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I'm so sorry, Joan. Hugs and prayers.
After several days with highs in the low 80s, yesterday brought cooler temperatures, and it was 32F when we got up this morning. We are supposed to have freezing temperatures tonight and tomorrow. That calls for a winter meal, so on Monday I made my Pork Loin Roast with Barley, Butternut Squash, and Kale. I had been wanting to make this meal for the last few weeks, using a roast that I bought a couple of months ago from the meat vendor at our farmers' market. However, I had to wait until last week when we did our shopping trip to the next town to get the kale, then I had to wait for cold weather, which I knew would be back.
I had one last very large squash that came from our garden last fall just before the freeze. It was from the seed that was in with the honey nut squashes but clearly did not belong there, as these squashes had large leaves and produced large fruit. This one was 15-inches long, mostly with a bulb at the bottom and long neck. It had not fully ripened when my husband picked it before the frost, but it sat on the enclosed sun porch and finished up nicely. Its taste is excellent. My husband decided to save some seed from it and will plant one, just to see if we can get an equivalent batch of large squashes. Of course, this seed would have hybridized with the honey nuts.
Follow-up: We love the butternut squash cake with my changes, so the recipe is a keeper. I will continue looking for just the right maple glaze, as I would like it with a bit more maple flavor. My husband thought it was fine, but to me, the powdered sugar somewhat obscures it.
For the glaze, I used 1 cup of powdered sugar, which I then sifted, 2 Tbs. maple syrup, 1/8 tsp. maple extract, and after starting with 2 tsp. milk, upped it to 3 tsp. to get the correct glaze consistency. I might just use 1/4 tsp. maple extract next time. The original recipe used just maple syrup, vanilla, and powdered sugar, but I've found that if a glaze contains a little milk, it lasts better.
If anyone has an excellent maple glaze recipe for cakes, let me know. Otherwise, I'll keep experimenting until I find one.
I've noted that a lot of the King Arthur rye bread recipes actually use only a small proportion of rye flour with their AP flour. I've found, based on Ginsberg's blog post recipe for spiced pumpkin rye that I can increase the whole wheat flour along with the rye to achieve a bread that is much more wholegrain. Doing so gets the nutritional advantages of both grains. I do recommend the King Arthur spiced rye cookies. The recipe uses medium rye, so not wholegrain but still better than straight AP flour. The chocolate rye coffee cake recipe is also excellent.
As for sourdough--King Arthur has a great sourdough coffee cake recipe. I do not bake it due to the butter, but maybe it will work for Aaron's family..
King Arthur has some recipes that use a small amount of starter in the levain. I do think that their starter tends to be thicker--perhaps much more so--than my milk-based starter. I usually use a bit more when I bake those recipes, and I try to make sure that the starter has recently been fed.
I think that King Arthur had a blog post on keeping only a small amount of starter.
Aaron--maybe you need to send Sam a care package of crackers!
Aaron--Today's email from King Arthur has a granola recipe that uses discard starter.
I'm wondering if the baked rolls would freeze well and then could be re-heated. That would let me stash away some special lunches for me.
I also like the suggestion at the end of the recipe that one could do a spinach and ricotta filling. I wish that specifics about that had been included, as my husband could eat that version.
On Sunday, I baked a new recipe, Butternut Squash Bundt Cake with Maple Glaze, from the blog Port and Fin. Here is a link to the recipe:
I was forced to find a new butternut cake recipe because the one I baked a few years ag and loved had a copious amount of butter and cream cheese. This recipe, which uses oil and sour cream--which I replaced with nonfat Greek yogurt--seems like a good possible replacement. I followed a commentator's suggestion for more robust spices. Whereas the original called for 1 tsp. cinnamon and ¼ tsp. nutmeg, the suggestion added ½ tsp. ginger, ¼ tsp. cloves and ¼ tsp. allspice. In my experience, butternut squash in baked goods usually benefits from more spices. I also used half white whole wheat flour and half King Arthur AP. I added 2 Tbs. Bob's Red Mill milk powder and 2 Tbs. flax meal. As noted, I replaced the sour cream with nonfat Greek yogurt. I might have used a low-fat one, but it is not easy to find where I live. I cut the salt by 50%. The recipe did not specify what size Bundt pan, but my selection of a 10-cup pan was perfect. I checked it at 50 minutes and let it bake another five. I removed it from the pan after 10 minutes.
I will let the cake rest overnight, then add the maple glaze tomorrow. I may look at some of my maple glaze recipes. The recipe's maple glaze uses only powdered sugar and maple syrup, and I think that it will need a bit of milk in order to set properly.
I made a large stir-fry for dinner on Saturday, using farro cooked in turkey/chicken broth, leftover turkey, mushrooms and red bell pepper from the grocery, baby carrots and napa cabbage from our farmers' market, and the leftover gravy. We have enough for two nights of leftovers for dinner, which I consider a win!
Mike is correct about finding unsweetened yogurt with live cultures in small containers. Even with the large containers, a lot of yogurt these days is thickened with food starch, which is cheaper for the manufacturer but reduces the nutritional value of yogurt made completely with milk. I can only find the quarts of Stonyfield yogurt that I use as starter for my own yogurt, and I had to settle for full fat, as no store close to us sells the low-fat that I could easily find at stores where we lived in Texas. Indeed, my frustration led to my dusting off a yogurt maker I had never used and getting into making my own, six small jars at a time. It also turned out to be more economical, as well as more nutritious.
Yogurt has a different kind of "tang" from sourdough or from buttermilk. I usually replace yogurt in bread recipes with buttermilk. I doubt that the active cultures in the yogurt (does buttermilk have active cultures?) can replace a levain, but it does make breads more tender and helps the rise a bit. S. Wirth (I think of her often) told us that buttermilk increases the "keeping quality" of breads.
I seem to recall that Paddy had a recipe for a buttermilk-based starter, but I never explored it, as I have a milk-based one that I have kept going for about thirty years.
I improvised a soup for lunch on Friday by first sauteing onion, celery, carrots, mushrooms, and garlic in olive oil. I added some leftover turkey/chicken broth and the broth I made on Sunday from the turkey giblets. I added a can of tomatoes with Hatch chilis, 2/3 cup brown lentils and 1/3 cup red lentils. For spices, I added ½ tsp. chili powder, 1 tsp. Salsa & Pico, ¼ tsp. cumin. I remembered that I had about 10 oz. of broth from black-eyed peas in the freezer, so I tossed it in along with some of the leftover water from cooking muddled mashed potatoes last night. The soup is mildly spicy, which is how I prefer it, and tastes great. I will have lunches from it into next week.
Thanks for posting the link, Mike. I know that we have at least two kinds of bees here. I've seen the big bumble bees, and there are little bees that are adept at pollinating our squash.
My husband started the tomato plants today, so now we wait to see if they come up. There will not be any transplanting until later in May. We are in a warm spell right now, with temperatures yesterday and today hitting the low 80s in the afternoon. However, next week is forecast to be much cooler. I'm ok with cooler, as long as there is no freeze. After all, it is supposed to be spring.
I roasted one of my two remaining butternut squashes on Thursday and made it into puree. I have a cake recipe in which I plan to use it.
For dinner tonight, I made muddled mashed potatoes to go with the leftover turkey and gravy. We had microwaved frozen peas and leftover applesauce too.
Those impromptu stir-fry dishes are a favorite at my house, too, Len!
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