Category Archives: food and cooking

Butter Week Quiche

church, food and cooking

Don’t know yet how it will taste, but it has the desired cream, cheese, milk and eggs, and butter in the crust. When I took two leftover lumps of pie crust dough from the freezer and mashed them together before rolling them out, I didn’t think about how they might not behave identically in the oven. I’m blaming the wonky edge on the split personality.

Other ingredients: spinach, Parmesan cheese, some leftover mix of cheeses from the freezer, caramelized onions, and tarragon. S & P. The Frugal Gourmet uses 4 eggs, 3/4 cup cream and 1 1/4 cups of milk in his basic quiche, so I followed those proportions approximately – and sliced a Roma tomato on the top for color.

Orthodox Easter or Pascha comes late this year, not until May 5th. This week is our last before the beginning of Lent, which officially starts with the Vespers of Forgiveness on Sunday. We sort of ease into Lent by fasting from meat only, and know it as Cheesefare Week, or as I enjoy calling it, Butter Week. Yum!

[Later in the evening] It was indeed yummy, better than I expected. That pie dough didn’t suffer at all being in the freezer for months, and the Frugal Gourmet’s advice to pre-bake the shell for 12 minutes was well taken; the crust came out just perfectly flakey and rich.

More or less of what?

books, food and cooking, poetry, , , ,

My thoughts about children’s books and Lent converge on this excerpt from Richard Wilbur’s More Opposites, which I think one of The Most Fun collections of poems and drawings. I don’t even require another person to read Wilbur’s humorous poems to — they often make me chuckle contentedly or muse to myself. I see that I already posted this particular one, but it was years ago, and I for one can use it often.

The illustrations of this question in the book include a simple drawing of people with distressed faces holding their tummies. I think the cartoon at bottom makes a similar companion to the poem.

It’s #15 in the More Opposites book:

The opposite of less is more.
What’s better? Which one are you for?
My question may seem simple, but
The catch is — more or less of what?

“Let’s have more of everything!” you cry.
Well, after we have had more pie,
More pickles, and more layer cake,
I think we’ll want less stomach-ache.

The best thing’s to avoid excess.
Try to be temperate, more or less.

There is a Mennonite cookbook titled More With Less, from which I gleaned many good cooking ideas in the early days of my homemaking career. But more valuable than the actual recipes was the refreshing concept that one might have more health and more enjoyment of eating and probably more money to spend on other things if you ate less.

Of course this is something we need to keep in mind all the time, not just during Lent. The church fathers caution us not to eat so much food that we aren’t able to pray after eating it; an overfull stomach hinders prayer. If it’s possible that Less Food = More Prayer….
Let’s just pause and think on that.

Sourdough Chronicles

food and cooking, ,

Today is Friday, which earlier in the week I designated as Baking Day. In anticipation, Wednesday evening I put two sourdough sponges to ferment. I am still experimenting with both the pineapple starter and Manuel’s starter. Last time I made bread with the pineapple one and forgot the salt. This time my focus was on following through with the salt, and on making a slightly smaller amount of dough with each type of starter, so that I would end up with two loaves of each.

The Manuel’s Rye Sour starter already has a darker color owing to its beginnings, though I haven’t fed it with rye flour yet. I might yet do that, if I buy some more rye flour; so far I’ve only fed it with unbleached white flour and water. Anyway, to go along with its flecks of whole grain I found a bag of teff flour in the freezer and put two cups of that into the sponge along with water and white (wheat) flour.

I added instant potato flakes along with flour and water into the pineapple starter.
Of course after I had taken a cupful out of each jar of starter, those soupy messes needed replenishing. I left them on the counter, too, when I went to bed.

The yeasts that grow in the pineapple sponge seem to work more slowly than the other – but its replenished starter was already highly active when I took this photo at right. It takes all my powers of restraint to not put up even more pics of bubbly gruels – must be the farmer in me that thrills at living and growing things .

I should have stuck that one back in the fridge! As I was about to drop off to sleep (while reading from the beginning of The Moonflower Vine a second time this month) I heard something like a balloon pop somewhere in the house. Out of my warm bed I popped to go looking around…but I didn’t discover until the next morning that it was the pineapple starter that had shot its lid off by super exhalations.

sourdough sponge with teff

The plan was to let the sponges sit around all day Thursday to get more sour. First thing I took some pictures. The pineapple sponge wasn’t very bubbly, but Manuel’s looked like it might be a pudding named Chocolate Foam. It has teff flour in it, remember.

Eritreans in my church often make their himbasha bread with some teff flour. They almost always make injera bread with at least part teff. It’s the smallest grain, and has more bran and germ than any other grain, too, giving it that warm hue. I found a fascinating page that clearly shows the relative kernel size of various grains.

tiny teff grains

By Thursday evening the pineapple sponge was similarly bubbly, while the teff mixture had separated into that thin porridge that isn’t very pretty. Usually when a jar of starter has sat in the refrigerator for a week or two it also looks like this (below), and sometimes also has some black oxidation in the mix. You’re supposed to just stir everything ugly back in.

This morning I used the Kitchen Aid with dough hook to do most of the kneading of my dough. I added gluten flour to both batches, and a tablespoon of salt and sugar to each, but no fat.

sponge after separation

The dough didn’t take all day to rise in the pans, as I’d expected — it took less than two hours. Jody at Gumbo Lily had told me about using a Dutch oven to bake a crusty “artisan” type of loaf, so I did that with one of the teff loaves, letting it rise and bake on a round of parchment paper.

Just before putting the potato dough into the pans I wondered if it might be a little boring as it was, so I scattered a total of three tablespoonfuls of poppy seeds on to the dough and kneaded them in as best I could.

The Dutch oven was supposed to bake at 500°, and many sourdough recipes called for a 450° oven, so I pre-heated the oven and the cast iron at the higher temperature and then dropped it to 475° after putting all the pans in at the same time.

Halfway through I took the lid off of the pot, and this was the state of things:

For the last 15-20 minutes of baking I reduced the temperature further, to 400°, I don’t know why. All the loaves were fully baked by 45-50 minutes.

As soon as I could I sliced into what might be called the Potato-Poppyseed Loaf (There is no pineapple flavor remaining from that original start weeks ago). It has a nice crumb, and the poppy seed flavor comes through just right. I didn’t expect the poppyseeds to be evenly distributed, since they went in so late — and they weren’t. Its sourdough flavor is mild.

Later Mr. Glad shared some of the Teff Loaf with me. It also is very tasty, only mildly tangy compared to my sourdough bread of antiquity, and compared to the Potato equally chewy and moist with a good texture.

What have I learned from my experiments?
1) In my sourdough bread I like the flavor of potato more than that of teff.
2) I like salt in my bread.
3) Fat is probably not necessary in sourdough.
4) The quantities of flour and water and salt I used in this batch were just about right.
5) Both of these starters work fine without the addition of commercial yeast.
6) So far the bread is not as dense in texture or as sour as what I used to make.

These loaves are more worthy to be given away than my last boring salt-free bread, so perhaps I can get them out of the house soon and be ready to do some more Sourdough Research. One thing I wonder is, will either of the starters change over time and make bread that is more sour? What was it that gave that old-style bread coming from my kitchen its character? Was it some feature of the climate we lived in at the time, a mini-climate just 15 miles away over the hills and farther from the ocean?

Perhaps I will try making the identical dough with both of the starters, to find out if I like the flavor or action of one better. Then I could dispense with having two containers crowding my already stuffed refrigerator.

I won’t likely find all the answers to my questions, and I will be content if I can eventually settle on a form of sourdough that is well-liked by our household and at least a couple of others. Then we’ll see if I can remember to feed the starter.
  

I go nuts with sweet and sour.

church, food and cooking, Lent, , , , ,

 

The sourdough experiment continued, through Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day. It felt a little hectic and chaotic (and nostalgic) to make cookies, pancakes, and bread, and eat candy, all in one week’s time. The chaotic part came from me being the only cleaner-upper of the kitchen. I always cook as though I have at least two of those following behind.

On Monday I put another sourdough sponge to ferment. This time I used the one made with pineapple juice, that took so long to get going. I had added a little buttermilk after a week or so and that seemed to give it a boost. At this point I added some flour and water and instant mashed potato flakes.

The next day was Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday, and for the first time ever I intentionally made pancakes for the day. I have never been in a church other than the Orthodox Church that had a liturgical calendar, and we don’t have Ash Wednesday. But Mr. Glad is Anglican now and I did it for the sake of that church’s tradition, even though there isn’t any need to use up all the eggs and butter in this era when Anglicans normally go on eating as they did before. All the while, the sponge sat nearby and got more sour and yeasty with those wild and local yeasts.

Wednesday morning I went to my first Ash Wednesday service with my husband. I didn’t take the ashes on my forehead, because I am not starting Lent yet, and when that time comes it will last just long enough.

In the evening I put together shortbread dough so that on Valentine’s Day I could cut out heart sweets for my honey. I used the Hearst Castle Shortbread recipe from 101 Cookbooks. Have you seen Hearst Castle? I went there and other places with my 8th Grade class on our Spring outing and don’t remember a thing.

All day I had thought about whether any minute I should finish up the bread dough and put it into pans to rise…I planned to make this batch without adding any commercial yeast, the way I used to do at the beginning of my sourdough career. In those days it was the usual thing for the dough to proof in the pans for several hours before it had risen enough to put into the oven. A couple of times I’d let it go all night.

As it happened, it just didn’t happen until the evening, that I could manage to get to it, and add the rest of the ingredients, i.e. some olive oil and mostly white flour. I forgot to add any sweetening, and I wrote down to put in 1 tablespoon of salt. But did I do it?

I shaped loaves and put them into three medium loaf pans on the counter. It was late by then, so I didn’t linger in the kitchen, but even in those few minutes before heading upstairs I saw that the dough was rising. Uh-oh. I was so tired, the clever idea of letting them rise in the refrigerator or in the cold garage never occurred to me. I went upstairs to crash.

Next morning….as soon as I woke up I ran down in my nightgown to find this:

So there was nothing for it but to do this:
And get those loaves into the oven as fast as possible. The little loaf was made of the trimmed-off pieces of dough.

We were expecting our out-of-town friend Myriah for lunch, but I had plenty of time to make the cookies I’d planned, or so I thought. But the slabs of buttery dough were too firm to roll out right away, so while they softened up on the counter I searched upstairs and down and all over for the pink and red baking decorations I had recently bought. Nope. Not to be found.

Finally I cut out hearts, and sprinkled on the remainder of a bottle of pink crystals left from some long-ago Valentine project. The cookies took much longer to bake than the recipe said, perhaps because my cookies were larger and my cookie sheet was insulated. All through lunch with our good friend I jumped up and down from the table to check the cookies and slide a few more on to the racks.

Meanwhile, the bread baked 50 minutes, cooled a little, and was soon tasted. The tops were rough and ugly where I had peeled off the plastic wrap, but the crust was just the right crunchiness and the crumb was lovely — chewy and moist. My first thought, though, was that I hadn’t added enough salt to the dough. After eating several slices I’ve concluded that I completely forgot to put in any salt at all. No wonder the dough rose so fast!

Myriah and Mr. Glad said they didn’t notice anything wrong with the sandwiches I made with the bread — they thought it was good. I’m eager to try doing pretty much the same method on a day when I have my wits about me. What to do with the Super Bland Sourdough? It’s perfect with Super Tangy and Salty Marmite spread on it.

Myriah brought some Crockpot Peanut Clusters that she and her daughters had made. They call for dry-roasted peanuts and the saltiness with the chocolate was addictive. The shortbread was heavenly. We ate plenty of both, no doubt out of salt-deprivation. The fact is, the flavor of sourdough does not come through without a little salt and maybe even a little sugar in the mix.

I didn’t think of taking the cookies’ photograph until I had put most of them into the freezer to have handy when Mr. Glad wants just one cookie, so I took out the container again so you can see them all piled up in it.

 

Am I not the maddest sourdough scientist you ever heard of? I should be embarrassed to tell this story, but instead it makes me laugh. I am strangely unflappable — I even considered starting another sponge today, but I got a grip on myself and even cleaned the kitchen before writing my tale.