Yum, yum, Joan!
I baked two loaves of the Semolina/Rye/Wheat Bread (aka Len’s buns recipe baked as loaves). I may have to work out how to scale it up to three loaves. We really like this recipe.
Dinner tonight is leftover breaded chicken breast and potato salad for my husband. I had salmon and couscous. That is because I accidentally thawed the single piece of salmon instead of the single frozen chicken breast. That's what happens when I go to bed, remember that I need to thaw an item, go downstairs and do not turn on the main light. (Both the salmon and the chicken come in the same kind of package.) We also had more microwaved broccoli.
When I was testing the recipes for Peter's 'Artisan Breads Every Day' book, I made a wheat starter and I also tried some recipes that you would keep in the fridge for several days, baking a little each day. My experience was that they started to behave and taste a bit like a sourdough by day 4.
Some of the preferements I've made recently start to behave a bit like a sourdough after 18 hours, so my guess is that if you make the preferment at least 24 hours before you want to mix the dough, you'll get reasonable results. No, it still isn't a true Type I sourdough, but it'll have some sour to it.
I've been maintaining a rye starter on and off for a couple of years now, when I want to make some sourdough wheat bread I make up a levain about 24 hours in advance using equal weights of wheat flour and water and 5% (by flour weight) rye starter.
We have spaghetti squash starts! One is rather large, and there are two smaller ones. It is taking over its section of the garden and crowding out the honeynut (small butternut squash) plant.
We lost the tomato that was starting to turn red. It was on the ground this morning and half rotten. My husband says that happens sometimes.
The snow peas and beans have been doing well.
Sunday night dinner was breaded chicken breasts (flour, egg, panko with Penzey’s Sunny Paris) roasted and accompanied by potato salad and microwaved fresh green beans from our garden.
Our farmer's market is Tuesday evenings and Saturdays in the summer. I went yesterday and came home with scallions, dark purple bell peppers, a tomato, and 2 more zucchini.
On Sunday morning, I baked my adaptation of King Arthur’s Basic Berry Muffins. I like this recipe, which also uses oats and can be adapted for any fruit. I use buttermilk rather than regular milk, so I reduce the baking powder by 1 tsp. and add ¼ tsp. baking soda. I also cut the salt in half. Today, instead of whole wheat pastry flour, I used white whole wheat flour. I also baked a half recipe, because I was using the blueberries we managed to harvest from our two little shrubs before the birds got to them, and I only had a little more than 1/3 cup of small berries. I baked them in a six-well Nordic Ware heart muffin pan—only because I could not locate my small muffin pans. (I think they were stored in the kitchen in the apartment, and we emptied out the apartment and have started renovating it.) I baked the pan in my countertop convection oven (even in the early morning, the humidity is high). I reduced the temperature by 25F and baked the full 20 minutes. I am beginning to think that I do not have to do a temperature reduction when baking in the small oven.
I made Healthy Oatmeal Cookies, from the Martha Stewart site. It's a small batch (claims it makes 18, I get 16) that uses oil as the fat. Not bad at all.
It is looking like we will not have the bounty of tomatoes we enjoyed last year. My husband says that one is starting to ripen. In the meantime, I bought a nice tomato at the farmer's market (she uses green houses or tunnels) and had my first Bacon-Tomato sandwich yesterday with turkey bacon. I could not find the turkey bacon I liked from last year (Kroger seems to have stopped selling it), so I had to buy Oscar Meyer smoked. I would give it a B-.
I have been trying to remember the brand of all-beef hotdogs that I used to buy, but it has been so long that I has forgotten it. I think that they were Ballpark. They came eight to a package, which was nice, as I was fond of Crescent Roll Hotdogs paired with baked beans. I used low-fat crescent rolls and 2% cheese; I tried reduced fat hot dogs, but they were terrible, so it was always the all-beef. (I realize the low-fat crescent rolls were still not nutritionally great.)
The other day, I found a recipe for half hot dogs wrapped in homemade cornmeal wrappings to be used as appetizers. That would be fun to try some day when I have other people around who can eat more of this stuff than I can allow myself.
Lately, I have been dreaming of a Brat on a bun.
Glad to hear others are having issues. Once upon a time, we liked Nathan's but they seem to have gone the way of others.
Len, if I ever make it to my nearest WF (1 ½ hours away), I'll have to try the 365 dogs - I like the house brand, most everything I've tried has been good.
I've tried some of the bargain brand hot dogs, they're awful, I'll willingly pay 3 times as much for a brand I can actually stand to eat. I've bought Nathan's, but they seem greasier than most other brands. We buy Fairbury all-beef hot dogs, a local brand. Vienna dogs are better, but unavailable here.
Good corned beef is also challenging to find, and we've learned the hard way that a lot of deli corned beef has garlic in it. If I had a good smoker I could try making Montreal Smoked Meat again, it is sort of like pastrami, though that's like saying a Cadillac is sort of like a Chevy. (Most MSM recipes have garlic in them, but I made some without garlic and it was pretty good.) I've been looking at the Big Green Egg, but the smaller size ones don't get good marks.
We can’t seem to find good hot dogs. Even brands we used to like aren’t good any more. I miss Kayem from up north. The make Fenway franks which are different (better) than Ballpark franks. I’ve been thinking about trying some of the higher end brands - we don’t eat them that often anyway.
I also miss Portuguese linguica and chorizo - easy to find around New Bedford.
On Wednesday, I baked my Whole Wheat Sourdough Cheese Crackers (aka Baker Aunt's Crackers) from dough I mixed last week.
Chocomouse, Genius Kitchen, which was originally Recipezaar (that was a Great site with many varied forums) has evolved yet again a few years ago, is now Food dot com. They carried over all the posted recipes so you should be able to find it. If you had the recipe saved, sign in and it should be there under your "saves".
I made muffins based on an old recipe from Genius Kitchen (anyone use their recipes? I had not visited the blog for ages, and today I found everything closed down; no blog. I can't find any info when searching the internet. Anyone know anything about this?) It's a nice recipe - oats, whole wheat, brown sugar. It calls for dates, which is why I looked for it in my recipe collection, but at the last minute I used apricots instead of dates. I also did not follow the instructions: just put all the ingredients, wet and dry in a bowl and mix, then use electric mixer on medium to beat until smooth, then add dates. That would make a pretty tough muffin in my opinion! I did the usual: mix the wets, mix the drys, and gently stir them together. They're not overly sweet, and did not dome as much as most of my recipes. But it's a keeper.
