Hey guys here is a beautiful first try of a ciabatta bread recipe by the legendary baker, Peter Reinhart.  The bread took me 4 days to make but let me tell you it was well worth it after i tasted it.  Very good bread:) Thanks to Elise for the new baking stone and Mom and Dad for the Super peel, they worked well to create this beautiful and delicious bread.

Ingredients:

• 3 (or as many more or less you want) bell peppers sliced (any color)
• 1/2 large onion sliced or 1 small onion
• 2 packages of McCormick Fajita seasoning
• I would say about 1 steak per person sliced
• Tortillas
• Sour Cream (optional)
• Salsa (optional)
• Spanish or Mexican Rice (optional)

Directions:

We like to use our dutch ovens to do this dish but it is just as yummy over the stove.  Put the sliced peppers and slice onion together in one pan (or dutch oven) and saute them together.  Cook the meat in another pan (or dutch oven).  Add fajita seasoning to meat.  Combine peppers, onion, and meat together and serve on tortillas.  Sometimes Casey likes to make up some Spanish or Mexican rice and put it in the fajita too.  He likes to put salsa and sour cream in it.  I like to dip it.  They’re so good though!  I hope you guys like them too!

You can put as much or as little of some things as you want.  I put a generous amount of cheese on the bottom and top.  I don’t use as much corn and I don’t use as many tomatoes.  It still turns out really good.

Ingredients:

• 6-7 large bell peppers (any color)
• 1 box of spanish rice
• 2 tblspn extra virgin olive oil
• 1 lb ground beef
• 5 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 2 jalapeno cleaned out and chopped
• 1 can diced tomatoes
• 2 cups water
• 1 can black beans
• 1 can corn
• 3-4 cups Mozzarella cheese
•  Parsley

Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees.  Start a large pot of water to boil.  In medium skillet add olive oil, onions, garlic, jalapenos, salt and pepper.  Cook until translucent.  Add ground beef, brown, DO NOT DRAIN!  Cut tops off peppers, clean out, add to boiling water, cook about 4 minutes.  Remove and set upside down to drain..  Add rice from box to skillet mixture and mix well.  Cook and stir until rice is brown/golden, about 3 minutes.  Turn heat up a little and add seasoning from box, the tomatoes, and water.  Allow mixture to come to boil.  Add beans and corn, return to boil.  Place lid on and turn heat to simmer; cook about 15 minutes or until rice is done.  Let stand about 5 minutes.  Place a little mozzarella cheese in  of peppers , then a little parsley (optional), then add rice mixture.  Top mixture with mozzarella cheese and parsley.  Arrange peppers in pan.  I like to pour whatever is left of the mixture into the bottom of the pan around the peppers and put some cheese on top of that.  Place it in the oven until cheese melts.

ENJOY!!!

White Chocolate Pecan Bread with Dried Cranberries

Melissa asked me a couple of weeks ago if I could try to replicate a White Chocolate Pecan bread sold at the bakery of her local grocery store.  This is my attempt to make something in that spirit.  I haven’t tried that bread myself, so I don’t know if this is anything like it, but Amie and I can’t stop eating it.  Aubrey and Isaac weren’t willing to try it, but that just means more for us .

I added dried cranberries in addition to the pecans and white chocolate, because I thought it sounded good (it is!).  However, if you prefer to stick to just the white chocolate and pecans, I would increase the amount of each of those so that the total amount of “mix-ins” is about the same.  The bread dough itself is 50% whole white wheat with a touch of honey, which gives it some extra flavor and softness, but using white wheat rather than the normal red wheat keeps the color lighter and makes for a nice contrast with the cranberries and nuts.  I used white wheat that we bought from the Bishop’s storehouse and ground ourselves, but it’s pretty easy to find whole white wheat flour in the supermarket these days.  It’s nice in general for adding whole wheat to baked goods without them seeming too “whole-wheaty”.

A look at the interior

The white chocolate in this bread melts and almost disappears.  You see empty pockets in the interior of the bread where the white chocolate chunks were, with just some gooey remnants of white chocolate around the edges of those cavities.  You can see the coloration of where the white chocolate melted and seeped into the bread around the spaces left by the former chunks of solid white chocolate, and you can taste it in the bread.  If the white chocolate pieces in the supermarket bread remain intact, that would indicate that it’s not really white chocolate, but rather “white pieces”, which is made from hydrogenated oils and wax instead of cocoa butter, from which true white chocolate is made.  I used a Ghirardelli’s white chocolate baking bar, which is the only product in the chocolate chip and baking chocolate section of our grocery store that is actually white chocolate.  “Chocolate” is the key word you want to look for on the package, and you can check for cocoa butter in the ingredients to confirm.

This recipe takes two days, using a sponge, or pre-ferment.  That is you mix up a portion of the dough ahead of time with a tiny amount of yeast so that it can ferment for a long time before mixing it in with the rest of the dough.  This significantly improves tast and texture of the bread.  It doesn’t take much work, just some planning ahead.  As I discuss below, you can also use the fridge to slow down and stretch out the rising times in order to fit your schedule while also giving the bread the time it needs to become great.  For both the initial rise and the final proof after youve shaped the loaves, you can stick them in the fridge halfway through and leave it for several hours until you have time for the next step.  I’ve had good success with this approach lately.

Sponge:

Final Dough:

Method:

1. 12-16 hours before you want to mix the dough (and at least 17-21 hours before you want to bake the bread), mix the sponge ingredients together and let it sit out on the counter, loosely covered.  It will form a soft ball of dough initially, but will double in volume and become loose and bubbly over the 12-16 hours of fermentation time.
2. Toast the pecans in a dry skillet over medium heat for about 3 minutes, stirring constantly, until they become fragrant.  Don’t let them burn, and do let them cool off completely before you add them into the bread.
3. When the sponge is ready, combine all of the ingredients for the final dough except the pecans, chocolate and cranberries.  Knead in a stand mixer or by hand until the dough is moderately well-developed.  This is a fairly soft and wet dough, and will be very sticky at first, but as the gluten develops it will become less sticky and merely tacky.
4. Once the dough is sufficiently kneaded, fold in the pecans, chocolate and cranberries and knead by hand until they are evenly incorporated into the dough.
   

   Starting the initial rise

5. Form the dough into a smooth ball and place it in a lightly oiled container, covered with a lid of plastic wrap, and let it rise at room tempurature for 2-2.5 hours.  At around the 30 and 60 minute marks, turn the dough out onto the counter and do a “stretch-and-fold”: grab one side of the mass of dough with both hands and stretch it out, then fold it back onto the top of the dough.  Do the same from the other side of the dough so that it is folded in thirds like a letter.  Then do the same from the top and bottom, so that you have a nice ball of dough, and return it to the bowl with the smooth (bottom) side up.
6. After the 2-2.5 hours of rising, divide the dough into two pieces, and form these into balls.  Do this by gentlly flattening out the piece of dough and stretching and pulling the edges in all around the piece of dough and pinching them together on top to seal the seam.  When you turn the ball of dough over, you should have a nice, taut surface.  Take two pieces of clean cloth (linen or cotton) and dust them generously with flour so that the dough won’t stick.  Place a ball of dough in the center of each one, smooth side down, and pick them up by the corners of the cloth and set them into bowls to proof.  Let them rise, covered, for 1.25-1.5 hours.  Alternatively, you can let them rise for 30-40 minutes and stick them in the fridge for several hours until you are ready to bake them.  This can be useful for working around your schedule.  For example, I let them rise and begin proffing before church, then stuck them in the fridge and baked them when we got home.  You can also use the fridge to slow down the initial rise to fit your schedule.  Just stick the dough in the fridge about halfway through the 2-2.5 hour rising time, then come back to it when you have time.
7. About 20-30 min before your loaves are done proofing, preheat the oven to 500F with a baking stone in the center rack.  Also put some sort of oven-safe metal pan on the floor of the oven, which you’ll pour water into for steam when you start baking the bread.
   

   Finished proofing, ready to bake

8. Once the loaves and oven are ready (if you’ve proofed them in the fridge, you can put them into the oven cold, no need to let them warm up first), invert the bowls onto a flour-dusted peel or rimless cookie sheet and remove the cloths.  Slash the top of the loaves with a bread knife or razor blade, and slide them onto the hot stone.
9. Pour about a cup of hot water into the pan on the floor of the oven and immediately shut the door.  Turn down the oven tempurature to 450F.  Bake for 12 minutes with steam, then rotate the loaves and bake for another 15 minutes or more until the crust is deep brown, but not burnt.  Turn off the oven and leave them in there for anouther 5 minutes or so with the door cracked, then set them on a cooling rack.
10. Allow the loaves to cool completely before slicing, or else the interior will be a bit gummy

I recently finished reading In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, by Michael Pollan.  I found his previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, even more interesting, but this book is a relatively brief, eye-opening volume that focuses on the modern “Western Diet”, it’s deleterious effects on our health, and some suggestions for how to “escape” from the Western diet and its ill effects to regain a more enjoyable and healthful relationship with food and eating.  I found it very interesting and valuable, and wanted to summarize the book and recommend that you check it out.

This is not a diet book.  In fact, I would call it an anti-diet book, since its primary theme is a renunciation of our modern conventional wisdom about how we should eat and the confusion and diet fads that come along with it.  The first part of the book discusses the political, economic, and cultural history of our modern American approach to food and nutrition.  This is characterized by what Pollan calls “nutritionism”, a deconstructionist, “scientific” approach to nutrition which views food in terms of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins and other micronutrients, as opposed to carrots, apples and fish.  This reductionist, nutrient-based view of food has largely supplanted the accumulated wisdom of food culture and tradition as our primary guide to the question of what to eat and how to eat. Judging from the soaring rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other chronic diseases, the results have been disastrous. 

Contrast this with other parts of the world where people eat a wide variety traditional cuisines (and lifestyles) and experience markedly lower incidences of these chronic diseases.  The argument here is that since our scientific understanding of nutrition is incomplete and can at best try to understand after-the-fact why certain cuisines and foods seem to be healthful, we should be best advised to stick to natural, traditional foods and cuisines, i.e. real food.  If instead we trust in food science to manufacture “edible food-like substances” out of highly processed corn and soy (think margarine, many breakfast cereals, GoGurt, etc) that are supposed to deliver the nutrients that food science thinks we need, our health is bound to suffer for the lack of nutrients provided by real food that we haven’t yet identified as essential.

The second part of the book describes the various ways in which our modern Western diet has departed from traditional diets, and details the damaging effects these changes have had on our health.  Ironically, this part of the books relies on the same nutritional science that he decries in the rest of the book, but I found this section very interesting.  I should put in my own caveat here that I think it would be wrong to think of nutritional science as the enemy.  The work that is done to try to understand nutrition and health is certainly important and valuable.  But we should recognize the incompleteness of our understanding of nutrition, and that whenever we’ve have tried to boil nutrition down to what we think are the essential, fundamental nutrients, it has made us sick (think scurvy, etc).

The final section is where things get practical, and Pollan offers some rules of thumb on the question of what should we be eating after all.  The cleverly succinct summary of this advice adorns the cover of the book:

“EAT FOOD, NOT TOO MUCH, MOSTLY PLANTS”

Simple, right?  Pollan elaborates on each of these points with several more specific rules of thumb for choosing and eating food (his latest book, Food Rules, consists entirely of such catchy rules of thumb).

EAT FOOD: FOOD DEFINED

• Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food: By concentrating on pre-modern foods, you avoid overprocessed products. Another way of putting it: Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting (e.g. Twinkies)
• Avoid products containing ingredients that are (a) unfamiliar (b) unpronounceable (c) more than five in number, or that include (d) high-fructose corn syrup: Ethoxylated monoglycerides? Enough said.
• Avoid food products that make health claims: The creations of food science make louder claims than the produce department does, though the added benefits may not be clear. The American Heart Association (for a fee) awards its heart-healthy seal of approval on Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puff, Trix, Yoo-hoo, and Healthy Choice’s Caramel Swirl Ice Cream Sandwich.
• Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle: Most grocery stores are arranged with produce, dairy, meat and fish lining the walls, with the processed, nonperishable foods in the middle.  If you stick to the edges of the store, you’ll more likely end up with real food in your cart.
• Get out of the supermarket whenever possible: You can’t go wrong buying your food from a farmer’s market.

MOSTLY PLANTS: WHAT TO EAT

• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves: If researchers agree on anything, it’s that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables reduces health risks. Leafy vegetables are filling, low in calories, and high in antioxidants and fibre.
• You are what you eat eats to:  Industrially-raised cattle are fed grain, rather than the grass that they are supposed to eat, which (along with living in cramped quarters, ankle-deep in their own waste) makes them sick, and makes their meat substantially less nutritious than grass-fed beef.  Grass-fed beef is lower in saturated fat and richer in omega-3s, beta-carotene, and other nutrients.  The same is true for the meat and eggs of pigs and chickens fed on grass, even though they tolerate grain diets better than cattle.  Eat grass-fed, pastured animal products if you can find and afford them.
• Eat wild foods when you can: Wild greens have higher levels of useful phytochemicals and omega-3 fatty acids. Wild fish have higher omega-3 levels than grain-fed farmed fish.
• Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism: Chinese tofu recipes may be healthy, but the soy isoflavones used in processed foods appear to have negative health effects.

NOT TOO MUCH: HOW TO EAT

• Pay more, eat less: Good food (in both taste and nutritional value) costs more, but this makes you eat more discerningly.
• Eat meals: Avoid between-meal snacks, TV treats, or in-car munching. And family dinners should be just that-one meal for everyone, not personalized microwave entrées.
• Do all your eating at a table: Desks and couches don’t count.
• Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does
• Consult your gut: Studies have shown that we tend to clear our plates no matter how supersized the portion is. Take modest portions, eat slowly and enjoy your meal.  Pay attention to your sense of satiety, and stop eating when you’re 80% full.

White Bean and Kale Minestrone

This soup is really good, despite being very simple.  How awesome is that?  I found this recipe on a really cool website that I came across recently, called Cookus Interruptus.  It’s a cooking website from the author of a book called Feeding the Whole Family: Cooking with Whole Foods.  The website features about 100 recipes, many of which come from the book, and best of all, they’re each accompanied by great videos, which are both instructive and hilarious.  Their shtick is trying to cook meals amid the chaos of wacky family members, and it’s a fun way to learn good but relatively simple dishes made from whole foods.  I highly recommend poking around the site and checking out some of their videos.  You’ll enjoy your visit.

This is one of the recipes that caught my eye, for White Bean and Kale Minestrone.  That it was called “minestrone” struck me as odd, since I think of minestrone as a red vegetable soup with kidney beans and little pasta noodles.  So I looked it up on Wikipedia and discovered that minestrone is actually a somewhat generic term for a wide variety of soups or stews, which often feature seasonal vegetables and sometimes pasta.  But the defining feature seems to be that the soup has a bean base (and according to some, those should be roman beans, aka cranberry or borlotti beans to be genuine–but we won’t split hairs).  So I guess this qualifies as a minestrone due to the beans and bean broth that form the base of the soup.  Whatever you call it, it was delicious, despite being very simple and easy to make.  It’s also very healthful, consisting mainly of two highly nutritious ingredients: beans, which are a great source of protein and fiber; and kale, a leafy vegetable full of all sorts of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.  We’ll definitely be making this again.

A few notes:

• I cooked the beans in a pot instead of the pressure cooker as she describes in the video.  I put a few bay leaves in the pot and a couple of sprigs of thyme, since we happened to have some.  I also added a cube of bullion, some chicken and poultry seasoning we had in our spice cabinet, and a few cloves of garlic that I smashed with the side of a knife and threw in the pot.  This made really nice tasting broth, which I used as the liquid in the soup instead of the stock she calls for in the recipe.  White beans cook relatively fast as beans go–they’ll be done in less than an hour.  Don’t forget to fish out the bay leaves and the thyme stems and garlic cloves after their done cooking.  I did throw in the cooked garlic in the puree.
• We garnished the soup with grated parmesan instead of the pecorino (a.k.a romano) cheese she calls for, since that’s what we had.  We’ve started buying blocks of real parmesan (but still lower end stuff, not the expensive parmesan from the fancy cheese section) and grating it ourselves, which is a nice but reasonable upgrade from the fake stuff in the plastic tubes, which contains a bunch of fillers and preservatives and “anti-caking agents”.
• This did not make a huge pot of soup.  I’d say it would serve no more than 4 adults, maybe just 3 if they have large appetites.  Next time we’ll probably double the recipe in order to have more leftovers.
• We served the soup with Amie’s delicious homemade bread and a nice salad, which made for a simple, delicious, and healthy meal.
• Did I mention that this soup was really good?  And easy?

Split-pea soup

I need your help on this one, family.  I vaguely remember some story we used to read, or maybe it was a Shel Silverstein poem, that involved split-pea soup, portraying it as something rather gross.  Do any of you remember?  If not, I may have to scour the bookshelf in Kristin’s old room when we’re out there in June.  Anyway, we made split-pea soup for dinner tonight.  It was the first time I’ve had it (that I recall), and it was quite good.  It had a very pleasant, pea-centric vegetable flavor, with a nice bacony smokiness owing to the smoked ham hocks we cooked it with.  

The soup itself was good, but it was made great in delicious sourdough bread bowls.  For the bread bowls, I used the same sourdough bread recipe I’ve posted in the past.  The recipe as posted will make 8 bread bowls (I scaled it to 3/4 of the posted recipe, to make 6 bowls)  Each loaf should be about the 250g if you have a scale, or about the size of a baseball (perhaps a bit smaller) when you form the loaves.  You can let them rise in small cereal or soup bowls (preferably ones with tall sides rather than wide, shallow bowls), lined with flour-dusted cotten cloths (like cloth napkins, scraps of muslin, or whatever you have around).  Instead of making slashes across the loaves, I sliced a circle around the top, which makes it easier to cut out the top for the bread bowl.  Once the loaves are baked and cooled, just slice off the top, then cut around the sides of the loaf and use a spoon to dig out the interior crumb to make the bread bowl.  I’d put these up against Panera, or any other sourdough bread bowls you might find anywhere–they were that good. 

Bread bowls after baking

 Aubrey declined the soup and just ate one of the mini-loaves whole.  She loves bread, and I love to indulge her by making it.  Isaac has a psychological aversion to sourdough, even though the sourness in my bread is almost imperceptibly mild.  He ate watermelon, and that’s about it. 

Split Pea Soup: 

• 1 lb dried green split peas
• 1 large onion, diced
• 2 celery stalks, chopped
• 1 large carrot, chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic, smashed, peeled and chopped
• 2 well-rinsed smoked ham hocks
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• Several sprigs of thyme
• Salt and pepper to taste

Drizzle a few tablespoons of olive oil into the bottom of a large pot.  Once the oil is heated saute the chopped vegetables and garlic until they soften.  Add the remaining ingredients, plus 10 cups of water (or chicken or vegetable stock, or some combination of stock and water).  Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for 30-60 minutes, until the peas are cooked and tender and the flavors of the soup have come together nicely.  Taste and adjust the salt and pepper as necessary throughout the cooking time. 

We cooked it the night before so that we could just reheat it after Church.  When you’re ready to eat the soup, fish out the bay leaves and thyme stalks, and pull out the ham hocks.   If desired, trim and scrape the meat off of the ham hocks and add it back into the soup.  We started doing this, but couldn’t get enough off of the hocks to be worth it.  Depending on your preferences, you might puree the soup for a smooth, even texture; leave it as is; or, puree half the soup to thicken it up while leaving some texture.  We did not puree at all, since the peas had disintegrated enough not to be worth it, and we liked the bit of texture remaining from the diced vegetables.  Serve with a drizzle of olive oil on top and freshly grated parmesan.

Kraft's Striped Delight (Sorry, I didn't snap my own picture...we ate it too fast!)

I love Striped Delight.  Ever since Mom discovered the recipe on the side of a Cool Whip container decades ago, it has pretty much been my favorite dessert.  I’ve been wanting to try taking it to the next level by making the various components from scratch, and finally did it Sunday for our Mother’s Day dessert.  It was awesome.  The chocolate pudding had a deep, rich chocolate flavor that Jell-O instant pudding can’t come close to, and the real whipped cream was heavenly.

The idea of doing Striped Delight from scratch came when I was making a filling for Amie and Aubrey’s birthday cakes, and realized that it was essentially the same as the bottom layer of Striped Delight, except that I used real whipped cream instead of Cool Whip.  We had started using real whipped cream recently, when Amie had made a fresh strawberry pie, and we had no Cool Whip on hand but did have some leftover cream from something else Amie had made.  Real whipped cream is sooooo much better than Cool Whip.  The superior taste and texture of real whipped cream was compounded by a question that had been nagging me: we know what Cool Whip isn’t (non-dairy), but what exactly is it?  The answer I found was somewhat disturbing, and since the article pointed out that you can whip real cream yourself for about half the price of Cool Whip, there’s no looking back for us.  Maybe it’s a bit disloyal to cut out Cool Whip when they were the source of the original recipe, and I am certainly grateful for the concept, but the benefits of making it with real ingredients are more than worth it.  Sorry, Kraft.

So here’s my from-scratch Striped Delight recipe, which I made for an 8×8 square pan.  For a 9×13, I would do 1.5 times the pudding and double everything else:

Graham Cracker Crust:

Okay, so I didn’t make homemade graham crackers for the sake of time, but promise I will next time.  As a side note, you’ll notice in the picture above that Kraft’s current version of the Striped Delight recipe calls for an Oreo crust.  I appreciate the aesthetic appeal of the black and white layers, but think I prefer the graham cracker crust that we grew up with.

• About 1 to 1 1/4 cup of crushed graham crackers (I didn’t measure these out, I just used a sleeve of graham crackers that was missing one or two crackers, and it seemed about right)
• 2-3 T sugar (I also did not measure this out)
• 4 T melted butter

Mix it together right in the pan and press it down evenly.

Cream cheese layer:

• 4 oz cream cheese (softened)
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream

Beat the cream cheese, sugar, and vanilla together until fluffy.  In a separate bowl, beat the whip cream until stiff peaks form.  Genly fold the whipped cream into the cream cheese mixture until thoroughly combined.  Spread it evenly across the graham cracker crust and chill.

Chocolate Pudding Layer:

• 4 T. corn starch
• 2/3 cups sugar
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 3 cups milk
• 4 oz dark or semi-sweet chocolate (I used a 4 oz baking bar of Ghirardelli’s 60% Bittersweet Chocolate), finely chopped or shaved
• 1 tsp vanilla

Stir the corn starch, sugar and salt toegther in a medium-sized pot (or double-boiler if you have one).  Add the milk and chocolate and put the pot over medium-low heat, stirring constantly until it becomes thick and smooth.  Once the chocolate melted it just looked like chocolate milk for a while until it suddenly thickened up.  Continue cooking over low heat for another 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally.  Stir in the vanilla at the end.  Allow it to cool for a while, then pour it over the cream cheese layer and spread it evenly.  This makes a little more than your really need for an 8×8 pan, so you can either reserve some in a little bowl to eat straight, or just have an extra thick layer of pudding.  Chill for at least an hour or so.

Before serving, whip 1/2 cup cream until it stiff peaks form.  You can do this with handheld electric beaters, a stand mixer with a whisk attachment, or even by hand with a whisk, which I’ve done and it isn’t that bad.  About halfway through (when it’s foamy but not stiff yet), stir in about a teaspoon of sugar, or to taste.  Spread evenly across the top of the pudding layer.  Aubrey (with a washed finger) then wrote “MOM” in the surface of the whipped cream, for Mother’s Day.

Roast chicken on a bed of root vegetables

I made this for Mother’s Day dinner on Sunday night, and it turned out great.  I must confess that this is not my picture–I pilfered it from the blog site where I got the recipe.  But ours looked pretty much the same, except that it was in our 9×13 Pampered Chef pan instead of a cast iron pan as pictured above.  The recipe is from famed chef Thomas Keller, known mostly for his restaurant The French Laundry.  He has another newer restaurant called ad hoc, which serves simple but very good dishes, as opposed to the notoriously intricate and extravagant preparations at The French Laundry.  The dish comes from Keller’s cookbook ad hoc at home, by way of one of my favorite food blogs, Simply Recipes.

This is roast chicken on a bed of root vegetables (click for the recipe), and that’s about all there is to it.  You cut up the vegetables and spread them in the pan, tossed with olive oil and salt and pepper.  Then set the chicken on top, also seasoned liberally with olive oil, salt and pepper, with some garlic cloves and thyme sprigs in the cavity, and roast it in the oven.  That’s it.  It’s pretty simple, but turns out great.  The chicken was moist and tender, and the vegetables were great.  A couple of notes from my experience with it:

• The chicken released a copious flood of juices when I cut into it.  I had to drain the plate it was sitting on multiple times and filled up a bowl with the chicken juices (which we saved to use for something else, like a soup).  I’m not sure whether it needed to cook a tad longer (some parts of the thighs seemed slightly underdone) or rest for longer (I waited the prescribed 20 minutes, which is supposed to allow the juices to seep back into the meat, but it was still very hot to handle and perhaps needed more time).  Or maybe it’s just the broth that supermarket chickens are injected with.  If you read the fine print, you’ll find that the chicken you buy is up to 10% injected “solution”.  I’m not sure what the purpose of the “solution” is, other than to make the chicken heavier for sale.  Or maybe it’s intended to make up for lack of flavor that results from the poor living conditions and diet of industrially raised chickens.  I’d like to try this with a more quality free-range chicken, but may have to go to someplace like Whole Foods to even find that.  At least until I can convince Amie to let us start raising chickens in the backyard.
• Some of the vegetables, particularly some of the rutabaga pieces, didn’t get cooked enough to get tender.  So, I’ll probably cut them a little smaller next time.
• This dish introduced us to to new vegetables that I don’t recall ever eating before: turnips and rutabagas.  The turnips were slightly bitter, some less than others (maybe more thorough cooking takes some of the edge off), and Amie didn’t care for them.  Rutabagas, on the other hand, are wonderful. The ones that got sufficiently cooked were tender and even somewhat translucent, with a pleasant orangish color and lightly sweet flavor.  The flavor was little bit like a sweet potato, or like a cooked carrot, but at the same time not really like either of those.  The texture of the pieces that got thoroughly cooked was almost like a cooked apple.  Hard to describe, but delicious.  I’ll be looking for other ways to use those in the future.
• Fresh thyme is heavenly.

Sourdough Biscuits:

Makes 12-15 biscuits (can be scaled as necessary)

• 1 cup active sourdough starter
• 1 cup milk
• 2 1/4 cups flour (I might try dropping it to 2 cups next time)
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 T. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 2 T. cold butter (not margarine), cut into small cubes

Preheat oven to 425F.  Whisk the starter and milk together in a bowl.  In a separate bowl, combine the dry ingredients (flour, salt, baking powder and baking soda).  Drop the cubes of cold butter into the flour mixture and rub it into the flour with your fingers (or a pastry cutter) until you have a coarse mixture with several small chunks/flakes of butter evenly distributed throughout.  You could use 4-6 tablespoons of butter if you wanted to kick them up a notch, but I thought it would be kind of pointless underneath a rich sausage gravy.  Combine the flour mixture with the starter/milk and stir until just combined.  Turn the dough out onto a floured countertop and gently knead it by flattening it out anf folding it in half on top of itself 5-10 times.  This will help get the flaky, layered effect where the biscuits are naturally cracked around the edges and easy to split in half by hand.  Gently roll the dough out to about 1/2  to 3/4 inch thickness and cut out the biscuits with a cutter or drinking glass (I used a heart-shaped cookie cutter to show our love for Mom!).  It helps to dip the cutter in flour since the dough will be quite sticky inside.  Place the biscuits on a cookie sheet, optionally brush the tops with melted butter, and bake for 12-15 minutes until the begin to turn golden on top.

Sawmill Gravy (adapted from Paula Deen):

I cut this recipe in half, figuring that only Amie and I would eat it, but the full recipe here should be good for 4-6 people

• 1 pound ground sausage (I used the sage-flavored variety–yum)
• 4 slices thick-cut bacon (sliced into small pieces)
• ½ medium onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• Salt and papper to taste (I also used some paprika, which gave it a reddish tint)
• 2 cups milk (the original recipe called for half-and-half, but let’s no get crazy)

In a large skillet, combine the sausage, bacon, onion, and garlic. Cook over medium heat until the sausage is browned and crumbles. Stir in the flour, salt, and pepper; cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Use lots of fresh-ground pepper, but hold back on salt–it will be plenty salty from the sausage and bacon.  Gradually stir in the milk. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture is thickened. Add more milk if it gets too thick.  Serve the hot gravy ladled over hot biscuits.  Heavenly.