Our quotidian meal

babka

Five hours until Mark comes home and we can continue watching Making a Murderer. I am in agony. Are you watching this incredible show? It’s a 10-part Netflix documentary about an uncanny crime saga in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin involving a wild, enraging, heartbreaking cast of characters and I would have stayed up all night to see the end if my companions had been willing. I can't recommend it more highly. 

A couple of stellar dishes from Michael Solomonov’s Zahav yesterday, although I was the only one who thought so. I'm 100% right, of course. These two dishes aren't even on the borderline. Total winners.

Dish #1: Mina with ground beef, coffee, and cardamom

Michael Solomonov: "Mina is the Ladino word for pie. This Passover dish, common throughout the Sephardic world, is almost good to be true.”

I have a serious question: Is it sacrilegious to make a Passover dish when it's not Passover and you're not Jewish? Is it cultural appropriation? Or is just eccentric, like a Jew or Muslim making buche de noel in July? Or is it none of the above? 

I did some internet research and found this in an Atlantic story about the recent cafeteria crisis at Oberlin:

“People don’t usually think about food as something that deserves respect, but food is reflective of the heart of different cultures. I identify as religiously and culturally Jewish and I would be offended if someone prepared a traditional Seder plate incorrectly at some time other than Passover. This would de-sanctify the religious meal of Passover and reduce it to just another quotidian meal."

Thoughts? 

As Solomonov puts it: "Once the matzoh is soaked and baked, it magically transforms into something more like traditional pastry than unleavened bread." 

In any case, what's done, is done. 

To make this Sephardic pie, you fry up a simple hamburger filling of meat, onion, garlic, a tiny bit of coffee and cardamom. Soak some matzoh in water until pliable and line a baking dish. Spoon the filling atop the matzoh. Top with more matzoh. Bake. Unmold. Serve this lovely, spicy, satisfying pie with a charoset of carrot, apple, raisin, and walnut. It's more like a salad than the charoset I've had at seders. (I think I'm more comfortable calling it "salad.")

Owen wolfed his slab of meat pie down in under a minute. He was in a horrible mood. I said, “So you like that!”  

He replied, “I’m only eating this because I’m really hungry.” Shortly thereafter, he and Mark got into a big, dumb fight and Owen stormed off. He yelled, “Now I’m making a quesadilla, Mom. That food was bad.” 

Talk about de-sanctified. A minute later Owen was back, shoveling more pie onto his plate. He said, “I’m only having seconds because we don’t have any of the good kind of tortillas.” Then he stormed off once more.

Isabel did not try the mina. 

Mark knows his role on this blog and plays it with verve. Of the mina he said, “It’s too weird. All the parts are good, but why not serve a nice hamburger with some bread on the side?”

Recipe at the end of this post.

*Dish #2 chocolate babka 

Lord, this was delicious. Make a sweet, rich yeast dough, roll it around a buttery chocolate crumble, freeze, slice, assemble the slices in a loaf pan, top with more crumble, bake. I believe the Zahav recipe can be found if you search Google Books, but the URLs are too long for me to link. If you do find and decide to make this splendid recipe, expect to add lots more flour than called for. Just keep adding flour until you have a soft dough and you’ll be fine. Better than fine.

Look at those pretty spirals.

Mark:  “It’s good, but it's not a cake and you wish it were a cake.”

No, you don’t.

***

Mina with ground beef, cardamom, and coffee, adapted from Zahav. I added kale to the meat filling, used more onion, doubled the raisins and apple in the salad and made a few other changes.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F and generously oil a medium-sized baking pan of some kind (I used a deep 9-inch pie plate). Brown 1 pound ground beef (I used chuck) in a little oil in a wide skillet. When it’s brown and crumbly, add 1 chopped onion, 5 minced garlic cloves, and a little salt. Cook for a few minutes and add a bunch of kale, stems removed and leaves shredded. Cook until all the vegetables have softened, but not browned. Add 1 teaspoon finely ground coffee and 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom. Mix well. Taste for salt. Now, soften 5 or 6 sheets matzoh in water, just long enough that you can bend them a bit but not so long that they disintegrate. Line the oiled pan with the matzoh, overlapping slightly if necessary. (It won't be tidy looking.) Spoon the meat into the matzoh shell. Layer more damp matzoh on top, pressing the edges to seal. Brush with some beaten egg and bake until the pie is golden and crisp, about 30 minutes. Let stand for 5 minutes. Invert onto a platter and serve with the following salad.

Carrot salad 

Grate together 4 carrots (peeled), 1 apple (peeled), and a small chunk of fresh horseradish. Mix in a bowl with 1/2 cup chopped walnuts, 1 cup chopped cilantro, 1/4 cup raisins, and 1 tablespoon cider vinegar. Add salt to taste. 

It was a short affair, but passionate

Bread is in the eye of the beholder.

June 10: The recipe for a “life-changing” gluten-free bread appears on Food52. Gazing at the picture, you shake your head. Calling this brick of nuts and seeds "bread" is like calling soy paste shaped into a cylinder “sausage.” You write a note to a friend: “I would eat this -- it looks very crunchy and tasty -- but it's not bread. In 30 years we'll be scoffing at the ridiculous things we cooked and believed about nutrition in 2014. It's the honey-sweetened carob brownie of our era.”

You tell ‘em, Jennifer. What a snot. But you grew up on health foods and look where that got you? You’re no healthier today than all your friends from the 1970s who got to eat real brownies.
 

July 15: You stop by your sister’s house to drop off the DVDs of Borgen. She says, “I want you to taste this strange health bread Margi (friend) made.” She toasts and butters a slice of dense, seedy bread and presents it to you. You take a bite. It has a complex texture and nutty flavor with just a hint of underlying slime. The slime doesn’t bother you at all, just adds to the complexity. You say, “Oh my God, this is amazing bread! I love this. Where did Margi get the recipe?” 

Justine: “Food52.”

Sigh. Of course.

July 16: Why are all the people who work at Whole Foods so young and groovy and all the people who work at Safeway so . . . not?  Do the managers at Whole Foods look for fabulous people with nose rings who are saving for a trek through Nepal while the managers at Safeway look for downtrodden lifers with kids? Honestly, you prefer Safeway, but for today’s errand -- buying the ingredients for that delicious bread -- you must endure Whole Foods. You search around and finally have to steel yourself to ask one of the groovy clerks: “Where can I find the psyllium husks?” It turns out they're about 2 feet away from the chia seeds, also on your list. Then, so the cashier can be sure you’re a real nut, you grab a bottle of a coconut probiotic drink from the refrigerator case. 

July 17: You mix the dough, which isn't beautiful and springy like yeasted bread dough, but a damp, rough, swarthy paste. You let it sit for a few hours and then bake the paste. You cut a slice. Divine. It has the rich flavor of coconut oil and that pleasant hint of slime -- from the psyllium husks? the flaxseeds? -- plus lots of gentle crunch. Perhaps it’s a bit crumbly, but you can fix that in future loaves. 

July 18: Mark was skeptical but loves the bread. He calls it “birdseed bread” and toasts it for breakfast and dinner. You eat a piece with butter for your afternoon snack. YUM! A new staple for the household. You don’t personally care that it’s gluten-free, but appreciate that it’s so full of fiber and Omega 3 fatty acids from the chia seeds. You’re not sure exactly what fatty acids are or why Omega 3s are good, you just know they are. 

July 19: You have a piece of the bread for breakfast with some avocado. Maybe the coconut oil flavor is a bit unctuous. Perhaps there's still a place in your life for the occasional Acme baguette.

July 20: You have another piece of the bread with butter for a snack. Today, it brings to mind an under-seasoned veggie burger. You can't finish your snack.

July 21: You think about having a piece for breakfast. You stare at the remainder of the loaf, oily and coarse, and try to think how you can make it palatable. Peanut butter? Jam? Yuck. No. What happened? You adored this bread only three days ago! Mark looks at you looking at the bread and says, “I'm done. It’s bread you can only take in very small doses.” 

You take the remaining chunk of bread down to the dung pit, a.k.a. yard, for the chickens, but the goats head butt the birds out of the way so they can have at it. Bullies. If they'd asked nicely, maybe you'd let them keep it. Instead, you take the bread away from the goats and crumble it into tiny pieces that you scatter all over the yard. The chickens devour the crumbs, which means their eggs will be full of Omega 3s, whatever those are. You just know they’re good for you.

And now for some Flour

misshapen but delicious

In Flour, Joanne Chang writes that she grew up in traditional and "fairly strict" Chinese family where, aside from the occasional plate of sliced oranges, sweets rarely appeared on the table. She was exposed to cakes and cookies at her friends' homes and at a young age developed a "full-blown obsession" with desserts and pastries.

Chang:  "I pored over baking books and food magazines; I read and reread dessert descriptions wherever I found them. I lingered at pastry cases at the supermarket. Most of the time I never tried the desserts I was dreaming about. Instead I could only imagine how they must taste: Turkish delight (I read about it in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,) snickerdoodles (Good Housekeeping,) sticky toffee pudding (The Joy of Cooking,) double-crust apple pie (Little House on the Prairie,) New York cheesecake (first spotted at a Safeway in Houston!)"

I completely relate. Her story supports my theory that childhood dessert deprivation can lead to an almost romantic ardor for sweets. The longer and more hopelessly you pine, the brighter those gorgeous and mysterious desserts glow. I should say that I don't view this is as a problem. Ardor is not the same thing as compulsive bingeing. Chang has built an amazing career from her passion and certainly looks like she exercises healthy restraint.

As I mentioned in the last post, Chang majored in math and economics at Harvard, then got a job at a big international consulting firm right out of college. After a couple of years, though, she decided she really wanted to spend her life baking and quit her consulting gig to do so. She opened her Boston bakery, Flour, in 2000. Her yardstick for a dessert: Would you serve this to your mother?

I'm not a complete newcomer to her book. Chang's banana bread is the only banana bread I make anymore and her oreos were the basis for the oreo recipe in Make the Bread, Buy the Butter. I can take no credit whatsoever for those incredible cookies. I would have happily served both Chang's banana bread and oreos to my mother. 

Last week, I made her brioche and the recipe is a masterpiece of clarity and detail. I've baked a dozen or so different brioche recipes over the last few months, and this is my favorite, simply because the whole process went so smoothly. I used half the dough to make a loaf of bread and half to make her chocolate brioche buns, which contain not just bittersweet chocolate, but a lovely layer of pastry cream. I baked three of these beauties (see photo at top) and froze the rest to bake later. My mother would have flipped for the chocolate brioche buns and been very pleased with the tender, buttery brioche.

I'm not quite as sold on Chang's so-called luscious cheesecake, which I baked yesterday for our weekly extended-family dinner. It wasn’t quite dense or tangy enough for me and the reviews were curiously contradictory. Mark declared it the best dessert I’ve ever made, while Isabel said that homemade cheesecake is always “kind of gross.” Seriously?! My sister commented on its "caramelly" flavor, which is odd because it contained no caramel. Maybe the top caramelized in the oven? Or did the caramel notes come from the thick graham cracker crust? I would have served this cake to my mother and she would have praised it extravagantly, but I probaby wouldn’t have served it to her again. 

I do have to mention a couple of Ming Tsai recipes I also tried last night, just to keep up.

His shrimp lollipops from Blue Ginger are a variation on a Vietnamese dish that consists of spiced shrimp paste that you mold onto the end of a stick of sugar cane. Tsai has substituted lemongrass stalks for the sugar cane and has you present these tasty appetizers with a spicy almond pesto. The lollipops were very, very good, but there was general feeling that some mayonnaise, bland and rich, would have been a better foil than that spicy pesto. You have to really love the flavors of lemongrass and Kaffir lime not to want them cut with a little mayonnaise. The recipe is here. (FYI, the lollipops in the book are pan-fried, not grilled, and there are some small differences in the quantities of several ingredients.)

I told my father to hold up a lollipop for me so I could take a picture 

and my sister cried out, "No! I'll do some food styling for you." 

I don't know. Her shot is definitely better, but maybe food styling doesn't run in our family. 

I also made Tsai's napa slaw which is not a refreshing salad, as I'd expected, but a relish, very pungent and sharp, full of fish sauce and vinegar. We ate it on burgers. I would not make it again.

On another subject, Owen texted me from camp requesting pictures of the goats and I took some shots this morning. I hesitated, wondering how it would go over in New England, the goofball from California showing off homely pictures of goats hanging out in a dust bowl. But I sent them. I'm including this picture to illustrate the stark difference between a yard with goats and one without.  It's like the border between North and South Korea. We're the North.

First they eat all the plants, then they grind the earth into talcum-fine sand with their little hooves. Currently, they spend hours every day trying to get through the fence into the neighbors' yard so they can continue with their mission of global destruction. 

Everlasting? This kitchen (and post) is &*#(% neverending

That's, I don't know, 50 sandwiches?

For relatively small animals, goats and chickens are very productive, and not just of babies. Relentlessly productive. I don't know what I would do if I had a cow except maybe jump off the roof. Quart by quart, the goat's milk accumulates, eventually making it hard to find space in the refrigerator for other things, like half a leftover Subway Veggie Delite sandwich or 5 pounds of Meyer lemons or caprine CDT vaccine or Chardonnay.

goat reblochon? we'll see

The other day, I got my act together and used all our milk to make cheese. High five! I made reblochon and ricotta. That took some time but cleared refrigerator space and eased my conscience. Will the reblochon age into real reblochon in our crawl space? Big laugh. First of all, real reblochon is made with cow's milk. Whatever. The milk is gone.

Now there's just the whey. The cheesemaking left behind a gallon of whey and whey makes the most incredible bread. A few years ago I tested this hunch scientifically by baking two batches of bagels, identical except that one contained whey, the other, water. In a blind tasting, everyone agreed that the whey bagels had more tang and flavor and aroma. You can not just pour whey down the drain.

such a burden

So to use up whey, I opened Bread and Chocolate and made another batch of Fran Gage's country wheat bread. I let the starter sit for 20 hours again and the bread was again fantastic. Since one recipe didn't get rid of much whey, I made her polenta bread (dense, excellent) at the same time, and let that starter sit for 20 hours too.

But there was still a lagoon of whey in the refrigerator. So I made bagels.

It's all about the presentation.

There was now a smaller lagoon of whey, but also three loaves of bread and ten bagels on the counter, plus the tail end of a previous loaf of bread which we hadn't quite finished. And you can't throw staling bread away.

The next day, I made french toast for breakfast, which I think of as a "jackpot" food, because it uses not just staling bread, but eggs.

And eggs, people, eggs are the mightiest challenge of all. We have 17 chickens. It is May. I give my sister a dozen eggs a week and my father takes six and a few weeks ago I gave my neighbor Joan 25 eggs that I discovered in a nest hidden in the ivy. They come from a single Blue Andalusian hen who values her privacy.

 means there aren't rats in the ivy

If you're thinking it was rude of me to foist weird not-so-fresh ivy eggs on Joan, don't. She knew where they came from and knew there was nothing wrong with them. Ivy keeps everything cool. Would a Burgundian housewife have declined unrefrigerated ivy eggs? Non. (This fun interview with Tamar Adler explains Burgundian housewife reference.)

Even though we give away eggs, I still have too many eggs. I judge recipes based on how many eggs they use up. For instance, I was disappointed that Fran Gage's Meyer lemon poundcake only used 2 eggs.

It would have been taller if I'd used a smaller pan.

And even though I don't love chocolate, I'm very stoked to make her chocolate pots de creme, which use 10 eggs. JACKPOT.

As of a day ago, the goat's milk was all gone and the whey was on the wane and we were down to 77 eggs. Maybe we had a bit too much bread and ricotta, but everything was momentarily under control.

Then I went outside and when I came back in I was carrying eleven eggs and a quart of warm goat's milk. Yesterday morning I brought in another quart of goat's milk and by the afternoon, seven more eggs. Last night, a pint of goat's milk. This morning, another quart. And in another week, Sparkles comes on line.

Last night, we had Fran Gage's ricotta gnocchi for dinner, which rid us of half of the goat's milk ricotta and 2 eggs.

dumplings soaked in butter

I also made Gage's salade Beaujolaise which I have always known and loved as frisee aux lardons. You may be familiar with this wonderful salad: curly, crunchy lettuce with cubes of bacon, croutons, vinaigrette, all of it topped with a poached egg, the yolk of which dresses the leaves.

I will make this again.

Jackpot recipe because it used up 2 slices of polenta bread and 3 poached eggs. For dessert, we had Gage's strawberry ice cream, which used 3 eggs and was delicious.

Occasionally I leave the kitchen. The other night, Owen and I went to a restaurant in San Francisco called Volcano that serves Japanese curry,  a genre of food we were unfamiliar with but loved instantly and very, very much. While Volcano had fast-food ambiance and prices, you could see people actually cooking and preparing food from scratch behind the counter and back in the kitchen.  Owen's fried calamari and shrimp were spectacular and I can't explain why except to say that they tasted "fresh," which is a useless adjective, but the only one I can come up with. The seafood was crispy. It wasn't at all oily. It was perfect. It tasted fresh.

Owen wanted me order the spiciest sauce -- "volcano" calibre --  on the pork katsu curry because he thinks that watching people eat spicy food is hilarious. He is 11. I obliged because I love spicy food. He taped me eating without telling me he had the camera on, which he also thinks is hilarious. Almost as hilarious as taking fish-eye photos that make people look bloated.

sidesplitting

I have never watched myself chewing nor wanted to, but I enjoyed this video because I now know that I eat just like my mom did. My grandmother eats that way as does my sister.

If it the video doesn't upload, I apologize. You're not missing much. Just the family way of chewing.

The katsu was fabulous but too fiery. If you ever have the opportunity, you should go to Volcano, but order your sauce "medium." After eating about a third of the katsu, sweat was pouring down my nose and I packed the rest of the meal into a box and when we got home I scraped it to the chickens who will convert it into eggs which will be used in Fran Gage's ricotta tartlets later this week.

To be continued. Endlessly.

Laziness, lethargy, languor

a Food52 production

Monday morning. Overcast. Dreary white sky. I've been up since 5:30 on account of a goat yelling for milking and grain. It's about 11 and I've reached a natural pause in chores and various jobs and have decided to sit down for a minute and check in with the internets. Idly, I wonder whether Wet Hot American Summer is available for streaming on Netflix so I can put it in the queue. You know, efficiency. It's been on the list (cultural education) and now it belongs in the queue.

Ah, yes. Here it is. Wet Hot American Summer is indeed available for streaming. Actually, it's available right this second which is the thing about streaming. And as Benjamin Franklin said, why put something in your queue for tomorrow when . . .

I don't recommend Wet Hot American Summer and definitely not on a Monday morning because: sloppy comedy. Also: self respect. When I looked up from the movie it was afternoon and the day was now hopelessly polluted by sloth. Who watches movies on Monday morning? Be quiet.

But once a day has been hopelessly polluted by sloth, you might as well just wallow in it. Turns out Fish Tank was also available for streaming and I highly recommend Fish Tank, which is brilliant, though not on a Monday afternoon because: self respect. The kids came home from school and I was lying there watching Fish Tank on the iPad. Whenever they passed through the room I switched it off so they would think I was reading.

Streaming movies in the day is like drinking in the day: not as fun as it should be.

I'm between cookbooks and during the hiatus have been making dinners from the Food52 Cookbook. It's a great book. Speed and simplicity are valued, but not fetishized. High quality ingredients are valued, but not fetishized. Obscure products are called for, but only occasionally, when they really matter. Everything has been thoroughly vetted and road-tested and the book is right at my natural level, no reaching required. We've liked some Food52 dishes more than others, but the things we've loved have been tremendous:  kale quinoa pilaf, lemon posset, chewy sugar cookies, zucchini pancakes. The other night I made the absurdly addictive asparagus which was a huge hit, though I believe it's the pancetta that's absurdly addictive, not the asparagus.

But I can't "do" Food52. It's already been done -- at Food52. So what cookbook comes next?

Yesterday, I had to pause Wet Hot American Summer to remove a loaf of country wheat bread from the oven and I cut myself a slice while it was still steaming hot.

puts Acme to shame

Ten minutes later I had to pause Wet Hot American Summer a second time to run upstairs and cut another slice. This bread has stupendous flavor (from a starter that I let sit for 20 hours) and a hard, hard crust (from baking on a stone and filling the oven with steam.) The recipe comes from a 1999 memoir called Bread and Chocolate by Fran Gage that includes about sixty recipes. Among them: chocolate cherry tart, brioches with goat cheese custard and fruit, ricotta gnocchi, California-style pork tamales. This morning as I ate toast made from Gage's country wheat bread, I realized I had topped it with the super-tart plum jam I made two years ago using the recipe in her book. Every time I eat that jam, I think all jam should be plum.

(The recipe for the bread is here, if you scroll down to page 216. I will probably make the bread again and post the recipe, with my changes, which included letting the starter sit for 17 extra hours.)

I'm going to do Gage's book as a quick palate cleanser between the olive oil and paprika of Spain and whatever comes next.  If the other recipes are half as good as the bread and the plum jam, this will be a very pleasant couple of weeks.

On another subject, over the weekend we emasculated Jack Frost. Key words: crushing, tissue, pliers, testes, bloodless, fast, painful. No fun at all. We do love that little goat and hope someone will want him for an impish, neutered, weed-eating pet.

The Moro victory lap

The picture is as bad as the dinner was delicious.

I'll start with the pastry triangle at top. Moro calls these fatayer, and they are like Syrian calzones. You make a simple yeast dough and let it sit while you roast and puree some squash. Then you roll the dough into four circles, and fill each one with squash, feta cheese, lots of chopped fresh oregano, and toasted pinenuts. 

Pinch into a rough triangle and bake.  As Isabel pointed out, these are like a bready version of the pumpkin ravioli you get at Italian restaurants, but in ravioli the counterpoint to the squash is grated Parmesan, which sometimes lacks the power to overcome its cloying sweetness. Here, the counterpoint is feta, and nothing can shout down feta, not even squash. They're evenly matched and the oregano, in the role usually played by sage, adds complexity. Everyone loved fatayer.

 

Some of us loved the chickpeas and spinach even more. It's not like other chickpea dishes, so don't stop reading!

You cook your chickpeas, cook your spinach. Set both aside. Heat some oil in a skillet and add cubed bread and fry until golden, then add garlic, cumin, fresh oregano, and red pepper flakes and saute a little more. At this point you put the beautiful fried bread into a mortar (or food processor) and mash (or puree) with vinegar. 

I had assumed the bread cubes would be a garnish, and thought the mashing step was a mistake when I first read the recipe. I reread the sentence. Did as told and ended up with a crumbly, dark paste that I toss this with the chickpeas and spinach. It was brilliant. The bread crumbs hold the intense flavors of the spices and garlic and cling to the chickpeas better than any liquid sauce.  A great, great dish.

On the other hand, the  beetroot soup with cumin

is not a great, great dish. I like the British terms "aubergine" and "courgette" but prefer the American  word "beet." I made a pot of this vegetarian Moro soup for my lunches because no one else in my family likes beets. I'm glad I didn't try to convert them with this soup, because while it was cooked for a long time, it tasted curiously raw. It was much better the second day, as soup often is, and I will keep eating it for the vitamin C and betacyanin, but would rather eat leftover chickpeas.

By the way, that's the Jim Lahey whole wheat bread on the plate. His cookbook, My Bread, is fascinating and contains recipes for 

-banana leaf rolls (long-rise, no-knead bread that incorporates fresh bananas and dates and is baked in banana leaves)

-bread made from seawater

-peanut butter-and-jelly bread

-celery root pizza

-a pancetta, mango and basil sandwich.

Bread update

As requested by a few commenters, the other day I baked the Moro bread (left) substituting whole-wheat for some of the white flour. For comparison, I also made a loaf of Jim Lahey's no-knead wheat bread (right).  (As many of you know, Lahey is the New York City baker behind the "no-knead" bread popularized by Mark Bittman a few years ago. )

Lahey uses a 3:1 ratio of white to wheat flour, a proportion he came up with after much experimentation. To make his bread, you mix the dough roughly then let it sit for 18 hours. After this you shape it into a round, let it rise for 2 hours, and bake in a Dutch oven. I wish I'd photographed the bread when it emerged from the oven, as it was a dark and noble loaf.

 

Because the 3:1 ratio worked for Lahey, I used a 3:1 ratio of white to wheat flour in the Moro bread. It took longer to rise than usual -- maybe 6 hours -- but otherwise worked beautifully. And it was better than the Lahey bread -- chewier, crustier, tastier. I don't understand how this can be, as they contain the same ingredients and it goes against all logic that the "quick" bread would be better than the long-risen. But it was better. The vote among four tasters was unanimous.  

Speaking of voting, Isabel and her friend Juliet have taken to playing Top Chef, and today I got to judge. The ingredient was flour tortillas, and here's one of the more appetizing dishes they presented: plain boiled macaroni on tortilla strips garnished with cold tomato paste. 

 Yum. Especially the unwashed lettuce.

Bread & soup & failed ice cream

I want someone else to bake this Moro bread so we can discuss. It's stunningly easy if you have a mixer. This is the third batch, and it's better than almost any bread I've ever baked, and I've baked a lot of bread. 

The recipe below is true to the book, but I've added slightly more salt. I've left the metric measurements in because I fear conversions might jinx the excellent results, so you'll need a scale. I hope someone tries it and tells me what they think.

 

MORO BREAD

1. Dissolve 1 teaspoon yeast in 125 ml. tepid water.

2. In the bowl of a mixer, combine 2 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt, 700 ml. tepid water, 1 kg. bread flour (or plain), and the yeasty water. Mix until smooth and elastic. It will be too wet to handle.

3. Oil 2 bread pans and sprinkle with flour. Pour in the dough. You'll need a rubber spatula to ease it into the pans.

4. Cover with a damp towel and let rise for 3-5 hours or until doubled.

5. Heat oven to 450. Bake loaves for 30 minutes, then remove from the pans and bake on the oven rack for 15 minutes more.

The crust on this bread is hard and crackly, and when you slice there are biggish bubble holes. 

The flavor and chewy texture are, in my opinion, perfect, like the best artisanal bread but in sandwich-friendly loaf form. And it's simpler than  Mark Bittman/Jim Lahey no-knead bread because you don't have to think a day ahead. In future, I might increase the salt even more, and try to omit the flouring of the pans. I also wonder if you really need a separate step for dissolving the yeast.

My sister-in-law, Amy, is visiting and we have spent a lot of time talking about food, though we come at it from very different perspectives. She's writing her dissertation on food in women's prisons, but she is not, herself, a cook. She said, "I feel about cooking like I do about skiing. I don't care if I can ski, and I really don't care if I can cook." She goes to Stop & Shop and buys the same reliably tasty things every week-- chicken, veggie burgers, pre-made pesto, pre-crumbled goat cheese, and then comes home and assembles it. I, on the other hand, spend untold hours obsessing about what I'm going to cook and then cooking it. Is this perhaps the reason that I, unlike Amy, will never have a PhD?

For dinner, I served the Moro's version of harira, a classic North African soup that includes a lamb shank, lots of vegetables, turmeric, chickpeas and lentils. Moro: "We always imagine the name of this soup being spoken with a guttural Islamic tongue, and being eaten without ceremony at the edge of a busy bus stations somewhere in Morocco. The flavours of the spices and coriander are very evocative, and only the bus fumes are missing. "

Nice!

Malaga raisin ice cream was a fiasco. I had frozen some heavy cream a while back, defrosted it for the ice cream, thought it looked a bit grainy but since it tasted okay went ahead and used it. Lesson: don't ever do this. When churned, this ice cream contained little flecks of hard butter. "You shouldn't have told me!" said Amy. "I thought those were tiny white chocolate chips."

 

In other news, my mother is very sick. I don't know how to weave this into my goofy food blog, and the idea of trying to do so makes me way too sad. But if I'm going to keep writing a blog that is any way honest, I can't pretend it's not happening.  I'll just leave it at that for now.

Must learn to bake this at home

Apricot ginger bread from the Noe Valley Bakery. Incredible.