Birthday Dinner!

Another one of my famously terrible photos... but you get the idea. Forgive me the chickens -- I had lots of meat eaters for dinner. The pie is tomato pie, from Laurie Colwin's Gourmet colums. The sweeet potatoes were dry (it's still early for them), but the beans were excellent. There's a big salad down the table, a rice salad (local rice!), and another green bean salad and dressings. I have to say, I was exhausted when it was all over. I had fun, though. Good fun. Worth every minute of prep.

Cake 3

Buttermilk cake with lemon frosting. Cake too squishy to frost entirely, so it has big pancakey layers of frosting. (I need to work on this.)
My birthday dinner was on my sister's birthday (the day before mine). Another guest - a new girl in town M met and, on her funniness and niceness, promptly invited - didn't mention it, but her birthday was actually the night of the dinner. I made this cake the day after, and we dropped it by her house.

Cake 2

Chocolate chocolate, topped with animal crackers.

Cake 1

Almond (naked).

Blowfish for vegetarians

Recently in the New York Times, Harold McGee had a fascinating article about baking baking soda. It turns out that when you expose baking soda to heat, it changes its chemical composition (from sodium bicarbonate to sodium carbonate).

After I baked the baking soda, I used it in two ways suggested by the article. First, pretzels, and second, alkaline noodles. The pretzels were okay -- I didn't think they were much different from my usual recipe which uses plain old baking soda. But the noodles! They were very exciting and I really want to make them again soon.

I didn't have any semolina on hand, so used plain, all purpose, white flour with some added vital wheat gluten. The noodles worked out so well -- they were bouncy and slippery (I'm not sure why the word 'bouncy' describes them so much better than 'chewy', but there you go). I had never really thought about what makes the family of yellow Asian noodles (I know them as Hokkien noodles or yellow mee, but they have lots of names) distinctive, but it turns out that they are all alkaline noodles.

R was very skeptical about my experiments with sodium carbonate. If you touch the stuff it could irritate your skin, so in his eyes I was dealing with a dangerous ingredient, like blowfish.

Plum Jam

This is a terrible picture of the plum jam I made this morning. 7 or 8 plums from the market had been hanging out in my fridge, so I boiled them up with some sugar and water and the juice of half a lime. I have been reading Laurie Colwin's old columns in Gourmet magazine (collected in "Home Cooking" and "More Home Cooking"), and to say that I have been enjoying these books is grossly understating the point. She wrote about plum jam, and I knew instantly what needed to be done.
I've already made my birthday cakes -- chocolate, for the People -- and a flourless almond cake for me. They're in the freezer. This is the filling for the almond cake. I made it in small rounds (6"), so it'll be a very tall four layers by the time I split and jam them. I plan to serve it (Saturday) with tofu custard. Yum.

It lives!

A confession: I forgot about my sourdough starter for months, and when I finally did unearth it from the fridge, it had completely dried out. Bad, bad baker!

I rehydrated it, and started daily feedings, but things weren't looking good. It smelled okay, but never got bubbly, and I thought it might be hopeless. But then, after about 10 days, there were bubbles. And now, we have bread:

I used the Natural Starter Bread recipe from Chocolate and Zucchini. I used a mixture of white, wholemeal and rye flours (about 200, 300, 100 grams respectively), plus some vital wheat gluten. One of the things I like about this recipe is that it has a long rising time -- my starter is kind of slow, and the 8 hour rise worked nicely for it. I wasn't sure about the recipe's suggestion of starting the bread in a cold oven (I've always assumed that you get the most oven spring from a preheated oven) so I used my usual technique based on the no knead bread one (where you preheat the cast iron pot, and bake the bread in that, for 30 minutes covered and about 20 minutes uncovered).

The bread worked out very nicely, with an excellent sourdough flavour.

Sometimes, We Need a Nice Sandwich and a Novel

The real treat here may be the soup (in the glass jar). Saute 1 onion, add lots and lots of sliced zucchini, and pour in some water with bouillon (not enough to cover zucchini). Steam/cook the squash until it looks soft. Add one small bunch chopped dill, puree, and serve room temperature or even cold. Delicious.
I believe I had this lunch, with a cloth napkin, while I was reading "Elegance of the Hedgehog." An excellent way to spend two days.
(I scored these plates - 4 - at a "moving sale" hosted by a woman I barely know who was moving to Scotland. I doubled my plate count.)

The Hot, Hot Oven

On the final days of a meditation retreat in early summer, I had begun to think of worldly things. Two worldly things became interesting to me in those days: an oven thermometer, and an oven timer. I bought them shortly after the end of the retreat.
I haven't been baking much this summer, but any time there is a birthday (a twelfth, a forty-seventh, a forty-fifth), I fire up the oven and make a double-layer chocolate cake. This is an old picture, but you get the idea... they're messy cakes, and obviously home made. The last one was covered in chocolate-covered star-shaped cookies. It looked crazy.

Tuesdays and Saturdays

This morning at the market, I came away with these things: kale, cantaloupe, bread & butter pickles, eggs, green beans, and cherry tomatoes. Jim, who grows organic vegetables and fruit, is especially nice to me. Today opened up his cooler to pack my bag of kale with all of his scraps. He wouldn't take anything extra for them.
I came home and made a peach salsa and a kale salad. This photo is from a week ago, when I re-made the zucchini soup. I used some of these peaches for my salsa, and froze most of them for smoothies. Before I head off to work, it's already 86 degrees or so, and the cold cold drink is lovely.
The market - the farmers, the food, the event of being there - is absolutely my favorite part of every week.

Easy Dinner

You may not know it in the Southern Hemisphere, but today is the start of College Football Season here in the Deep South. I made a very very easy dinner, with ingredients almost entirely from the market: the soup is built from bouillon, and some roasted tomatoes and red pepper; it was a bit lemony by the end (?), so I added a small spoonful of basil pesto. The sprouted wheat toasted cheese is filled with goat cheddar curds. The pickles, bread and butter, I love to put inside the sandwich while it's hot and gooey. Yum.