Greek Celebration Bread

Crazy, but true: I have been writing this here blog for three years today. A lot has happened in three years, and not just in the kitchen. I know I’ve said it many times before, but it’s true: When I first started writing here, I really didn’t know much about cooking at all. I’d always enjoyed doing it, but my technique left much to be desired. My favorite meal was rice and beans from a box, and I was so freaked out about raw shrimp I didn’t look closely enough to see that they weren’t de-veined before cooking them. I thought baking bread from scratch was Little House on the Prairie stuff, and I didn’t have the first clue that broccoli has a season.

In celebration of three years of cooking and writing and taking pictures of food, and learning my way around an oven, I decided to splurge this week and bake this lovely Greek Celebration Bread, from Reinhardt’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, as my weekly breakfast loaf. And it does feel like a splurge from my usual plain, whole wheat loaf. This bread is fragrant and tender and rich and really freaking fabulous.

Rustic Walnut Bread

For someone who bakes her own bread pretty regularly, I haven’t experimented too much with different types of bread. I usually only eat bread once a day, for breakfast, with peanut butter, so I tended to think that my options were limited to plain sourdough or wheat. But I recently read a book by Joyce Carol Oates in which the main character begins learning how to bake bread. And she bakes all kinds of different loaves, full of fruits and nuts and flavors, and I was smitten. I decided it was time to branch out, to move away from sourdough and try something new. And I just happened to open one of my bread cookbooks to a recipe for Rustic Walnut Bread, and my decision was made.

Focaccia Mediterranea

One of my favorite things about my new life in Walla Walla is that I have plenty of time for elaborate cooking projects. I have long, lazy Saturdays and Sundays with no one to see and not very much to do, and I spend most of that time in the kitchen (or on the couch learning to crochet and watching Buffy). On weekend evenings I like to pick a recipe from one of the many cooking magazines that are taking over my house, something that looks elaborate and involves many steps, and spend a good two or three hours in the kitchen, kneading dough and roasting things and assembling and baking and then, happily, eating.

This particular piece of deliciousness, from La Cucina Italiana, took about three hours, although most of that time was spent watching a movie while I waited for dough to rise. And it was well worth the wait. The dough is easy and rolls out smoothly (though it could do with a teensy bit more flavor, which could be achieved by letting it sit in the refrigerator overnight, I suspect). Roasting peppers in my oven was an adventure, and the end product was excellent: yeasty and warm and full of flavor. Anytime you combine bread, vegetables, and cheese, I suspect it’s impossible to end up with something bad.

My First Sourdough Bread

Several weeks ago I teased you all with mention of my newly acquired sourdough starter. I nursed it back to health, waiting patiently to make my first loaf, and of course, the day I was all set to make it I read through the instructions and realized that you have to feed a starter before you use it, so that it’s fresh and active. I fed the starter, and then unthinkingly put it back into the refrigerator, where I suspect it promptly went back to sleep, or whatever it is that sourdough does that makes it less useful. So my project was delayed. I tried to do a little research so I might have a better understanding of my starter, but the interwebs were full of conflicting information. Shocking!

Well, this past Friday I finally got around to baking my sourdough. I remembered to feed the starter Thursday evening, and let it sit near the radiator Friday morning to ensure it was fully lively and ready to go. Then I got to messy work. And you know, even though the loaf didn’t turn out as sour as I hoped (it’s not San Francisco, after all), it is easily the best loaf of bread I’ve made yet. The crust is lovely and chewy and the texture is just right, not too soft or too dense. Next week I’m definitely trying out the extra-tangy version of the recipe that came with my starter.

Peanut Butter Bread, new favorite breakfast

My housemate, Christa (of the Turkey Chili Rice fame) gave me a wonderful old cookbook for Christmas: Good Housekeeping’s Book of Menus, Recipes, and Household Discoveries, from 1922. The binding is delicate, the pages yellowed, and it has the great musty old book smell that I would wear as perfume if I could (um, maybe). It offers recipes for every day of the year (as long as you don’t mind eating cold boiled tongue and buttered asparagus every Sunday in May), and I can waste hours perusing the pages, awed by the odd ingredients and the minimal instructions. It’s clear reading this that back in 1922 it was unnecessary to explain every step of a recipe because the woman reading it (and yeah, it was almost always a woman) already knew more cooking basics than most people do today. I’m totally fascinated by this cookbook.

Sneak Peeks: Baking to come!

I have a full day of baking ahead of me, one of my favorite ways to spend a day off. I thought I’d give you all a little sneak peek, to tempt you about the exciting things that will be posted here soon!

Quintessential Summer Dinner: BBQ Chicken, Potato Salad, Corn, and Biscuits

I told you I ate a lot of great food in San Diego. The best part of my trip was being able to enjoy awesome meals with my family and friends. There is something perfect, something I miss everyday living here in Boston, about sitting at a table with people I love, sharing food and conversation. I grew up in a house where family dinners were important: I remember waiting every night for dinner until everyone was home from work and school and practice and whatnot before we sat down to eat, and now that I’m an adult (ahem, ha ha) I realize how great, and perhaps uncommon, it is that my parents brought us up like that. So, thanks ma and pa. You guys are rad.

The last night I was in San Diego, my aunt and uncle and their two kids came for dinner, and we cooked up this way-too-classic summer dinner: barbecue grilled chicken, corn on the cob, German potato salad, and buttery biscuits. The only thing missing, perhaps, was apple pie. But we had vanilla ice cream with strawberries instead, which is pretty perfectly summery itself. And this dinner was truly a group effort. I made the barbecue sauce and biscuits, Mom made the potato salad, my brother’s grilled the chicken and corn, and Dad entertained us all, the goofball.

King Arthur’s Blitz Bread, or Ghetto Foccaccia

Most of the time, I enjoy cooking projects that are complicated, things that involve many steps and often bewildering instructions. I did recently try to make sourdough from my own starter, which, sadly, was an utter disaster. I’ve been dreaming of making croissants for awhile (I hear this is a three day process), and I have in the past tackled tortillas, chicken mole, homemade pasta, tortilla espagnola, paella: foodstuffs which have a (sometimes) deserved reputation for difficulty. But I have always stopped short of breads that involve making a biga or a poolish. I mean, just look what happened with my starter! Whenever I see a bread recipe that reads “add 1 cup biga” I tend to run the opposite direction, which is a shame, because that stuff is what makes bread really really good.

I am trying to get over this pre-ferment fear, but in the meantime, I’ve discovered a way to make foccaccia without a pre-ferment.

Sun-dried Tomato and Caramelized Onion Scones

There is a little bakery across the street that consistently makes the Jamaica Plain’s Best list as the best local bakery, and frankly, I have no idea why. Sure, they make vegan cupcakes, and JP is just the sort of neighborhood where people will swoon for a vegan cupcake. And yes, there is a shortage of places to get a cup of decent, non-Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. But nothing, I tell you nothing about this bakery has ever impressed me. The pastries and pies look sloppy: I could frankly do a better job in my own kitchen. The croissants are not proper croissants, but more like bread dough shaped to masquerade as croissants. I ordered a sandwich once and the bread on which it was served was stale. At a bakery! And I won’t even get into the abysmal service.

For reasons unknown to me, however, I still occasionally visit this bakery, as though somewhere I can’t give up hope that my previous bad experiences were flukes, each and every one. I can’t account for my actions sometimes. What is they say about crazy people? On my last visit (the visit of the stale sandwich), I noticed some roasted red pepper, spinach, and caramelized onion scones in the display case, and the hamster wheels in my little brain immediately started spinning. “What a brilliant idea!” I thought. But I was not about to buy one of their scones (vegan, of course) only to be disappointed. No, I decided to go home and make my own.

Semolina Wheat Bread

Baking bread is one of those things that is really hard to find time to do when you’re in grad school. I am very rarely home for more than two hours at a time, and even the famed No-Knead bread requires some pretty tricky timing maneuvers. So, since I’m on spring break this week and have all kinds of time, instead of buying a fresh loaf of bread for my morning toast-and-peanut-butter breakfasts, I decided to bake myself up a loaf of something tasty. Well, something hopefully tasty. My skills with all things dough-related tend to vary widely, but yesterday I was up for a gamble. And thankfully, despite the fact that the dough was a pain in the arse and the bottom of the loaf stuck to the pan and tore clean off despite having oiled said pan, this bread is something of a triumph.

I first got the idea of using semolina flour bread from Panera, actually. When I was in San Diego at Christmas, I went to Panera for the first time so my mom and I could buy bread for dinner. I was immediately intrigued by their semolina loaf, so we bought it, and were not disappointed. The texture was perfectly grainy and the flavor was just a little different, and a lot delicious. Ever since then, semolina bread has been in the back of my mind, but the aforementioned grad school responsibilities kept me from semolina experimentation. But isn’t that what spring break is for?