It was a busy week for me, so my baking was concentrated on Saturday. I baked the Malted Whole Grain Rolls (KAF recipe) in the stoneware "Tear and Share" dish that I bought from KAF. (I spend less time at that website now; so I'm less tempted to buy such items. It's a nice baking dish but not strictly necessary for the recipe.) They are nice rolls with a lighter texture. I needed to add 2 Tbs. of flour to the dough. I like how the pan gave them a nice bottom texture, but they seem to have picked up a bit of the canola flavor from the oil. I'll use less next time, as the dish is seasoned enough. The original recipe says to use butter, but I was concerned that it would stay on the dish and get rancid.
I baked Grape Nuts bread, as we are out of bread. I baked the Vanilla Pound Cake from the KAF Wholegrain Baking Book. We will have it as strawberry shortcake base for Sunday dinner dessert. I also made a batch of Chex Mix. To get ready for the next week, I made up a double recipe of my version of the Sourdough Crackers (KAF) but my version uses more flour (soupier starter) and the powdered cheese. I'll bake them off during the week. I also assembled a scone recipe before I went to bed, so that it could be baked Sunday morning.
BakerAunt, all the cooking and baking you do is really great, since you didn't have a grandmother's influence in the kitchen. You're making the memories you missed out on, although you appear to have cute memories of them (Velvetta & rutabaga).
I don't have many grandmotherly memories in the kitchen. I recall one grandmother cooking only for the annual picnic. She would never have allowed a child to help her. My other grandmother made a Banana Cake with me once. I can recall her method for making fried potatoes, but otherwise, nothing.
My dad was the cook from whom I learned the most. My mother canned a lot each summer, but I didn't inherit the desire to do that. Maybe that's the difference between rural-living and city life.
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This reply was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by
Italiancook.
I've got a lot more pictures to post, including several closeups of the buffet table. I brought one of the skulls (the smaller white one) home, along with one of the pumpkin candy dishes. My wife has them as her Halloween decorations at her office, everybody says, "Oh, what a nice plastic candy dish!", then they realize it's made of dark chocolate, spray painted with orange cocoa butter.
I think what you're thinking of as owls are bats. Here's a high-res photo of them:
(Right click on it to get the high-res version.)
I brought one of the bats home, but sadly the wings broke off in transit. I'm going to see if I can repair it next week when I've got some tempered chocolate to work with. The repairs won't be spray-painted black, though.
One reason that I enjoyed the story is that I don't have any great cooking (or baking) memories of my grandmothers. Both worked throughout their marriages, so maybe that is why there was not a lot of experimentation. In the case of my maternal grandmother, her mother-in-law lived with them, even after my grandmother was widowed and remarried, and my mom told me that she did the cooking. So, I only remember, as a child, having fried spam (hey, we thought it was great!), Kraft macaroni and cheese, and Velveta cheese, as well as eating either raw turnip or rutabaga as my grandmother peeled it.
Sounds like the kitchen would be an interesting place to work, or just watch and listen. (Might help to be able to speak Italian, though.)
There won't be much about baking, this was a class about making chocolate candies, not baking with chocolate. I do have a few pictures of some of the fancy desserts we had at lunch that I'll post in part 3. I'm also going to talk a bit about spending a week eating in Chicago. (It's never been much of a 'fancy restaurant' town but it's well-know for 'good food'.)
I think nearly everyone who works at the Chocolate Academy has attended cooking school, most had a pretty solid work history in food service, too. So there's probably more cooking talent there than in several high-caliber restaurants combined. Since their primary mission is to develop recipes and convince restaurants, bakeries and chocolatiers to use their products, being able to speak to a chef on a professional level is highly desirable.
Chocolate is something I've dabbled with over the years, covering home made candy (especially sponge candy) with milk chocolate, for example, but I really didn't know anything about working with choco
[See the full post at: My Week at Chocolate Boot Camp - Day 1]
Lots of trees down. Minimal water damage because the storm went further off shore. The thing that kept us away for so long was that the wastewater treatment pumps lost power so we had to wait til that was clear. Good news no contaminants in the water. The crews have done an amazing job cleaning up. We're all thankful we didn't get the floods around St. Augustine or NC
Some of us were at work today cleaning up. The generators that power the coolers didn't go on - yesterday the back of house (kitchen for the uninitiated) staff went in to clean everything out. I understand it was nasty. Today they brought some us in from front of house to clean everything in the kitchen and do some reorganizing. Tomorrow a few will be going in to get the restaurant ready for service tomorrow night. And, we'll be back at work Friday morning.
Made mac and cheese (baked) for dinner last night. No baking quite yet, but probably be n the next couple of days. No eggs at the market yet
Thanks. I've tended to either weigh or scoop flour (usually scooping). I'll have to start weighing it. Something that is very nice about weighing over measuring that I've never seen anyone talk about is that it is easier to keep track of the amount when you are interrupted in mid-measure. We have a very busy kitchen and a very active three year old who will toddle in and decide she wants to help. If I am three cups into a measure of five cups I usually have to start over. If I am 16 oz. into 20 I can just pick up where I left off (so long as the scale has not switched itself off).
Update: The Maple Pound Cake with Maple Rum Glaze was very good. The Nordic War pan in which I baked it caused it to spread out more (nature of the wreath pans that are 10-inches wide) than it might have done in a 9 or 10 cup pan that is not as wide and is deeper. The glaze made it very moist. I'm not sure that the texture was that much different from any other cake I've baked with regular flour. We liked it, and I will bake it again--especially since I need to use that unbleached cake flour.
We're heading back tomorrow morning hoping to avoid some of the traffic. Tonight we'll know when they let phase 2 in, we are phase 3 - residents which should quickly follow. Current issue is getting the waste water treatment system up and going and there is a boil water alert. Our intention is to get back on the island, but we do have a friend we can stay with tomorrow night if we can't.
I just feel so badly for the people in the Carolinas - they got hit so badly and it was never expected to go that way. There were 2 couples from Hilton Head in our hotel and they said Harbor Town was pretty much decimated. The 18th green (for those of you golfers who watch the Heritage) was completely covered with debris. This morning they got news of surging water where it had been dry after the storm had passed.
Sorry I did not see this sooner.
I have a beehive wood burning oven and I've used it to cook chicken as well as pizza. You will need a roasting pan that will stand up to the heat as well as a way to handle the pan. My oven heats up to over 1000 degrees (I once leaned in to close and singed my hair off). The oven also came with a wooden door I can use to close it off.
There are basically two ways I can cook meats. I can heat it up (it takes a few hours) and put the chicken in while it is hot. The heat is intense and I can roast a chicken super fast.
Or I can let the wood burn down and put the chicken in and then put the door in. This cooks slower and works more like a smoker.
How do you like the Jim Leahy no knead pizza dough? I am looking for a no knead recipe to go along with my standard recipe for a pizza class I am teaching.
It being the week of Rosh Hashanah I made challah. I made it extra sweet and with a sweet egg wash instead of my normal one. Then I sprinkled sparkling sugar on top. I also added an extra egg but that was by accident. I had four out warming - three for the dough and one for the egg wash - and without thinking put all four in. I did not add apples (which I've done in the past) because I was rushing and out of time (hence the accidental extra egg).
I made two round loaves each almost two pounds and took the nicer looking one to my cousins' for dinner.
I won the family challah competition and did not even know there was one!
Also my wife and kids like the sweeter version better so it looks like I will be making that from now on.
On Sunday, I baked Wheat-Oat Flax Buns (KAF recipe) to use for sloppy Josephines. On Monday, I baked two loaves of Buttermilk Grape-Nuts Bread (recipe posted on this site), as we were out of bread. On Tuesday, I mixed up the dough for my Sourdough-Cheese Crackers. It's a KAF recipe that I adapted by adding cheese powder and deleting salt. I baked them on Friday evening. Not only is it more convenient to rest the dough in the refrigerator for a few days, but the dough is easier to work with, and the crackers have better texture. On Friday, I also baked Orange Sesame Muffins--a recipe I haven't made in years--to use up some evaporated milk. On Saturday, in honor of our first few days of cooler weather, I made the first pizzas of the season, using our favorite thin crust pizza recipe from KAF. I also baked a new recipe, Maple Pound Cake with Maple-Rum Glaze, from the latest KAF catalog. It calls for their new unbleached cake flour, which I do not have, but I do have Bob's Red Mill unbleached cake flour (it's of a finer consistency than regular flour), so I used it. We will have it for dessert with Sunday dinner. I baked it in my Nordic Ware Autumn wreath pan. The glaze really helps the design stand out.
This week was busy, but I cook so that there will be leftovers and no need for a completely new meal every day. On Sunday, I made sloppy Josephines (uses ground turkey instead of ground beef). On Friday, I made Dilled Salmon and Couscous for dinner. Saturday, of course, was a pizza day. I also cooked up a package of white beans that afternoon. They had a 2010 expiration date, so I was worried that they would stay hard, but I soaked them overnight, and after three hours they were the correct consistency. I froze most for later use, but some will go into a soup this next week.
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This topic was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by
BakerAunt.
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This topic was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by BakerAunt.
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This topic was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by BakerAunt.
