Food – Page 22 – Into the Woods

Grinding your own flour

As I have gotten more and more experienced with sourdough bread, two factors have converged to pull me into breadmaking even deeper. Watch out. It could happen to you, too.

For one, the sourdough baker becomes so obsessed with the quality of the bread and takes such pride in each loaf that the amount of time and work involved is no longer an issue.

For two, it’s difficult to find stone-ground whole wheat flour these days. Partly, I suspect, this is because of the demonization of gluten (and therefore wheat) by so many “gluten free” people. Whole Foods now carries all sorts of exotic (and, in my opinion, useless) flours, and that’s crowding out good wheat flour. Organic wheat berries, however, are easy to buy in bulk, and they’re cheap.

My Champion juicer, fitted with Champion’s grinder attachment, makes a somewhat slow but entirely workable wheat grinder. The flour is excellent. Later this week I hope to have a portrait of my first home-ground loaf.

Update: The bread rose poorly and did not make a portrait-worthy loaf, probably because the weather was so cold. However, it was delicious.

An earthier take on sourdough

Up until recently, my philosophy on sourdough bread was influenced chiefly by Peter Reinhart (The Bread Baker’s Apprentice) and Michael Pollan (Cooked). While looking at reviews of cookbooks on Amazon, I came across this book by Lisa Rayner, Wild Bread: Handbaked Sourdough Artisan Breads in Your Own Kitchen. The book has definitely changed my philosophy of sourdough.

Technically, the main difference in Rayner’s approach is that she uses more starter. She builds up her starter with three successive feedings before mixing her dough. The starter provides nearly half of the total weight of the loaf.

But there is another difference in her philosophy of bread that is more subtle but very important. Pollan and Reinhart are city folk. Their references for bread are the sophisticated professional bakers that you find in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York. Whereas Rayner is much more rustic, more provincial, in her approach to bread. Provincial is good.

When good cooks ask me what my chief influences as a cook are, I name three: traditional Southern cooking as practiced by my mother’s mother, whose kitchen was supplied by a good-size farm; my eighteen years in California and my love for California cuisine as exemplified by Alice Waters; and hippy cuisine.

What’s hippy cuisine? Remember The Tassajara Bread Book? It was originally published in 1970. All through the 1970s, hippies were developing a new, healthier, more vegetarian cuisine. Think of Moosewood Cookbook (1977), or The Findhorn Family Cookbook (1976). In my opinion, these three very different approaches to cooking fuse very well. Wild Bread was published in 2009, but there is something very 1970s hippy-esque about it.

The first loaf of bread I made after reading Rayner’s method was just what I aim for — inherently and un-obviously sophisticated yet extremely countrified and rustic. As I said to Ken, the bread that Frodo and Bilbo ate in the shire was probably like that. In my imagination, at least, it’s what a loaf of bread might have been like a thousand years ago. Bread with that ancient quality just cannot be done with yeast. Only sourdough will do it. And, paradoxically, such a rustic bread can be achieved only with some hard-to-learn techniques and things that many kitchens don’t have — a baker’s peel, a baking stone, durum flour for dusting, and so on. One of those tools, unfortunately, is a steam oven.

Cotillion chardonnay

I have very rarely bought wine just because I liked the label. But when I saw this chardonnay at Trader Joe’s, I laughed out loud at the label and bought a bottle.

It’s a so-so chardonnay, barely worth the price at $8.99. It’s a blend of grapes from three counties — Sonoma (63 percent), Napa (20 percent) and Monterey (17 percent). That’s an entirely agreeable blend of California chardonnay regions, but still the wine falls short.

Another thing that fascinates me about this wine is the word cotillion. That’s a type of country dance, of course, similar to a quadrille. Our American square dance is a quadrille (and therefore a cotillion), I believe. In fact the word quadrille relates to squareness and the number four. Apparently the word quadrille fascinated Lewis Carroll, since he wrote the poem “The Lobster Quadrille” for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

As for the word cotillion, it comes to English from a French word, cotillon, which means petticoat. An unabridged French dictionary says that cotillon also refers to party novelties such as confetti and streamers. Another French dictionary, tout en français, (the abbey has lots of dictionaries) defines cotillion thus: Divertissement composé de danses et de jeux avec accessoires (chapeaux, serpentins, confettis, etc.) et qui clôt le bal. So cotillion is the precise word for what the animals are doing in the label. They’re winding up the barnyard ball with a wild dance with festive accessories.

These days I’ll take a laugh anywhere I can get it. Though at the moment (9:22 p.m.) it’s time to switch to some serious port.

Seeds!

Plans are in for a big garden for 2017. Last fall, Ken fed the garden with generous quantities of organic soil amendments, then planted cover crops. The abbey’s garden soil has been pure organic dynamite for years, but this year it should be better than ever.

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds has been our source for garden seeds for years. Unfortunately, we haven’t done a good job of saving seeds from year to year, so that’s something we need to work on.

Each year we learn. For example, as much as everyone loves broccoli and cauliflower, the climate here is such that cool-weather crops like broccoli bolt too soon, without ever forming heads. We end up wasting a lot of garden space and effort on broccoli and cauliflower. Cabbage, however, does fine. This year we’ll do more herbs — basil as always, but also parsley and cilantro.

Here’s hoping that 2017’s weather will make it a good gardening year. Last year was terrible. There were long spells of hot, dry weather that were devastating to gardens. We can deal with the heat, but not with drought.

Uh-oh. More cookies.

The abbey’s chocolate budget is pretty high. Though desserts are far from a regular thing, there’s always dark chocolate after supper — the good kind, organic chocolates from Whole Foods, usually 70 percent and above. If the chocolate runs low before I make a Whole Foods run, then some sort of emergency chocolate is necessary. A morsel or two of chocolate after supper is de rigeur. Not to mention an addiction. Preferably with port.

These double-chocolate cookies, from a New York Times recipe, are my current candidate for emergency chocolate. The goal is to keep the chocolate hit high and the calorie hit low. Just keep some dark chocolate chips (or discs) on hand, and cocoa, obviously, and you’re good for making emergency chocolate.

The recipe makes just over two pounds of cookie dough, so I bake half of it at a time and leave the rest of the dough in the refrigerator.

Simple Friday

The weather Friday was perfect (67 degrees F, quite a change from the polar vortex a week ago), so we had Simple Friday rather than Simple Saturday this week.

Why is cooking and eating outdoors so much fun? In any case, I’m starting to get the hang of cooking on the firebox. I’d kill for a brick-made outdoor range, with an oven for baking bread. Ken spent most of the day working on a second chicken house. There will be photos of that soon.

Port

When I lived in San Francisco, it was easy to buy good port, with lots of options. Much of it came from California. But, here in the provinces, the city liquor stores don’t carry port. If the grocery stores have it, it is almost always cheap brands that are not safe for septic tanks, let alone for drinking.

Trader Joe’s has come to the rescue with an Evenus port in half bottles, at $9.99. I suspect that this was bottled especially for Trader Joe’s. Evenus usually labels their ports with the type of grape (for example, syrah, or zinfandel) and a year. This port is labeled “Port Dessert Wine,” as though it’s meant for a market in which people don’t really know what port is, or even that it’s a dessert wine. No matter. It’s a superb little bottle of port.

Sometimes when I’m admiring the recipes and food photos at the New York Times web site, I marvel at how many dessert recipes there are. Do people really make, and eat, so many desserts? Here at the abbey, pies and cakes and pastries are rare. One way of cutting down on dessert consumption is to always keep a good stock of dark chocolates for after dinner. Nothing goes better with chocolate than a wee glass of port. Calories saved!

Cooking from the bottom of the kitchen

One of my sayings is that I can always squeeze one more meal out of an empty kitchen. Today is a squeeze day.

It’s Tuesday morning. Starting Friday evening, snow started falling. By Saturday morning, it looked like a blizzard, with 10 to 12 inches of snow on the ground. That night, the low temperature was about 8 degrees F. On Sunday night, the low was about 5 degrees F. The kitchen was prepared for being snowed in, though fresh food was started to run low. I had not been to Whole Foods in more than two weeks. Nor am I going to Whole Foods today. The Smart car is still very much snowed in and is not going anywhere for a while. Even though the Jeep would get out perfectly well, I’d rather cook from the bottom of the kitchen than clean the snow off the Jeep and drive it on salty roads.

I call this “cooking from the bottom of the kitchen.” In the refrigerator, there are eggs, milk, plenty of wine and ale, lots of butter, and all sorts of sauces and such. In the cabinets, there is no shortage of flour or oil or things that come in cans. It’s fresh food that is always the problem. I just took an inventory. I have half an onion, a lot of celery, and a winter squash. There are lots of sweet potatoes (I had bought a bushel of sweet potatoes a few weeks ago). We are nowhere close to starving. But the objective, of course, is not to avoid starving but to make something good out of a kitchen in which supplies are dwindling. Cooking from the bottom of the kitchen is a good exercise in frugality. It gets you to use up things you’ve been ignoring but that need to be used. The beets that I had been ignoring got eaten last night.

So then, for supper I’m thinking butternut squash soup (with lots of celery), a whole wheat flatbread, and tuna salad (with lots of celery).

After supper, I’ll clean the refrigerator to get it ready to be filled up again. And tomorrow I’ll go grocery shopping.

Winter pesto with foraged chickweed

I finally remembered to use some of the chickweed that is growing so abundantly in the backyard and orchard right now. Mixed about half and half with fresh cilantro, it made a fine pesto as a dressing for avocado. The chickens love the chickweed, by the way, and we get the benefit of the chickweed indirectly in egg yolks that are as golden as springtime eggs, but in December.

The rest of this breakfast was organic yellow grits, bought in bulk at Whole Foods and drenched with garlic butter, and an abbey-laid egg fried in garlic butter.

The cookie is from a New York Times recipe, Tahini Shortbread Cookies. I substituted stone-ground whole wheat flour for most of the flour, and I substituted walnut oil for part of the butter. Next time I think I’ll add a little almond extract and some chopped pecans. The cookies have a delicate sandy texture and are great with tea.

K&W Cafeteria revisited

I know I’ve written about K&W Cafeterias before, but I had not been to one in almost a year. The nearest K&W (on Hanes Mill Road in Winston-Salem) recently reopened after being closed for several months for renovation.

Yes, I have a fascination with cafeterias, diners, and white-tablecloth bistros. In the category of cafeterias, K&W is as good as it gets. I used to have a Welsh friend who lived in London (he is now deceased) who loved to eat at K&W Cafeterias when he was in the U.S. It’s a pity, he used to say, that there isn’t one in London, because it would do huge business. K&W Cafeterias have changed very little since the 1930s, and that’s an important reason they stay in business. Pretty much everything is made from scratch, and the menu changes considerably from day to day.

They changed their china when they renovated. The segmented diner plate, alas, was plastic. But everything else was good vitreous china made in the U.K. Notice that the iced tea was the most expensive item on my ticket. Refills are free, and people drink a lot of that stuff.

Their corporate office is in Winston-Salem, but here’s a list of their locations.