Bread, Wine, Salt

A Christmas Feast: ( Maud started it .) The most important part is the julekake for breakfast, which we had with scrambled eggs. Well, the most important part is to play with the presents. But julekake is a close second.  I also made enough to share with everyone in the known universe. My dough bucket overfloweth. Well, not yet, but soon after this picture was taken. Sausages : I sent the husband to the store with a list which said bangers and he returned with a variety of flavors of pork and chicken sausage, none of which could be said to be banger-like. People ate them anyway. It seemed fine. Potatoes : What can go wrong with potatoes, cream, cheese and garlic ? Nothing, except when you don't read the recipe properly ahead of time and find out it has to cook for 90 minutes, not 60.  Dinner was a bit late. Carrots: Gingered, as before . Went off without a hitch.  Brussels Sprouts : Shredded, with the food processor which I ...

In October of 1997 I was on a ferry from Calais, France to Dover, England.  From Dover my friend and I had a long train ride to the North of Scotland.  After a month of hostels and backpacks and European men with questionable intentions, my friend and I were still friends, but we did not have eight hours of conversation left in us. I needed a book. I picked two books from the duty-free gift shop on the Ferry, and read them both on the train. One was The Yellow Admiral by Patrick O'Brian, number 18 in a popular series featuring the brave, dashing sailor Jack Aubrey and his friend the naturalist and intelligence agent, Stephen Maturin. The eighteenth book is not the best place to jump into a story, but O'Brian and his publisher knew that, and the new reader is helped along with crucial bits of backstory, so I didn't have trouble following it. I've forgotten the other book I bought that day, but in the nearly 16 years since I first read The Yellow Admiral I've be...

If you were to invite me over to your house and then leave me alone, to chase after some child who is raiding some other child's couch full of animals , for example, then I will eventually end up digging through your cookbook collection. You're welcome to come over and dig through mine as well. They're in the cabinets above the stove. I borrowed Maud's copy of Avoca Cafe Cookbook (more correctly the Irish version thereof, a couple of weeks ago, because I wanted their baked lamb with cumin, cardamom and coconut milk recipe, thinking it might be similar to a dish I ate in an Indian restaurant years ago. I cannot resist an interesting bread recipe, so when I saw the lovely picture of round loaves of seeded bread on page labeled “Multiseed brown bread with fruit” I knew I had to try it. Now, as it turns out the picture had nothing to do with the recipe, but I liked the ingredients in the recipe too, so I decided to give it a shot. The first four ingredients...

Are you on Pinterest? I got on Pinterest a few weeks ago and have been pinning happily since then. One of my boards is titled “Intriguing Recipes” and it's there that I stick the recipes for things I might want to try, if only I can remember that I want to try them. One of my early pins was a recipe for Butter Chicken without the butter from Julie at Dinner with Julie. I love Indian food and Julie's recipes are always solid, so I knew I'd like it. I'd just have to remember to make it. I probably wouldn't have remembered, except that the pin generated some discussion with a friend, first on pinterest and later by email about cooking with chicken thighs. I know some people have a problem with chicken thighs because they're greasy and dark and have a flavor. (And don't tell me it's a weird flavor. It's a chicken flavor and we've all been beaten into blandness by the industrial chicken breast.) My chicken-thigh-averse friend asked if I...

Mary Bailey: Bread so that this house may never know hunger. Salt so that life may always have flavor. George Bailey: Wine that joy and prosperity may reign forever. Bread, Salt and Wine are traditional housewarming gifts.  We all know this because we've seen "It's a Wonderful Life." Perhaps some of us assumed that it exists because of "It's a Wonderful Life."  But the tradition goes back to a time before Frank Capra, and it's a lovely idea, one I'm in favor of keeping alive. Depending on who you ask, the tradition is either Russian, Polish, Jewish, or Italian, unless it's Lithuanian, or something else.  Of course it's possible, that similar traditions grew up in different places.  Many cultures value bread, salt and wine. It was a Russian folk custom for local merchants to present the gift of a round loaf of bread covered in salt to the visiting emperor as a sign of hospitality. In many cultures bread, salt and wine are given ...

Lunch in the Park , a novel about love and family, is available for sale in multiple electronic formats at Smashwords , for the Kindle at Amazon.com and for the Nook at BN.com Wherever you buy it, it is DRM-free . The delicious recipes that Kate and Jeff cook up are right here on my blog. I hope you'll read Lunch in the Park , you'll love it, and you'll feel the overwhelming urge to write a review on one or more of the sites above. And of course I'd love to hear from you here on the blog, too.  "Kate was in the kitchen making banana cranberry bread, which she had learned to make from her own grandfather in his long ago kitchen that always smelled of coffee and baked goods.” Lunch in the Park, New Year's Eve Kate's grandfather taught her to make the bread as she stood on a kitchen step stool pushed up to the counter so that even as a small child of three or four she could help measure and mix. This recipe does actually come from a grandfather , ...

Years ago, when my parents married, my mother asked my father what he would like her to make for Christmas. He asked for Julekake, a Scandinavian Christmas bread. It was common in the bakeries in my father's childhood Chicago, but it was more difficult to find in the small Army towns where my father was posted, so my mother found a recipe, and baked her own. We ate it with eggs or bacon or sausage every Christmas breakfast of my childhood. My mother baked simple round loaves studded with raisins and candied cherries. When I grew up I swapped out dried cherries for the candied ones. I baked it in the oven of my boyfriend's apartment before I went to share Christmas with his family, inhaled the scent of them to make it Christmas when the traditions around me were not my own. I've discovered that the fruit is not mandatory, though I'd never leave it out. A braid is traditional, and I'll make a braided loaf when I have time, though for gift giving I ...

"But", you say, "St. Paddy's day was Thursday. I won't need this recipe for another year. You have terrible timing, blogging person." To which I reply: "You only want fresh bread with dinner on St. Patrick's day?" You might also complain about the lack of raisins. Then I'd say something about not wanting raisins in my dinner bread and you'd tell me that all the soda bread in the store has raisins and do I hate Ireland or St. Patrick or what? Then I'd ask you what Ireland has to do with anything. Did I say Ireland? Did I say it was Irish Soda Bread? No, I did not. I said soda bread. I might also cast aspersions on the authenticity and quality of the "Irish" soda bread in the store. But we should really skip all of that because we'd just end up mad at each other when really all I want to do is give you a loaf of this lovely simple bread and tell you to eat it with some nice butter, preferably unsalted ...

My kids are unpredictable. Restaurant portion sizes are unpredictable. Put them together and I end up with one whole, huge grilled cheese sandwich in my fridge. I have this aversion to throwing away food, especially if I paid someone to cook it for me, so the grilled cheese sits in my fridge for a few days. Grilled cheese is not a food which ages well. I had to do something. That something turned out to be a super-simple savory bread pudding which used up the grilled cheese and two sausage links that were hiding out in my freezer, waiting to be forgotten. It's even pretty quick since it bakes a skillet already hot from the stove. It's adaptable to whatever crusty bread you might have lying around, and it will be great with or without those two lonely sausage links in your freezer. Savory Bread Pudding with Sausage, Cheddar and Apples 1 Tablespoon olive oil 1 small onion 8 ounces italian sausage 2 small tart apples 6 ounces leftover grilled cheese sandwich, or c...

If I could only take one thing with me to a desert island it would probably be my cast iron skillet. It would be useful for bashing the local fauna on the head and for cooking said fauna over an open fire.*  Though I am not on a desert island my cast iron skillet is still in daily use, and has developed such a lovely patina that I don't need to grease it to cook an egg so long as I have properly preheated it first. There are a few tricks to cast iron, and anyone who loves their cast iron will tell you what they are and they'll all be different and you'll get confused. Here's what I do with mine: cook with it often, scrub with hot water and a plastic scrub brush, heat it dry on the stove-top, repeat. It is a frying pan. Its ancestors helped tame the West. You don't need to coddle it. My favorite (right now) use of my cast iron is cornbread. There are two basic forms of cornbread: Southern and Yankee. Southern cornbread does not have sugar in it. Yankee...

ANaNoBloPoWriMoPhoToGoGo Or something. I'm as likely to post every day for 30 days as I am to become a GoGo dancer, but the improbable is not the impossible (and besides, impossible things are happening every day .) What I am likely to do is change my mind about stuff, even/especially stuff that I have written authoritatively about in the past. So when I talk about having to knead bread dough for 20 minutes just after the sponge stage and again after the first rising, you can hold out hope that I'll offer up an easier alternative sometime in the future. Like now, for instance. Using the recommended procedure in The Tassajara Bread Book (which I commend to you) you can cut out the second kneading and replace it with another rise which does increase the time a bit, but it's inactive time, so that's not so bad. Tassajara also gets you out of washing to bowl after the sponge, so it's environmentally friendly, too! Give it a try with this Oatmeal bread ...

Just suppose perhaps the baking powder isn't good? I used it out of the new can. And Mrs. Lynde says you can never be sure of getting good baking powder nowadays when everything is so adulterated. ~Anne of Green Gables Good intentions...crisper drawer...healthful vegetables...blah blah blah... This is a savory quick bread, so don't think zucchini bread when you look at it. Think soda-bread with vegetables included, or think quiche with integrated crust. It's tasty, with just enough honey to balance the natural bitterness of the greens. This will be breakfast tomorrow, along with eggs made to order. I used up a bunch of raw collard greens in this recipe, but you could also use it for doing something with the leftover greens from last night's dinner. Really, you could use any leftover cooked veggies, up to 2 cups worth, chopped small. If you're starting with raw greens, count on prep time to wash, chop, cook and cool the greens before you start making the bread. ...

I bought Uprisings , my first whole-grain baking book off the book-rack at a Fresh Fields grocery store in 1999. It was early in my bread-making career and I wanted a truly whole-wheat bread that made a good sandwich loaf. Golden Wheat Bread wasn't quite that loaf. But I loved it anyway. It was dense and chewy but not too heavy. The whole wheat flavor was good, but not overpowering. It makes really, really excellent toast. I also loved the book, and still do. It's a great resource for baking with whole grains and less-processed sugars. The handwritten and illustrated pages are charming and the recipes are consistently good. Like the banana sandwich bread , this starts with a sponge. The original recipe calls for barley malt syrup, but if you don't have an appropriately crunchy health food store near you, you can substitute with half the amount of honey. For the sponge: 2 teaspoons active dry yeast 2 2/3 cups lukewarm water 3 cups whole wheat flour ½ cup barley malt s...

Adapted from the Tassajara Bread Book. “Bread makes itself, by your kindness, with your help, with imagination streaming through you, with dough under hand, you are bread-making itself, which is why bread-making is so fulfilling and rewarding.” I was determined not to be two years behind in the delivery of bread to the mom with the new baby. So this morning, as I sorted out my day to get ready to make dinner for them, I cracked open my copy of Tassajara and settled on this yeasted banana bread. There's a lot going on here, and the banana flavor gets lost. I think you could leave out the orange zest and the cinnamon and have a perfectly yummy loaf of bread, but you could also leave them in and have a perfectly yummy loaf of bread. This is an almost whole wheat loaf, so it uses the sponge method. The ingredients are divided into two parts, the first for the sponge, a batter which allows the yeast to make your heavy whole wheat flour into a light and fluffy lo...

This is what happens when you don't apply a second coat of egg wash halfway through baking. Look, there's bread on breadwinesalt! If you've never made yeast bread, this is a good place to start.  It's a very forgiving dough, and the results are both beautiful and delicious.    The key is to knead it thoroughly.  I almost never measure flour when I'm making bread, because I do it enough that I can feel when there's enough flour.  If you're just starting out I recommend adding in the minimum amount of flour and then adding more as you knead, just a sprinkle at a time.  When the kneading is done you'll have added enough flour. These are braided round loaves with the second coat of egg wash. Much prettier. 2.5 cups water, wrist temperature 1 Tablespoon active dry yeast 1/2 cup honey 4 Tablespoons softened butter or olive oil 4 egg yolks 1 whole egg 1 Tablespoon salt 8-9 cups all-purpose flour Clean an area of your co...