Snowdrop has decided to hang out in the planter sometimes.
Wisp, meanwhile, has suddenly decided to sleep on the couch next to me or in my lap rather than on her pillow.
It’s almost like they’re living creatures who change their preferences rather than wind-up toys.
And here’s the raw apple pie I mentioned planning to make. A mix of nuts, dates, apples and dried apples, it’s quite tasty. Especially with some cheddar on top.
#SFWApro
Filed under Miscellanea, Personal
I have several food goals that I’m working on this month. Well, actually, most months. I’ve found if I don’t put them down regularly I slack off.
The main ones are baking more bread, making more vegetable-centric dishes — even though I’m vegetarian, it’s easy to go heavy on cheese or eggs and skip the green stuff — and more fruit dishes. Also to use more of my spices because after a while they go bad, and that’s wasteful. And to push myself to try some new things. This has turned into an excuse to check cookbooks out of the library and see if there’s anything good in them. For example Lee Watson’s Peace and Parsnips gave me a recipe for these chunky-looking but tasty apple-date muffins.
Next weekend I’m going to try the book’s recipe for a raw apple pie — no baking, just a lot of chopping, mixing and pressing together. We’ll see how it goes.
I also recently tried a Vegetarian Times experiment in spelt bread. Spelt flour, with a generous cup of sunflower seeds mixed in.
The flavor was strong enough it would have worked better as a sandwich bread rather than just as toast. It also makes firm, solid slices for sandwiches; next time I plan some sort of fancy sandwich, I may make the bread again and see how it works.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Personal
So last Saturday, TYG and I went out to lunch at Ted Turner’s Montana Grill. It’s the first time either of us has had French fries in over a year.
It’s also the first time in over a year that we’ve had a chain restaurant maximal calorie dessert, the kahlua chocolate brownie.
Okay, that one was partially eaten when I photographed it.
Very enjoyable but in hindsight we should have split the dessert.
Fingers crossed the Delta variant and anti-vaxxing won’t end up cutting short our opportunity to do more of this.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Personal
Lately my weekends haven’t been lazy, or not as lazy as I’d like. As we have to take the dogs to their rehab appointment at least once a week, I’ve been compensating for that by watching Alien Visitors movies on the weekend. But this weekend, after rushing to get all my Leaf and Veterans Network stuff done, and finish the golem article, I just decided to crash. And did.
So I watched some Hitchcock, read quite a bit, cooked dinner, made what’s called a cottage loaf —
— and no, that’s not two bagels on top of each other, it’s one loaf — and watched some TV. Plus petting dogs, Wisp, using the stationary bike and snuggling with TYG some.
Now that the golem piece is done (subject to edits) I imagine I’ll get back into weekend movie viewing, but it was a really good break.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Personal, Time management and goals
TYG does too. She requested I make it for her birthday after a friend of ours mentioned making it. So of course, I did. It came out a little misshapen — 
— but very tasty. However I think I overdid the glaze.
Very chocolatey though. She was happy.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Personal
Last year, I found Breaking Bread by Martin Philip a frustrating book. As I discuss at the link, when I followed Philip’s advice on keeping the dough at a precise temperature the dough rose much more than usual. But as my other bread books don’t specify a dough temperature, that didn’t seem to do me much good. Even so, I’ve had the urge to try and see if I could get the same results with other recipes. So last weekend, I gave it a shot.
Reading on the subject online indicated most bread doughs need a temperature between 75 and 78. Picking a whole-wheat recipe, I somewhat arbitrarily set the target temperature at 75 (75 to 78 is not a big difference but apparently it can make a big difference in the results). With air temperature at 66 and flour at 68 that meant the water temperature should be 91 degrees to get 75 degrees in the dough (I used my kitchen thermometer to figure all this out).
I actually miscalculated and made the temperature higher, but the bread still came out much larger than usual with my baking. I was able to use them for the sandwiches I made that evening — usually the slices are a little too small to be satisfactory.
I look forward to using this approach again.
#SFWApro.
So when my sister got me a gift certificate to Local Spicery, which sells both spices and tea, I couldn’t resist buying this one.
A satisfactory blend, in case you were wondering. I’m also pleased with the others I ordered: Assam, Darjeeling and Brobdingnag tea (an Irish breakfast blend). Though the latter should, of course, have come in a giant size tin.
Due to becoming caffeine sensitive with age, I have to drink all my day’s tea in the morning, which is occasionally frustrating, but better than getting even less sleep than I often do. I’ve begun having a cup first thing in the morning, which lets me squeeze in extra. And I love starting the day with tea, so hey.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Miscellanea, Personal
After watching The Sea Hawk back in February, I decided to reread its source, Rafael Sabatini’s novel THE SEA HAWK (yes, it took a while). I was pleasantly surprised to find it as much fun as I remembered: Elizabethan protagonist Sir Oliver saves his brother Lionel from a murder rap only to have the spineless youth realize framing Oliver for the crime would be even safer; to top it off, he pays a sea captain to have Oliver “trepanned” (shanghaid) and sold off as a galley slave, after which Lionel will pretend Oliver fled rather than face justice.
Fast-forward several years and Oliver is now Sakh el Bahr, the Sea Hawk, a legend among the Barbary pirates. When he learns from a captive that Lionel is marrying Oliver’s faithless fiancee, the Sea Hawk heads back to England to settle some scores … This was a solid swashbuckler with decent characterization and avoids making the Muslim supporting characters into devils. And unlike the film, nobody has to get into brownface to play the Arabs.
THE STAR KINGS has John Gordon, a WW II vet, agree to change minds with Zarth Arn, a prince from a galactic empire 200,000 years in the future. It’s only supposed to be temporary, but when the League of Dark Worlds begins its attack on the peaceful interstellar worlds, the prince’s father has “Zarth Arn” yanked out of his lab before the return switch. Now Gordon has a pivotal role in a fight he can barely understand, with incredibly advanced technology, and a romantic triangle to cope with to boot. This is a fun adventure, and the amoral, manipulative Shorr Kan is a remarkably likable villain. It does show its age in that while there’s a lot of advanced energy powers allowing for FTL communication and travel, the tech uses vacuum tubes.
The Shadow novel GANGDOM’S DOOM by Walter Gibson starts off with a bang when Claude Fellows — introduced as one of the Shadow’s agents in the first of the series — visits Chicago to help a witness turn state’s evidence, only to die in a hail of machine-gun fire. That, of course, brings the Shadow into the picture, but the results are a little too stock — you could replace the Shadow with a G-Man and not have it change much. Like The Shadow Laughs, this reuses crooks from an earlier story; statements that the Shadow never kills his enemies show Gibson was still working his mythos out (that certainly wouldn’t stay true). Competent, but not a standout.
Edward Eager’s TIME GARDEN has the kids from Knight’s Castle preparing for a dull summer at a seaside mansion where obviously no magic is going to find them. Then they meet a talking Natterjack which reveals the mansion’s thyme garden is yes, a time garden, allowing them adventures on the Underground Railroad, in the story of Little Women and to meet their parents as kids (a scene we already saw from the parents’ perspective in Half-Magic). Eager’s writing style is charming and his kids are fun, but as the kids themselves complain, adventures in history aren’t as exciting as the more outrageous exploits of the earlier books.
I picked up BREAKING BREADS: A New World of Israeli Baking — Flatbreads, Stuffed Breads, Challahs, Cookies and the Legendary Chocolate Babka by Uri Scheft from the library when it turned up in the same title search as Breaking Bread. Unfortunately it’s not very useful: Scheft is all about using a dough mixer and I don’t think I can translate “one minute on slow, two minutes on high speed” into hand-kneading. However it was fun to read about babkas, burekas and other popular breads of Israel.
#SFWApro. Cover art is uncredited; all rights to image remain with current holder.
Filed under Reading
So last month I checked the ebook of BREAKING BREAD: A Baker’s Journey Home in 75 Recipes by Martin Philip because I heard it had some excellent sections on bread-baking technique. It does, though I’m not sure how easily I can apply them to recipes from my other bread books.
I actually skipped over most of the text in Philip’s book. A lot of it is food memoir and I don’t care that much about what food recipes mean to him or the nostalgic feelings he has when cooking his family’s traditional dishes, etc. (I had a similar problem with Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene, though that was a better read). I was reading for the bread directions, nothing more.
Philip’s technique advice is much more rigorous than most bread books. He recommends measuring flour amounts down to the gram rather than by volume, and says water temperature has to be exact. Dough needs a precise temperature to rise best and morph into the best possible loaf: if the ideal temperature is 76 degrees, for example, and your kitchen is at 70 degrees (normal for my kitchen this time of year), you want water at 88 degrees. That’s a lot cooler than I usually use. He favors folding the dough — stretch it up, drop it back in the middle — several times during the initial rising, without much kneading.
I was skeptical, but I must admit the results were impressive. After weeding out several breads with a sourdough starter — I dislike keeping and maintaining starters because I don’t use them that much — I settled on an oatmeal bread. It had a “soaker” which was oats in water, oil and milk, but it was a one-time deal, no starter left on hand afterwards (obviously I could throw out a starter after I’d made the sourdough, but I’m slightly obsessive about not wasting food).
I had to guesstimate the temperature — no thermometer handy — and working with an ebook was frustrating (check recipe steps, flip through to detailed technique instructions, flip back … over and over again. Much easier in hard copy). Regardless, I ended up with a very good-looking and very tasty pair of loaves.
Did it taste better than other breads from other books? Not really? Did it taste good? Definitely. And the two loaves rose way more than mine ordinarily do. Not that my loaves are leaden or lifeless, they just don’t rise a lot. Is it just that some loaves don’t rise, or have I been doing it wrong all this time? And if so, which part of Philip’s approach made the difference? I’m guessing it’s either the water temperature or shaping the dough more carefully before the second rising.
If it’s the water temperature, I’m not sure this is a lesson I can apply to other breads. Philip gives a desired dough temperature to shoot for, but my other books don’t do that. At 70 degrees in the kitchen, the right water temperature ranges from 88 to 100 degrees depending on the desired dough temperature. Without a desired temperature to shoot for, I’d be flying blind. Though even 100 degrees is cooler than the water I usually use, so perhaps cooler water will help. Although that flies directly in the face of the usual recommended temperature for yeast, so I’m nervous … but I can proof the yeast in water in advance. If cooler doesn’t work, then I use hotter and try again before adding it to the bread.
If nothing else, the oatmeal bread was great. I copied a couple of the other recipes out; if they work out too, I may just buy the book.
#SFWApro.
First the bad: a week ago the power went out (transformer blew, judging from the sound). Only for around five hours but that’s enough that we had to throw out all dairy products and leftovers in the refrigerator. 
That’s Earth Balance, yogurt, feta, tofu, Parmesan, hummus and dog food. And cheddar. We don’t eat that much cheese per week, but given the unpredictability of what’s available in the pandemic I try to stock up. All wasted. I spent an extra hundred dollars replacing all that. Bummer.
The good. Some time back I read The Woman’s Own Book of the Home, a 1930s household management guide passed down from my grandmother. The recipes are a little intimidating to modern eyes as they say things like “place in the middle of a hot oven until done,” which isn’t very precise. However you can find translation guides online (“hot” in this context is 400 to 450 F) so I decided I’d try one of the bread recipes. I scaled it down by half — it’s the kind of thing you’d make for a farm family of six — and gave it a shot. Despite the lack of detail (no suggestion how long to knead it for, for instance), I had no trouble following it. Perhaps not surprising as I’ve been baking bread for around forty years, but I was actually surprised it came out well.
It’s a basic whole wheat bread, nothing fancy, but satisfying. And as a translation of the recipe, an accomplishment I’m proud of.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Personal
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