Category Archives: food and cooking

Bread with Sorghum

books, bread, food and cooking, housework, people

I made some more bread this week. The bread pans and dough hook were still in hiding, but I enjoyed the kneading, and the free-form loaves do look more rustic, even if they are a bit problematic for B. when making his lunch in the mornings.

This time I used a lot less oil and sugar, and for flour I added some oat and sorghum to the mix. Sorghum? I picked up a small bag of the stuff somewhere, sometime, toward the goal of always-increasing variety in the diet. I didn’t really know where sorghum comes from, but while the dough was rising I read on the bag that it is a grain. This morning I read more about it online and find that it has been used for a long time by humans, more in other parts of the world than here in the U.S., but is gaining popularity here, too.

When it was time to put the loaves into the oven I quickly tried to think of what styles of decorative cuttings I’d seen on commercial artisan breads, but it was too late to do a good job of being creative in that department. So far, my experiment shows that the simple and traditional architecture is nicer.

I have a dear friend N. who is about my age. Neither of us gets to make bread the way we used to 20 or 30 years ago, when The Tassajara Bread Book was one of our bread bibles. Tonight I talked with her on the phone and told her about making bread twice in one week. She was surprised, and said, “You must be avoiding something you should be doing instead.”

That’s one way of seeing it, and how wonderful to have a friend who understands me! Another aspect of the phenomenon is that breadmaking is a relatively small and particular task that I know how to do. None of the little decisions about how closely to follow the recipe comes with very many options, and if the whole batch is ruined for some reason it wouldn’t have much consequence. Baking a loaf or two of bread takes only a few hours, and makes me feel homey, useful, and accomplished.

The tasks I am “avoiding,” on the other hand, consist of three whole rooms, each of which will require at least a day’s worth of work, consisting of one hard decision after another about whether to keep one item or who among my friends, or among thrift shops, might want  another one. If I keep it, how will I store it so I can find it? Etc. Everyone knows how that works.

Now how did I end up talking about sorting junk when I started with homemade bread? The subject is like the clutter itself, creeping in when you are busy doing doing good work. This next week is my chance to tackle one of those rooms, where I hope to lodge a wedding guest if I can clear off the bed. And this afternoon I found both my dough hook and my loaf pans, so it’s even possible I might be inspired to make bread again, too.

Bread for Sanity’s Sake

food and cooking, housework

Many things I do are probably downright irresponsible and illogical. Like making bread and blogging about it, when large areas of the house are still scary to venture into because of the piles of this and that tottering around you. Just fixing that one many-faceted problem should take priority over any optional activities, but there’s more.

A party is being given for my husband this Saturday, for which actual cleaning would be in order, and maybe hanging some balloons in those places where we still don’t have pictures back up on the wall for several reasons. I don’t have all my wedding garments ready or chosen or shopped for, for my own son’s wedding that is in two weeks. The church garden needs some more things planted, so they’ll be ready for the big festival we have in two months, and my garden wants weeding. Grandchildren are having birthdays for which I mustn’t forget to send the gifts I do have around here somewhere.

If I say that some things must be done just to keep me sane, I hope it will make people think twice before they call me to account for what is probably laziness.

In any case, I’m glad I did make bread yesterday. I tried to come up with a sensational title to this post, seeing how breadmaking is so fundamental and important an activity in the history of the world. And I love to make bread, though I haven’t for a year or more…can’t remember the last time I took out the yeast. When God gives me a summer of fog, and goosebumps in my own house, perhaps I could make a case for it even being logical to make bread.

Any bread would do, the mood I was in, so I found this card in my recipe box, and rye flour in a drawer. I started by mixing a sponge in my Kitchen Aid, and would have done most of the kneading in there, too, but I couldn’t find my dough hook. It must be in one of those boxes I haven’t unpacked. So I initiated my new quartz countertops in a monochromatic kneading session that only hurt my wrists a little bit.

I stayed up late last night waiting to take this bread out of the oven, and I’d have blogged about it right then if my camera battery hadn’t been used up. The plan was to go right to bed as soon as I turned off the stove. But it didn’t seem long after I set the loaves on my new baking stone and shut the door before Mr. Glad called from upstairs to ask what that “strong” smell was; he hoped the bread wasn’t burning.

No, it wasn’t, but when I looked inside, I saw that it was browning more quickly than I expected. Must be the convection oven, or the amount of sugar in the dough. I put some foil loosely over the top and let it stay in the full 45 minutes, during which time the whole house filled with the heady anise smell on top of the plain wonderful bread smell.

When I did take it out, I must have been in the middle of reading something interesting; anyway, I didn’t go to bed, and before I knew it, the bread was cool enough to slice and eat, which I did. I’m glad to report that it wasn’t as exquisite eating as it was intoxicating to the olfactory senses, or I’d have gone to bed really late, with a tummy ache.

It’s a very nice bread, but a little too sweet and rich for my taste. I’ll have to make some adjustments if I use the recipe again. This morning I hope to take one loaf to a friend. Thank You, Lord!

Foggy Flowers

food and cooking, housework, my garden, , ,

Yesterday the sun never did come out. They say our summer is 4° cooler than average, but it seems worse than that, especially when the morning fog continues all day. It’s making me slow and dull this morning.

I was busy in the kitchen yesterday, so it didn’t bother me too much. The lack of bright light made it possible to take flower pictures, so I did catch my new hyssop plant that has reached 4 feet! I bought the hyssop back in April, in a 2″ pot as I recall, but I can’t find a picture of it as a baby for comparison. It did grow fast.

 

The New Zealand Spinach I was so pleased to find at the plant sale has done beautifully. This is what it looked like back then:

Earlier this month I made some Creamy Green Soup using the first pickings, shown in this bowl, which you can’t really tell is 16″ in diameter. Creamy Green Soup is a recipe I got from Laurel’s Kitchen long ago. It is infinitely variable, depending on your whim and what greens you have around. This last time mine had split peas, this spinach, onion and garlic and basil in it….maybe some other things, certainly butter. It’s nice to add a little cream or cheese, too.

The nasturtiums I planted all over the back yard are doing famously. I remembered at least once to put three colors of their petals in a salad. Now I really must go upstairs and do some ironing. Maybe it will help warm me up on this wintry summer day.

Sticky Rice

food and cooking, ,

Ten years ago we had a Laotian neighbor who invited us to her wedding, where we experienced our first Thai sticky rice. Moist and chewy, but at the same time clean and dry enough to pick up with our hands out of a giant basket on the buffet table. It was aromatic, but different from jasmine rice.

Some years after getting the recipe from our friend I produced a good batch; she had moved away by then. The first several times it scorched cooking in a regular pot, but eventually I read online that what I needed for success was a certain type of basket steamer, which I bought at a Southeast Asian store for under $10.

It’s so easy now to make this kind of rice. Start with a bag labeled Sweet Rice that is found at the same kind of store. The typical Japanese/Chinese/Korean Asian market near here doesn’t even have it.  I don’t have to measure, but I put three or four cups of sweet rice into a bowl for soaking, and then rinse it several times until the water is almost clear. Tonight I used four cups.

You have to soak it most of the day if you are using cold water, but I read somewhere that I could use hot water for soaking and it would only require an hour or two. So I almost always do it that way.

After soaking, heat some water in the steamer pot, drain the rice into the basket over the sink, and set the basket of rice over the steaming water. Put a sizable lid from some other pot over it to keep the steam in.It takes about 20 minutes to cook; sometimes I turn the lump of rice over midway.

When it is tender, dump it out on to a board or mat big enough that you can spread it out with a fork to cool it down, to keep it from overcooking into a soggy lump. At this point you can form it into balls, as I did for my grandchildren last week–balls that can be dipped in a coconut sauce. I often put a pile into a bowl and ladle Thai stew over it.

But tonight I mixed the cooked and still warm rice with sweetened coconut milk to which lime juice had been added, to make a platform for chunks of mango. Those are not ants, but black sesame seeds sprinkled on top, as I assured my husband.

A can of coconut milk, 1/3 cup sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 2 tablespoons lime juice boiled together made the sauce that I poured over the rice that was still warm, then pressed it into a shallow pie plate and a pasta bowl. Within ten minutes it was firm enough to cut into wedges with a knife. It got even firmer when cold. This dish is called, naturally, Sticky Rice with Mango.