Industrious Weekend

I'm trying to get back into the swing of things even though I'm not in my own home with my own kitchen.    This weekend I hit up the farmer's market  and bought lots of delicious things.

 Including beautiful flowers.

And way more strawberries than I needed.  I planned to make jam, but I didn't know how many strawberries I'd really need.  I would have been fine with half as much.

 For dinner I ate this arugula, fava bean and mint salad.

It was a quick healthy meal while I made this.  I'm not sure it set up as thickly as it should have.  May be more like strawberry sauce than jam.  Oh well, it'll be delicious.

I also accomplished one of my resolutions for the year... making sourdough english muffins from scratch.  They were pretty easy.

 And I made fresh strawberry pies to use up the remaining berries.  Lucky co-workers tomorrow.

It was a good weekend.  How was yours?

Weekend Edition: First Sourdough in California

Yes, I brought my sourdough starter with me to California.  That's extremely nerdy in a culinary way, I know, but once you get used to a certain quality for your daily bread its difficult to go back to store-bought bread.   Ironically last weekend my never-fail sourdough pancakes kind of failed.  This weekend my first loaf of bread in the new climate looks to be a success.  It rose well and has a nice crust.  Tomorrow will tell if the flavor is good.  (Its always a good flavor, some weeks its more sour than others).  

Weekend Edition: Roadtrip to Winslow, AZ and Beyond

On Saturday afternoon I picked up my friend Elise and we drove to Winslow, AZ to stay at the Mary Colter designed La Posada Hotel.  I'd wanted to visit the La Posada since I listened to an NPR story about its near demolition and subsequent restoration back in 2000 (no longer available for online listening, which is too bad).  I loved it, the beds were comfortable, the restaurant is renown, and the history is fascinating.  The interior of the hotel is largely renovated, and they've made a lot of progress on the gardens.  We arrived just after sunset got settled, went down to the restaurant to eat, then explored the hotel via their handy self-guided tour.  Early the next morning we woke up so that Elise could catch the Amtrak back to Albuquerque, while I embarked on a nine hour drive to Southern California by myself.

Warm winter kale and lentil salad.  I think those disks are sunchoke... can't remember.

Braised bison short ribs in blackberry barbeque sauce.

As close to licking the plate clean as you can get in a restaurant.

One of La Posada's great appeals was the oasis in the desert that it provided travelers.  Since its winter, the gardens were just starting to green up, but this view of the sunken garden gives a sense of its shadiness and enclosure.

Looking back from the end of the sunken garden.  The ballroom looks over from the left, and guestrooms on the right.

The Ballroom.

This snippet of video was perhaps the highlight of the drive to California.  Still quiet on the road and early enough that I wasn't aching to get out of the car.

On the Road near Flagstaff, AZ from S@sha on Vimeo.

Why was I on the road to California, you may ask?  It looks likely that I'm moving here for awhile.  Tomorrow I start a job that was too good to pass up.  I really didn't want to leave the Albuquerque and the homestead, but now I should be able to earn enough money to actually get a lot of work done on the property.  I'll still blog about the same things (I brought my sourdough starter with me for example), though they'll have a slightly different regional focus.  More marmelade and less green chile.

Weekend Edition: Spring is in the Air

Spring is in the air here, but that translates to a lot of very strong wind.  It can be the most unpleasant time of the year, which is of course frustrating since all you want to do is go outside and enjoy the sunshine.

Sunday's breakfast: Home-made black bean with Oaxacan pasilla chile in banana leaf and chorizo, potato and wild mustard in corn husk tamales, eaten with Vanilla atolé.

Can you see the buds swelling on the apple tree?  At the tip you can start to see the petioles opening just a little.  (I think those are petioles, its been many years since I had to take any botany).

The flowering quince are way ahead, with actual baby leaves and flower buds emerging.  This is always the first to bloom on our property.  

Yum, this salad was as tasty as it was colorful.  

Much like myself my dogs are not the most photogenic.  Violet looks much less goofy than this in real life, as I like to think I look better in person.  That's why you'll see few photos of me online. 

Anna Sui double sided  fabric that I bout at Britex in San Francisco several years ago for an upholstery project that I decided not to use.  I recently rediscovered it in my sewing crate and thought of a new way to use it.  I'll reveal as soon as I actually get it done. (And yes, I know that at the rate I sew that could be never.  I'm working on it).

Weekend Edition: Little Snippets

We had a lovely sunny weekend with predictions of falling temperatures and a winter storm today.  In  between taking advantage of the weather to do yard work and laundry (hung outside), I did a lot of cooking this weekend.  A little too much cooking, as by Sunday night I was completely exhausted.  

Each week after making bread, there is a bit of sourdough sponge left over.  Sometimes I just incorporate it into the bread dough and increase the size of the loaf, sometimes I make pancakes, and other times I make a cake.  I've been developing the cake recipe week by week, and I'll share once I think its consistently good.  Most weeks I've been flavoring it with orange zest, rosewater and cardamom, but this week I had no rosewater or oranges.  I experimented with apples and a vanilla glaze instead.  Its good, but I'm not sure that I really like apples in cake.  The sourdough has made for a nicely textured cake each week.  Its similar to pound cake, but with very little sugar or fat.  Just a third of a cup each.

Most of the exhaustive cooking on Sunday was the result of making lasagna the hard way--- with everything from scratch. None of it was hard, it just took forever.  (We used this recipe from Deborah Madison's The Greens Cookbook). The noodles, two sauces, and the ricotta.  Ricotta is ridiculously easy to make-- one gallon of milk mixed with a teaspoon (or two) of citric acid and a teaspoon of salt, brought to just below boiling at 195° F, at which point curds will start to form.  Let it sit in the pan for ten minutes, drain in cheese cloth-- seen above-- and then really drain by tying the cloth into a bag and hanging it for half an hour.  Voilá, ricotta, and you can use the whey, the liquid you've drained off for baking later.  I like how you can still see the texture of the cheese cloth in the picture above.  One gallon of milk resulted in about 2.5-3 cups of ricotta.

In between the cooking, I was reading this.  Super romantic story that is almost guaranteed to make you reevaluate the quality of any love letters you've ever received.  Todays' men(and women) with, their affinity for the text message, seem sorely lacking.  If you like a man (or a woman) who is good with the written word, this book is for you.

And, this afternoon, during the gloomy hours, I took advantage of being stuck inside to do a little beauty maintenance.  Good-bye grey roots.  I started dying my hair in college because I didn't like the way it turned red in the summer.  Sigh, if only I could have that hair back.  I think naturally auburn hair is awesome now.  Especially since you can't achieve it with hair dye without spending a fortune or having it look fake fake fake.  Now I can't stop because I have a shocking amount of grey hair.  This hair dye is kind of expensive, but its free of a lot of the bad things found in hair dye, an important fact since I'll be continuing to cover that grey for many years to come.

What did you make this weekend?

Weekend Edition: Lost Weekend and California Recap

I got back from California on Thursday, and I was as sick as a dog!  I was feverish, achy, and coughing like I had the croup.  I spent Thursday afternoon, and most of Friday asleep on my couch with my dog looking worriedly after me.  By Saturday I felt well enough to accompany my mom out to finish our Christmas shopping, in part because I was buoyed by the Chicken Curry Stew at this restaurant.   Then back to the couch and early to bed.  On Sunday I felt a lot better, and I was back to baking my weekly loaf of sourdough, and making braised short ribs with sauerkraut for dinner, as well as catching up on a week-plus loads of laundry. Pretty dull stuff.  Since I planned to do a trip wrap-up on Friday for my Friday Fun post and felt too sick to get online, I'm just going to do it now instead.  Lost weekend, over and forgotten.

I didn't take a whole lot of pictures while in California, well I did, but they were mostly of Tawny opening every gift that she received at her shower, and the items that we wanted to remember for later at IKEA.  Won't bore you with those!  Here is a quick pictorial view of the trip and some of the things we did.

Oceanside, California.

Tawny's belly, I guess that was about 33 weeks.

The next morning I made this flower arrangement for the baby shower from the things growing in Tawny and Jack's front yard.  Tea roses, camellias, bird-of-paradise, kangaroo paws, and oranges in your yard and blooming in December?  Yeah, that's the draw of California, in case you've never felt it before.

One of the buntings that I made her last shower was recycled for this shower. Yay fabric!

Tawny and her friend Annie.  They've been friends since middle school.   Tawny's mom is an amazing seamstress and she made that blouse as well as several others.  The details were really beautiful.

Present time!  

Tawny has that giant smile throughout all the photos from the shower.  Good job party organizers, you made her really happy.  I think everyone was laughing here because we all agreed that Jack was going to want a matching set of lion pajamas.

The baby shower was on Saturday, and on Sunday our focus switched to home improvement projects.  These are some of the bamboo flooring samples that Tawny was pricing.  She and Jack have only been in their current house for a little over a month, and their landlady has agreed that she'll pay for new laminate or bamboo flooring if Jack will install it.  Tawny is leaning heavily towards the bamboo option, and these pale colors were the simplest and cheapest options.  She's hoping that if costs are low enough they'll get to do the whole house, and not just the living room and kitchen.

Next we hit up IKEA looking for bedding, rugs, and decor items for the nursery/guest room.  This rug fit the color scheme perfectly, but in the end was rejected because it was synthetic, and Tawny wants a wool rug.

We both liked this poster, and again it fit the color scheme and has an educational component, but it too was left behind.  I'll do a separate nursery post update later in the week.

This is one of many citrus trees that adorn Tawny and Jack's yard.  This is an orange, but there is also a pomelo, a grapefruit, a lemon, a lime, and several tangerines.  Also a peach, an apple, a guava, a strawberry guava and two pomegranates.  Right now the citrus is just starting to ripen in quantity and Tawny doesn't know how to use it up fast enough.  She needs a juicer stat!

I suggested we make marmalade, which was fun.  We ended up with 17 jars of marmalade and really didn't use that much citrus, considering.  Oh well, she's got Christmas gifts at the ready, which is good considering the next paragraph's news.  It was her first time canning anything, and this was her leaning over the jars giggling as the lids popped down after they came out of the water bath.

Tawny's due date was supposed to be January 24th, but on Saturday her water broke and she's currently in the hospital getting ready to have Baby Boy six weeks early.  Everything seems healthy with mother and son, he just wants out early.  Good luck baby and mama!

Weekend Edition: Thanksgiving Weekend

We had a lovely Thanksgiving despite the cold.  It should be cold on Thanksgiving, right?  It's late November after all!  We celebrate Thanksgiving most years with a large group of family friends, all of whom are excellent cooks.  The day is spent in an idyllic New Mexico location, and always includes a hike before dinner.  Can't get any better than that!  No photos because sometimes its nice to just live life, not document it for others.

Meanwhile with the extra long weekend I did fairly typical things.

I read an actual letter from a friend.  Visited a local nursery and brought home a beautiful gardenia that has been perfuming my kitchen and fooling me into believing that I'm in the tropics.  (Tried a ridiculous number of times to capture a photo that was in focus, and could not do it.)  Baked the third week's worth of sourdough bread.  Many other completely non-photogenic things as well, like mowing the lawn for an hour until the gas ran out in the mower and it could be cleaned and stored for the winter, and obsessing over really great furniture deals on ebay that I couldn't partake in because they were all local pick-up only in locations that I can't easily get to.  Sigh.

Weekend Edition: All About Bread

The weekend had non-bread related moments, of course, like battling the pre-holiday crowds at TJ Maxx.  That was hellish, but resulted in the purchase of a really great gift for a friend, as well as a bag of Lindt White Chocolate Lindor truffles for me.  So good.  The older I get the lighter I seem to like my chocolate.

First bread related item: Afghani Bread, $3.00 from Ariana Halal Market.

Huge (my computer is in the photo for scale), chewy and still warm when we took it out to the car.  I'd eaten this bread before when friends had brought it to work, but I'd never stopped into the market myself.  The owner (I'm assuming) was really nice, and the café menu looks delicious.  I'm definitely going to have to go back to eat someday soon.

Second bread related item: This week's loaf of Sourdough.

I thought the sponge was too dry last week, so this week I made sure that it was less so.  Instead of just tweaking last week's recipe, I defected to this one from Clotilde of the Chocolate & Zucchini blog.  I like her detailed instructions, and the fact that the bread had fewer ingredients (no oil or sugar).  Due to my lack of a kitchen scale, I had to wing it a little with measurements, but stuck to her basic 1:2:3 ratio and ended up with a delicious and large loaf of bread.  Less dense this week than last, and a better flavor, possibly due to the folding technique that she recommends.  

Third bread related item: Sourdough Starter Cake.

I had a little bit of sourdough sponge left over after I'd mixed up the bread, and not wanting to waste it, decided to make up a little cake.  Flour, eggs, baking powder, sugar, orange zest, rose-water and crushed cardamom made a very tasty cake.  The glaze was orange juice, powdered sugar and a tinge more rose-water.  Yum.  

Brr, now I have to go sit closer to the wood stove because I've caught a chill today and can't seem to stay warm.  I blame the nasty wind we're having.

Weekend Edition: Adventures in Sourdough

I showed you my sourdough starter on Thursday, and this weekend I made my first loaf of bread from it.

I read a lot of recipes, and had planned to use one from Chocolate & Zucchini, but since most of her measurements are in grams, and I don't have a kitchen scale, I had to look elsewhere.  I ended up going with this recipe from S. John Ross.  It turned out pretty well, but there are definitely a couple of things I'd adjust for the next loaf.  I think my sponge should have been a little wetter, because I was only able to incorporate two cups of flour instead of the recipe's three.  I felt like even with dramatically less flour my dough was on the verge of being too dry when I was kneading it.  Also, next time I'd cut out the sugar that is added to the sponge prior to mixing up the dough.  I know sugar is often added to feed the yeasts and make the bread rise, but this loaf had a touch of sweetness to it that I don't favor.  Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a sweet bread, but was more like a commercial sandwich loaf.  

All in all, the loaf turned out better than I expected.  It rose well, it browned nicely and formed a nice crust, it cut nicely, and it tasted good.  I mixed whole wheat and white flour.  It wasn't particularly sour-- there were parts of the bread that tasted more like sourdough than others.  The crumb was dense enough that it would be good for sandwiches, but it wasn't dense and heavy, or hard to chew.  And most importantly, it sent me an omen that I should continue to make sourdough.  Do you see the perfect "S" that formed as the bread rose?

I also made pancakes with some of the sourdough starter.  I used another recipe from Uncle Jim's Book of Pancakes, a vintage cookbook that I featured in this Vintage Kitchen post (before I'd named the Vintage Kitchen posts, I guess).  They look slightly red because I threw some frozen raspberries into the batter.  Extremely good pancakes.

If you click those photos they'll open slightly larger, but in case you still can't read it, here's the transcription.

Sourdough Pancakes from Uncle Jim's Book of Pancakes by James E. Banks; Filter Press, Palmer Lake, CO, 1967.

In the early days of the American West, a solitary prospector or herder couldn't go to the market when he needed yeast for his baking.  So he carried along a sponge of sourdough starter.  It really was sour dough.  Even today, sourdough cookery is one of the supreme treats for an amateur chef.

The first thing you need is a starter.  Here's a method that has always worked for me.  Because this is still an art, not a science, it may not work for you.  If it doesn't, wait a few days and try again.  Your first batch of sourdough pancakes will repay your effort many-fold.

Place 1 cup of milk in a glass jar or crock (nothing metal!) and let it stand at room temperature for a day.  I use a 6 oz. instant coffee jar, but any wide-mouthed jar will do.  The second day stir in 1 cup flour.  Leave the mixture uncovered in a warm place (80˚ F is ideal and can be achieved near the pilot light on a gas stove.  Not too near, though or the heat will kill the yeast.)  for 2 to 5 days, depending on how long it takes to sour and get bubbly.  To speed the process in warm weather you can cover the jar with a layer of cheesecloth and let it stand outdoors for a few hours to expose the dough to wild yeasts in the air.  If the mixture starts to dry out, stir in enough lukewarm water to bring it back to its original consistency.  When it has a good sour aroma and is full of bubbles, it's read to use.

Every time you use your starter, replenish it with equal amounts of flour and milk.  Let it stand at room temperature for a few hours, or until it gets full of bubbles again, then cover loosely wan store in the refrigerator.  From time to time you may have to scrape some mold from the top of the jar where the starter dries out a bit.

This is certainly not the only way to get a starter going.  When Cal Queal, outdoor editor of the Denver POST, appealed for a recipe, he got 23 answers.  A starter is best if used once a week.  If you don't use it for two or three weeks, discard about half and replenish it as described above.  If you don't expect to use it for several weeks, you can freeze it.  Be sure to leave it at room temperature for at least 36 hours when you want to use it again.

After you've worked with your starter for awhile, you'll get to know it as an old pal that gets better with age.  I'd read this and was skeptical until I noticed that my results took a real turn for the better about six months after I made the starter.

Here's the basic recipe:

1/2 cup sourdough starter

1 cup undiluted evaporated milk

1 cup warm water*

1 3/4 - 2 cups unsifted flour

2 eggs

2 TBS granulated sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda**

In a large bowl gently mix 1/2 cup starter, 1 cup undiluted evaporated milk, and 1 cup lukewarm water (*or 2 cups whole milk), and 1 3/4 - 2 cups flour.  The amount of flour is determined by the consistency you like.  Leave overnight at room temperature.  Be sure not to leave a metal spoon in the bowl.

Next morning add 2 eggs, 2 TBS granulated sugar, 1/2 tsp salt, and 1 tsp baking soda**.  Mix well, but don't beat.

** If your starter is quite sour, you may need to add more baking soda.  You'll learn by trial and error.  Never go more than 50% above the suggested amount.

For variations on the basic recipe, you can replace as much as half the flour with buckwheat flour, rolled oats, cornmeal or wheat germ.  They are all good.

If you want to make sourdough waffles, add 2 TBS melted shortening to the batter just before baking.

In the old time lumber camps, the loggers had an easy substitute for syrup.  The simply dissolved brown sugar in hot coffee and poured it over the pancakes.