I made a really gorgeous no-knead bread this week. Even with my crummy point-and-shoot camera, you can see the tiny bubbles along the surface of the crust. This bread not only sprung up like you see, but the entire crust was shattery when it came out of the oven. This one took two days. It’s been so cold, and I’m such a miser, that my house has been hovering between 57 and 62 all week. I mixed up the regular old no-knead recipe in the middle of the day Monday. Three cups flour (I use half bread flour, half all-purpose,…
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I’m finding the recession sort of interesting, and frankly, kind of inspiring. It’s easy when times are fat to get lazy — to buy stuff instead of fixing something or making it yourself, but really, just going out and buying things isn’t the way I was raised. I had one of those moms who if you were bored and whiny on a Saturday told you to “go make something” or better yet, “go outside and make something.” Maybe it’s being from the Midwest. Lan Samantha Chang had a piece in the Sunday NY Times about living in Iowa, and how…
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I made a cheese! Unlike yogurt cheese — this is a “real” cheese for which you use rennet and everything. There’s a biology/chemistry professor in Cincinnati who has a terrific website about making cheese, and I followed his instructions for “Neufchatel” cheese. (Although I did half a recipe — I didn’t use all my weekly milk share.) This was really interesting — first you gently heat the milk, add a little souring agent (I used yogurt) and a tiny bit of rennet dissolved in water. Then you let it sit overnight. By morning, you have curds — which to me…
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Cooking in clay is one of those things that you read about in cookbooks and wonder what the fuss is all about — or at least I did, until my mother gave me this funny little pot one year for Christmas. I have no idea where she found it, it was an odd gift, even for her. For the first few years I had it, I assumed you could only use it in the oven. It wasn’t until I was at a party during one of the Squaw Valley Writers workshops and saw Barbara Hall using hers on her stove…
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Way back in my youth I worked in New York for a company that repackaged magazine material into cookbooks — our biggest client was Gourmet Magazine. So I’ve watched with great interest as Ruth Reichel has taken that hoary old magazine, run by women from the suburbs who at least in the late ’80 were still known to come to work in plaid skirts and knee socks (knee socks! I remember my shock that grown women would go out dressed like old girls — oh, and in blouses with those big floppy bows that women wore in the ’80s in…
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There’s a vigorous and healthy debate going on in the blogosphere about school lunch. Congress is gearing up to revise the Child Nutrition and WIC act, which includes the school lunch program, and the forces of Hope and Change have ideas. (Click through to the actual essays linked, my summaries necessarily oversimplify.) Alice Waters started the debate on the NY Times Op-Ed page, advocating that we double the lunch subsidy from $2.17 to $5.00. She also, no surprise, wants a program that works with farmers to get organic local produce into schools, and advocates rebuilding school kitchens. This suggestion, particularly…
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To wrap up home-cooking-week, I thought I’d give you all a little summary of the blogs I read most often. These are the ones that inspire my own home cooking, give me interesting ideas, send me off on projects, or that I find inspirational. The Slow Cook — I love this site — although I’m jealous of his long growing season in DC, I always learn something here. Especially about pickling. This was the site that inspired me to make sauerkraut. He’s got a particularly good piece at the top of the blog right now, Food Lessons for Hard Times.…
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I don’t have a photo, because it didn’t even occur to me until this morning that the dinner I made last night was a good illustration of what we’ve all been talking about this week — eating at home is not rocket science. As you can tell from the erratic nature of mid-week blogging, my day job has been a little insane lately. I’m lucky enough to have a remote position with a Big Corporation, but the level of fear and anxiety that working in a Big Corporation entails these days as layoffs fall all around like autumn leaves in…
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NPR has been running a series this week about how people are changing their eating habits during this recession and I’m finding it really depressing. So far, it’s all about how people aren’t eating out, or ordering in, but they’re eating prepared foods out of the frozen food aisle. They had a home economist on yesterday pointing out that a bag of frozen french fries costs about five bucks, and for that you can get a five pound bag of potatoes. Granted, if you want fries, there’s the scary frying part, but as the home economist pointed out, is there…
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The sun has come back. We feel like pagans here in MyLittleTown, ready to thow a party and rejoice. We were not forsaken! The sun came back! It’s been light before seven in the morning and until nearly six at night. It’s like being let out of jail. And so, because the evenings have not come slamming down at 4:30, and because it’s been sort of mild and pleasant out, I’ve fired up the grill again. My new friend Sabrina came for dinner mid-week, and I marinated some local lamb chops in yogurt, lime juice, olive oil and spices, then…