Raised Bed Re-Design

Posted on March 3, 2012 by cmf

IMG 0405 300x224 Raised Bed Re Design I’ve decided that the time has come — as much as I like the decorative aspects of my current garden design, it has several crucial drawbacks.

This design is based on 6-foot lengths of lumber, so the big square boxes are six feet square, while the triangular beds are all based on six-foot right angles. Here’s the diagram: IMG 0703 300x224 Raised Bed Re Design (Sorry about the photo quality.) While I love the decorative aspects of this design, it has several practical drawbacks. The biggest of which is that I can’t reach across the beds. Once I got chickens, I wound up fencing the outside perimeter with copper pipe and plastic mesh — which also has the added benefit of keeping the dogs out of the garden. They were never much of a problem, but it’s just not sanitary — same with the chickens (also, the chickens will devour all the greens in record time). This means that I only have access to these beds from the inside pathway, and I can’t reach the center of either the big squares or the big triangles. In past years, I’ve planted long-season crops like kales at the back or center of these beds, but in general, it’s a problem. Weeds crop up and I can’t get to them, and harvesting is a pain, and so, I wind up with a considerable amount of my limited square footage that is just enough of a pain in the neck to get to that it goes feral.

IMG 0706 300x224 Raised Bed Re Design

So last week I went out with the tape measure, and downloaded some graph paper off the internet (handy!). The perimeter is 25′ x 15′ and I decided I wanted plain rectangular beds. After a bunch of noodling around, and consulting with the Builder, I came up with this plain-but-efficient design. The U-shaped beds are 3.5 feet across. My kitchen table is 4 feet square, and I can’t quite reach from one side to the other, so I went with 3.5 for these beds. The long center bed will be 3 x 15 feet, which leaves me enough room to maneuver a wheelbarrow.

The best part, I gain square footage! The old beds totalled 216 square feet, and the new beds total 251.5. The other thing I find exciting is that the long narrow bed in the center should be perfect for hooping, although since everything is rectangular, it will be a lot easier to use hoops not only for season extension, but for protection against pests in the early part of the season (when the flea beetles seem particularly virulent).

It’s supposed to start warming up this week — temps into the 50s– so I’m hoping the ground will thaw out enough that I can begin tearing things up, turning dirt over, and laying down new paths. Will post photos when the actual work begins.

Baguettes!

Posted on January 29, 2012 by cmf

IMG 0678 300x224 Baguettes! Thanks to Michael Ruhlman and his bread baking app for the iPhone, I have nearly mastered the baguette.

Out here in the sticks, we don’t have access to the kinds of artisan breads that I could get even at my not-swanky supermarket in California. I live with a man for whom good carbs are really crucial — and who loves loves loves good bread.

I’ve been making the no-knead bread for ages (as my many posts on that subject attest), but it needs a long lead time and an overnight fermentation. There have been a few times recently when I’ve been out of bread but didn’t want to pony up four bucks for a mediocre loaf of bread at my local market. Ruhlman’s bread baking app is great — you can put in what you want to make, white or wheat, boule or baguette, and up comes a recipe. Yesterday I started the dough at about 3pm and we had bread for dinner at 8 (this is where working at home comes in handy).

The first one I made last night was too long for my oven, so it wound up as a sort of s-shaped baguette, but it tasted great. This morning, I mixed up a new batch, and split it into two loaves. Voilà! Baguettes.

The second batch I tinkered with a little bit — added some sourdough starter for flavor (which required a little math, the starter is 50/50 flour water, so I had to calculate how much flour and water I was replacing from the original recipe), and wheat germ for crunch and depth of flavor. They came out really well (although I haven’t tasted them yet).

IMG 0679 300x224 Baguettes! There is one minor issue I’m having … scorching. The recipe says to preheat the oven to 450 — I actually cut that to 425 because I’ve found that the no-knead works best at that temp. But both last night and today, I wound up with scorched bottoms when I baked them on the baking stone. The stone is on the bottom of the oven, and this afternoon, I put the loaves on parchment paper (makes it much easier to slide them into the oven that way). Still, wound up with scorched bread. When I smelled the scorching I moved the loaves up onto a rack, where the rest of the crust got nice and brown, but this is an issue. I’m going to have to play around with it.

I have to say, I love the iPhone app for this use. It’s easy to access, the instructions were simple and straightforward, and for the first time I understood how to roll/shape the baguettes so they didn’t go flabby all over the oven. It would be nice if there was a way to make a note on your own copy of the app. But overall, I’m a fan so far.

Green Soup

Posted on January 24, 2012 by cmf

IMG 0313 300x225 Green Soup Last spring when I had backyard greens to spare, I put up several quarts of “green soup.” And boy, am I glad now. It’s winter. It’s not that cold, but it’s grey and windy and grey — and nothing is growing in my garden and yet, down in the basement freezer, there are quarts of this lovely soup, made with my very own greens. A saving grace.

Green soup is very easy. Wash and chop greens of any variety — most of last springs’ soups were made with a mix of broccoli rabe, komatsuna, spinach, and mustard greens. In a big pot, sauté some chopped onion, and maybe a little garlic and red pepper flakes if you like. Then I like to add some peeled and chopped carrot (for sweetness). Sauté for a few minutes to start them cooking, then add all the greens and sprinkle with salt to taste. Throw in a few peeled and chopped potatoes (for a dutch oven full of soup, I’ll put in 2-3 peeled baking potatoes. You want them for the starch, to thicken the soup up.) Wilt the greens and add either stock or water to cover. Simmer until the potatoes and carrots are very soft, and the greens have cooked through. Then puree with an immersion blender. You can add a little cream if you like, or a dollop of sour cream or yogurt to the soup bowl.

I froze this in quart jars, which made me feel guilty for not eating them all summer, but are now rewarding me with late-winter green goodness. With a slice of toast, this is a perfect lunch.

“Lifestyle” Chickens?

Posted on January 8, 2012 by cmf

IMG 0666 224x300 Lifestyle Chickens? Chicken feed has been a problem lately. When I first got chickens, I bought regular commercial feed from the feed store where I bought the chickens — they carry the Nutrena brand (which is Cargill) and Purina. Regular layer feed runs about $16 for a 50lb sack, and scratch is about the same.

Then a new feed store opened in town, and they carried a local organic feed and scratch milled just north of here in Fort Benton called Big Sky Feeds. This is a photo of their scratch mix — and here’s the label:
IMG 0669 300x224 Lifestyle Chickens? — wheat, sunflower seeds and flax (although there seems to be some corn in there too, but that’s probably because I poured the dregs of the regular feed into the scratch when I ran out of feed).

IMG 0667 224x300 Lifestyle Chickens?

Here’s what their mash looks like — what I like about this stuff isn’t necessarily that it’s organic, although that’s nice, but it’s that it looks like actual food. The label for this one looks like this: IMG 0670 300x224 Lifestyle Chickens? One reason I went into something of a tailspin about chicken feed last week, is because this company actually tells you what the ingredients are. You can’t find a list of actual ingredients on the commercial feed bags — you can find the “Guaranteed Analysis” but not what’s actually in the stuff.

Where the “lifestyle” part comes in is in the cost differential. “Lifestyle chickens” is the term my Sweetheart uses when I try to argue that backyard chickens are cost effective. That’s when the Man-with-no-affinity-for-livestock points out that you can buy ranch eggs for about three bucks a dozen all over town. Backyard chickens, he argues, with some validity have become a sort of status symbol, a marker of lifestyle. Since one of my other gigs is reviewing cooking and sustainability books for Bookslut, I’ve also got two or three years worth of evidence on that front in the form of various guides to urban and suburban homesteading (a term which alone is a sort of marker of class. Drive around Montana and you can see what homesteads actually were — dry, barren chunks of 120 acres where people, mostly unsucessfully, attempted to eke out a living). Most of these glossy books, filled with illustrations of largely white, largely professional folks seem as concerned with the aesthetics of one’s backyard setup as they are with the practical issues. I won’t even go into the holier-and-more-organic-than-thou tone of a couple of recent books, because they just pissed me off and what’s the point of giving them more publicity?

This all came to a head for me last week when I ran out of chicken feed and discovered my local feed store had as well. The girl here told me she thought the feed stores in Bozeman carried the Big Sky Feed, and when I wound up at the fancy feed store over there, I found myself buying a 28 dollar bag of organic crumbles. As I drove away, I thought “I can’t spend $28 on chicken feed!?!” so I went to the nearby regular feed store to see what they had. They only had the regular Nutrena and Purina feeds, which don’t actually list what’s in them (nor can you find a list of ingredients on their websites). I knew I had some scratch left, and that my local feed store had the good feed on order, and although I felt ridiculous and precious about it, I just couldn’t bring myself to buy the processed commercial feed. So I get back in the car feeling pissed off and ridiculous and like some character from Portlandia with my first-world, organic chicken feed problems. I decide to return the too-expensive bag of feed, because although it’s organic, it’s just as processed as the non-organic ones, and what I really like about the Big Sky stuff is that it’s just grains. You can see what’s in it. I figure that I’ve got enough scratch to get through the week, and if the Big Sky stuff doesn’t come in, I’ll just buy the regular feed from my local feed store (which is Payback, another commercial brand).

So the long and the short of it is, that by the time I’d convinced myself that I was being precious, and that I was spending far too much money on chicken feed, the good chicken feed came back in, and I wound up spending $23 bucks on feed, and $22 bucks on scratch. Not really much less expensive than the $28 dollar bag that sent me into a tailspin, and, as someone I live with has pointed out, not any kind of economy. Especially with only 5 chickens in the yard, which really does put me smack in the middle of the least economical end of the spectrum. I’m not getting enough eggs to make selling them worthwhile, and yet, I’m getting more than Himself and I can eat. I’ve been waiting until I have about 4 dozen in the fridge, then taking them to our local food pantry (if nothing else, I figure this is good karma in a bad economy). I get about 3 dozen eggs a week, and lets say I stretch these bags of feed and scratch to last 6 weeks, that means I’m spending just under $3.00 a dozen to grow my own eggs. Which is, as Someone will be happy to point out, no economy.

Yes, I know, I’m supporting a really good local company (in Montana, 190 miles is local), who are milling and marketing organic products whose food value is apparent just from looking at them. My chickens are healthy, and lay gorgeous eggs. I like my chickens, and the chicken-shitty-straw and compost is great for my garden. But as much as it pains me to admit it, what I have are indeed “lifestyle chickens.” On the other hand, if the revolution comes, I now know how to raise (and slaughter) chickens, which is a useful skill. But for now, I guess I have to accept it. I’m raising lifestyle chickens. Expensive, organic, lifestyle chickens.

El Cheapo Kitchen Reno …

Posted on January 3, 2012 by cmf

IMG 0642 300x224 El Cheapo Kitchen Reno ... I woke up the day after Christmas and decided that after ten years, I couldn’t stand my kitchen one more day. That it was time. Time to paint the kitchen.

My kitchen is the last frontier in this house. For almost ten years I’ve spun my wheels and lived with the kitchen as it was when I moved in. Kitchens are problematic that way. You think, well, if I’m going to paint I have to move the appliances, and if I’m going to pull out the appliances, then I should do the floor. And if I’m going to do the floor, then I might as well pull out that wall with the arch, and if I’m going to do that, then I should build the porch off the back of the house that I want to do — and I don’t have the money to do any of that so — for ten years I’ve lived with this kitchen.

But paint is cheap. And although I don’t love to paint, I’m reasonably competent. Since the Big Corporation closed for the week, so I wasn’t getting paid anyway, I decided I might as well work for myself. I dug out the paint chip I’d put in the folder several years ago when I went through an earlier bout of I-hate-my-kitchen, and an affordable $150 later, I was ready to paint.

Challenge 1: The Fridge Corner

IMG 0643 224x300 El Cheapo Kitchen Reno ... This corner is one of the characteristic weirdnesses of my kitchen. It was originally the closet for the room on the other side, but I had that wall pulled down before I moved in, so that there would be someplace to put the refrigerator. The floor beneath the fridge is really uneven — the vinyl flooring ends and the wood floor from the former closet begins. It’s one of the challenges of replacing the floor in this room. Now this corner looks like this: IMG 0664 224x300 El Cheapo Kitchen Reno ...

Challenge 2: The Former Door

IMG 0645 224x300 El Cheapo Kitchen Reno ...
This corner was also a problem. It’s hard to see in this photo, but next to that big square on the wall (where the previous owners had a large chalkboard) there was a door. That door led to the bathroom. In 2007 (?) I had the bathroom renovated, including moving the door so you no longer access it right off the kitchen. Ever since, the baseboards along that wall have been missing, exposing a horrifying line of plaster rubble along the floor. I hid it behind the bookcases, but it always freaked me out. Himself was kind enough to cut me new baseboards and quarter-round — so now that corner looks like this: IMG 0652 224x300 El Cheapo Kitchen Reno ...

Challenge 3: The Ginormous Cabinet

IMG 06441 224x300 El Cheapo Kitchen Reno ... This is the Ginormous China Cabinet. I actually love this cabinet — there are two big flour bins on the bottom, one of which perfectly fits a 30 lb bag of dog food. There’s room for everything in here. The downside is that the countertop, which you cant’ really see in this photo, is a very ancient piece of linoleum with a swirly grey pattern. Not only is the pattern ugly, but it always looks dirty.

The idea of unpacking this cabinet and repainting it is part of why I couldn’t face this project for so long. But I did it. I pulled everything out, painted the shelf surfaces with oil paint, painted the linoleum with black oil paint, and then painted the rest of it in the same yellow and white as the rest of the room. It now looks like this: IMG 0660 224x300 El Cheapo Kitchen Reno ...

After six days, she rested:

IMG 0663 224x300 El Cheapo Kitchen Reno ... I thought this project would take three days, and it took six. Everything needed two coats of paint, and to mask that green on the walls, I had to prime them as well. It was as big a pain in the ass as I’d figured it would be — but now it’s done, and I have a nice, clean, cheerful kitchen for only the price of paint, and my time.

Which is sort of what the whole Living Small project is all about. Making do with what you have, and what you can do yourself. As much as I’d love one of those kitchens in the magazine photos in the file I’ve been collecting, this is the kitchen I have. It’s a good kitchen. On winter afternoons, the sun streams in, and it’s the most pleasant room in my house. Even more so now that it’s all clean, everything has been scrubbed and painted and spiffed up. Someday, I’ll have an extra freelance job that will pay for a new floor, but for now, this floor is just fine.

So there it is, the El Cheapo Kitchen reno. A new year, a new shiny kitchen.

Organized!

Posted on November 27, 2011 by cmf

IMG 0572 224x300 Organized! My kitchen is the one part of my house that has still, after almost 10 years, not been renovated. It’s one of those tricky cases — if I pull the appliances out to paint, I might as well replace the floor. And if I’m replacing the floor then maybe I should have that problematic weird wall pulled out. But I don’t really have the funding to do all that, and well, the kitchen works surprisingly well in it’s unrenovated state, and so, nothing gets done. Sigh.

I’m considering painting it over the holidays. The Big Corporation I work for closes for a week so I’ve got to take the time off, and as long as I’m not getting paid, I might as well do something useful. But then there’s the floor issue, and I’m not sure I have the money to replace the floor, and then there’s the timing issue — will the floor guys be working that week? You can see where this goes. I’ll have to talk to Himself about it, since he’s the contractor and all and see what he thinks. I hate to paint, but I’m not bad at it, and it’s certainly cheaper than hiring someone (including Himself).

IMG 0564 224x300 Organized! However, there was one easy fix I did yesterday that has made me feeling much more sanguine about my un-done kitchen. I had one bookshelf in there already — the one with the chiles hanging off it, but what with the CookBookSlut work (another column should be up next week) the cookbook situation was getting out of hand. There was this messy pile, with other messy stuff tucked in the corner, and messy re-usable grocery bags stuffed underneath.

So I succumbed to the Big Box store, where I found a new five shelf white unit for a ridiculously low price. I put it together, then finally had the space to organize the cookbooks.
I’m really trying not to keep them all — just the ones I think I’ll actually use. The others I’ve been selling to Powells (in exchange for yet more books — when I’m an old lady they’re going to find me buried under a pile of books). It makes me ridiculously happy to look over at that corner now — there are sections now for English cooking, Reference, Essays, American, Mushroom cookbooks, Vegetable/vegetarian, Baking, Greek, Italian, French, Asian, Meat/Charcuterie and Canning/Pickling. (You can take the girl out of the bookstore, but you can never really take the bookstore clerk out of the girl). I can see things now. I can find things.

I’ve also been playing around with this fun site called Eat Your Books. They comp’ed me for a membership, but it’s not very expensive — $25 for a year and if you have a lot of cookbooks, as you can see I do, I think it’s kind of a great idea. You search their database for cookbooks you own, then click to add them to your “bookshelf” — what they provide is an expanded database of the indexes of those books, complete with lists of major ingredients. So, for example, if I’m looking at the last of the lamb in my freezer, and wondering what to do with it, I can type Lamb into the recipe index on “My Bookshelf” and it will kick up all the lamb recipes in the books I own — then you can drill down if you want, lamb and ginger, or lamb and grilled, etc. What I’m liking about it is that it reminds me of cookbooks I haven’t used in a while, as well as that it provides an easy access to some of the encyclopedic cookbooks like Joy or the Sunset Cookbook that I often forget to consult. They’ll also kick out shopping lists for you, and I’m sure there are a bunch of other features I haven’t figured out yet.

So there we are, one small corner of the kitchen re-organized (or perhaps just organized), one small clot of chaos defeated. Now, what to make for dinner?

Christmas Cultural Dissonance …

Posted on November 16, 2011 by cmf

Ray asks: Christmas consumerism? What's a body to do?

For some reason, the annual consumerist frenzy of “Christmas” seems even more dissonant to me than usual. It’s clear there’s a class thing with the Christmas frenzy — there are people for whom the once-a-year pile of stuff under the tree is really really important, and there are people for whom it’s not. I have to admit, I grew up in a family who mostly believed in keeping it simple at Christmas. And although as a kid I was bummed by my parents’ knee-jerk rejection of anything like the “toy of the year” as consumerist claptrap (well, there was also an element of snobbery involved), in the long run, I’m glad to have been raised by people who almost always questioned the validity of marketing and taught us to be suspicious of its claims.

At any rate, the Christmas thing. If I was the kind of person who understood lining up all night outside some big-box store to buy cheap electronics or the “must have” toy of the year, I wouldn’t be the kind of person who moved to Montana where there isn’t really any shopping. By temperament, I’m not much of a shopper, but this year, the media-driven frenzy seems even more weird than usual. Like there’s some huge cultural disconnect between the media/powers-that-be who want to insist that everything is fine! that we’re all going shopping! that it’s Christmas! and the rest of us who have been growing gardens and canning and learning to bike commute because who can afford gas and car insurance anymore? Between the television advertisers and the Occupy movement folks — really? lining up for the entirely manufactured non-event that is “Black Thursday” when our young people are camping in city parks demonstrating against the stacked deck that is our current financial system? To whom do they think they’re advertising? There’s 10% official unemployment out there — which means unofficial unemployment is at least double that — especially in minority communities.

My beloved sometimes accuses the entire sustainability/urban homesteading thing of being a “lifestyle” issue — that is, not something one does to really save money or change the way you live but because chicken coops are hip, and canning and DIY are cool. I think he’s right to a certain extent, but on the other hand, there are a lot of people learning to get by with less. While I’d like to see people have jobs again, I don’t think we need to return to the rampant consumer excess that drove the housing bubble. We all bought a lot of junk, and went into debt to do it (I’m not innocent of this). On the one hand, we’re being bombarded with consumerist Christmas junk on tv and in the newspaper and in the “straight” media, and on the other hand I’m reading things like this terrific article over at Yes! Magazine about a couple who discovered that life on the “wrong side” of town opened their family up to community in a way that enriched their lives, and the inimitable Harriet Fastenfest’s piece over at Culinate on “the University of Grandmothers” who worry because “people don’t know how to be poor” anymore.

As aways, my peeps will be receiving food boxes of stuff I’ve made, perhaps some lovely items of clothing re-purposed from thrift stores, and if you’re a kid, art supplies. So readers — what are you doing about the Christmas issue? Shopping? Not shopping? Making things? What about those of you with little kids — how are you doing the “magic of Christmas” without getting sucked into the consumerist frenzy?

Battening Down the Hatches

Posted on November 13, 2011 by cmf

A bushel of black kale, ready for the freezer

My first post-deadline, post-travel weekend and although I was woefully short on new fiction pages produced, I did get some long-neglected house-and-garden tasks done.

First of all, I’m feeling sanguine about winter because, at long last, we got our whole pig! It took a long time this year because, well, the small packer/butcher operation we buy from sold more post-fair pig specials than they had pigs. So we had to wait for them to get more local pigs (they promised me it wasn’t a CAFO pig), and then for them to make the delicious hams and bacon. There’s nothing like going into a winter with a freezer full of pork. Also, if you get used to buying meat by the share (or if you have nice friends who give you hunks of elk, or venison, or antelope, or their own homegrown beef), and you are a person who works at home, you get really really used to not having to go to the store. It was just weird not having enough in the freezer that dinner is a choice of what to thaw. I found it unsettling. Now we’re fat on pig, the new chickens are laying, I’ve got a pantry full of pickles and fruit, there’s homemade sauerkraut in the fridge, and as you can see above, kale for the freezer.

Putting up greens is a tiny bit time consuming, but worth it. Again — there’s nothing like being able to “shop the freezer” and I like knowing that I’m really the only one who has been handling my veggies. This is black kale, also known as Dino Kale and Laccinato Kale. It’s the long skinny-leafed kale, and I love it for soups, and in the morning sauteed with onion, garlic and hot pepper with a fried egg on top (a little bacon is also welcome in the mix). This was a bushel of kale. I filled the sink with cool water while my biggest pot was coming to a boil, then used garden scissors to clip the leaves into semi-bite-sized pieces. I swished them around, then put them in the boiling water to blanch. The cookbooks say to boil them for 3 minutes, but I just leave them in the hot water, even if it hasn’t come all the way back to a boil, until they turn a deep, electric green. In the meantime, drain the rinse water and re-fill the sink with cold water and ice. The blanched greens go in the ice water to cool off. A bushel was two sinks and two batches in my biggest stockpot. I drained them in collanders, then used the salad spinner to prep them for the vaccuum sealer. Two serious spins in the salad spinner I found, got enough water out that I didn’t overwhelm the vaccuum sealer. I wound up with nine fairly solid bags of kale. There’s probably just as much curly kale out there, which I’m nursing along as fresh playing chicken with the weather. I’ve found I can keep eating kale out of the garden until we get a multi-day spate of below-zero weather — with any luck, I can get through most of December, but really, one never knows.

I also put up some pears this morning — I stole some pears out of a neighbor’s yard. A neglected tree in a rental house. They were small and hard, but after a couple of weeks in a bowl on the kitchen counter they took on a beautiful rosy hue, and smelled divine. I did them before the kale, using the stockpot of water I was bringing to a boil to sterilize a few jars and lids, and then to process them. I made a simple syrup from equal parts red wine (Bota Box malbec) and sugar. Half a vanilla bean, the zest and juice of a lemon, a piece of cinnamon stick and a couple of cloves also went in. I peeled, cored and sliced the little pears, then poached them and packed them in the simple syrup. Twenty minutes in a hot water bath and either I have an instant-dessert (over ice cream?) or a present for someone’s Christmas box.

My last chore was modifying the chicken house door. The chicken house has a much more beautiful door than a chicken house really deserves — but it came out of the Sweetheart’s immense store of salvaged, recycled, bought on sale contractor supplies, and it was just the right size to lean in, collect eggs, and clean out the bedding. The problem is, that in the winter, it was too big to keep much heat inside, even with a light bulb. So today, I took it off and cut a chicken-sized hole in the door, and put it back on it’s hinges. Now they’ll stay warm, and I can still get in when I need to (knock wood, because I’m in the middle of town, so far I haven’t had varmint problems, but it is a risk. I kept the piece of wood figuring I can put it on a hinge if need be).

I also lucked out and the Sweetheart fixed the broken dog door while I type up a bid for him, so the wind is no longer blowing directly into the kitchen. All in all, a very satisfying weekend of house and backyard farming tasks. Winter is upon us, and I do have to admit, I’m looking forward to holing up and carrying the deadline energy back over into my own work, but there’s also something so pleasant about an afternoon in the kitchen, listening to back podcasts of Fresh Air, and putting up food for the winter.

First good bread of the fall …

Posted on September 19, 2011 by cmf

2011 Fall bread 223x300 First good bread of the fall ... With apologies to my blog readers who have seen this bread before, but after several years, what I find interesting is how the weather affects my bread baking. I can’t get a decent loaf to work for me in the summer when it’s hot, but when my kitchen goes back to it’s usual 65-70 degrees, I can make a bomber loaf of bread.

This is the no-knead bread I’ve been making for years now. Three cups flour (this is one cup each of King Arthur bread, all-purpose and whole-wheat flours, with a nice sprinkling of Bob’s Red Mill Dark Rye for flavor), 1 tbsp salt, 1/4 tsp. active dry yeast, 1.5 cups sourdough starter and about a cup of water. Mix until you have a “shaggy dough” as the original recipe noted, cover with plastic wrap and let rise overnight. In the morning, dump onto a board, knead a few times and shape into a boule (here’s a link to an instructive video with a slightly dopey voice over: http://youtu.be/I5t-1sJwzFs). I don’t have one of those fancy baskets, but I use a collander lined with a floured dishtowel.

So, I don’t bake when it’s 90 degrees out — and after languishing in the back of the fridge for a while, the sourdough starter takes a few batches to get it’s mojo back. But beyond that, the bread just doesn’t work when it’s warm out. It winds up weirdly flaccid, or it rises too fast, or something. I’ve made probably three or four loaves since the worst of the heat broke, and this is the first one that worked. You could feel it in the dough this morning when I went to shape it. The bad loaves, you couldn’t really get a “skin” on it like you wanted. The dough just felt “dead” in some weird way … this dough, it rose overnight but didn’t seem overly foamy. When I dumped it out on the board, it kept some shape, and it had a little pushback when I went to knead/shape it. How to explain? It just felt like bread.

My kitchen stayed in the high 60s/low 70s all day, and by about one, the bread had risen to the point where when you poked it with a finger, a slight dimple was left. So I cranked up the oven to 425 (which is the temp I like — it springs, but the crust doesn’t get overly caramelized) with the dutch oven inside. When everything came to temp, the bread went in the pot, I scored it a couple of times with a sharp knife, and put the lid back on. It cooks for 30 minutes with the lid on, 20-25 with it off.

And voila! My first fully-sprung, fully-risen lovely bread of the season. Yet another reason to be glad the dog days of summer are over.

Homemade Cheese with Backyard Apple Chutney

Posted on August 29, 2011 by cmf

IMG 0509 224x300 Homemade Cheese with Backyard Apple Chutney
Here’s the fresh cheese I made out of Home Made, a cookbook I’ll be reviewing for Bookslut later this week. It’s a good simple cheese that doesn’t require any special equipment.

It is even better topped with the Apple Chutney I made (sort of a mashup between the recipes in Put ‘em Up! by Sherri Brooks Vinton and in Tart and Sweet by Kelly Geary and Jessie Knadler). I put up 10 half-pints of this one, and had a tiny bit leftover for an afternoon snack, which was delicious.

LivingSmall

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