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This afternoon, I baked the Brown Sugar Sour Cream Pound Cake from the KAF site. It's a favorite that I have baked before, and we will have it with fresh strawberries mixed with sugar and drizzled on a slice. I made two changes in the recipe: I cut the salt from 1 tsp. to 1/2 tsp. (With the sour cream, I figure it will not be missed.) I also substituted in 1/2 Cup whole wheat pastry flour for 1/2 cup of the KAF flour. I used the Bundt Vintage Star pan (10 cups). As it is a deeper rather than a wider Bundt pan, I baked the cake for the full 60 minutes.
With this cake I used the "grease" for the first time. I used 1/2 cup each of Crisco, Pillsbury unbleached flour, and canola oil. I used my immersion blender to blend it in the tall cup container that came with the blender. It mixed up very nicely. I used a silicone pastry brush to coat the pan; think of it as a paint brush and paint. I have stored the remainder in a container with a tight lid. (I have a lot left, as I intended, so that I can use it for other baking projects.) The cake baked nicely and released beautifully. I did not have the overbrowning that seems to happen with the Baker's Joy spray I've been using. The grease is also very inexpensive to make, and it allows me to reduce waste by never buying those spray cans again.
Thanks to S. Wirth who first wrote about the grease on the old Baking Circle. Thanks also to Mrs. Cindy who wrote about it with evangelistic fervor in a memorable thread from the second Baking Circle that now likely exists only in my head.
For dinner tonight, I'm making soup, mostly on the wood stove--a good recipe for a cold day that has had intermittent snow. I started by sautéing a package of ground turkey in a bit of olive oil, then added some chopped onion and celery, then sliced mushrooms. I peeled, then diced a butternut squash and added it. I had a container of about 6 cups turkey stock from the freezer. I used the Bob's Red Mill Vegi-Soup mixture of lentils, split green peas, and split yellow peas with barley (1 1/3 cups). I added an additional 1/3 cup pearl barley. I seasoned with 1 tsp. rubbed sage. I moved the covered pot to the wood stove at this point, and it should be ready in an hour. It will go nicely with the cheese crackers I baked yesterday.
Thanks, Mike and Wonky.
Bernard Clayton does not give weights--no one did back then. I'll list the ingredients:
2 1/2 Cups water
1/3 nonfat dry milk (I'll probably replace with a cup of buttermilk, and reduce water to 1 1/2 Cups)
1/4 Cup molasses
1 Tbs. salt
1/2 Cup wheat germ
1/2 Cup buckwheat flour
2 pkgs. yeast
2 Tbs. shortening (I'll probably use butter)
1 Cup rye flour
3 Cups whole wheat flour
1 to 1 1/2 Cups bread or AP flour.My mixer is listed at 1000 Watts. It does have an automatic shut-off, but I've never had it do so. I've done some three loaves recipes in it: Grandma A's Ranch Hand Bread (with about 60% whole wheat and additional flax meal) and Marilyn's Oatmeal Bread (KAF) with 2 cups whole wheat flour substituted.
I usually proof the yeast, mix the liquid ingredients, and then mix in the whole grains with the paddle. I do a rest period of 15-20 minutes before switching to the dough hook and adding the white flour with the salt. I adopted that technique after making the Grandma A's bread, and it seems to help the mixer incorporate all the flour more easily, and it gives the whole grains a chance to hydrate, so that I do not add too much additional flour.
I have found that when making bread dough with my mixer, I initially need to stop it and use the dough scraper to turn the dough over to make sure all the flour gets incorporated, but that does not seem unusual to me.
Bernard Clayton adds the salt with the yeast mixture. I usually hold it back and add it in with whatever white flour I'm using. I'll probably do that here.
I'll likely try this recipe, which makes two loaves, on Friday or Saturday, by which time we should be finishing up the last loaf I baked.
Monday night's dinner was one of my stir-together dinners. I started with chopped orange bell pepper and sliced mushrooms, which I sautéed in grapeseed oil. I cut the rest of the chicken into small pieces and added it, then broccoli florets. I had frozen the drippings from about ten days ago, when we had roast chicken legs with maple syrup and sweet potatoes. I skimmed off the fat and added it to the vegetables. I cooked soba noodles and tossed them with the meat and vegetables. I added sliced green onion right before serving.
I've roasted a lot of chickens over the years, beginning in graduate school and thereafter, until I married my husband who prides himself on his chicken roasting, which is not quite what I prefer. A 4-5 pound chicken would last me for the week. I'd eat it with sides for a couple of days, then cut it up and make some kind of a chicken dish--casserole or chicken over rice, chicken with pasta or soup--and I'd boil up the bones to make broth. In those days, they would also give us the "innards," and I would cook those up separately in a small pot and add that broth to the other broth.
With two of us, the chicken does not last that long, but I still reserve the bones--usually until I have several chickens or else those from a turkey--and make broth. Whole chickens were very inexpensive. Up until a couple of years ago, I would buy a couple when they were on sale for 50 cents a pound. It was more like 69 cents a pound on sale when we left Texas last year. Here, I don't think that I've seen under 99 cents a pound for a whole chicken. However, whole chicken legs or quarters are often 49 cents a pound on sale.
I use, and would still use, the Betty Crocker's Cookbook; my mother gave me the 1978 edition for Christmas that year. It included a table that said to roast a 3-4 pound (unstuffed) chicken at 375F for 1 hour 45 minutes to two hours and 15 minutes. I roasted it that way for years in a square oven baking dish. I've tried other recipes. A wild-rice with cherry stuffed chicken from Bon Appetit never cooked properly (that one was somewhat raw), although I tried the recipe twice, so I gave up on it.
I checked the Betty Crocker cookbook for a chicken roasted with vegetables, but it does not have such a recipe. I went online and looked at various ones, and what I did this time reflects one from a blog. (I think it is called Seven Spatulas.) A lot of recipes were "fussy," like the one where the chicken is cooked on top of the vegetables, which are then finished on top of the stove--no problem there--but it then wanted the chicken, after sitting out for 30 minutes to go back into the oven on a half-sheet pan at high temperature for browning. That seemed more trouble than it was worth.
On Friday, I have been busy in the kitchen. I fed my sourdough starter and used the discard to make a double recipe of the dough for my Whole Wheat Sourdough Cheese Crackers (recipe on this site). I'll bake them in a couple of days, since I think that they are better when the dough rests in the refrigerator for a couple of days.
I also baked Butterscotch Apple Sweet Rolls, a recipe from Sift (Fall 2015), p. 40, which is also on the KAF website. I first baked it at the end of November. I still had enough Jonathan apples in the refrigerator from fall to make the recipe again. This time, I used half white whole wheat flour and 1/4 cup of flax meal. As before, I used the special gold yeast. I'll glaze them tomorrow morning, and we will have several mornings of nice breakfasts. [Note: This recipe kneads beautifully on the dough cycle in the bread machine, which gives you a chance to start making the filling, so that it will be cool by the time the first rise is finished.]
My final project was to make the levain for the recipe for Honey Spelt Sourdough Bread, another recipe that I first tried last fall. It's on the KAF website and was also in one of their fall catalogs. I'll bake it tomorrow.
