Category: Food

Even though it’s February, and even thought the yard smells like the 500 pounds of organic fertilizer that was spread yesterday, the temperature was in the 60s, and the deck and the grill were calling.

For breakfast I settled on pancakes with two different treatments. On the right is a chutney of roasted apples and tomatoes. There is onion and coarsely grated carrot in the chutney, sautéed on the stovetop. The seasoning is cinnamon and cumin, with a bit of brown sugar. On the left is a grilled banana with maple syrup. The pancakes are made from organic sprouted whole wheat flour, milk, olive oil, and baking powder.

I suspect that supper will be cooked on the grill, too.

Is it that I don’t get out much, or are eggs Benedict not on many restaurant menus anymore? Once upon a time, when butter and eggs were considered much more unhealthy than we consider them now, eating eggs Benedict was extremely decadent. But the chickens have been laying extremely well lately in spite of the cold, so I have eggs to spare, and then some, for Hollandaise. Eggs Benedict are a heck of a lot of work, though, so that ensures that one doesn’t eat them too often.

Making English muffins is no big deal. I used the recipe from King Arthur flour’s web site and baked the muffins on a griddle on the gas grill. As for the Hollandaise, for years I have used Irma Rombauer’s classic recipe from the 1943 edition of Joy of Cooking. It comes out a little thick, though, which probably means that my home-laid eggs are much bigger than the eggs Irma used. The fake bacon is from Morning Star.

In a recent post on healthier hot dogs, I mentioned the Loma Linda canned hot dogs and that I’d had a hard time finding them. It occurred to me that the local Ingles store, which carries a lot of slow-selling products that many grocery stores don’t carry, might have them. Indeed they did. They were in a section that I don’t exactly frequent — canned meats.

The Loma Linda hot dogs are pretty good, though the bite is a little soft. I’d say that the Morning Star hot dogs are a bit better, but either makes an entirely convincing vegetarian hot dog.

Are pasta salads more a summer thing? Pasta salads were never in my repertoire until recently, when I hired a caterer for a political event and one of the dishes was pasta salad. It was good, so I resolved to add pasta salad to the competencies of the abbey kitchen.

One of the cool things about pasta salad is that it’s a work of imagination. What have you got in the kitchen, and what can you do with it? The pasta salad above is artichoke hearts, a winter tomato, raw walnuts, roasted peanuts, and Roquefort. It’s dressed with a dressing that is sorta-kinda ranch.

The previous pasta salad was a warm pasta salad with seared shredded cabbage, walnuts, peanuts, and a dressing that included toasted sesame oil and brewer’s yeast.

Trader Joe’s, by the way, has canned artichoke hearts at a reasonable price. TJ’s also has proven to be my best source of affordable avocados that almost always ripen nicely. Even Roquefort (and other good cheeses) are affordable at Trader Joe’s. I’m aware that Trader Joe’s is disparaged by Californians as the Walmart of the grocery business. But shopping wisely at Trader Joes’ (lousy produce!) can really stretch the food budget.

Pasta salad should be a creative mixture of tastes and textures. Now if I can just stop myself from buying Bacon Bits…

And remember, anything MacDonald’s can do, you can do better. And cheaper. And not have to eat off of paper.

This is a homemade sausage biscuit with Morning Star vegetarian sausage.

I love the taste of organic stone-ground whole-wheat. It tastes like wheat, and I love wheat. I also make no apologies to anti-gluten partisans, because I think that good wheat breads baked at home from good organic flour are not at all the same thing as commercial baked goods. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to Google for the difference between stone-ground flour and ordinary whole-wheat flour and how they are milled. But there is an easily detectable difference in taste. Ordinary whole-wheat flour often has a bitterness, or what country folks disdain as having a “whang” about it. Stone-ground whole wheat flour has no whang. It tastes like honest wheat, which is what it is.

But the problem with stone-ground whole-wheat flour is that it is very hard to work with. The bran is rough and dry. Unless you use baking techniques optimized for stone-ground flour, your baked items are likely to end up hard and dry. The easy and fast method is to combine the stone-ground flour with whatever portion of unbleached flour your conscience will permit.

Artisan bakers of yeast and sourdough breads who work with stone-ground flour insist on soaking the flour before using it. That softens the bran, encourages some beneficial chemical processes, and makes a tastier, better-rising bread. You also need to get as much moisture into the bread as possible. Surely, I thought, the same concepts can be applied to quick-breads like biscuits.

As usual, I apologize for not usually giving specific recipes here. Part of the reason is that I rarely use exact recipes for things that I make frequently. Another reason is that this is about a concept — the concept of making quick-bread with stone-ground flour. I’m assuming that you’re already an experienced biscuit-maker and that you already have a method or a recipe.

The night before you make the biscuits, mix your stone-ground whole-wheat flour with milk (or buttermilk). We’re going to add more liquid in the morning, so use only enough milk to satisfy the thirst of the flour while keeping the mixture fairly stiff. Also add a teaspoon to a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, depending on how large a batch of biscuits you’re making. Put this in the refrigerator, covered, overnight.

The usual method of mixing biscuits completely falls apart if you’re starting with wet flour. I suppose you could mix your shortening into the flour before the soak, but I don’t. Take your flour mixture out of the refrigerator early to let it come to room temperature. Cut your shortening into small pieces (I use butter) and use your hand to mix the shortening into the flour mixture. This will take some patience, but small lumps are OK.

Now the objective is to get a bit more liquid mixed into the dough, along with the salt and baking powder. Cutting the dough into pieces (leave it in the bowl) might help here. Add the baking powder and salt. Add more buttermilk if you used buttermilk, or heavy cream if you used milk the night before. The thickness of the buttermilk or cream helps get more moisture into the dough. You should end up with a moist biscuit dough. Shape the dough into biscuits as you usually would.

I bake the biscuits at 450 degrees using the bread function of the Cuisinart oven, which injects steam into the oven for the first seven minutes of baking. This helps keep moisture in the biscuits and improves oven spring. If you don’t have a steam oven, flinging a little water into the oven or having a shallow pan of water in the oven during pre-heating can’t hurt.

Biscuits made this way are some of the tastiest, most tender biscuits I’ve ever made, no lie.

By the way: Over the years, when I’ve discussed biscuit-making with inexperienced or casual bakers, I’m surprised how many people are completely unclear on the concept of what “self-rising” flour is. Some people think that there is something magical or special about self-rising flour and that it’s the only kind of flour from which biscuits can be made. But self-rising flour is just flour to which leavening agents such as soda and baking powder already have been added. Any biscuit recipe that starts with “plain” flour will tell you how much soda or baking powder to use per cup of flour. King Arthur makes an unbleached self-rising flour, but I have never used that, or any, self-rising flour. Self-rising flour seems like a useless convenience, as far as I’m concerned, especially since I use potassium-based, no-sodium baking powder like the baking powder sold by Hain.

I had not made ice cream in well over a year. But the chickens have been laying well lately, so I start thinking about how to spend some eggs. Ice cream was a start. If you want to make ice cream, you have to crack some eggs. Proper ice cream has egg yolks in it.

Here’s a basic recipe for vanilla ice cream with a whiff of lemon. You could add whatever you like to this recipe to make different flavors.

Rich, old-fashioned ice cream

4 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup whipping cream
1 cup milk

2 teaspoons vanilla extract 
1/4 teaspoon lemon extract

In a double-boiler, whisk everything together except for the extracts. While whisking over steam, heat the mixture to about 175 degrees. Then pour the mixture into an ovenproof glass bowl, cover it, and chill it to refrigerator temperature. This will take several hours, or overnight.

When you’re ready to make the ice cream, add the extracts (or other flavorings) and pour the mixture into your ice cream freezer.

I don’t waste the egg whites. When I have leftover egg whites, if I can’t think of anything else to do with them, then I cook them and feed them back to the chickens. Chickens certainly should not eat chicken, but eggs are good for them if you cook the eggs and mix them with other scraps so that the chickens don’t know what it is.