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.

Election night baking

I had to do something to ease my nerves. And so, bread:

Even though the results were coming in and not looking too good, when I pulled this beautiful loaf out of the oven, I cheered up for a bit. (Basic boule from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, with a bit of sourdough starter added, baked in a Dutch oven.)