Marisa’s 20th of the Month Sourdough Sidetrack: Brownies

I love baking and cooking with my sourdough starter. Just not bread.

Over the past day and a half, I attempted to make an actual loaf of sourdough bread. Probably along the lines of a boule. In theory. Hot mess. Dense and flat. No post-oven crackling. No beautiful airy holes.

My starter is beautiful. Bubbly and resilient. The transition from starter to baked freeform loaf requires skill. And tinkering. And patience. And repeated trials in the quest to perfect. I’ll leave that to the experts. Those Cedarburg experts do an outstanding job, and I’m grateful they’re closeish.

Thank goodness for Sourdough Suprises. And brownies.

I made two batches this month. I enjoyed them both. Neither pan’s contents disappeared as quickly as last month’s Smitten Kitchen Caramel Brownies. I may try to sourdoughize those in the future. Although my favorite brownies are gooey and fudgy. My guess is the flour from the starter is fighting the fudge factor?

In the past hour, we’ve discovered that our hot water heater is about ready to explode. I thought cooking without an oven was a challenge. I’ve dirtied a good portion of our dishes today and currently have no easy means to clean them. As soon as this batch of bagels is done, I’m walking away from the kitchen for the day.

Deep breaths. A botched loaf of bread and a broken water heater. Frustrating. Not a catastrophe.

It’s Been a Week.

This week, I turned 34.  It’s not a monumental age, just mid-30′s, but it hit me kinda hard.  I’ve always been a big lover of the birthday, but this year I was just not that into it.  All I can see is ALMOST 40 in neon lights.  Ack.  But I have a wonderful husband and great friends who all helped me focus on the most important thing about birthdays: food and presents.

The divine Miss Marisa not only makes her own yoghurt, but she is also a quilter, and I have been lucky enough to be the recipient of some of her creations.  For my birthday, she made me an amazing bag.  Not only will it be the perfect prize bag for a class I teach, it also has elements of many of the kids I have been lucky enough to interact with over the years.  It is the perfect present.  One more sangria, and I would have been bawling.

To celebrate Christmas and my birthday, Marisa and I went to see Good vs. Evil: An Evening with Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert.  It was entertaining, funny and we got to listen to celebrity chefs gossip about other celebrity chefs.  A good time was had by all and it was good inspiration to keep up with cooking without recipes.

Oh yeah.  And I cooked some stuff.   Searing… okay.  I’ll sear some pork chops.  I had the best of intentions to get some really thick chops, stuff them, sear them and finish them in the oven.  But I didn’t.  I cooked them in a pan.  High heat.  That’s searing right?  I think it is.

And I also finished up my final potato goal from April: pan fried potatoes.  They cooked through, but were not as crispy as I wanted them.   They were fine.

Goals for this month:

1. Steak

2. Fish

3. Scallops

We’ll see how all that goes.

Happy Birthday Alisa!

What do fairies and soccer and campers and watches and trains and nail polish and shamrocks and mushrooms and penguins and Scooby Doo and tops and Star Wars and sausage have to do with cooking?

The friends who love these activities are the reason that we care about fading the prompts. And the whole reason Alisa and I like each other in the first place. Well, them and 5 bad brothers from the Bean Town Land.

I thought a little something created from these fabrics would be a more welcome birthday gift than the sharing of some yogurt or sourdough cultures.

Happy birthday friend.

May: Let the Searing Begin

I am positive that Alisa is more excited about searing than I am.

It’s May. I am excited by the sorrel sprouting outside of my front door. By the chives that I can see peeking up around the corner of the garage. By the asparagus and rhubarb and spinach and green onions that I anxiously await from Witte’s. And oh my goodness, Barthel’s strawberries and peas are lurking just around the calendar corner.

The good news is that there are tutorials out there for pan searing asparagus. Beyond that, I may have to sear some meat. The Kitchn offers some advice on how to make that happen. It sounds exactly like roasting but on the stove instead of in the oven. Ooh-scallops. I should sear scallops.

I’m mostly looking forward to the side dishes that will accompany the seared stuff. I’ll add steak to my list of goals for the month. Mostly because it’s an agent for chimichurri. And by “my goals,” I might mean that Andy should cook some steak. Because I don’t know that I’ve mentioned that cooking meat is not my favorite.

And these sourdough bagels weren’t seared, but they turned out really really well.

Potato Recap

Chips and pieroges were my potato goals. I was 1 for 2 in April, which isn’t bad considering that I clearly couldn’t boil pieroges with a broken oven. 

These chips are something my parents made occasionally growing up. Slice them thin. Fry them in oil. Salt them. These were good. My parents’ are better.

I did attempt one other potato staple sans recipe, using this as a guide for technique. Clara enjoyed seconds. For mashed potatoes, they were fine. I think I prefer egg noodles as a gravy sopping vehicle.

April’s remaining potato adventures all included recipes. Miso Maple Sweet Potato Tacos with Coconut Cilantro Sauce were really tasty. Salt and Vinegar Broiled Fingerling Potatoes sadly did not live up to the very high expectations I’d set for them. I’m embarrassed to admit just how much I love Salt and Vinegar Potato Chips. So, when I try to turn them into other sorts of foods, like potato salad, it’s just not the same. I added chicken to said salad, and it was very good, but, oddly enough, it didn’t taste like a potato chip.

I couldn’t get too excited about potato month. April may just be the most out of season month there is for the potato. Those I’d treasured from Witte’s are sprouting, so my creations utilized grocery store spuds. Searing is up next. With May will bring asparagus and rhubarb. Can those be seared?

Bake It Once and the Bake It Again.

One of my April goals was twice baked potatoes.   They have always seemed like a restaurant food, not an at home food.  I could make them an at home food.

The Pioneer Woman has a recipe that looks delicious, and was great inspiration.  Bake the potato, scoop out the insides, mix up some fill-ins and bake it all again.  I can do this.

Twice baked potatoes seem like a good place to work on flavor.  It’s a pretty blank canvas that you can be creative with.  I wanted to stay away from ham and cheddar and try something different.  I went grocery shopping with an open mind.

The cheese section.  Lots of choices.  Where to begin?  I think I stood there for 10 minutes looking at labels, trying to remember how all the different cheeses tasted, and thinking “I’m serving this with fish. What the heck goes with fish?”.  I still don’t know what goes with fish, but I did buy some smoked gouda.

The whole process is relatively easy.

1.  Bake the potato.  I actually used the oven for this.  I wanted the skin to be crispy and that doesn’t happen in the microwave.  Good lord, that takes forever, but I think it was worth it.

2. Cut in half and scoop out the insides.  Be gentle with the skin.

3. Mix in the fix-ins.

4. Put the fix-ins back in the shell.

5. Bake it again.

The fix-ins are the important part.  I shredded the smoked gouda over the potato insides.  A little bit of butter, some sour cream, crushed red pepper, salt, and pepper.  Tasted good, but it needed something else.  In the fridge, I had a jar of spicy pickled mushrooms.  What the heck, I’ll try it.  A little acid, a meaty texture, it just might work.  Chopped them up and put them in. They were delicious.  Jamie said that it was one of the best things I have ever made.  The smokey cheese and the spicy mushrooms worked together really well.  I should have kept them in the oven a little more to brown them up a bit more.

Because of the warm receptive the potatoes received, I decided to try them again tonight with a different flavor profile.  This time I used bacon, cheddar, sour cream, butter, sauteed green pepper (skill maintenance), crushed red pepper, salt and pepper.  I tasted.  It needed something.  Acid.  So I sprinkled on some lemon juice. More cheese on the top before baking.

Delicious again.  Twice baked potatoes:  a completely manageable at home food.

 

It’s The Cheese that Makes the Difference

As a child, I loved cheesy potatoes.  My mom would regularly make those Betty Crocker beauties from a box, and they were creamy, cheesy and delicious.  I didn’t discriminate; I would eat all the flavors.  But I could not figure out what was the difference between the scalloped and the au gratin.  They were all cheesy potatoes to me.

As an adult (who no longer buys potatoes in a box), I realize there must be a difference between au gratin and scalloped.  Thank you Google machine for providing the answer: cheese.  Au gratin always has it, scalloped never does.  Betty, you had me fooled.

I love cheese, so au gratin was the way to go.  And I had some left over Easter ham in the fridge (turns out 9.8 pounds is a bit much for two people), so I could throw in the ham and make it a main dish.  I read the steps at For the Love of Cooking and used them as a basic guide.  I modified and did not measure. I went with my gut.

Jamie hates onions, so there were none of those.  I hate bread crumbs on the top of things, so there were none of those.  We were out of flour, so I used corn starch to thicken (look at me, solving a kitchen problem without even looking it up).  I used a combo of sharp and mild cheddar and layered the chopped up ham between the potatoes.

It turned out pretty well.  Here are the things I will do differently next time:

1. Use full fat cheese.  I am a big believer in reduced fat cheese (not that fat free garbage).  While it does melt, it doesn’t melt as much as I want it to.

2. Make sure all the cheese fully  melts into the sauce.  It was really cheesy on top and less so in between the layers.

3. I would layer in the sauce instead of pouring it all on top.  But this might not be a problem if I’m better at melting.

Overall, a winner.  I would make it again and experiment with different cheese types.  Still have to work on the flavor profiles.  I’ll get there.

Marisa’s 20th of the Month Sourdough Sidetrack: Pasta

Since joining in on the Sourdough Surprises venture several months ago and looking back on the creations that I’d missed before discovering the group, I’d been longing to try my hand at pasta.  For the group’s one year anniversary, they returned to their roots!

Our oven has been broken for a while.  We have the luxury of a double oven, and the upper half broke in December.  We’d more than managed for a few months with the lower.  Then that one broke too.

Rationally, I recognize that an oven is needed for neither pasta, potato chips, nor perogies.  At the same time, the premise of the creation of this blog, on my end at least, was an inability to work flexibly in the kitchen. So, for me, a broken oven = a broken kitchen.

Thanks to Andy and our firefighter/handyman friend, one of the ovens is fixed, and with a day to spare, pasta was made. Potatoes are another story.

I made two batches of pasta yesterday morning. One using this recipe exactly. The other with some modifications: whole wheat pasty flour and lemon and lime zest, a la this recipe.  The tip to use the mixer was genius and made the dough composition take what seemed like less than a minute.  After leaving the dough to do its thing for the day, I rolled it and cut it into linguine-fettuccine-esque strips and left it to sit for a bit.

Julia arrived at this point, bearing ingredients for Greek salad (and wine!), disappointed that she had missed out on the pasta prep.  Knowing there was caramel making in our near future, I thought I’d get a head start on what I could.

The batch of whole wheat pasta ended up being just the right amount for our family of five.

The other batch of uncooked pasta is now in the freezer. Can you do that?  You can freeze anything, right?

The caramel making was left to Julia, while I supervised from a couple of feet away.  My distance may be the key to making caramel because both Julia and Jill have done an incredible job on my stove with as little involvement from me as possible.  The caramel was then frozen, cut up, and added to these brownies. Good.  Choice.

Dinner was tasty.

Dessert was delicious.

Watching the kids try to get a ball out of the flooded backyard pond was entertaining.

Following the events in Boston via a combination of electronic devices and later sitting in front of the TV watching the press conference and discussing where we were when…September 11, the Challenger, Oklahoma City, OJ, Columbine…and reminiscing about how long Andy, Julia, and I have know each other and how the Boston Marathon Bombing and subsequent events may just be our childrens’ first we-remember-where-we-were-when moment was the culmination of an evening that will not be forgotten.

Potato, potah-to.

It’s April.  That means it’s potato month.  I realize this post is a little late, but I’ve been busy.  Sorry about that.

There are many varieties of potatoes and work better in some dishes than others.  Russets usually show up in our house, but this will be a good month to expand my selection.

The United States Potato Board has some general recommendations for potato cooking.  After that, all’s fair in love and potato.

Even I know that there are many, many things that one can do with a potato.   When I googled “how to cook potatoes”, how to boil potatoes came up first.  I can do that.

I can also mash, bake (well microwave, so much faster), and roast (thank you,  January) without a recipe, so I feel like I have the basics covered.

April will be about expanding skills.  Frying, au gratin, twice baked: these are my goals for potato month.

Stir Frying and Sauteing Month was Fine. Better than Fine.

The highlight of stir fry month was definitely Irasian night with Julia. The velveting method stir fry turned out well, although it may have been more work than necessary if the meat is sliced really thin to begin with. The filling for the Shrimp, Pork, and Jicama Turnovers from Asian Dumplings by Andrea Nguyen was sauteed, so it totally qualifies. The Simple Flaky Pastry Crust was delightful, and I may turn every month into pie crust month. Couldn’t ask for better company than Julia. And drinking wine while Andy fried the dumplings and stir fried the stir fry was appreciated. I’m pretty sure it’s somewhere in the ABA literature that delegating is one of the most effective forms of prompt fading.

The Ir in Irasian came from the Stout Ice Cream with Irish Whiskey Caramel Sauce that I didn’t get around to making on St. Paddy’s Day proper. Thank you lady from the Village Market who very skeptically sold me the needed 1/4 cup of whiskey for said dessert. I’ve been able to purchase alcohol for 14 years. Scrutinize my ID and question me suspiciously anytime! According to Julia, “This is like the best thing I’ve ever tasted. And I would say that even if I weren’t still a little afraid of you right now.” Sorry. Caramel sauce makes me angry. It’s not hard to make. And I make it hard to make. And I don’t get it right the first time. And then I get fussy. And then others just want to help either so I’m not fussy anymore or just so that we all have caramel sauce. And then it all works out fine and it’s delicious. But the list of people who will make caramel sauce with me in the future is potentially dwindling.

Other March meals were satisfactory and unexciting. Nothing wrong with that. Overall, I definitely think my sauteeing times approached those the recipe suggested.

Sauteeing the components of this salsa made the house smell delicious, went quickly, and yielded the tastiest non-traditional salsa we’ve ever tasted. Reminiscent of Cempazuchi’s peanut salsa. A little burn your throat off, depending on spice tolerance. Worth it.

Looking forward to potatoes. Chips and perogies are on the short list.