Chicken Soup For The Sick Person

So every now and again, folks get sick and need something simple to eat.  That may or may not have happened this week, so here was a quick soup I put together to salve the meager and delicate appetite.

This takes three burners, so clear off the stove.

Boil 8 cups of water for broth - add 4 chicken bouillon cubes
Boil 4 quarts of water with a little salt for spiral noodles
A heavy bottom pan / dutch oven to assemble the soup in

3 boneless, skinless chicken thigh pieces -- very cheap and full of fatty goodness

Season lightly with some kosher salt and brown in some butter in the final pan -- it's not necessary to cook the whole way through as you'll be putting it into boiling broth.  You just want to get a nice brown on the chicken, which will eventually dissolve and give a subtle flavor to the soup.

Once the broth is boiling add some carrots to it -- I used baby, mostly because it was easy.

Once the water is boiling add the noodles and cook per the package.

When the chicken is browned and the broth is boiled, remove the chicken and deglaze the pan with the boiling stock.  Make sure to get the good brown bits off the bottom of the pan.  Put this on med-low heat and allow to simmer.

Cut up the chicken into small pieces and add back to the pan.  Allow this mess to simmer until the chicken is cooked and the carrots are to your desired tenderness.  Add some green beans also or whatever other vegetables you like.  Remember, this is for sick folks - don't get crazy.

When the pasta is done, drain it and then add some butter to it to keep it from sticking.  I leave the soup and the noodles separate until I serve, so the noodles don't turn to complete mush.

When I ate it, I finished it with a little extra salt and cracked fresh pepper so mine had some semblance of flavor...

Hopefully it doesn't make you any sicker!

Apple Butter - the cheap, easy way

Who doesn't love pictures of a kid playing in a red wagon?  Especially on a beautiful fall day in a pumpkin patch?  I'm not sure if a question mark is appropriate there, but that's what is happening.  This picture is especially wonderful, because it shows the general lack of concern by the person taking the photo (me) for my child's safety as he stands up in the cute red wagon.  I'm a wonderful parent, really.

At said pumpkin farm, you're encouraged to pay money to let your kid play on bails of hay, run through a corn maze and/or pet goats.  You are also encouraged to buy gourds, toobers and canned fruit from the previous season.  Of course we gave in to buying a pumpkin and apple butter, duh.

Apparently I like to waste my time in the kitchen, so I got to wondering how to make apple butter.  Ironically, unlike rain on your wedding day, apple butter involves no butter.  If you disagree with my understanding of that as a case of irony, please consider the following:
i·ron·ic  (-rnk) also i·ron·i·cal (-rn-kl)

adj.

1. Characterized by or constituting irony.

2. Given to the use of irony. See Synonyms at sarcastic.

3. Poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended: madness, an ironic fate for such a clear thinker.

i·roni·cal·ly adv.

i·roni·cal·ness n.

Usage Note: The words ironic, irony, and ironically are sometimes used of events and circumstances that might better be described as simply "coincidental" or "improbable," in that they suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly. Thus 78 percent of the Usage Panel rejects the use of ironically in the sentenceIn 1969 Susie moved from Ithaca to California where she met her husband-to-be, who, ironically, also came from upstate New York. Some Panelists noted that this particular usage might be acceptable if Susie had in fact moved to California in order to find a husband, in which case the story could be taken as exemplifying the folly of supposing that we can know what fate has in store for us. By contrast, 73 percent accepted the sentence Ironically, even as the government was fulminating against American policy, American jeans and videocassettes were the hottest items in the stalls of the market, where the incongruity can be seen as an example of human inconsistency.

If you still don't think I'm intelligent, you're probably right.

Apple butter has the consistency of butter due to some form of chemical something or other.  I read a lot of this stuff and it basically boils down to this:  if you boiled apples down long enough, you get a consistency similar to a butter-intense sauce.  Punn intended.  I like two n's better.

Many of the recipes talk about starting with fresh apples, which I suppose you would do if you had an affinity for apple picking or an apple tree, but I have neither.  What I do have is access to unsweetened, natural applesauce from mott's at the grocery store.  Applesauce is what you get when you don't boil the apples as long.  Most of the recipes sought to make you feel like less of a person on the order of this article, if you chose to use store-bought apple sauce.  Please understand that the article uses a magical literary style called satire.  Though if you read the comments at the bottom of the article, you will find many individuals who have not grasped this particular style of humor.  Alas, it all comes down to what do you enjoy wasting your time on.  Processing fruit is not a favorite waste-time of mine.

The picking, peeling, coring, cooking for many hours and jarring involved to obtain a jar of apple butter almost justified me paying five dollars.  However, once I figured out I could start with a 3 lb jug of applesauce for $1.79, an empty salsa jar and make a batch in about an hour, I turned my nose up at the apple butter mafia and struck out on my own.

By the way, sanitizing the jar beyond washing it in the dishwasher is completely unnecessary.  If the stuff turns out well, and it will, it will be consumed in a day anyways.

I tried this starting with 2 and 4 cups of apple sauce.  It cooks down to about half that volume, though I found doubling the sauce doubles the time to cook and double the mess.  Proceed at your leisure.  I'll provide the 2 cup amounts here.  Soon, you too can have delicious apple butter and your house will smell like the little house on the prairie in the fall.

Here's my recipe:

In a cast iron pan combine the following:

2 cups applesauce
2 tbs white sugar
2 tbs brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp allspice
1 tsp ground cloves

Mess with the spices per your own desires -- I just throw stuff in until it looks right.

Mix well and place on med-low heat.  You want to maintain a nice slow simmer.  Don't turn the heat too high because it will splatter everywhere and burn.  Besides, leave it a little lower and drink a nice warm glass of brandy and relax.

Stir it occasionally to keep it from sticking and enjoy the aroma.  It's done when it has darkened and reduced in volume by about half.  It took about 30-45 min on my stove.

Put it on just about anything.  My favorites are graham crackers, fresh biscuits and the French Toast I posted earlier today.

Down with the Apple Butter Mafia!  Please attend my funeral if they knock me off.

French Toast

I may or may not be having a perfect fall Sunday.

The kid woke up at 500 and after being topped off he slept until 830.  Beautiful.  I finally dragged myself out of bed by about 8 and got to work in the kitchen.  This is my perfect day, don't judge.  I got to work preparing a pork shoulder for pulled pork later on in the day and then got to work on making a Sunday breakfast treat for the family.  It went over spectacularly. (I'm not conceited, really...)  After breakfast I warmed up my embouchure before taking a shower and heading to church.  The organist at our church is simply wonderful and it inspired me to dust off (literally) my trumpet for some accompaniment.  This next Sunday being Christmas for Lutherans, a.k.a. Reformation Sunday, we chose a piece for me to play for the Prelude to the service.  I have really forgotten how much I love making music.

After that, we dumped the kid in the church nursery.  I feel like I should break out a thesaurus to find a different way of saying "after that", but I'm no English major, so you'll just have to suffer my intolerable monotony.  Claire and I are new to the church and didn't realize that the whole nursery is carted into the church for the children's sermon.  While the procession of children processed, I noticed a woman carrying a pudgy red-headed kid, and I thought to myself, "that kid looks like Rowan."  My brain did a little of that new math and figured out that is was my kid.  It took me until the end of the Hymn of the Day to stop laughing at myself for my sheer stupidity.  It probably wasn't that funny, oh well.

Following the church service, I had a cup of coffee and chatted with the members as God intended for Lutherans.  We did purchase tickets to the church's Oktoberfest, which I'm pumped about.

Upon arriving home, I put the pork roast in the oven, hoping it emerges fall apart delicious pulled pork on kaiser rolls for after ultimate frisbee this afternoon.  The kid drank a bottle on the drive home and promptly fell asleep for his Sunday afternoon nap, also as God intended for Lutherans.  Now I am drinking coffee, eating a braunschweiger with dijon mustard sammich and writing this ridiculous blog.

Which brings me to my next point, don't smoke crack.
 
Apparently this post has something do to with French toast, so I might as well get after it.

A few months back, I got into making all of our bread at home.  One of my go-to bread recipes is one I adapted from my friend Penny -- it's a sounds-like version of Brownberry's oatmeal bread.  I will post that recipe later on today, but now I'm focusing on the French toast part of it.  If I make three loaves of the stuff on Sunday, I usually end up with half a loaf left by the following Sunday morning, which cuts into six, one inch slices, perfect for this recipe.

Possibly my favorite TV chef, whose recipes I generally adore, is Alton Brown.  My wife recalled eating French toast growing up, so she encouraged me to give it a shot and lo and behold, Alton had a recipe for it.  It seemed a bit involved at the outset, but it is most definitely worth the effort.  For the most part, I keep everything true to the original, save the thickness of the slice of bread.  The thickness just seems extravagant to me, plus it reduces the number of things I have to fry in a pan - less time cooking, more time eating and drinking coffee.

So here goes the recipe:

Preheat the oven to 375° F

Here's the goofy equipment you need:
two wire cooling racks
two cookie sheets
pie pan

In a bowl mix the following:

3 eggs
1 cup of at least whole milk, half and half even better
2 tbs of warm honey
1/4 tsp of salt (be sensible)

Once mixed place this all in a flat dish like a pie pan

Cut your bread 1 inch thick - seriously, it's great.

Put the cooling racks in the cookie sheets and set one next to the cook top and put one in the oven.

Get your pan nice and warm - I prefer a well seasoned cast iron for this.

Put a piece of bread in the pie dish and let it soak for about 30 seconds on each side and then move it to the cookie sheet on the counter for about 2 minutes to let egg mix soak through the bread - remember how thick you cut it?

Put a pad of butter in the pan so nothing sticks and then brown the bread evenly brown on both sides, being careful not to rip it - there's a lot of eggy-goodness in there.

Once it is browned on both sides, transfer to the wire rack in the oven and let it bake for 5 minutes to finish of the interior of the bread without burning the outside.

Plate it up and serve it with just about anything you like, however after picking up a jar of apple butter at a pumpkin farm, I definitely encourage going with apple butter.  PS - I'll be posting a really easy recipe for this in a little bit.

Here is to my perfect Sunday.  I'm trying to come up with something witty and/or sarcastic, but I'm in too good of a mood to act so foul.

Enjoy your Sunday afternoon and go listen to the re-broadcast of a Prairie Home Companion, as God intended for Lutherans on Sunday afternoons.

Margarita Chicken Sammiches

A limerick for Mike and Jaime
Our time was quite cockamamie
When Mike got hurt
He did not work
Thus, Big Bite with Guy Fieri

That was rather lame, but I do like limericks.  And if you do too, you should check out the The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form.  I much prefer their definition of chicken to my putrid attempt at artfully adulating the inspiration for this recipe.  There goes the alliteration again...

A chicken is someone who's not
Very brave, and who worries a lot,
Or a fowl like a duck,
That we slaughter and pluck.
We may cluck as it's chucked in a pot.

Back in the day, when my wife and I lived next door to our friends Mike and Jaime, we got in the habit of watching a lot of Food Network and subsequently, we tried making some recipes from said tv station.  Mike decided we should try this recipe from Guy, and though I am not usually a fan of his, this recipe serves as the basis for a wonderfully tasty sammich.

This time around, I didn't have jalapenos to use in the recipe, but after just returning from Wisconsin, my mother gave me some tabasco peppers from her garden.  I figured this was worth a shot.  In the past I have also done fresh jalapeno and pickled jalapeno, both tasted great.

The recipe calls for marinating red bell peppers, then dredging them in flour and frying them.  From my recollection, this turned into quite a debacle of smoke.  I'm sure if I was more proficient at frying this wouldn't happen, but it seemed like a lot of effort to add something that would be masked by the flavor of the chicken, red onions and spicy mayonnaise.

Speaking of the spicy mayonnaise, the recipe called for putting plain mayonnaise on the roll, but we had a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce screaming to be used, so I looked around for some recipes and came up with the following:

1 cup of mayonnaise
2 tbs of lime juice
3 peppers finely chopped
2 tbs of adobo sauce
salt and fresh pepper to taste

Later on when I ran out of chicken, I made a salad of spinach, red onion, tomatoes and the spicy mayo as a dressing.  It was rather delicious, however don't plan on kissing anyone for the rest of the night...

I also traded out cabbage for what I had in my fridge - spinach.  Something green and crunchy did the trick.  I also finished it with a couple tomatoes.

So here goes my recipe:

3 boneless skinless chicken breasts, butterflied and cut into pieces the size of a deck of cards.  I think I got about 9-10 pieces of chicken out of that

Marinate the pieces in the following for 4-8 hours:
2 tbs of chopped peppers (in my case tobasco)
1/4 cup of chopped fresh cilantro
4 tbs of tequila (rot gut works just fine)
1 tbs of minced garlic
1 tsp of cumin
1 tsp of oregano
juice of two limes

When it times come to cook, I would imagine you could do them in the broiler or a pan, though I prefer charcoal grill.  I cook my chicken indirect, because otherwise I end up burning the hell out of them and end up with dry chicken.

Cook the chicken until done -- should be firm to the touch.  It took about 10 minutes a side indirect.

Build up your sammich with some spicy mayo on the bun, a piece of chicken, a slice of jack cheese, spinach, red onion and tomato.

As you can see I served it with tortillas and some guacamole.

Work has been done.  Oh, fond memories of Meridian.

Kaiser Rolls

Tonight's menu includes grilled chicken sandwiches done in the style of Guy Fieri's Margarita Chicken Sandwich.  I made a few changes and will report them and the results later on, but it calls for kaiser rolls, so I figured I would try and make them.

My wife found a wonderful website called The Fresh Loaf, and upon googling for kaiser roll recipe, it pulled up a recipe from the site, so I figured that would be a good start.  The initial list of ingredients looked do-able, though I have no idea what "malt powder" is, and I wasn't feeling particularly motivated to find out, so I decided to do the recipe without it.  I made one batch last night to see what would happen and today my wife made a batch with a few suggestions from my mistakes.  We found out a couple of things:

The basic recipe works fine.  Here are my modifications:

I prefer to start the yeast with the water, sugar and yeast before I add things like salt and oil.  Somewhere I heard those items inhibit the yeast's growth, so I let I start the yeast to make sure it's alive and happy.

Like I said, I left out the "malt powder".

I had no poppy or sesame seeds, so I just did extra flour on the outside.  This turned out to be an important step.  You need to let the formed roll rise for about an hour and if you don't supply the seemingly superfluous flour, alliteration aside, the rolls will collapse if they stick and you try and move them to the stone.

I had to bake in two halves as my stone isn't large enough.  The first half of the first batch, I used 450° in the oven and set the time for 22 minutes.  At 20 minutes they came out pretty dark, but the the decorative folds turned out very nice.

The second half of the first batch, I used 450° and did 18 minutes.  They had better color, but because of the extra rise time, the decoration was much more muted.

The second batch was put together by my wife while I was at work.  I told her to change the temperature to 425°, and while I had noticed the flour did I nice job of keeping the the risen roll from sticking and subsequently deflating, I didn't mention the utilitarian purpose of the flour on top.  She didn't care for the excess flour so she didn't use a whole lot and the rolls ended up sticking and deflating...  Sad face.

As far as the decoration goes, it got about 2 hours of rising in roll form so the decoration wasn't that pronounced, but I'm sure they'll taste fine.  They were baked at 425° for 15 minutes which produced a much lighter brown on the roll, though I think I may go back to the 450° and use 15 minutes.  The lower heat didn't make as intense of a crust.

So here goes my recipe:

Combine the following and let rest for 10 min:
1.5 tsp yeast
1 tbs sugar
1.25 cup water tepid water

Once the yeast is happy whisk in the following:
1 tsp salt
1 egg
1 egg white (save the yolk to fry up and put on the finished roll with some butter and a slice of cheese)
1 tbs vegetable oil

Add flour until it's right.  In my French Bread recipe I explain what that means.

Knead until it is mixed, let it rise in an oven with the light on for an hour.

Knead for a few minutes and rise for an hour again.  Maybe it develops flavor?  I don't know.

Let it rise for another hour.

Take a look at the Kaiser Roll recipe from fresh loaf for how to form the roll.

Place the formed roll on a heavily floured (or poppy/sesame seeded) surface to rise for an hour.

40 minutes in to the rise, preheat the oven to 450°F with the stone on the middle rack and a cast iron pan on the bottom rack.

Once everything is hot, transfer the rolls to the stone and then pour a cup of water into the cast iron pan to make some steam to help develop the crust.  Leave it in there for 15 minutes and then assess how the crust looks.  It would also be worth turning the remaining rolls over so the decoration doesn't get flattened.

Here is a photo of the different batches in the order in which I made them so you can see what I mean about browning and decoration.


Make it so number one.  Engage.

Latkas - aka potato pancakes

So this one is my first mobile edition - straight from the cool kid phone. I used a couple recipes, but here is what seems to work best in terms of texture and taste balanced with effort.

Get yourself a bag of ore-ida frozen hashbrowns. Raw potatoes take a long time to cook and using pre-baked was not worth the effort and it turned out a little mushy.

Whisk together 2 eggs, 1.5 tsp salt, 1 tsp of fresh ground pepper.

In a large bowl, combine half the bag of hasbrowns, 2 tbs flour and a diced medium onion, then add the egg mixture.

Heat up a cast iron pan over medium heat with about a 1/4 inch of veggie oil until the shimmers. Put a pattie of the hasbrowns in and cook for 3-5 min a side. Be patient with it, keeping the temp down and letting a nice brown develop on both sides. I like to put them on a cooling rack in a pan in the oven set to as low as it will go - it helps prevent getting soggy.

Eat with applesauce or ketchup or whatever else you can think of.

Lchayyim.

It means "to life". Don't confuse it with Monty Python's Life of Brian, that would be ha'chay l'Brian. And if you ate these pancakes and exclaimed they would be good enough for YHVH.... Well, don't say it...

BTW - posting from the iFizzle sucks. That is all.

Grilled pork shoulder -- latin american style

I love pig.  It's my favorite animal.

Here is an excerpt from an extremely important episode of the Simpsons.

Marge: All right, Lisa, if you don't want lamb
       chops, there are lots of other things I can make.  Chicken
       breast.  Rump roast.  Hot dogs.

Each forms an image in Lisa's mind.  The corresponding part falls off
onto a plate.

 Lisa: No I can't!  I can't eat any of them!
Homer: Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute.  Lisa honey, are you
       saying you're *never* going to eat any animal again?  What about
       bacon?
 Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
 Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
 Lisa: Dad!  Those all come from the same animal!
Homer: [Chuckles] Yeah, right Lisa.  A wonderful, magical animal.

Yes -- pig is a magical animal.  I learned this early on from Homer, but my love for the animal has only grown as I have learned the joys of pork tenderloins, pork cube steak parmigiana, bacon, and it goes on and on.  It has driven me to begin dreaming of being an organic pig farmer -- free range piggies, if you will.  Hopefully the won't smell like cigarettes and beer... (go watch Trailer Park Boys if you would like to understand the reference)

So as I explained in my previous post, I had a Cinco de Mayo party in September and I wanted to have pork burritos.  I looked for carnitas recipes, and found out that involved boiling the pig in lard, which sounds well and good, but I had a hankering to cook the pig on the grill.  One of my personal grilling heroes is Steve Raichlen, whom you may remember from such shows as The Primal Grill.  He has some amazing recipes, one of which I absolutely love for South Carolina Pulled Pork.  I'll write about that one another day...

I used the cooking time and mopping method and adapted for a latin american flavor.  Here goes my version:

5-10lb pork shoulder with the skin on -- definitely need the skin on...

Cut a hatch pattern in the pork skin so when you season, it will be able to get to the meat.  Season the pork shoulder with salt, pepper, powdered garlic, powdered onion, oregano and chili powder.  I don't know what measurements I used, but just be reasonable about it.

Set up a Weber One Touch (as far as I'm concerned, there is no other grill) grill for indirect heating
Put a pan in between the coals which will catch the drippings to be added to meat later on.  Aluminum foil will work, but it's a pain to get it out afterwards without spilling.  I have a 9" x 13" metal pan that works great, but if you're concerned about it looking pretty afterwards, I would advise against using it.

Put the grate on (be sure to orient it so you can add coals as you go) and put the meat directly above the pan.

About every 45 minutes you will want to go out, add a few coals and then mop the meat with a mixture of fresh lime juice, simple syrup, salt and water.

You'll be repeating this for the next 5 hours or so, depending on how hot the fire is and how big your shoulder is.  You're looking to get the interior of the roast to 195° -- this is really warm, but don't worry about drying it out.  The fat is extremely marbled in the shoulder and will keep it moist.  The outside will look pretty dark, but don't worry, this is going to happen.

Once it is done, the roast should be literally falling off the shoulder bone, if you have to cut much, it's probably not done.  You should be able to pull it apart with great ease.  Retrieve the pan of drippings as the meat should be placed into it once it is pulled.  Add to it 2 cups of sofrito, I found the jarred stuff works well, but I'm sure someone will take offense to that.  Mix it all up and then stick it in a tortilla with the aforementioned cilantro lime rice, some guacamole and some black beans, and baby you got a stew goin!

Engage.

Cilantro Lime Rice

A few weeks ago I decided to have a Cinco de Mayo party.  The party took place on September 18th.  My explanation was that I had ventured forth a new translation -- "Party at Tim and Claire's".  I was having burritos at this party and wanted a rice component to the burrito.  I was planning on making my "spanish rice" which was basically just chicken broth and salsa to cook the rice in, but my friend recommended I make cilantro lime rice.  I thought that sounded like a great idea, as I love lime and cilantro with a great loving.  That sent me on a google search for a recipe and I came across this:

http://www.cooking-mexican-recipes.com/cilantro-lime-rice.html

It called for basmati rice, but I just substituted mahatma long grain rice and used chicken broth in the amount listed on the rice package.

My recipe is as follows:

1 Tbs olive oil
2-3 cloves minced garlic
kosher salt to taste

Saute this together over medium heat to soften the garlic

Add 1 cup of long grain rice and saute for a few minutes to get a little browning.

Add 2 cups of chicken broth or boullion and 2 Tbs of lime juice (juice of one lime)

Cook covered over low heat until rice is done (about 25 min)

Finish with the cilantro and lime zest.

Felicidad!

Check out my next post for my grilled pork shoulder which also went in the burritos!

Roast Beef for Sammiches

I don't know what it is, but putting something between two slices of bread makes something delicious, one bit closer to gastro-intesntinal heaven. As such, I decided to find a way of making roast beef at home so I didn't have to pay the 5-10 dollars a pound for the stuff from the deli. I don't particularly care for oscar mayer meat, though Carl Buddig holds a special place in my heart - paradox in preference is a key tenant of my culinary outlook on life.

I have tried using the brisket, but found it to be a little too chewy, though I probably just don't have the right recipe. You could spend lots of money on a standing rib roast, but that almost defeats the purpose. Shopping at the commissary, I can get bottom round roasts for about $2.50 per pound, which I find a perfectly acceptable amount, though I wasn't sure what the quality of the sandwich meat would be. I looked on the internet for bottom round roast and came across this recipe:

http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/high-temperature-eye-of-round-roast/Detail.aspx

I followed the recipe almost exactly, except that I made a roasting pan with a rack out of a cookie sheet and a cooling rack. One of my failed attempts at using brisket resulted in crock-pot style beef when I put it in a pan and covered with foil and slow roasted.

Here is my version:

Select a round roast that has a fairly even shape -- you don't want one that is really skinny at one end and large on the other, because you'll end up with one end being dry and the other bloody.

Preheat the oven to 500°F.

If the roast has a fatty side, try and trim it away in one sheet. If you don't remove the fat, only the fat will get seasoned and you'll have some gristle making the meat harder to chew. Flip the roast bottom side up, season liberally with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper. You can modify the seasonings with whatever you prefer, but I like the simplicity of salt and pepper. Place the roast on the rack and season the top and sides -- I do it this way rather than seasoning on a plate because I seem to leave half the seasoning on the plate. Finally, take the piece of fat you trimmed off and place it on top of the roast so as it cooks, that fat can drip down the roast and flavor itself.

Place the roast in the oven and turn on the exhaust fan above your oven (hopefully you have one) because you will get some smoke. Set the timer for about 7 minutes a pound. Ex: 21 minutes for a 3 lb roast.

Once the time is up, turn off the oven and leave it alone for 2.5 hours. Good luck.

The real challenge comes in carving the meat. I like to slice mine as thin as possible. These are the times that I wish I had a deli meat slicer, but that would bring my aspirations of thriftiness to a grinding halt.

If you're feeling saucy (pun intended), you can deglaze the pan with some beef broth to make a nice dipping juice.

Getting the meat sliced thin is a nice goal, but the whole point of this is to have meat for sandwiches at a particular meal or for lunches throughout the week. As you slice the meat, you will find it nearly impossible to keep the people in your house away, as they have been forced to smell it for the past 2.5 hours. The truly insurmountable task is keeping yourself from snitching as you slice. Hopefully some of it makes it to the table, and maybe even a little to the refrigerator.

BTW it goes great with the french bread recipe I posted yesterday.

French Bread

As of late, I have taken to making bread every week for the family. I have been making an oatmeal bread recipe, which is supposed to be a knock off Brownberry's bread. I enjoy the loaf a great deal, but I seem to have a case culinary attention deficit, so I wanted to try something new. I have heard that the French Baguette is extremely simple in terms of ingredients, however it is anything but in terms of taste and texture, so there begins my adventure.

One of my favorite chefs is Jacques Pepin, so I decided to turn to him after first consulting Julia Child's quintessential book and finding no information. Below is a link to the recipe I found:

http://www.kqed.org/w/jacquespepin/springrecipe1.html

For my first attempt, I decided to make baguettes and I tried to follow the recipe exactly as I could. I was pleased to see he called for the use of a food processor as I received a Kitchen Aid 12 cup for my birthday last month. Sadly, I found it's use much more of a hassle than it was worth. I have become fairly proficient at making bread in a large bowl with a wooden spoon and find it much easier in terms of getting out the tools much less cleaning up afterwards.

As far as the amount of flour goes, I found the 4.5 cups to be not quite enough -- the dough was far too sticky to attempt any hand kneading. It probably took about 5.5 cups total. The other issue I had was that I only have a round pizza stone, which doesn't exactly hold a lot of baguettes and I don't plan on spending 2+ hours baking each loaf individually. I was able to fit 3 10" baguettes on the stone and one in a regular bread pan. They weren't the most elegant looking loaves... I also forgot to read about the baking section where you put water in the oven to create steam to help develop the crust. When all was said and done, the bread tasted great -- the crust had a solid bite to it and the inside was chewy like a baguette should be.

Needless to say, the bread didn't last long between egg sandwiches, roast beef sandwiches and general snitching. So I tasked my wife with making some more bread, except this time we made a couple changes.

Here is our version to make a 10" diameter and 4" tall country loaf of french bread.

Combine the following in a large bowl (we use a pyrex bowl with a plastic cover):

1/2 cup 110° water

1.5 tsp yeast

.5 tsp sugar

Let rest until yeast begins to bubble (about 10 min)

Add the following ingredients and stir until dissolved:

1.5 cups water

1.5 tsp salt

You will add in total about 5.5 cups of flour, but use the following method:

Add flour 1 cup at a time and stir with the wooden spoon -- the first 2 cups should make a fairly smooth batter and then it will begin to clump. At that point start using the spoon like you would knead with your hand, pull from the bottom and push on top. After that, you should be able to start kneading by hand, but as soon as the dough sticks to your hands, add some more flour. The goal is to not have to scrape half the dough off your hands when you're done kneading. Once the dough can be knead about 5 times before it sticks to your hands, it has the right amount of flour in it.

Put the lid on the bowl (or plastic wrap) and place it in the oven with the light on for about 3 hours to rise. I think the dough will rise to double in size within an hour or so, but I think there is a certain amount of flavor developed as it "proofs" for the full 3 hours.

After the three hours, knead the bread for 2 minutes adding flour as necessary to keep from sticking to your hands, being sure to press out the pockets of air, otherwise you'll end up with hol-ey bread.

Take a good amount of cornmeal and lightly press it into the seam side of the loaf and sprinkle some more cornmeal on a plastic cutting sheet or other flat surface. Place the loaf seam-side-down on the sheet and place it back in the oven for two hours to rise. The goal with the cornmeal is to get the loaf to slide to the stone with ease.

Remove the sheet and loaf and put the stone in the oven. Preheat the oven to 425° F and let the stone preheat for 20 minutes or so. Sprinkle the loaf with a little flour and make a couple slices across the top to make it look fancy. Transfer the dough to the stone and put in the oven. Before closing the door, spray some water on the bottom of the oven to create steam. Do this three more times at 3 min, 6 min and 9 min. From then on let bread bake for about 45 minutes to an hour depending on your oven. When you knock on the loaf and it sounds hollow, then it should be done.

Ideally you should wait an hour before cutting into the loaf... Good luck.

Enjoy.

A new purpose

So I used to be a full-time technology instructor and consultant, but I decided to join the military. Since then I have had much less time to mess around with technology, but I have spent a lot more time cooking as a creative outlet. The main reason for me blogging about it is because I have made some good things, but they come from looking at a couple recipes and based on what I like and what I have in the cabinet I modify the recipe. That's all well and good, but when I enter the food coma after consuming what I ate, I immediately forget what I did, much less what I made week to week. Half of this is so I can remember what I made, but also for my wife who will be left to cook when I deploy. If any of you find enjoyment in this, great! If it frustrates you, oh well.

Party on Wayne.