BakerAunt
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Those are lovely loaves, Joan. Some people find whole wheat bitter. When I bake bread when Scott's cousins are around, I use white whole wheat flour, which is more mellow. King Arthur, in their whole grain baking book, uses about 1/4 cup of orange juice to mellow out regular whole wheat flour. (That was before they got into selling white whole wheat flour.)
However, like you, I bake what the people want to eat, not what I think that they should eat.
We are having very cold temperatures. We made it into the upper teens today after starting at low single digits. It was 9 F when we did our grocery store run in the later morning. Scott estimates our snow total since a week ago at 12 inches.
I made my faux lasagna that uses spaghetti squash in the place of pasta for dinner on Tuesday. I added some chopped sautéed celery with the sliced mushrooms.
Earlier in the day, I roasted the last two of the pumpkins with the basketball textured skin because I thought that they might be starting to go bad, but they turned out to be fine. I have some pumpkin recipes in mind for this batch of fresh puree, but I have also frozen some of it.
Navlys--I don't count on rental places having sheet pans, based on past experience. I have a medium-sized one that I bought on our first vacation in Florida, and it goes with us whenever we travel and plan to cook. It has also turned out to be very useful here at home.
Hurrah! Joan's pictures are back. Your bread looks yummy. Your little doggy is clearly interested in the meal!
For lunch today, I cooked a batch of black beans, then made Black Bean and Pumpkin soup. I adapted this recipe from Smitten Kitchen, and Deb adapted it from Gourmet. I like to make it every year, and it lasts me for over a week unless I freeze some of it. This time, instead of using the food processor to puree the black beans and diced tomatoes, I put them in my deepest metal bowl, along with some of the black bean broth, and used my stick blender. That worked well, and I did not have a food processor to clean!
We repeated last night's dinner except that we had microwaved frozen peas as the vegetable.
A few thoughts for CWCdesign:
After I started using a stand mixer, nearly fifteen years ago, I started having more blowouts of my loaves than when I kneaded by hand. At the time, when it came to shaping the loaf, I was rolling out the dough to a rectangle with a heavy rolling pin, then rolling it up and tucking the ends in before I put it into the loaf pan. I now shape the loaves differently, and it seems to make a difference. I form each loaf into a rough oval, cover them, and let them rest for 5 minutes. To shape, I turn the oval over, so that the smooth side is down, flatten with my hands a bit to make the correct size of rectangle for the pan, then fold in each side to meet in the center, fold in each end, then fold in the long sides, and roll with my hands to make a cylinder that fits into the pan without pushing out at the ends. That has stopped any major blowouts for regular loaf pans.
In looking at your pictures, I've always considered the marks along the side as oven spring rather than blowouts. That said, some of my loaves have more pronounced marks on one side, which I think may be due to air flow in my oven.
For Sunday dinner, I roasted chicken thighs rubbed with olive oil and sprinkled with Penzey's Justice seasoning. I roasted potato chunks tossed in olive oil separately in the small convection oven at 400 F for 50 minutes, and they came out well. We also had microwaved frozen mixed vegetables. Dessert was Butternut Squash Cake with Maple Glaze, which is delicious! We had temperatures in the teens for a high today, and we are having yet more snow.
We had some an dusting of snow last night, with a bit in the early evening on Saturday. I baked Butternut Squash Bundt Cake with Maple Glaze in the afternoon. I had to add about 27 g of pumpkin puree, as there was not quite enough in the squash puree I made earlier in the week. I used the "Celebration" Bundt pan, which holds 10 cups. I made it with half King Arthur AP flour and half Bob's Red Mill whole wheat pastry flour. I replaced the sour cream with nonfat Chobani Greek yogurt and halved the salt. I followed a reviewer's suggestion for upping the spices by adding ginger, cloves, and allspice. I also added 2 Tbs. each milk powder and flax meal. I baked this recipe a couple of years ago and commented on it at the time and posted a link to the recipe here at Nebraska Kitchen. I could not bake it last year because of the paucity of butternut squash at that season's farmers market, but I have a lot from this year's market. I will let the cake rest overnight, then glaze it tomorrow.
Len--I like putting a dash of sherry in chicken soup, a habit I learned from my mother. It also is excellent in the black bean and pumpkin soup I like to make.
I made yogurt on Saturday. I also roasted a pumpkin and processed it for puree. I do not know the name of this kind of pumpkin, but the skin resembles the outside of a basketball in its roughness. It made lovely puree.
For dinner, I made Salmon and Couscous with Penzey's Greek Seasoning, and we had microwaved fresh broccoli as well.
On Friday, I made dough for Whole Wheat Sourdough Cheese Crackers. I am still working out the mixing with the Ankarsrum, as the final dough seems a little thick for it to handle easily. I ended up kneading in the last bits of flour by hand. With bread, I would use less flour. I may try holding back a bit next time I make cracker dough, but the final consistency of crackers and bread are two different matters. I may look at some cookie recipes with the Ankarsrum as a comparison.
We finished the black-eyed peas with brown rice and ham for Friday night's dinner. All the leftovers are gone, so tomorrow I will cook again.
Oh, no! We need Joan's pictures!
We had most of the leftover turkey and noodles from the other night for dinner on Thursday, with enough left over for me to have it as part of my lunch tomorrow.
Like Joan, my meatloaf contains oats. I never use cheese. I use an egg, 8 oz of tomato sauce, maybe a dash of evaporated milk if it is dry, and of course, chopped celery, onion, and bell pepper. Scott is not fond of beef meatloaf, so I make it rarely these days. Usually, I make a turkey loaf with either zucchini or frozen spinach,
For lunch on Wednesday, I made soup with the puree from the Autumn Frost squash I roasted earlier this week. I did not have any broth on hand, since I have not gotten around to boiling up the bones that I have frozen, so I used some Penzey's chicken base, which works in a pinch, with about 1 ½ cups water. I added dried sage as flavoring. I will have it for lunch tomorrow as well.
It began to snow on Wednesday morning, a lake-effect snow from Lake Michigan, and it snowed most of the day and overnight. Scott estimates that as of this Thursday morning, we have had at least eight inches. It is fluffy snow, so he finds it easier to shovel. I woke up around seven this morning, so I had time to bake Whole Wheat Apple Muffins for breakfast. The recipe first appeared in Sift (Fall 2019), p. 24, the short-lived King Arthur baking magazine that replaced the beloved The Baking Sheet. The original recipe was more cupcake than muffin, with all of the unhealthy implications of that difference. I replaced ½ cup of butter with ¼ cup canola oil, reduced the brown sugar from ¾ to ½ cup, and halved the salt from ½ to ¼ tsp. I added ¼ cup Bob's Red Mill milk powder and 2 Tbs. flax meal to increase nutritional value. I reduce the boiled cider from 2 Tbs. to 1 Tbs., as I have found it otherwise overwhelms the other flavors. The recipe calls for ½ cup dried or fresh chopped apples. I used two small Winesaps, cutting out a bad place on one, so I had about 1 ½ cups. I reduced the walnuts from ¾ to ½ cup and deleted ½ cup raisins. The muffins are so good warm from the oven, especially on such a cold morning, and they are also good at room temperature. As finished this post, the sun broke through, but it will likely go behind the clouds again.
Wednesday night's dinner was leftover black-eyed peas with brown rice and ham. It began snowing mid-morning and has not stopped since. It's another lake effect snowstorm, which means the sidewalks got wet under the snow, which means ice.
Dinner on Tuesday evening was turkey with noodles, mushrooms, and peas. I used the leftover turkey meat, nearly a pound of sliced mushrooms, the leftover gravy from our earlier chicken combined with the deglazing liquid from when I roasted the half turkey breast, and some leftover evaporated milk. The pasta was fettucine. I spilled some of the deglazing liquid in taking it out of the refrigerator, which resulted in Scott and I both doing clean-up on the refrigerator, the top of the freezer door, and the floor. Sigh.
I order my coffee from Peet's, and they have kept their 1-lb. bags of coffee beans. The price, however, has increased by over $2 due to the tariffs.
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