Category Archives: food and cooking

I like the oatmeal bread better.

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A week ago I put some sourdough sponges to ferment, and on Monday and Tuesday I finished the bread from them. First was the batch made with Manuel’s Rye Sour starter. I made it with whole grain flours and lots of seeds: sesame, black sesame, poppy, sunflower, and pumpkin. Did I leave anything out? I had a vision of a nourishing lenten bread.

Seeded Sourdough

The next day I was on the Communion bread team at church, and that morning we produced the most gorgeous “lambs,” but I didn’t have my camera, so I will show you a photo of one from the past. Ours this week were much browner and more evenly browned, having baked in the new convection oven.

It was at church I took these photos of wisteria later in the week. It surrounds the courtyard where the fountain was actually working that day.

As soon as I got home Tuesday I began to finish up the other dough, made with the pineapple starter. (Of course it has no pineapple flavor remaining.) I had decided to make that batch heavy on oatmeal and had added several cups of rolled oats to the sponge the day before.

Both the breads came out pretty well — but I have decided to end my Sourdough Experiments. I think the natural yeasts in the air of our town just don’t make a sour flavor that I like. The odd thing is, they are very active and powerful yeasts, compared to the ones where we used to live, which had a more agreeable flavor.  They work nearly as fast as commercial yeast.

The pineapple starter is a bit nicer, so I didn’t throw it out yet, but I keep thinking that I prefer the smell of regular bread in the oven, and out of the toaster. (Perhaps I should try biscuits or pancakes with that starter.) And I like oatmeal bread a lot better with butter in it as well as on it, so considering the small amount of bread we two eat, I may as well just not bother during Lent. I have learned a lot from my experiments. And I think all the bread I’ve been squirreling away in the freezer will do nicely to make grilled cheese sandwiches a few weeks from now.

Sourdough Oatmeal Bread

Addendum: In the old days either Pippin or I would bake 5-loaf batches of un-sour oatmeal bread once or twice a week as our household’s basic bread. It was a more traditional shape of loaf; these loaves are flattish because I haven’t yet worked out how much dough fills my new extra-large loaf pan and it came out a bit short.

Beautiful Beans

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A few weeks ago I bought a bag of Bean Soup Mix, with plans to use it during Lent. If those beans looked cheerful through the plastic bag, they more than brightened up the kitchen when released. I couldn’t stop taking their picture.

Then I washed them in the colander, and Mr. Glad said they looked like pebbles on the beach. Ah, no wonder they were captivating me. So I took their picture again.

I wanted my soup to be heavy on the vegetables, so one day I chop-chop-chopped and made colorful piles of collards, carrots, celery and several other ingredients all over the kitchen. After the beans soaked overnight and cooked a while by themselves, in went the vegetables, then some herbs and vegetable stock, and it seemed no time at all before I had my soup just the way I wanted.

It would be minestrone if it only had some tomato — that’s the one common soup ingredient I didn’t add in this case. The soup is not Asian, Tex-Mex, Italian or curried, so it will do nicely as Plain Food. We can use the break from the many spicy or highly flavored dishes I make so often. And vegetables – I think they are, dietarily speaking, my staff of life.

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?

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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.