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Posts Tagged ‘cooking’

Artisan-style Bread Overnight

Posted in Food, Recipes, tagged , , , , , , on 05 Jul 2012| Leave a Comment »

This weekend, treat yourself to homemade artisanal bread.

I put this recipe online a few days ago, and want to give it a bit more visibility because it is, in my humble opinion, the bread recipe.

It’s easy: Mix, let sit, shape, let sit, bake.

This is my version of the Bittman-Lahey version as posted by my friends over on CheapSeatEats. It’s a great recipe, especially if (like me) you’re a bit challenged in the Baking column. My main problems with baking bread have always been

  • That they never rose enough
  • I could never knead them down into that really glutenous, almost rubbery feel of the great artisanal breads
  • The crusts were never as chewy as I wanted, but always crisp and hard

This recipe solves all of those problems. The rise is guaranteed, the “tooth” is glutenous heaven, and the crust is like the old Italian loaves of my youth: firm, but chewy.

It’s an overnight rise, which actually makes it much easier. And it’s a great “master” recipe, that you can vary and tailor to your specific tastes.

Check it out, and make some this weekend!

k

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Pozole, or Mexico’s Phở

Posted in Food, Recipes, tagged , , , , , on 02 Jul 2012| Leave a Comment »

I spent the weekend working on my recipe for pozole, a traditional stew from Mexico, and it’s been impossible not to see this wonderful dish as Mexico’s answer to the Vietnamese phở. It’s a hearty stock, chock full of meat and a starch, served with a variety of garnishes that the diner can add to personal taste. And I suspect, as with phở, devotees will spend their lives searching for that perfect bowl of pozole.

Take a good stock—my preference is turkey stock—and add seared, grill-marked hunks of pork for a long, slow simmer. Shred the pork, add a nice mole sauce to the mix, and fill it out with a batch of hominy. This is your base, and it’s a good one; good enough to have all on its own.

But wait! There’s more!

You can split up the work on this dish, breaking it up over two days. On Day One, you take the long-duration tasks and prepare the stock and the meat, even prepare the mole. On Day Two, you put it all together, giving you time to spend with guests (and look like a master chef!)

Hang on! It gets better!

Now give everyone a steaming bowl of hearty goodness and let them add, well, just about anything they want: slices of buttery avocado, crumbled bits of salty queso fresco, chopped herbs like cilantro or oregano, whisper-thin shreds of green cabbage or romaine, crisp-fried tortilla strips. Squeeze a wedge of lime over the whole thing and dig in.

Heaven!

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You, a Disappointment

Posted in Food, Gardening, tagged , , , on 25 Jun 2012| Leave a Comment »

Ever-mindful of the fact that the freshest ingredients make for the tastiest meals, and always on the lookout for products that are economical and can be re-used, the line of AeroGarden hydroponic indoor grow-farms had always piqued my interest. Last year, I got a small one like the one pictured at right, along with two herb seed kits. The results? Well, let’s say that the pictures AeroGarden provides (like the one at right) should be sub-captioned “Results not typical.”

Any foodie worth a pinch of salt would be gaga over the idea of having thick, never-ending bunches of organically grown basil, dill, or thyme at the ready year-round. Well, I was, anyway. And justlookat it! Lush, tall, bursting with aroma and freshness!

Sadly, though the seed “pods” are guaranteed to grow, my first pod of thyme didn’t. And if I thought I was going to be able to rip off stalks of basil for weeks on end, I was sorely mistaken. Another realization was that these plants were no more “organic” than anything I might buy at the grocer’s, because every week I was dumping the contents of a nameless, unspecified “nutrient pack” into the water.

After a month, I was able to get two stems of basil for an omelet. A week later, I could get another stalk, maybe two. After eight weeks of growing, I had only collected as much basil as I got in one $2.99 plastic pack from Safeway. And the Italian parsley? Ha!

So, cost-wise, it was a bust. A $17.99 for a three-pod herb pack only produced a fraction of the herbs I could buy at the grocery store for around $8. It was also a bust by way of quantity; it never produced enough to supply herbs for two meals, much less enough extra to dry.

In short, a disappointment on every level.

My recommendation? Buy fresh herbs at the store, when you need them, or go down to the hardware store and get a 4-inch plant that might give you a second crop. Fresh is worth it, but the AeroGarden is more toy than utility.

k

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