horse chestnuts. The jackets also look quite different. Horse chestnuts look like the head of a mace, with just a few big points on them. Sweet chestnuts look like a little green hedgehog. They have a dense covering of amazingly prickly spines, which is why you stomp them gently to get the nuts out. Wear stout shoes, and be careful not to bounce one up onto your ankle. Gloves would be a good idea too.

AKA 'conkers'

imagine if that fell on you.

Chestnuts are unusually low in fat and high in water and starch for nuts, making them vulnerable to dehydration and mildew. Unless you are going to eat them right away, you should freeze them. I put them in ziploc bags.  Later, I'll investigate some recipes.

Go with the mojo

  

Ce n'est pas une jupe

  
Sometimes, I don't feel like making anything. Those are the times when my house gets cleaned. This has not been one of those moments. My house is now slightly destroyed, but today I made some drawer dividers to keep my skivvies organized and a blue fleece top which reminds me of cookie monster, and yesterday I made these pants. I'm not just having a Magritte moment, they really are a pair of shorts.

Here's to you, Mr. Akin

See? Neat, huh? I found the instructions over at this neat lady's blog, and thought they would be really useful. They are super comfy once they're on, but I only had a 4"  zipper rather than a 6" one that would be a more appropriate length, so they are a little hard to get in and out of.

But that's ok! They are navy blue, so maybe I can get away with wearing them to my stupid job, and they look good with knee socks, which I realized I have way too many of when I organized my drawers, and they have pockets.

Also, I did not buy one thing to make all this stuff. Hooray for using up the stash!

It's a Sweater

  

  
With a long floppy cowl neck. I started knitting again last month, and it has sort of taken over my life. I have become a Chick Who Knits On The Bus. People including a very old lady coming from the airport, a lady who spoke very little english, and a buffed up dude with a bunch of neck tattoos ask to see what I'm doing. They were all quite polite. I just don't know how I feel about suddenly having become a person who looks like they could be approached by strangers. Maybe if I knit in smaller gauges, the effort will make me scowl more. But maybe not. I tend to stare off into a middle distance while I knit.

In any case, I think I'll just resign myself. I spend up to an hour and a half on public transit per day, and whereas before, this was all wasted time, suddenly the bus ride is bonus crafty time. I now have a very nice sweater, and a pair of experimental knee socks that are too itchy to wear.

More socks are forthcoming. I'm sure the popularity of sock knitting has a lot to do with the fact that even the most ambitious sock project stays at a convenient size for schlepping around. As a side note, the yarn for the last two projects came from goodwill. The stuff for the sweater is very high quality, and was a joy to work with. It's all squishy and bouncy, and has a satiny kind of finish. I shudder to think what it would have cost if I'd bought it new. The socks are another story. The yarn seemed like it was all right to begin with, but once it was made up, it was just terribly uncomfortable.

The lesson is that high quality yarn is the only way to go if you actually want to use the things you make. It is particularly annoying to spend all that time and effort making something and then have it turn out to be intolerable once you put it on. Maybe some children of my acquaintance will want a pair of christmas stockings.

Oh Banana Bread!

  

  
Why are you so delicious? Why is it so hard not to eat you with a spoon right out of the oven?

Why banana 'bread'? It isn't even legitimately bread, it's CAKE, damnit. And why is it so hard to get a loaf of banana bread out of a non-stick pan? I am champing with impatience to eat this thing right now, and it's too hot, and it won't come unstuck, and all I can do is put a picture on the internet so that at least everyone else can share my suffering.

3/4 c sugar
5 T softened butter
2 eggs
1 1/2 c very ripe bananas (that was 3 medium sized ones for me)
1/2 c greek yogurt
1tsp vanilla
2 1/2 c flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 c chopped toasted walnuts

 Pre-heat the oven to 350.

Put all the moist ingredients in a large mixing bowl and whip the bajeebus out of them. Add the sugar and salt, whip again. Sift in the flour and soda, mix until smooth, mix in the nuts, then pour into a loaf pan. Bake for 1 hr 20 min. Seriously, it's that easy.

But there are some things that are useful to know:

1. Start with the eggs and bananas at room temperature. Makes the bread poofier. If your eggs and or bananas are cold, stick them in a bowl of hot tap water for about 10 minutes.

2. No, you don't have to put in the nuts. But if you do, it is important to toast them first, they have much more flavor that way,.

3. Learn from my mistake and line the pan with waxed paper. Oil the pan, put in the paper, oil and flour the paper, then pour in the batter.The paper keeps the bread from touching the pan. No touching = no sticking.  Oiling the pan keeps the paper from scooting around. Oiling & flouring the paper makes it possible to get the paper off the bread when you want to eat it.

4. There is a handful of crumb topping on it. Take roughly equal parts of flour, sugar(either brown or white), oatmeal and butter. Ok, be a little generous with the butter. Add a teaspoon of baking powder for every 3 cups of crisp. Smash everything into pea-sized morsels, then freeze it until you want to use it.

The original recipe I found on the Betty Crocker website called for nearly twice as much butter and sugar, and uses buttermilk instead of yogurt. I never have buttermilk, but yogurt is pretty much the same. As I've written it above, this bread is not as heavy and gummy as many recipes I've tried, and the banana favor isn't overwhelmed by sugar. Yes, I gave up waiting for the thing to come un-glued from its pan. At least I used a knife to cut out a piece, not a spoon.Well, two pieces. For now.

Mushroom & Spinach Pockets with Walnuts

  

  
I was going to make a pizza, but then I discovered that both my cheese & my sauce had grown hoary-bearded with age. I came up with this because several of the key ingredients are things I keep in the freezer, and are consequently unlikely to spoil. I was thinking of Pete's Kalezones*, but since I had no kale, I added nuts for texture.

1 recipe of the pizza dough I use for everything

8 oz mushrooms, chopped
8 oz chopped frozen spinach
1 large onion, diced
1 or 2 garlic cloves, crushed
a tomato (Optional. It was in the fridge, and I wanted it gone.)
1 tablespoon tomato sauce
1 teaspoon each of minced fresh rosemary & oregano
1/2 cup grated parmesan
1/2 cup finely chopped walnuts
salt & pepper
oil for frying

Pre-heat the oven to 450.

If your dough is in the fridge, get it out and let it start warming up.

Put a little oil in a heavy bottomed 3 or 4 quart saucepan. Saute the onions, garlic, herbs, and mushrooms until they are fairly dry and are starting to brown. Add the spinach and tomato, continue to cook, stirring occasionally, until the liquid from the spinach is pretty much gone. Remove from the heat and let cool enough to stir in the nuts & cheese without melting the cheese. Salt & pepper to taste.

Cut the dough into 8 pieces, roll them out, and fold a scoop of filling into each one. Seal with a fork, and slash a hole in the top so they don't blow up in the oven.

Bake for about 23 minutes.

Notes!

1. Parmesan is pretty salty. Definitely you will want to hold off on the salt until after the cheese is in the filling to see if you want more.

2. On the other hand, it needs a good amount of pepper. Go ahead and put that in any time, actually.

3. Who the hell ever just has one tablespoon of tomato paste lying around? Not me. I divide up a can into blobs and freeze them. Then I can just pull one out of the tupperware when I want it.

4. Incidentally, I also keep walnuts in the freezer. Keeps the %*$$! meal moths at bay.

5. Don't knead the dough before using it. Just cut it up and flatten it out, or it will be too rubbery to deal with.

I got these done at about 10 pm last night, but they sure are good for breakfast. The dough is pretty chewy, and holds up well to the slightly chunky texture of the filling. They would probably taste good with hazelnuts too, but if you do that, I'd recommend toasting the nuts first.

* I thought I'd written a post about Pete's recipe for kale & cheese calzones, but now I can't find it. The procedure is roughly the same as this, but the filling is composed of kale and onions, with plenty of ricotta and some mozzarella, I think. What on earth happened to that recipe?...

  

Secret Ingredient Gazpacho

  

  
1 can whole tomatoes in juice
about 3lb fresh tomatoes
1/2 medium onion
1 clove fresh garlic
1 large green jalapeno pepper, seeds & ribs removed
1 whole red pepper
2 cucumbers
1/2 yellow pepper
1/2 green pepper
1/2 tsp roasted garlic chips
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp ground coriander
juice of 1 lime
juice of 1 lemon

2 tsp minced fresh tarragon
2 tsp minced fresh mint
1 T minced fresh thyme
3 T minced fresh parsley
1 tsp black pepper

some salt

1 T Secret Ingredient!*

This makes around a gallon of soup. In a blender, puree all the tomatoes, the onion, the jalapeno, the garlic, one of the cukes, and 1/2 of the red bell pepper, along with the spices & juice.

Mince the herbs by hand or they will turn onto green mush and discolor the soup. Dice the remaining cucumber and bell peppers, and stir everything together.

* This is where the secret ingredient comes in.

Add only about 2/3 the amount of salt you want, and then add either 1 tablespoon of thai fish sauce or 1 tablespoon of dark soy sauce. If you use soy, it has to say it's dark soy sauce, or it won't be the right kind.

Since both dark soy and fish sauce are basically liquid salt, why not just use salt? Because even though tomatoes, garlic & onions taste delicious together, they do not have that special, mouth filling, savory taste unless they are cooked. By definition, gazpacho is not cooked. Even cheating a bit with a can of tomatoes doesn't quite do it. Therefore, you need something rotten, or at least, powerfully fermented. Either sauce will perfectly round out the flavor of the soup.

The difference between soy & fish is subtle; personally I like the soy better, except for the fact that it does change the color of the soup slightly. Fish sauce keeps the appearance of the gazpacho the same, but I think it's a little less fruity or something. It's your call. If you can't decide, you can do what I did and add about 1 drop of either secret ingredient to individual servings to perform a taste test before flavoring the whole batch.

I like to eat mine with avocado and a dab of yogurt, because why leave well enough alone?

Cannibal!

  

  
This thing is also called a German pancake, but it is more fun to say "Honey, do you want to eat a Dutch Baby for breakfast tomorrow?"

The recipe for the pancake is exactly the same as the one found here, (except that I always use salted butter) but there are a couple things I think are useful to know, namely that

1. It does make a big difference to use eggs & milk at room temperature. They poof much less when cold.

2. Make sure the oven is fully pre-heated, then make up the batter. It is too easy to get impatient and ravenous and put the batter in the oven before it's hot enough.

3. Freshly grated nutmeg & cinnamon.

4. Heat the skillet on the stove top, not in the oven. Otherwise you will get it smoking hot and the butter will scorch and it will not taste good.

5. NO PEEKING! If you open the oven even once, the thing will go all flat and never recover, but it will taste good anyway.

This recipe, cooked in a 10" frying pan is exactly the right amount of breakfast for 2 modestly sized, moderately hungry adults. I skipped the orange sugar recommended in the original recipe, and went with jam and greek yogurt on one piece and maple syrup and super-dark chocolate on the other. Break the chocolate into bites and poke them into the hot pancake to get melty before slopping on the syrup.

In the middle of the winter, I'm going to break down and cook one of these in bacon drippings.

I made a skirt

  

  
It is a perfectly normal skirt. There are some things I like about it. I made it very quickly, like in less than a week. That's unusual for a thing I draft a pattern for. It only took about 2/3 of a yard of scrap fabric. It's sorta stylish at the moment.

On the other hand I think it just looks a little stupid. The pleats in the front are very popular right now, and I have never thought they were a good idea. I was right, they are not. They bulge out at the wrong places when you walk. And it is far too short. That's what I get for trying to use up my stash fabrics. 2/3 of a yard is just 2/3 of a yard no matter how you cut it. What I wanted was a practical skirt that I would be able to ride my bike in. Instead I have this trendy little number I feel rather ambivalent about. I don't know if I would want to wear it to the office, and I'm not much of a miniskirt girl the rest of the time.

The most practical thing about this skirt is that I put pockets in the side seams. I think the front pleats are silly, but they do make it possible to keep stuff in the pockets. In the pictures, I'm carrying my wallet & my phone and they don't make the front of the skirt have curious square knobs over my hips.

Over all I am satisfied with it, because instead of abandoning it in disgust when I realized it was not going to turn out as I had envisioned, I finished it up anyway, on the principle that it is better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing perfectly.