Maybe I should be thinking about new projects and ways to be productive, but I’m about to go get a Covid test and I’ve got work to do and it’s lunchtime, so instead I’m thinking about food.
Today that means I’m thinking about stuffed grape leaves. Our neighbor has a grapevine that has reached out to us and now covers a significant part of the fencing in the back. The vine is starting to bud and soon we’ll have new growth.
My culinarily-talented brother gave me this recipe years ago. I love citrus so I serve these with egg-lemon sauce, but adjust as you like.
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Stuffed Grape Leaves
2 lb. ground lamb 1 large onion ⅓ cup tomato paste ½ tsp. each thyme, basil, garlic powder 1 tsp. each oregano, dillweed, salt 1 cup cooked rice 1½ oz. Pernod Grape leaves (canned or bottled)
Dice onion and sauté in a little butter until tender. Add tomato paste, then lamb, stirring constantly as it cooks.
When lamb is almost cooked through, remove from heat, add spices, then stir in rice and Pernod.
Drain excess fat and refrigerate until use.
To assemble, lay out a grape leaf with the stem pointing toward you. Place a spoonful of stuffing at the bottom of the leaf, and roll leaf around it, working away from you. Tuck in the sides of the leaf as you go.
Heat in microwave for a minute or two just prior to serving. May be dressed with fresh lemon juice or egg-lemon sauce.
Everyone and their uncle will be talking pi/e today, so I’m just going to leave it at a wish for a happy day, and pie.
It’s cold again today, with gusty winds and a bright clear sky that feels like winter will never leave. Still, Spring is near, I just picked up the first Travis McGee book again and my reader mind is in Florida with lemon and lime trees around every corner. Today I’m thinking of warmth and lemon meringue.
Will I make it? Maybe, but taxes are calling. Either way, it is a delightfully sweet, citrus-scented dream.
Whether you’re in it for the math or the sugar, here’s hoping you have a very Happy Pi Day, folks!
I like Rube Goldberg machines. They are ridiculous and entertaining and look like something I might actually be able to make (even if that’s not always true). They also help me pay attention to the everyday objects and systems around me in new and more interesting ways, always helpful for creativity!
Here’s a fun one for all you cake lovers out there.
I especially love the butter bit. (TBH, though, after all that, I’d want chocolate:)
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And don’t even get me started on some of the lockdown creations people have come up with, like this family of awesome in Toronto.
I lost my biscuit recipe the other day. You know how it goes, you dig through your cookbooks, go online, pick a selection of recipes that looks promising, triangulate ingredients and techniques, make adjustments, then test and sample and retest until you come up with a recipe that works for you. Then you lose the piece of paper you scribbled it all on.
So there I was on Valentine’s Day, all ready to make chicken pot pie with biscuits (one of Mr. Man’s favorites) but I was short one biscuit recipe. I cobbled together a replacement but it was an imperfect substitute. Good news? Mr. Man was still happy. More good news? I found my original recipe!
I like this one because it’s quick, easy, uses the kefir we always have, and the melted butter with cold milk trick results in a lot of well-distributed butter bits without all the hassle of cubing and cutting in.
I am hereby committing it to these pages for posterity, and for Valentine’s Days to come.
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Buttermilk Drop Biscuits
283g [2 C.] flour
9g [2 t.] baking powder
2.3g [½ t.] baking soda
5g [1 t.] sugar
3g [½ t.] salt
113g [½ C.] butter, melted
245g [1 C.] kefir or buttermilk
Preheat oven to 475F.
Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar and salt.
Melt butter (I used the microwave for this), add kefir or buttermilk, whisk together.
Pour butter mixture into dry mix and stir until just incorporated.*
Scoop and drop large, rounded spoonfuls of dough onto a lined tray or on top of hot pot pie filling.
Bake until just golden and cooked through, 12-14 minutes for biscuits alone, or 24 minutes on pot pie.**
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* It’s easy to overwork biscuit dough. Ask me how I know!
** I’m experimenting with dropping the temperature to 425–450F for the last ten minutes of the pot pie to keep the edges from scorching, but that’s still in the trial phase. And I might add a bit more salt and sugar. And baste the top with butter when done, but only if they aren’t on top of the already buttery pot pie. And this is how I roll in the kitchen.
I’m baking today. I made a double batch of Sammich Bread so we would have two loaves of actual sandwich bread, and two loaves for experimentation. The extra loaves are a cinnamon walnut twist and a raisin bread with pear, cardamom, cinnamon and lemon syrup.*
The bread is currently in its second rise. I’m posting now because
1) isn’t it nice to be on top of things?
and
2) I’m pretty sure the raisin bread (at least) is going to go Not Entirely As Planned. Also, there’s no way I can get them all in the oven at the same time, which means rise times are probably going to be Not Ideal. Ah well! These things happen.
And if I post now I have a perfectly reasonable excuse not to include photos of said bread. Which may or may not look at all like I hoped:)
Me this morning. Only, not a dude. Photo by Vaibhav Jadhav on Pexels.com
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* I cheated a little, as I made poached pears the other day and that sauce is so delicious. The pears went into a jar and the extra syrup is going into… everything else:) This flavor combination is highly recommended! In fact, here’s a photo of the pears. Which are delicious. Have I mentioned?
I’m fortunate enough not to get headaches much, but last night I had a doozy. So headache plus poor sleep plus Tuesday (my least favorite day, you may recall) means that today is a bit of a slog.
Most of my time will be spent working, but I thought I’d take a few minutes for something soothing. And since I’m an English speaker with a penchant for bad Franglish jokes (sorry, French Canadian half of the family!), this bread-making video caught my attention.
I’m in the mood for cookies today, and winter spices seem like just the flavor. I’m not big on commercial cookies but I do have a soft spot for Biscoff.
A Belgian speculoos cookie, Biscoff are crunchy, flavorful, go great with coffee or tea, and can be (here’s the sad part) hard to find. They were at Costco for about a minute and then gone. Amazon would be happy to sell me a bunch but for inflated prices.
After some fruitless searching among the European delis in the area, I wondered if I could make my own. (Surely I could write reams of speculative fiction, if only I were fueled by speculoos. I had to find out.)
Good news! Stella Parks put together a recipe for a homemade version. You can dive into it here, with her explanation of why what should have been a simple process was not, and why some of the most important ingredients can get lost in translation.
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This recipe was a great place to start but not spicy enough for me. If you compare the original with what’s below, you’ll see I’ve boosted the spices considerably. I’ve also trimmed down the ingredients a little.*
Candi sugar was ok but it was hard to find and I found it a little too sweet. The kinako, or roasted soybean flour, was interesting but was a little too nutty and could lean toward burnt flavors.
I don’t know that these cookies have done much for my writing, but they are perfect for an afternoon coffee break. Enjoy!
.5g (scant 1/4 t.) ground or freshly grated nutmeg
.4g (fat 1/8 t.) kosher salt; for table salt, use half as much by volume or use the same weight
.25g (fat 3/16 t.) ground cloves
.4g (scant 1/4 t.) ground cardamom
.125g (fat 1/16 t.) ground anise
15g (1 T.) water
155g (1 1/4 C.) flour
Directions
1. With oven rack in lower middle position, preheat to 350°F. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, combine sugar with butter, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, cloves, cardamom, and anise. Cream on medium speed until fluffy, soft, and pale, about 10 minutes, pausing to scrape the bowl and paddle as needed if the sugar seems dense and compacted at the bottom of the bowl.
2. While creaming on medium speed, slowly drizzle in the water a little at a time. Once it disappears into the fluffy butter/sugar mix, reduce speed to low and add the flour all at once. Continue mixing until the dough begins to gather around the paddle.
3. Turn the dough onto a clean surface, and knead gently to form a ball. Pat into a rectangular shape, then dust with flour, above and below. Roll to a thickness of ~3/16-inch, using a ruler for guidance. Slide a spatula or bench scraper beneath the dough to loosen, and brush away any excess flour.
4. With a fluted pastry wheel, pizza cutter or blade, cut the dough into 3/4-inch strips, then cut crossways to form 2-inch rectangles. Cut the scraps with cookie cutters or bake as is. With an offset spatula, transfer the cutouts and scraps to a parchment-lined cookie sheet, leaving ~half inch between each piece to account for spread.
5. Bake until cookies are golden brown, about 16 minutes. Cool to room temperature directly on the baking sheet; the cookies will not crisp until fully cool. Store leftovers in an airtight container up to 1 month at room temperature; the scraps can be ground to use for crumbs and frozen in an airtight container for up to 3 months.**
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* I’ve included Imperial units but note that they are by nature less precise than weights, and I’ve only tested the recipe in grams. I will say that a couple of years ago I bought an inexpensive spice scale to go with my regular kitchen scale and it was very much worth it.
** Seriously though, they won’t be around that long. And I usually make a double batch.
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My recipe iterations, with version notes and the Post-it I use for marking out the dough spacing.
Ugh. I slept not well, feel not 100% well, and it’s Tuesday, the most demanding of my work days. But! I have decided!* Today will be a not bad day. Probably.
How do I know that this is true? Because already one thing has gone right. No spiders in my straws.
As you may remember, I usually have a smoothie for breakfast, the kind with chia and hemp seeds and other ingredients that require big straws. You may also know that I have a soft spot for the planet and the critters who live here (even creepies like spiders), so I don’t use plastic straws. A thoughtful friend gave me some cool metal bendy straws for my birthday (thanks, L.:)** which are terrific for things like lemonade and iced tea, but for smoothies, I like glass.
That’s them on the right. Sturdy borosilicate glass straws*** with rounded ends, thick enough for thick liquids but clear enough to see if anything has crawled inside during the night. Like a spider.****
It’s only happened once, but coming this close to sucking up a house spider first thing in the morning? Not something one forgets.
So, how do I know that today is going to be a not terrible day? No spiders for breakfast. I count that as a win.*****
Hope you have a not terrible day too, but if you don’t, remember that it happens to the best of us!
“But I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.”
― Charles Darwin
I think of this quote a lot on bad days. Just keep going. You’ll get through it.
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* I find this sort of declaration works better if exclamation points are involved.
** This photo shows other cool gifts as well, like the fun person-shaped tea infuser and spice rack. I try not to be too saccharine, because sometimes life just really is hard no matter how much positive thinking one applies, but starting off the day feeling both grateful and fortunate helps.
*** My straws came from a company called GlassDharma but they’ve retired now. They passed on their lifetime guarantee to another company called DrinkingStraws. I haven’t tried them yet but their straws look fun.
**** For a while we were getting spiders in all kinds of weird places, like the blender and yes, straws. My guess is that it the light refraction in those places looks something like water to them, but that’s just a guess.
I’m baking today. Remember that recipe I posted a couple of days ago? Yeah, that’s the one. Mr. Man is fresh out of sandwich bread and I like to bake, so it’s a win-win.
Bread is at once astonishingly simple (flour + water and optional leavening and heat, the end) and complex. Once you get past the basics, head onto the web and search for “baking bread,” you’ll find a million (no wait, 1.61 billion! seriously?) hits, plus an entire genre of cookbooks plus whole cultures (hello, France!) that revolve around this particular culinary marvel.
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I like bread. I like baking. I don’t love lots of nitpicky details.* That’s why I spend a non-zero amount of time trying to simplify my favorite recipes. I’m usually asking “What can I strip from this process and still have the result turn out well?”
But. Our house is cold at night plus my flour spends most of its time in the freezer, and cold dough is sluggish dough. So today I’m going to highlight a little thing called “desired dough temperature.” (Yes, the acronym is unfortunate, but it’s still a useful concept.)
“…there’s a crucial facet of baking that can help us bakers increase consistency that isn’t always immediately apparent: the importance of dough temperature in baking.”
The article linked above gets into the nitty gritty of what and why, if you’re up for a deep dive. Here’s a similar review from King Arthur, who I love***:
Geesh, so many footnotes today. Where was I? Right, how to produce consistent bread through temperature control. Ahem.
Short version: balance ingredient and room temperatures so your dough is ~78F. The easiest way to do that is to tweak the temperature of your liquid to compensate for cold flour, say, or a cold room.
There’s a formula, which I dutifully wrote down, then thought, “Self, you know the internet worked this out already. There’s got to be a handy dough calculator just waiting for you!” And lo, there was. I’m sure there are lots of them, but this is the one I’ve been using:
This is what my calculator looked like for this morning’s dough:
I used my mixer to knead the dough today and had to guess on the friction factor, but I came quite close to my target****:
And look, it’s time to shape the dough for its second rise. Happy baking!
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* I was never the kid who memorized every single dinosaur genus and species, or knew every baseball stat, or could rattle off the weather in my hometown in 1861. I suspect that particular period in a child’s life has to do with some confluence of brain expansion outpacing life expansion, but that’s just me guessing. Hmm… This is where I have a moment of deep introspection and realize, wait a minute, I was that kid. Not dinosaurs or sports, but Star Wars. And Lord of the Rings. On the other hand, I was never the sort of completist who had to love all things Star Wars (sorry Episodes I, II & III, you definitely do not complete me), so no judgements here.
** Aside: That Brød & Taylor proofer in this blog’s first picture? I want that. It’s pricey and a mostly single-use appliance and I don’t know that it’s quite big enough to hold all of our yogurt containers and as I’ve been telling myself for the past three years, I do not need it. And still it calls to me:)
*** Both as a mythical modern legend and a company. I liked T. H. White’s The Once and Future King and Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave as a kid. Although I try to ignore that business with Guinevere and Lancelot and Mordred and… ok, maybe I just like Merlin and Excalibur and the Round Table. Where (let’s bring it home) they would have enjoyed bread!
**** I probably should have stuck the probe in all the way (have I learned nothing from aliens?) but the dough ball was so nice I didn’t want to puncture it.
I post recipes for your entertainment and edification, but also so that when I lose my scribbled-on bits of paper I’m not left digging through piles of scrap-paper notes while muttering “I just saw it here somewhere!” For example, today’s recipe is my current favorite sourdough bread recipe. Here’s what it looks like when it’s at home:
Mr. Man liked my initial attempts at sourdough (I’ll have to post that recipe later) but wanted a soft, sandwich-friendly loaf that had good flavor and stored well but wasn’t as tangy as a classic sourdough loaf. This recipe works perfectly.
The recipe is a hybrid, with both starter and instant yeast. If you don’t have yeast, it’s possible to make it work with levain only, using a little more starter and longer rise times (check out comments at the recipe link below; search for “yeast” to see what other bakers have done).
The original is from King Arthur, an employee-owned company established in 1790, and known for its flour but also its recipes, videos, and helpful staff. We can’t get their flour up here, and so have to make do with alternatives. I use unbleached organic all-purpose flour because that’s what I’ve got, and I’ve tweaked the recipe to work without dry milk, which I never have.
I’ve used this recipe to make two standard loaves or (same bake time) one 9 x 13 pan of pull-apart rolls, great for sliders or with soup, chili, etc. Hasn’t failed me yet!
* The flavor won’t be as developed, but if you forget, this can be done the morning of.
Dough
• 5 1/4 C (631g) flour
• 1/4 C (50g) sugar
• 2 1/2 tsp (15g) salt
• 2 tsp (5.6g) instant yeast
• 4 Tbs (57g) butter, softened*
• 1 5/8 C (382g) milk (70° to 80°F, I microwave for 42 seconds)
• the ripe levain
Instructions
• Make the levain (~8pm): Mix the levain ingredients together and place in a covered container with room for the levain to grow. It will almost double in size, and will take about 12 hours to ripen at room temperature (70°F).
• Make the dough (~8am): Mix and then knead together all of the dough ingredients, including the levain, to make a smooth, supple, and not overly sticky dough. Your mileage may vary, but kneading takes me 10-12 minutes by machine or hand.
• Place the kneaded dough in a lightly-buttered bowl, cover the bowl, and let the dough rise for 1 to 2 hours, until doubled in size.
• Divide the dough in half, and shape each into 8″ logs. Place the logs in two buttered bread pans. Cover the pans and let the loaves rise until they’ve crowned about 1″ over the rim of the pan, about 1 to 2 hours. Don’t score.
• Towards the end of the rising time, preheat the oven to 375°F.
• Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until the crust is golden brown. (Internal target temperature is 195-200F.) For me, this is 35 minutes. Remove the loaves from the oven and turn them out onto a rack. Let cool completely before slicing.
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nom!
* The original recipe calls for room temperature butter, but I always forget to take it out the night before. Turns out melted butter works fine too. Mayonnaise works too, but I’d add another gram of salt.
J.R. Johnson 
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