Grillable Bread - Onion Naan

We're nearly out of our usual no-knead bread. I try to get a ton of bread baked and stashed in the chest freezer by mid-May, so that we have homemade bread all summer without the need to heat the house up by baking. Baking is a winter habit in our home. Alas, I was low on the bread flour we buy in 50-pound bags, and I didn't want to buy another one and hold it over the summer because this flour contains the germ of the wheat. Wheat germ contains fat, which goes rancid rather quickly in warm weather. So keeping 50 pounds of the stuff was out of the question with our summers.

Enter this recipe for naan, made with all purpose flour, and able to be grilled on a charcoal or gas grill. This is a fast rising dough, needing only 1 hour in warm weather to be ready for shaping and cooking. I usually give the dough more than that, part of the time in the refrigerator to slow it down and allow flavor to develop. I adapted this recipe from one by Mark Bittman, from his Best Recipes in the World cookbook. Leave it to me to figure I could improve on the best. This recipe makes a dozen flatbreads.

Grilled Onion Naan

1 Tbsp. active dry yeast
1 Tbsp. sugar
2 Tbsp. live culture yogurt
2 Tbsp. milk
1 medium onion, peeled and roughly diced
2 tsp. salt
4 cups all purpose flour (you can substitute a whole grain flour for a small part of this volume)
1 egg
3/4 cup water
extra flour for kneading
oil for the bowl

Thoroughly combine the yeast, sugar, yogurt and milk in a small bowl. Set this aside.

In the bowl of a food processor, combine the diced onion, flour and salt. Process for about 30 seconds so that the onion is finely diced. Add the egg and process another 15 seconds. With the blade running, add the yogurt mixture through the feeding tube. Then add the water in a moderate stream until a more or less uniform ball of dough forms. You may not need to add all the water. The dough should be fairly sticky but not as liquid as a batter. Add water or flour a tablespoon at a time if the dough is either excessively dry or wet.

Take the dough out and place it on a well floured board. Knead it 8-10 times and form a ball. Place this ball in an oiled bowl with a capacity at least twice the volume of the dough. Cover and place in a draft-free spot for 1-2 hours, or keep in the fridge for 5-6 hours.

When ready to shape, take the dough out and form it into a thick roll on the floured board. The roll should be about 2 1/2 inches thick and about 20 inches long. Cut it in half and then in quarters. Cut each quarter into three equal pieces. Roll each piece into a little ball and set them on the board. When they are all finished, cover them loosely with plastic wrap or a clean towel. Let them rest for 15 minutes.

Holding the dough in your hands, shape each ball of dough into a flat oblong, roughly 5 by 9 inches. Start by thinning the dough in the center and then work outward in a circular fashion. Let the dough hang from your fingers, always working at the top, turning it, gently pulling it, gradually stretching the edge so that the dough elongates and thins. Each naan should be quite thin in the middle, slightly thicker at the edge, but try not to have any paper thin areas as these will burn quickly on a grill. If you stretch one part too thin (hold it up to a light to tell), pinch the dough together over that area to make it thicker. Dust the shaped naans with a little flour and place them on a baking sheet as you finish each one.

Cook the naan over a moderate charcoal fire or high heat on a gas grill. Holding the naan on your fully open hand, slap the dough down on the grill and make sure no part of it folds over on itself. Don't overcrowd the grill. Keep an eye on them as they can move from cooked to burnt in very little time. They will cook very quickly, no more than 2-3 minutes on the first side, and less on the second. Keep tongs handy to turn them so each side is nicely cooked. If you wish, you can brush the naan with melted butter or garlicky olive oil as you remove them from the grill.

These naan go well with just about any grilled meat and are much better than store-bought buns when folded in half for hamburgers. They also compliment BLTs and Indian dishes. Or put some good, soft, thinly sliced cheese on the naan while still on the grill, as soon as the first side is done and you flip them over.  We've been making these naan quite often. It's not the same as the multi-grain round loaves we like to slice and toast to eat with our eggs, but it's good fresh bread that doesn't heat up the house. You can also omit the onion if you want a more all purpose bread, but you'll need to add just a bit more water when mixing the dough. They'll also bake up well on a preheated baking stone in a hot oven if you want to make them indoors in wintertime.

Harvest Meal: Old Meets New Pizza

Fully fledged harvest meals have been a little hard to come by lately.  Even this pizza is a bit of a stretch given that neither the cheese nor the dough are homegrown items.  But everything else on this pizza was either grown on my property, or I had a direct hand in.  It struck me that the toppings are an interesting mixture of a few long-storing items from last year and the earliest crops of this year.

It's April already, and while the fresh garlic that remains from last July's harvest is definitely sprouty, it's still usable.  I think we owe this to the root cellar.  Last year In 2008 I had to dehydrate all that remained of our homegrown garlic by late December.  Garlic is always a key component when we make pizza.  Rather than a tomato sauce, a few of our smoked tomatoes, rehydrated in hot water for a few minutes, gave a tomatoey intensity to about every other bite of pizza.  Although it's hard to see in the picture, I also added a few thinly shaved pieces of the lardo experiment that ended up smoked.  Laid on top of the other ingredients, these shriveled up and began to crisp deliciously during the very brief time the pizza spent in a hot oven. The bites including these little pieces of lardo were unctuously delicious!

From this year's garden came the spinach, shredded and spread over the pie, and a few scallions chopped up for just a hint of oniony goodness.

Can I just say how hard it was to stop and take a picture of that pizza instead of tearing into it immediately?  Yesterday's fine weather had me doing plenty of outdoor work, and I was hungry by the time that pizza came out of the oven.  Fortunately, I made two of these pizzas, one of which is leftover and will be my lunch on the road today.  I'm going to New Jersey to pick up my fig trees.  Part of yesterday's work was finishing up the self-watering containers they're to be planted in.  I should have a post on that very soon.

Baking Day

I spent Thursday baking.  I'm trying to use up the last of a 50-pound bag of flour that includes the germ of the wheat before spring temperatures help it go rancid.  So I baked up a storm - of flour, that is.  Baking day is messy.  And long.  And exhausting.  It was lights out for me before 9pm last night.  But at least I have plenty of bread to show for it (Acme Bread's fabulous rosemary herb slabs, courtesy of the Artisan Baking cookbook).  There's nothing - nothing - in the world like freshly baked bread.  As another super-special treat that I posted about over at The Simple Green Frugal Co-op, I also made lardy cakes.

Yes, I know, you can't resist the name any more than I could.  Click the picture to see my post over there, which includes the recipe.

In other news, the arrival of our bee packages has been delayed by a week (or possibly two).  This means I can turn my attention to other things for a few days at least.  Such as doing something about the annual garden.  And maybe planting a few seeds.  We're going to go borrow a rototiller from gardening friends tonight or tomorrow.  I swear this is the last year I till that bed!  Also, I pick up three fig trees next Thursday.  So it's time to get their self-watering containers built.  More on that soon.

Happy weekend!

Harvest Meal: Cream of Roasted Parsnip Soup, Plus Scallion Biscuits

I've sort of been on a cream-of kick. Soup has been much desired lately, and I've been wanting to highlight the root vegetables that are still available in the winter garden. Cream-of soups do the trick and are so easy to prepare. We were taught in culinary school how to make cream-of soup out of just about anything. This time around, a predicted blizzard sent us out digging for parsnips. I had in mind a roasted parsnip soup. We dug up a little under two pounds of them as we waited for the storm to begin in earnest. Despite the lower than freezing air temperature, the ground is not yet frozen below the surface. Digging the parsnips was pretty easy.

After being cleaned the parsnips were roasted using a method I usually use for potatoes. I greased a large casserole dish lightly with butter, cut up the parsnips and laid them in the dish, ground some white pepper over them, sprinkled with kosher salt and then drizzled them lightly with olive oil. I tossed everything together with my hands to coat the parsnips evenly, then arranged everything evenly again in the casserole. To this I added about 1 1/2 tablespoons of water and then tightly covered the dish with a sheet of aluminum foil. Into a 400 F (205 C) oven for 35 minutes, and then the foil was removed. I put the dish back in the oven uncovered, and raised the temperature to 425 F (220 C) to let the roots brown up a bit. This took about 15 minutes. (Note that most of the caramelization (browning) takes place on the side of the parsnip in contact with the casserole. If you wait until the tops are browned, they'll probably be burned underneath.) Meanwhile, I was also baking two medium potatoes in the same oven.

I waited until the vegetables were done before proceeding, but if you're in a hurry you can start on the next step as soon as the root vegetables are in the oven. I medium diced two medium onions (boughten) and sauteed them in butter with a pinch of salt until they became somewhat translucent, soft but not browned. Then I put the nicely browned parsnips, and roughly chopped baked potatoes (ours) into the pot and added enough chicken stock (ours) to cover everything and make the parsnips float freely (about 2 quarts). I also added a couple of cloves from a head of roasted garlic (ours) we happened to have around and two bay leaves (boughten). All this was brought to a gentle simmer and then the heat under the pan was reduced. I let it all simmer together gently for about 15 minutes.

The next step is the one that's a pain. I fished out the bay leaves, then strained out the liquid from the solid ingredients, but reserved the liquid. Working in batches, I pureed the solids with a little of the liquid added back in to help everything blend up nicely. The puree and extra reserved liquid was returned to the pot. (I tried the pureeing step first with an immersion/wand blender. It didn't work.) Then I added about 3/4 cup of whole milk (local) and tasted to adjust for salt and seasonings. I brought the pot back to a very gentle simmer and let it go for 5 more minutes. Each serving was garnished with a brilliantly colored slice of parsley butter (our parsley, boughten butter).

It's a simple soup that tastes richly of sweet parsnips. Not something that will necessarily wow guests, but pretty satisfying as a winter harvest meal, and very warming on a chilly night. If I were feeling more adventurous, I might try adding a slice of fresh ginger during the initial simmer (probably best not pureed) or some freshly grated nutmeg.

Moving on to the non-harvest part of our snowstorm feast, I also made scallion biscuits. Ceridwen asked for a recipe, so I'll go ahead and list one. But first, an absolutely necessary little digression into etymology. Blame Ceridwen, or skip ahead a bit if this stuff bores you.

"Biscuit" literally means twice-cooked. The German word Zwieback, and the Italian word biscotti are cognates for the English word biscuit. But the Germans and the Italians actually mean what they say when they use their terms. Both Zwieback and biscotti are hard little farinaceous things baked once, and then sliced and baked again. The English word "biscuit" is an excellent example of the two nations divided by a common language. The Brits, when they use the term, mean what Americans call a cookie. Yet neither American cookies nor English biscuits are generally baked twice. When Americans say "biscuit" they mean something in the general ballpark of what the Brits call scones, and American biscuits are not twice-baked either. Americans eat their biscuits in a savory rather than a sweet capacity. In the US, biscuits are vehicles for ham, eggs, cheese, or gravy, usually showing up at either breakfast or dinner, where they are associated with heavy meals. Though Brits don't put sugar in their scones, they often slather them with jam and cream; and dried fruit might be included in the dough. Usually in the UK scones are associated with tea, rather than a full meal. (Please correct me if I'm wrong in this, British readers.) Americans on the other hand will bake scones with sugar in them or on top of them, but don't add jam to them after baking as commonly as the Brits. So to conclude, an American biscuit is pretty close to a British scone when it comes out of the oven, but not in the way it's eaten; a British biscuit is nothing like an American one; and a British scone may not bear much resemblance to an American scone. -There! I've had my foodie-word-geek catharsis for the day! Here endeth the lesson.

Oh, and Ceridwen, I too was thinking of adding cheese to my scallion (green onion) biscuits (scones). I just hadn't decided which cheese to add.


Scallion-Cheddar Buttermilk Biscuits

2 cups all purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup thinly sliced fresh scallions (green onions)
5 Tbsp. cold butter, cut into small pieces
3/4 cup grated sharp cheddar cheese*
3/4 cup well shaken buttermilk**, plus extra for brushing

Preheat oven to 450 F (230 C) and grease a baking sheet or line it with baker's parchment. Sift/stir together dry ingredients. Using your fingertips, blend in butter very quickly until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Stop before you think you should, and try not to warm up the butter any more than really necessary. Stir in the scallions and grated cheddar. Add buttermilk and stir just until dough forms. Gather into a ball and knead on floured surface, gently, just 6 times. Pat dough into a square or rectangle. Cut into 9 (sorta) equal pieces (the corner pieces will probably be irregular - don't sweat it) and arrange them on your baking sheet. Brush the tops of the biscuits with a little extra buttermilk. Bake for about 12-15 minutes, or until golden brown on top.

*Plenty of other cheeses will work here too. If you don't have cheddar, try whatever you've got. But firm, somewhat assertively flavored cheeses tend to do best.
**If you have no buttermilk on hand, put 1 tablespoon of distilled white vinegar or lemon juice in a 1 cup measure. Fill the measure the rest of the way with whole milk, stir gently, and let the mixture sit for ten minutes before proceeding with the recipe. This makes just a bit more than is needed for this recipe.

By the way, this recipe doubles well, which I strongly recommend doing if you've got a house full of biscuit eaters. They'll keep a few days at room temperature in a sealed bag, and you can freeze some if you need to. Fresh sage (in smaller quantities) makes an excellent substitute for the scallions. All in all, it's a pretty flexible recipe. Enjoy!

Chocolate Crinkle Cookie Recipe & Method

There were a couple of recipe requests for the Chocolate Crinkle Cookies shown in my last post.  So here 'tis.

These are not cookies that you can whip up from start to finish on a moment's notice. The dough must be chilled rather thoroughly before baking. Most recipes you find for these cookies if you just google for it will tell you to chill the dough for three hours before baking. That's certainly a good start. But to get the full effect of the dramatic appearance of these cookies, there's an essential extra step; one that's little mentioned in the recipes I've run across either online or in print. After chilling the dough, I scoop the dough onto a baking sheet and freeze the dough solid. Once the dough is frozen, these do indeed become spur-of-the-moment treats. You can put the frozen chunks in a plastic bag and then reach into the freezer for however many cookies you feel like baking at a time. The dough will keep for two months in a frostless freezer, longer in a chest freezer. But read the recipe below carefully if you want the cookies to turn out as beautiful as they are delicious.


Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

Ingredients

1/2 cup unsweetened dark cocoa powder (~55 g)
1 cup sugar (~190 g)
1/4 cup cooking oil (~53 g)
2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup all purpose flour (~100 g)
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. table salt

For topping: about 1/4 cup powdered sugar (aka confectioner's sugar)

Method

Combine the cocoa powder and the sugar in a mixing bowl. Add the cooking oil, eggs, and vanilla extract and stir well to produce a homogeneous mixture. Add the remaining ingredients except for the powdered sugar. Stir again until the dough is consistent throughout. Cover the mixing bowl and chill the dough in the refrigerator for at least three hours and up to 24 hours. (The dough will be very soft and spread far too much if shaped without this pre-chilling.)

Scoop the dough using a small ice cream scoop or two tablespoons, forming rounded balls of dough. Arrange them, tightly spaced, on a baking sheet and freeze them until solid. Remove the frozen cookie dough from the baking sheet, place them in a plastic bag, and keep frozen until you feel like baking some.

When ready to bake

Preheat the oven to 350 F/175 C. Put the powdered sugar in a bag or plastic food container and either grease your baking sheet or line it with baker's parchment. When the oven is up to temperature, remove however many chunks of cookie dough will fit on your baking sheet and put them directly into the powdered sugar. Working as quickly as possible, close the bag or container and shake it to thoroughly coat the cookie dough chunks with sugar. Remove the chunks one at a time, making sure each one is well coated with powdered sugar, arrange them on the baking sheet, and get it into the oven very quickly. (NB: If the dough is allowed to sit at room temperature, either before or after being coated with powdered sugar, the sugar will become damp and the appearance of the cookies after baking will be muddy brown rather than a stark contrast of white and dark brown.)

Bake the cookies for about 10-12 minutes. They will expand as they cook, producing a festive cracked appearance. Bake just until the chocolate areas of the cookie lose their very wet sheen. They should still be fairly soft, though you can bake them longer if you want to produce a crisper cookie. The softer version of these cookies will fall slightly after being removed from the oven. Allow the soft version to rest for three minutes before removing to a cooling rack. Get the crunchy version off the baking sheet as soon as they're out of the oven.

The yield from this recipe depends very much on the size of the cookies you make. I typically double this recipe and end up with about four and a half dozen medium-sized cookies. This is a dairy-free vegetarian recipe, so I believe they can follow any meal in a kosher household. Although very easy to prepare, they also draw lots of remarks in a holiday cookie exchange. I hope you enjoy them!

First Baking Day of the Season

I'm carbo-bonking. Bread, bread, bread. The sourdough starter looked good to go yesterday, so I mixed up two doughs with it last night and baked off the breads this afternoon. I canNOT resist freshly baked bread. Above is Fig-Anise bread, and farther down the page you'll find the smaller rolls I made from the other half of the same batch of dough. The rolls were supposed to be pannini, and since "pannini" means "little breads," I suppose they are. But I'll modify the shaping step next time to try for a flatter, wider shape. The recipe source is Artisan Baking, if you want to look it up. (Sorry, typing up anything that long isn't going to happen, even if copyright weren't an issue.)

Still just slightly warm from the oven, cut open with a little bit of butter? Divine!

Here's a batch of sourdough English muffins, which are cooked in a skillet rather than baked. Aren't they full of character? Character is important in things farinaceous, I think. These are reproductions of the best English muffins I've ever had in my life, from the Cheese Board bakery in Berkeley. The recipe source is The Cheese Board: Collective Works: Bread, Pastry, Cheese, Pizza.


This is the solution to leftovers from the English muffin recipe. Cut the dough up with a circular cutter and you end up with scraps, which then become a zampano, also of the Cheese Board. Basted with garlicky olive oil, sprinkled with kosher salt, and then lovingly topped with a few chili pepper flakes and a grate or two of parmesan when it comes out of the oven. They don't hold well at all, which makes it a crime not to eat them the day they are baked. Man! I'm full now.

My weekend looks to be absolutely packed. Hope yours is a good one.

Farmgirl Fare's Lemon Coconut Bread

Have I mentioned that I have a tendency to overdo things sometimes? Yesterday was too rainy to work in the garden much, though I did plant some Cherokee Trail of Tears beans. It seemed like a good day to do some baking, and Farmgirl Susan's Lemon Coconut Bread recipe has been buzzing like a bee in my bonnet.

If I was going to fire up the oven, I figured I might as well triple the recipe. That's one effect of having a chest freezer and a stocking up mentality. It's so satisfying to chuck the surplus in there, forget about it, and then uncover a goodie like this in a few months. This recipe turned out very nicely, though I tweaked it from Susan's a little bit. I substituted some cream cheese for some of the butter, because I had some that needed using up. The texture was light and just moist enough. In terms of sweetness it falls right in between a proper cake and a proper quickbread. Having some for dessert last night, I kept wanting it to be just a little sweeter. And I usually like my sweets on the less sweet side. So I could see serving this for breakfast with a straight face.

Which is what's going to happen in a moment.

Bialys!

I woke up yesterday knowing that it was going to be a cold day. I like a good snowstorm when I've got everything I need for a week or more and have nowhere I need to go. There's an unearthly beauty in falling snow that layers itself thickly over branches and fence lines. But the 20 F weather with the 25 mph wind sure makes it forbidding outside.

So I decided to do just a little baking to take the chill off the house. Since I hadn't mixed up any dough on Sunday, it was going to have to be something pretty fast. That's when I stumbled on to the bialy recipe in Artisan Baking, by Maggie Glezer. Don't know what a bialy is? Not too surprising since they're almost unknown outside of New York City. Bialys are very small breads, sort of like a bagel. But instead of having a hole in the center, they have an indentation, and they're not boiled before baking. The dimple in the bread is filled, usually, with browned onions, but occasionally with garlic or poppy seeds. Another Jewish contribution to the world of baked goods. Like bagels, bialys can be sliced and topped with various things, simple butter, or lox and cream cheese apparently being the most popular choices.

I couldn't swear that I'd never eaten a bialy before I made my first batch, but if I ever had, the experience didn't leave much of an impression on me. Fortunately, a bialy straight out of the oven turned out to be a most memorable and enjoyable experience.

I won't copy out the recipe here, because it's long and there would be copyright issues. But I will tell you that it was a real pleasure to work with the dough, which gets worked and warmed several times in a food processor between hand kneadings. The warm dough felt wonderful on my hands in a chilly kitchen. The warmth also gave the yeast a nice head start that would otherwise be hard to provide in my coolish winter home.

I tried two different ways of shaping the bialys and found that the dough really did need to be pulled out very wide and almost flat. The ones I stretched out less than that almost completely lost their dimples and puffed up like balls, despite the fact that they are shaped immediately before going into the oven. I thought handling them too aggressively would deflate the dough and make them flat. Now I know. I enjoyed them all, but the widest ones were best.

The onion filing is usually just ground up and lightly baked onions. Of course, glutton that I am, I went overboard. I had some schmaltz that needed using up. So after grinding up the onions, I cooked them in the rendered chicken fat, and used that for my bialy topping, along with kosher salt. It's not authentic, I know, but I make no apologies. The recipe also warned me to go light on the topping. This I most deliberately ignored. And I'm glad I did.

I ate two bialys right away, the first one piping hot out of the oven. The recipe said they don't keep very well, so I didn't hold back, much. I can see, today, that the cookbook is correct; they really are best fresh from the oven. It's no wonder then that whatever bialy I might or might not have eaten in the past was so underwhelming. I probably got one several hours old. My own bialys were good enough that I would have happily devoured half a dozen. But then I would have had to lay on the floor and moan for a while. I can see that these quick to prepare little gems may become a habit when the weather's chilly and there's schmaltz in the house.

If you enjoy baking and are looking for easy breads to make on relatively short notice, have a look at a good bialy recipe. I mixed the dough at 9 am and enjoyed my first bialy around 2 pm. You don't have to use the schmaltz, as I did, but it sure made for an incredibly tasty, cheap indulgence.

You've all been mighty quiet lately. Did I drive you away with the meat rabbit post, or was it my unannounced absence last week?

Tiny Tip: Repurpose Your Credit Card

I thought it would be appropriate to mention this tiny tip this month, since February's Alternative Action Item is to bake bread. And many people out there are getting rid of credit cards or having the accounts close on them. That little piece of plastic may have been the bane of your existence, a temptation as potent as a drug, that has gotten you into a financial mess. It's a good thing to retire a credit card or two. But that doesn't mean the card itself is worthless to you. It need not end up in a landfill.

Instead, you can repurpose that stiff little piece of plastic into a baking tool. Bakers often need something to scrape dough off a wooden work surface, or off the inside of a container. The tool is called, appropriately enough, a dough scraper. Baker's supply catalogs will sell you specially made ones with extra features for $10. But really, all that's needed is a stiff, but somewhat flexible piece of plastic, curved on one side and straight on the other. The ones you can buy are bigger than a credit card, but there's no reason you can't work with a smaller version that fits neatly in your hand. And because you can make as many as you want from old membership cards and credit cards, it's possible to have a very large supply of them for baking day. An ordinary but sharp pair of scissors is all that's needed to make these hacked scrapers.

Using a homemade dough scraper made from retired spending enablers to bake your own bread is a great way to triple up your savings while increasing your self-sufficiency. It's a nice feeling to know that I can be a proficient baker without needing to spend money on specialized equipment. And it's feels good to keep another piece of plastic out of the landfill too.

Got any other tool hacks or repurposing stories you'd like to share?

More tiny tips: More Sunlight in Your Garden, Parboil Your Pasta, Make the Most of Old Man Winter, Broccoli Stalk, Scallions

February Frugal Action Item: Kitchen Competence

Time for another month's Frugal Action Item. This month, in honor of the chilly winter weather we're having in the northern hemisphere, I am challenging my readers to improve their kitchen skills. My goal with these Action Items is to provide concrete steps that both renters and homeowners can take to improve their household budgets. By the same token, this month's item highlights areas for skill expansion for all but the most serious professional cooks and homesteaders.

If you already know how to cook well, congratulations. Now skip down to the Alternative Action Items below. If you don't know how to cook well, you've most likely been using this as a ready-made excuse for eating out, or picking up ready-to-eat meals at the grocery store. Both of these practices are a serious drain on your food budget, and they also tend to steer eaters to less healthy food choices. Additionally, highly processed and over packaged foods contribute significantly to the production of greenhouse gasses, and thus global climate change.

So this month, I urge you to check out a few basic cookbooks from the library. The goal here is not to wow anybody with fancy meals or exotic ingredients. Instead, look for a few dishes that can provide a basic but healthy meal in a single item. Candidates include casseroles, twice-baked potatoes, soups, pasta dishes, fritattas, and so on. None of these dishes are difficult to prepare, and they can all be made to include green vegetables. Challenge yourself to prepare at least one such dish each week. Keep an eye out especially for dishes that use plenty of vegetables, or meat dishes that are readily supplemented by vegetables or starches. Don't be afraid to add extra vegetables to a dish with meat. These types of dishes will help you stretch your food budget farther.

If you are really new to cooking, I recommend that you begin with pasta dishes and soup. A good way to build skills is to start slow and plan to repeat dishes with some variation. For instance, this week you might begin with a pasta and tomato sauce dish. In the second week of February, make a broth-based soup. In the third week, you could prepare a pasta with an olive oil sauce. And in the final week of this month, prepare a chowder soup of some kind. So two types of pasta and two different soups in a month.

Recommended cookbooks for beginning cooks:
The New Best Recipe, by the Editors of Cook's Illustrated
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, by Mark Bittman
Joy of Cooking, by Irma S. Rombauer
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, by Marion Cunningham

I can specifically recommend the following dishes from these cookbooks. They're all delicious and easy to prepare:

Chicken with Dumplings, from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
Cabbage Stuffed with Lentils and Rice, from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian
Twice-Baked Potatoes, from The New Best Recipe
Pulled Pork, from The Joy of Cooking

If you want to try a simple meal of roasted chicken, have a look at my walkthrough of this dish at the Simple Green Frugal Co-op.

My hope is that the joy of mucking about in your own kitchen will prove addictive enough that you become an instant convert. But I recognize that not everyone enjoys cooking as much as I do, and that learning to cook may be a daunting enterprise to some. So I will allow as how the monetary savings would likely also be a powerful motivator. Or, you might find inspiration in the knowledge that you are preparing wholesome food for yourself and your family, thus contributing to better health. Perhaps parents could also show children that developing new life skills can happen at any age. In the end, there are many reasons to improve our kitchen skills.


Alternative Action Items: Accomplished home cooks are hereby challenged to learn how to bake bread, and to bake at least one loaf each week of this month. It's a good time of year to bake; you'll be warming your house up at the same time. See below for some basic resources.

If you already know how to bake bread, then I would suggest learning some form of food preservation, such as canning, fermenting, homebrewing, cheese or yogurt making, or dehydrating. (Heather had a great post on easy-peasy jelly making just a few days ago.) I include this suggestion only for those who are already quite advanced in their food preparation skill set. Canning, fermenting, cheesemaking, brewing, and dehydrating will all required you to invest in some fairly specialized equipment, and that's not an investment I think everyone should make...yet. But if you have all the cooking and baking skills you really need, it's certainly something to think about. If you're at that point, you probably don't need any advice from me, which is just as well since I'm far from an expert in all of those subjects. We're still working on canning and homebrewing.

If you already bake and preserve food routinely, your challenge for the month is to pass on some of your impressive kitchen skills to a young person. Equipping the next generation with basic skills for their own self-sufficiency is a noble task and a generous gift of knowledge and self confidence.

Suggested resources for baking skills:

Breadtopia.com - This site has fantastic tutorials on my favorite easy method of bread baking: no knead. Try this method! It's easier than you imagine and the bread is fantastic!

The Bread Baker's Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart - Highly detailed book on the fundamentals of bread baking, fabulous recipes too.


I want to hear your reports on this month's Frugal Action Item! Please leave a comment and share stories of your efforts. We're all in this together, so let's support each other.


Other Monthly Action Items:
January: CF Bulbs & Pipe Insulation
March: Rein in Entertainment Spending
April: Go Paper-less
May: Solar Dryer
June: Raise the Deductible on Your Auto Insurance
July: Stay Cool Without Touching that Thermostat
August: Repair It!
September: Insulate
October: Preventative Health Care
November: Frugal Holiday Wish List
December: Plan Next Year's Garden

Brrrr! Baking Weather!

This past week I've woken up to indoor temperatures in the mid 40s. I've been eating large bowls of hot soup for breakfast, just to try to stay warm as the house heats up somewhat. With a hat and four layers of clothing on, if the house gets up to 60F (15.5C), it starts to feel pretty toasty. We run the heat in only one part of the house, and with temperatures in the single digits (and breezes too) outside, it never gets to what normal people would regard as a normal room temperature, even with several rooms of the house shut off. It was so bad yesterday that I accepted a friend's invitation to go to the mall - I know, the mall! - to keep her company. She was in search of a good deal on a winter coat. I regarded it as a chance to catch up with her, get some indoor walking in, and enjoy a warm building that I wasn't paying to heat. I didn't spend any money, I did get a fair bit of mild exercise, and she was grateful enough for the company to spring for lunch.

Today I couldn't stand the cold anymore. I decided to follow my own advice, and use the oven to stave off hypothermia, and also cook some yummy things. My first thought was to cook one of our few remaining sugar pumpkins. This Afghan recipe sounded great to me, because it required running the oven for more than three hours, while the prep work for the pumpkins took a mere 20 minutes. I've made it before, and it's incredibly good; one of those recipes that tastes far better than can really be inferred from the ingredients list. And since I'd made it before, I already had some of the tomato and ground beef with coriander sauce stashed in the freezer. I've found it's perfectly fine to cut way down on the 3 cups of sugar called for in this dish.


Since the oven was going to be running anyway, bread was also on the agenda. I haven't had sufficient motivation lately to prep any bread dough a day in advance. So today I turned to a short list of breads that can be mixed and baked the same day. The rustic potato bread from Baking with Julia is one such. I've often found that when something is called "rustic" it refers to an endearingly ugly appearance. That certainly holds true with this bread.


It's made with both flour and mashed potatoes. There's so much yeast in it that the proofing and rising times are very short. As it happens, we're scraping the bottom of the barrel with our homegrown potatoes. All I had on hand were some All Blue potatoes. I had no idea what purple potatoes would do to the color of the bread, but I'm always up for culinary experimentation. What do you think? Other than the dark color of the potato skins, I'd never guess there were purple potatoes in this bread.

It's been a good day; a warm day; a day that ended with slices of warm bread and butter. The temperature in the kitchen was in the mid 50s most of the day. I feel positively decadent. I may shed a layer.

(In case you were wondering, the only reason I was able to proof the bread dough in a house this cold is that the heating system we're using is a radiant heat floor. I proof the dough in bowls or on baking sheets resting on the warm floor, covered with towels. A warm floor comes in very handy sometimes.)

Hope you're all keeping warm out there.

Related posts:

Staying Warm with the Thermostat Set Low
Stop Wasting That Heat!

Sour Milk Potato Biscuit-Muffins

We returned from Thanksgiving travels to find nearly a half gallon of milk had gone sour in our fridge. Over the summer I wrote about using up sour milk in a chocolate zucchini cake. Remember: sour milk won't make you sick, and it's a great baking ingredient. I have shredded zucchini in the freezer, but I didn't feel like making chocolate cake yesterday morning. I was more in the mood for something savory. So I whipped up a batch of impromptu sour milk biscuit-muffins.

I'm a scavenger in the kitchen, in terms of both recipes and ingredients. Besides the sour milk, I had two items I wanted to use up: leftover mashed potatoes and an abundance of cheese in the fridge. So I looked at two different biscuit recipes, one using sour milk, the other using mashed potatoes and cheese, and combined them willy-nilly. Then I doubled the recipes since I had a lot of sour milk to use up. Here's what I came up with.

Sour Milk Potato Biscuit-Muffins

4 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of salt
2 tablespoons cold butter (shortening would also work)
1 cup leftover mashed potatoes
1 ounce (about 1/4 cup) sharply flavored cheese, shredded or crumbled
2 cups soured milk (buttermilk would also work)

In a large mixing bowl I combined the flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt until well blended. Then I worked in the cold butter with my fingertips until the pieces were very small. Next the leftover mashed potatoes and the crumbled cheese were stirred in with a spoon, and finally the sour milk was stirred in to bring the dough together. (My mashed potatoes had been made with cream and accented with scallions.)

This produced a soft dough that didn't look like it would roll out very well. One of the recipes called for cooking the biscuits in muffin tins, so that's what I decided to do. I greased two muffin tins and added scoops of dough with a large soup spoon. It was enough dough for almost two dozen biscuit-muffins. I put a few ice cubes in the one empty space of the muffin tin so that the grease in that one wouldn't burn. I think I could just as easily have scooped them with an ice cream scoop and baked them on baker's parchment on an open baking tray. I also think I could have added a good deal more cheese.

These were baked for 20 minutes in a 400F oven. Their irregularly textured tops browned up beautifully. I probably could have encouraged even better browning had I brushed the tops with a little extra sour milk before baking them.

They were very tasty just slightly cooled and eaten with an extra pat of butter! We each had to have two, and were tempted to have a third, with our morning cuppa. I now have another recipe in my arsenal to deal with sour milk, something which I simply threw out in my pre-frugality days. Incidentally, this would also be a good post-Thanksgiving recipe for using up excess leftover mashed potatoes.

Still Harvesting, Processing Food, and Gleaning

Well, it's been a long weekend. But we got one of those beautiful Indian summer days we'd been longing for yesterday. And Saturday was cool enough to do some heavy digging and outdoor work without breaking much of a sweat. It's a good feeling to be somewhat caught up on the garden and yardwork chores, but I know there's more, much more to come soon.

I spent an inordinate amount of time baking two pear upside down cakes on Friday. I used about four pounds of the gleaned Bartlett pears from down the road (have I mentioned those?) and a few of our earliest apples. One to eat, one to freeze. The recipe also fortuitously called for almond flour, so naturally I substituted the hazelnut flour that turned up during our recent freezer inventory. It turned out delicious. The one we didn't freeze (smaller than this one) is nearly gone. These gleaned fruits are weighing heavily on my conscience. I don't know that they'll last long enough to be added to our apple cider. And there's this imperative that I have to figure out what to do with them.

The potatoes are all out of the ground. Finally. I was afraid the rain we got compliments of hurricane Kyle might have rotted them. Most of them were sound, but a few of them, the Kennebecs and the All Blues in particular, were eaten away by something. I don't know what was eating them. They looked gnawed, but I don't think it was any toothed animal. We couldn't find any holes in the ground, so I can't figure it out. Sometimes they were lightly "gnawed"; and sometimes there was almost nothing left of the potato. Usually the eaten away area formed a relatively flattened area. Any ideas as to what's going on here? Most of the damaged ones were in a particular area of the garden straddling the rows of the two different varieties of potato. Most annoying. But we got a nice haul of four different varieties of potato, including just enough of the Sangres to serve as seed stock for next year.

Could one of my knowledgeable readers kindly advise me how to store my seed potatoes over the winter? I read so many conflicting things on the web. I've even read that these days only potatoes produced from tissue cultures should be used for seed stock. This seems far fetched to me, but what do I know?

Having gotten the potatoes in on Saturday, we turned our attention to preparing a new bed for the garlic, which needs to be in the ground soon. I've had the girls in the garden as it gets cleared out, so they've been processing compost for me, and laying down some manure. I worked over a 5'x18' bed where some of my squash plants had been and applied the lasagna method of mulching. And I took pictures to illustrate the process.

First I staked out the bed and used survey tape to mark it out. I work best in the garden when I have a clear indication of where the bed is. Then I tore out the weeds and loosened the top few inches of soil with a cultivator. The weeds can be left lying on top of the soil, so long as their roots are out.

While stocking up on free vitamin D for the coming winter months (so frugal!), I used the broad fork to loosen the soil at a deeper level without tilling.

Next, I laid a few comfrey leaves over the bed at regular intervals. Comfrey is a deep mining plant that pulls up minerals and nutrients from 12 inches or more underground. The leaves can be used as green manure, and it grows incredibly vigorously. With the comfry leaves spread out, I began papering over the bed with newspaper.

Once the bed was completely covered in a few layers of newsprint, I hosed down the paper to thoroughly drench it and began covering it with some of that free mulch I get from our township.

When I plant the garlic I'll need to punch through the newspaper to get the bulbs in the ground. The paper will be an impenetrable barrier to other plants, which is good, because I don't like to weed, and garlic doesn't compete very well with neighbors. In the meantime, the worms will happily do their thing in that enriched and loosened soil. A year from now, both the paper and the mulch will have at least partly broken down and will also be enriching the soil. It's especially satisfying to me that my only materials cost (other than the tools) for this project was for the survey tape, which is very reasonably priced. A friend saves the newspaper for me, and I can help myself to as much mulch as I want at the yard waste facility. The wooden stakes were made with a hand ax and a short piece of scrap 2x4.

I found time yesterday to dig some daffodil bulbs up for transplant, and cut out about a third of one variety of comfrey for transplant under the apple tree. I'm told fruit trees enjoy the companionship of comfrey and that comfrey tolerates dividing very well. We shall see.

We also harvested what will probably be the last of the tomatoes. As many cherry tomatoes went to the chickens as came into the kitchen. Many of them were badly split. A few beefsteaks may ripen on a sunny windowsill inside, but I can hardly be bothered. It's October, and no tomato on the vine right now is going to live up to the glory of its name. The tomato plants are due to be ripped out this week. Using a trick I tested last year, we'll uproot them and hang them upside down to allow the green fruits to ripen. This works in a limited way. The "ripe" fruits will be plenty good enough for the chickens. We may use a few as cooking ingredients, but we probably won't eat them fresh. What will probably be the last batch of peppers went into my homemade smoker, and then into the dehydrator. They'll be delicious accents in many dishes over the winter.

We're looking at the apple harvest very soon. Our tree is bearing fairly well, and the apples are turning red, at least on the sides that face the sun. I picked a few on Friday, but I'm going to give them at least another week before picking in earnest. I don't know what type of apple we have, but it's definitely a late variety. We also went back to the neighbors of my relatives to gather more of their apples. We need to go yet again with a really big ladder. Most of their apples are very high up on the tree. We pressed last year in early November. I'll post more on the whole apple cider pressing thing when it happens.

On top of all that, we cleaned up and cleared out one bay of the garage. We were pooped last night! Leftovers for dinner and into bed by 8pm for a little reading before sleep.

I'm still trying to find the enthusiasm to keep harvesting, washing, blanching, and freezing our Tuscan kale. It loves cool weather, so the autumnal temperatures we've been having don't dampen its spirits at all. I went shopping for one of my upcoming cooking classes on Thursday last week, and got a chuckle from seeing local organic Tuscan kale priced at $4.99/lb. at Whole Foods. It looked no more or less nibbled by insects than mine does.

Speaking of fall weather, Brrrr! I love the cooler temperatures for sleeping, but I've had to layer up before going out to feed the hens in the morning lately. Winter is just around the corner, it seems.

Salvaged Food = Chocolate Cake

I took two short trips away from home this month. When I got home from the second one on Monday, I found that the better part of half a gallon of milk was right on the edge of drinkability. It was starting to go sour. It's important to remember that just because old milk tastes off, it's not dangerous - so long as we're talking about pasteurized milk. My milk was pasteurized, and it had been in the fridge for a few weeks. There's nothing in pasteurized milk that has soured which can make you sick. It's a great ingredient to cook with.

Aside from the milk, I've had the last two oversized zucchini from the garden sitting in my kitchen for about a month now. They're sufficiently large that they stabilized enough to behave like winter squash, meaning that they won't rot anytime too soon. But they're also tender enough that there's no reason the flesh couldn't be used for baking. I think you see where this is going, right?

I'd heard about chocolate zucchini cake before, and I recently stumbled upon a recipe for chocolate buttermilk cake. Being the foolhardy baker that I am, I saw no reason not to combine and substitute as my supplies indicated. So I whipped up two chocolate cakes in tube pans on Tuesday night. And boy did they turn out well. Here's what I did.

Chocolate-Zucchini-Sour Milk Cake

Ingredients

2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup unsweetened cocoa, plus extra for dusting
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
3/4 tsp. salt
1 1/2 cups sour milk (or buttermilk)
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 3/4 cups sugar
6 oz. (1 1/2 sticks, or 3/4 cup) butter or shortening, at room temperature.
3 eggs
2-3 cups shredded zucchini

Method

Grease two 9" cake pans or one tube pan and dust with unsweetened cocoa. Arrange a rack in the middle of your oven and preheat it to 350 degrees F.

Combine the flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl. Whisk together the sour milk and the vanilla extract in a small bowl. In yet another large bowl, cream together the sugar and butter, then beat the mixture for 3 minutes at high speed until it is light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, scraping down the sides of the bowl after each addition. Add the two other mixtures into the butter mixture alternately and in stages, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients and blending well between each addition. Mix in the shredded zucchini by hand.

Pour the batter into the cake pans or tube pan and bake for 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out mostly clean, with a few moist crumbs clinging to it. The tube pan will require at least 55 minutes of baking. Cool the cake or cakes for ten minutes in their pans. Remove them from the pans and cool on racks for at least one hour for cakes or two hours for the tube cake. Dust with powdered sugar or frost as desired. The cakes can be wrapped with plastic wrap when thoroughly cooled and frozen for up to three months.




I like this recipe because it feels like I made something yummy and even mildly healthy out of materials that might otherwise have been thrown away. The sourness of the milk vanished into the moist luxury of this cake. If anything it just contributed a slight tang to the overall flavor. I'm not partial to frosting, so I just enjoyed the cake as is. It did suggest to me that it would really go nicely with a scoop of vanilla ice cream though. I put in only two cups of zucchini in my recipe, and I couldn't even detect the zucchini in the cake. I will definitely increase it to 3 cups per batch next time. This is a sneaky way of using up this notoriously prolific vegetable, and also of getting finicky eaters to consume a little vegetable. My guess is they'd never even notice if you didn't say anything.

I still have some more sour milk that needs to be used up. I'm reminded of the blini that I enjoyed in people's homes in Russia. Over there they deliberately let the milk go sour so that they can use it in the blini recipe. Then they eat them with berries and honey or smetana, a heavy product similar to creme fraiche. I'm going to find a blini recipe soon and then see how well they freeze!

Related post:
Sour Milk Potato Biscuit-Muffins

A Baking Day in the Middle of August

I'd pretty much given up on any serious baking, other than an occasional pizza, for the summer. But our stores of no-knead bread have been getting very low. Very low indeed. And my favorite tomato sauce requires high temperature roasting. The tomatoes are poised to come in hot and heavy this month. So this past weekend, I checked the weather forecast. I was stunned to see that a high temperature of only 70 was forecast for Monday. Hot damn! That's baking weather. My agenda for Monday was set.

I geared up big time for a marathon baking day, and it was so much work that it's taken me this long to recover sufficiently to tell you about it. On Sunday I made two pie crusts for quiche, and prepped five pounds' worth of Moonblush cherry tomatoes. I also mixed up two double batches of my multigrain no-knead dough. 101 Cookbook's special zucchini bread recipe and apple butter cake were also on the agenda, so I juiced six lemons and converted half of the peels into zest and the other half into candied peels. These organic lemons had been sitting around long enough, and I knew I'd need the zest for baking. The juice got frozen via the ice cube tray trick. All this prep set me up well for Monday.

After folding and letting the no-knead bread rise, I fired up the oven at 9 am on Monday morning. The oven was on continuously until 5 pm, and except for short periods when I needed to change the temperature of the oven, it was never empty. While the bread baked, I prepped the Special Zucchini Bread, modifying the recipe willy-nilly to suit what ingredients I had on hand. As soon as the last two loaves of bread came out of the oven, in went the two loaves of zucchini bread. Then I prepped a batch of roasted tomato sauce with the beefsteak and Roma tomatoes that are now ripening in the garden. While that cooked, I washed the zucchini bread residue off the loaf pans and prepped the apple butter cakes. I cut up some of our sugar pumpkins from the garden, trimmed them, and then put the slices in the oven for a long slow bake as soon as the apple butter cakes were out. These were destined for our dinner of kaddo bourani, a succulent Afghan recipe I once enjoyed at Helmand restaurant in San Francisco. I had waited years to try this recipe. I was able to pre-bake the quiche shells while the pumpkin cooked, since the oven temperature was compatible. While the quiche shells cooled and the pumpkin did its thing, I prepared two different sauces to go with the pumpkins: a ground beef and tomato sauce and a garlicky minted yogurt sauce. I also pureed the roasted tomatoes and canned the sauce, then assembled the two quiches to be ready for the oven when the pumpkin came out.

Aside from the bread, everything I prepared contained ingredients that I had grown myself or in some way been involved in procuring directly. Here's a list of food that was "processed" to make it store longer:


Roasted Tomato Sauce:
tomatoes and garlic from the garden

Zucchini bread:
zucchini from the garden
gleaned, hand-shelled hickory nuts
eggs from our laying hens
homemade vanilla extract
homemade candied lemon peel

Kaddo Bourani:
sugar pumpkin, garlic, and tomatoes from the garden
Part of a chuck roast bought on sale and ground up at home

Apple butter cake:
apple butter made last fall from our homegrown apples
eggs from our laying hens

Quiche:
homegrown cherry tomatoes (converted into Moonblush tomatoes)
homegrown rainbow chard
homemade pie crust
eggs from our laying hens


We finally sat down to dinner around 7:30. I was exhausted! You'll have to take my word that the kaddo bourani was sublime and very filling, because by that time I was too hungry and tired to waste time snapping pictures. But dinner tasted better knowing that I had four loaves of my multigrain bread, two loaves of zucchini bread, two apple butter cakes, two quiches, and three quarts of canned roasted tomato sauce to show for my efforts. Plus plenty of leftovers from dinner. The freezer was well stocked, and I knew we wouldn't run out of bread until cooler weather arrives. I went to bed early with an enormous feeling of satisfaction at having put so much of our garden produce to good use.

Our Daily Bread

I've posted before about learning to bake bread. But I realized recently that I've never posted about No-Knead bread (NK for short). Apparently, this revolutionary method of bread baking hit the foodie world like a tsunami after an article by Mark Bittman appeared in the New York Times sometime in late 2006. This was just before I became interested in learning to bake a good loaf of bread.

At first, I dismissed the idea, thinking that such an easy and simple technique couldn't possibly produce a loaf of bread with a great crust and interior texture. I was sure that doing it the traditional way, with hand kneading and plain old fashioned effort, would contribute something wonderful that would be lost if too many shortcuts were taken. Eventually though, after a few so-so results of all my hand kneading, I figured I had nothing to lose by giving the NK a shot. I already had a cast iron dutch oven, so there were no up front costs for me.

My first time making NK bread convinced me. This was going to be my standard bread making methodology from now on; I was never going back. I've eaten bread in the San Francisco bay area and in Paris. If you have too, you'll know what I'm talking about. I can say in all honesty that NK bread would be able to stand up straight with its shoulders back among the ranks of breads produced in either of those locations. It's not the very, very best bread I've ever had in all my life. But it's damn close, and it's ridiculously easy - and cheap - to make at home.

As of this writing, organic bread flour costs well over $1 per pound, even when buying in bulk. The NK loaves I make use exactly one pound of flour. Usually I make multi-grain loaves that contain both wheat bread flour and whole spelt flour, along with mixed rolled grains such as rye, barley and oats. All together, my materials cost is somewhere around $1.40 for all organic ingredients. That produces a 10" round loaf that weighs about 1.75 pounds, for a unit price of 80 cents per pound. See if you can find any freshly baked loaf of bread that sells for 80 cents a pound, let alone one made with organic ingredients. And we'll let alone the quality issue as well.

Breadtopia has a fantastic tutorial on baking NK bread, with both text and video, so I won't bother to repeat the instructions here. I'll just say that if you have a dutch oven and even a little bit of time, you can make this bread. Truly, a seven-year-old could make this bread; it's that easy.

For better frugality, we invested in a second dutch oven so that we could bake two loaves simultaneously. So now we get twice the output of bread for the energy required to heat our oven up. Now that the hot summertime is upon us, baking is the absolute last thing I want to do. Fortunately, I planned ahead this year and stocked my chest freezer with about ten loaves of our beloved NK bread during the cold months of the year.

I didn't think, when I started learning to bake, that I would end up baking all of our bread. But that's how it is for us now. It's one more thing that we never have to run to the store for. That cuts down on wear and tear on our car and saves us gas too. One more thing we can do for ourselves. One less skill we pay for someone else to develop.

Give No Knead Bread a try. I think you'll be impressed with the flavor, the savings and with the ease of preparation. It's a can't lose experiment.