what happens when it’s too hot to actually cook

Today it is too hot to do very much.  After working with children all morning, I had an amazing burger from a little stand in town–local meat, cheese, homemade pickles, and a good slice of tomato on a portuguese bun…yes please–and have since been trying my hardest to remain motionless by several fans in a room with the shades drawn.  Luckily the work I needed to do this afternoon involved only a computer.  And since I finished that, I’ve decided to make a summer list.  It’s a trend in blogs right now (see here, for example), and I like to stay with the times.

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Things to do (and by “do” I probably mean “eat”) this summer:

peach cake with whipped cream

korean bbq including homemade pork buns

blueberries

make mozzerella

mint juleps

swim/canoe/boat in the west river or elsewhere

tomatoes in abundance, especially sun golds hot from the garden

banh mi (from this recipe)

contra dance

pie and lots of it

bacon-fused hot dog/pineapple wonders (thank you for inspiration, fourth of july and chris)

make pickles

make jam

potato salad (possibly this?)

fresh sweet corn on the cob, skip the butter, then leftover corn, off the cob, with big fat slices of juicy tomato

home squeezed lemonade

saturday farmer’s market (better yet, beat the crowd and get there by 10am)

walpole creamery ice cream

update this blog more

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Alright.  Time to get to work…

Aaaaand it’s July!

Bam!
Oh, hello July, where’d you come from?  (Obviously I’m really bad at blogging.)  So…camera still not uploading photos to computer = still no photos on the blog, however, I do have this to say:

Hot dog, fused with pineapple, using bacon.

Happy fourth of July (a day late).

The Sourdough Experiment

I have to preface this by saying that my camera is currently on bedrest and I’ll supply pics shortly.  In the meantime, enjoy my wordsmithship.

So, it’s summer again (what? when did that happen?) and I’ve pulled an old favorite, HomeBaking, off the shelf again.  Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford wrote this cookbook posing as a coffee table book.  I became obsessed originally solely because of the gorgeous full-page full-color photographs.  This is definitely one of those read-front-to-back kinda cookbooks.  For me, anyway. I realize that’s a pretty nerdy admission but there you have it.  But the book is freaking huge and therefore couldn’t travel to London with me, so it’s been shelved since last summer.

After dusting it off a few weeks ago I made the chocolate chip cranberry sweet buns when more than lived up to my expectations.  Then I totally wrecked havoc on the easy cheese and bean rounds, but the ones I made were pretty delish, nonetheless.  Naomi and Jeffrey have been disappointing me a little bit, though.  I finally got down to bread baking, and I opted to make a poolish for the ciabatta recipe.  And what can I say? The end result was “eh”.  I didn’t even mess with the recipe!  (I think).  I saved some of the poolish as they instruct, and have been treating it like a starter.  Today I made sourdough pancakes– pretty excellent flavor, but too dense for a pancake.  They don’t come anywhere near my favorite SDpancake recipe from King Arthor.  Alas, alack.

I’ve also started an experiment.  Recipe-less sourdough bread.  I think it may have too much salt.  It’s supposedly rising right now, so the judges are still out on how bad an idea that was.  I’ll keep you posted.

sidetracked…?

With all the fresh mint taking over the newly growing world there is but one solution: The VerMint Julep.
Crushed ice.
Fresh mint.
Bourbon.
Maple Syrup.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Strike!

For now, I will eat only vegetables. They are too good to be ignored.
Also, LOOK at how pretty the salads are where I work…

(photo by liz)

in the meantime, this is how you make pound cake

Basically. But a little more complicated.

A Winter’s Tale

Outside, it is doing this. I spent a good long time with a 2×4 trying to free the lilacs of the crippling heavy snow.

Meanwhile, inside, friend Lizzie decided to whip up a batch of these.

Biscotti di regina are simple and delicious. They have very little no butter, but I like them anyway. The toasted sesame seeds alone would be enough to win me over, but when dipped in a cup of post-shovelling coffee they are divine. Thanks lizzie!

Gimme A Little Goat

Goat cheese is great. Put it in a salad, put it on a pizza, put it on a cracker with jam. Yum in so many ways. Now, we’ve never been huge cheesecake fans (I mean, we guess we’ll eat it if we have to), but this is a truly genius dessert.

It’s less sweet and heavy than most cheesecakes with just a hint of goat, plus when you use muffin tins you get perfect little mini cakes. And let’s face it, things that have been miniturized are just better.

pre-baked crusts...so buttery delicious

We adapted a recipe from this great food blog.  Since graham crackers are hard to come by in England, we used digestive biscuits.  This was a good call.  Again, slightly less sweet, excellent texture that improved with age (started fine and crumbly, became dense and moist), and more buttery.

melting the cheese

We also used slightly more goat cheese, and slightly less cream cheese.  Apparently they make mini cheesecake molds, and while we love kitchen appliances that serve only one purpose (apple slicers, egg cups, egg slicers…apple cups) this seems a little extreme.  Muffin tins work just dandily.

Little Goat Cheesecakes with Jam

adapted from Food on the Food

1 cup smashed digestive biscuits
5 Tbsp. butter, melted
400 g cream cheese (about 14 oz)
300 g goat cheese (about 10.5 oz)
½ cup sugar
2 Tbsp. honey
2 eggs
Black currant preserves (I used Bon Maman, any flavor you want, the more tart the better)

Preheat oven to 350°F (175˚C).

Grease a 12-cup muffin tin, or two 6-cup ones.  Or a mini cheesecake pan, if that’s your thing. Combine digestive biscuit crumbs with melted butter, and press even amounts into each cup.  Bake 10 minutes and set aside to cool.

Cut cream cheese into chunks and melt over low heat (or in the microwave, if you’re so lucky to have one).  Add crumbles of goat cheese, sugar, honey, and eggs and whisk until its smooth.  If you’re doing this on the stove top, you can keep the heat on very low.  Spoon even amounts on top of each crust (beware: batter will expand in the oven) and bake about 20 minutes or until centers are set and just starting to crack.

Set tin aside to cool, then refrigerate.  When you’re ready to eat one (or two, or three) use a clean knife to cut cake from the edges of the tin, then pop out onto a plate and top with the preserves of your choice. Makes enough to fill a 12-cup muffin tin or a 9-cup mini cheesecake pan.

Vanilla suga suga

For christmas we were gifted many bundles of potent, infectiously delicious-smelling vanilla beans. First off, LOOK AT THE SEEDS. Secondly, vanilla sugar. Thirdly, vanilla bean creme brulée. But that’s another story.

In which we rise to the occasion (and other bad baking puns)

So in September we launched this blog…

• In October we made endless apple pies, perfecting our crust (shortening is a fact of life, it turns out.)
• In November we ventured into sugar pumpkin land. Purées were whipped up, pies were baked. Whisky drinks were concocted to keep us warm.
• In December we made oatmeal chocolate chip citrus cookies. And Norwegian christmas bread. And more pie. ’nuff said.
• In January we were too sick of winter to make more than grilled cheese. All the time.
• And oh hey we’re up to February. Blogging is easy.

While this baker’s computer is spanking new and ready to share, her camera is kaput. So I will satisfy your baked-good cravings with images from one of our many Tepid Water BAKESTRAVAGANZAS back in the Old Days (before we went international.)

Ukrainian-Ontarian bakestraganza!

So we have this beautiful book by Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford called Home Baking: The artful mix of flour and tradition around the world. It is a wonderful book for many reasons. Three reasons it is so good? 1) It is big. Like coffee table book big. 2) It is full of beautiful photographs of food and people around the world. 3) It shows “the daily rhythm of turning flour into food.”  Somehow looking at people’s bread seems less voyeuristic than looking at pictures of them.

We were seduced by the names and pictures. This particular day we made Ukrainian Honey Cake (Medivnyk) and Butter Tarts, a specialty of Ontario. I won’t bother with too many mundane details. Get the book if you’re interested. I will just say that it was an enlightening and tasty process.

The honey cake involved your average cake eggs and flour etc. Different highlights included honey and coffee for depth of flavor and color.

Honey is added to the batter to make it beautiful and delicious

This is no boring white flour cake. OH NO. Spice city!

Thickened batter

plus coffee

Finished product: tastes more remarkable than it looks (I swear!)

The cake was one of the most interesting I’ve eaten–not too sweet, tasted faintly of spice and honey with a bit of bitterness from the coffee. Survey says AWESOME.

The butter tarts were another story. We saw the name, we thought “Hey! We love butter! Let’s make these.” Turns out everyone knows what they are in Ontario, but elsewhere people have no clue. Well, if we were Canadian we would have known that we were making essentially pecan pie filling minus the nuts, in a pastry crust. Being american we added the nuts out of instinct.

I have to say that butter tarts, while delicious, did not live up to their name. So here for your viewing pleasure is some butter.

YESSSSSSS

This just in: Americans Mess Up Traditional Canadian Dessert, Make More American

All in a day’s experimental baking.