Corn-sage biscuits

Isn’t it great when a baking experiment turns out well? These biscuits aren’t as flaky as your standard all-flour biscuits, but the flavor is unbeatable. Slather ‘em with butter while they’re still hot, and top with poached eggs, herby beans, or a nice thick gravy.

Ingredients

• 1 C cornmeal (I use medium-ground, but anything finer that polenta/grits should be fine)
• 1 C all-purpose flour
• 1 T baking powder
• 1 t kosher salt
• about 20 fresh sage leaves, cut into fine ribbons
• 4 T butter
• ¾ C milk

1. Mix the cornmeal, flour, baking powder, salt, and sage together in a bowl.
2. Cut the butter into the dry mixture. Rub together with your fingers until there aren’t any big chunks left.
3. Pour in the milk, and stir with a fork until the dough comes together.
4. Knead the dough for a minute or two.
5. Divide the dough into eight equal pieces. (Alternately, you can roll the dough out and use a biscuit cutter to cut out perfect little biscuits. I think this’ll make for a more biscuit-like texture — maybe? Of course, if you are like me and own neither a rolling pin nor a biscuit cutter, you’re best off just dividing the dough.)
6. Arrange dough pieces in a 9-9½ inch glass pie dish. No need to grease it beforehand.
7. Ultimate gluttony option: dab a wee sliver of butter onto the top of each biscuit.
8. Bake at 450°F for 15-20 minutes, or until they brown just a bit.

Leftover Soup Soufflé

If you don’t have a microwave, there’s no such thing as boring leftovers. That’s my theory, anyways. The reasoning goes like this: if reheating means you’ll have to dirty a pan, you might as well add a little something — some butter, some garlic, maybe a sauce. Really, you might as well go all-out.

In the best case, the second dish is not only better than the first, it’s also unrecognizably different. Like making a soufflé out of last week’s soup.

I should mention that this soufflé is flatter and less airy than most. If you prefer a traditionally lofty dish, use an additional two egg whites (but not yolks!) and only one cup of soup.

Ho-hum leftover cuisine meets French fanciness. I love it.

Ingredients

• 2½ T butter
• 3 T flour
• 1½ C leftover cream of chard soup (anything nice and creamy will do)
• 4 eggs, seperated
• butter and a wee bit of grated hard cheese, for the dish

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F.
2. Melt the butter, stir in the flour, and cook for a couple minutes, stirring.
3. Stir in the soup, add salt if needed, and bring to a simmer.
4. Remove from heat. Add the egg yolks one by one, stirring each in completely before adding the next.
5. In a large bowl, beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. Do it by hand to Check out how buff you are!
6. Using a rubber spatula, fold about a quarter of the whites into the sauce. Then add the rest of the whites and fold only as much as you have to; leaving it a little streaky now, instead of mixing it into utter submission, will make for a better soufflé in the end.
7. Grease the soufflé dish liberally with butter. Grate a tablespoon or so of cheese into the bottom and tap-tap-tap it around to coat the bottom and sides. Makes for quite a tasty crust.
8. (Carefully) pour the eggy goodness into the dish, and put it in the oven. Lower the heat to 375°F and set the timer for 25 minutes.
9. Resolve not to open the oven until the timer goes off, not even for the tiniest peek. If you have a curious boyfriend or roommate roaming around, stake out the oven door and guard it with your life! (The expansion of air and steam in the tiny bubbles is what makes a soufflé rise; let in too much cold air, and it will fall flat.)
10. When the timer’s done, check out the soufflé. If it’s still quite jiggly, put it back in for another 5 or 10 minutes.
11. Slice, serve, and eat right away! But save some for the next morning — cold soufflé ain’t a bad way to start your day.

Better Than Grandma’s Pecan Pie

Pecan pie is one of the few dishes my mom’s family serves at every single holiday dinner. It was also one of the first recipes I got to help with; when I was little, my mom and I would arrange the pecan halfs on the empty pie shell, carefully resisting the temptation to press them in, so they would rise to the top during baking. As a teenager, I made the pie myself a few times, and was always so proud of my contribution.

We’ve only ever used one recipe for pecan pie, and that’s Grandma’s recipe. I’m not sure if she actually wrote it herself, or if we call it that because she made it for so many years. The thing is, Grandma’s recipe uses corn syrup. In fact, it uses more corn syrup than anything else.

I did a wee bit of research online before last year’s holidays, trying to find a “real” pecan pie recipe that didn’t call for corn. I figured there would be an original recipe that people used before the advent of corn syrup.

As far as I can tell, I was wrong. Pecan pie was an invention of the processed food age, and the original recipe was printed on a bottle of Karo syrup! Yikes.

Luckily, I did find an alternative recipe by John Thorne. In place of corn syrup, he uses golden syrup, a British product that I can’t find around here. I’ve been using agave nectar instead, but I think any inverted sugar syrup — like honey or maple sugar — would work.

With dishes like this, the final product relies more on the quality of the ingredients than how you cook it. If you go out of your way to get truly full-flavored brown sugar, high quality butter (Straus!), and tasty little pecans, the pie will be exceptional.

I made this pie for Thanksgiving this year, and a couple family members dared to call it, “Better than Grandma’s.” Sorry Grandma, but it’s true. It’s unapologeticly untraditional, and it’s reaaaaaally yummy.

Pecan Pie

Ingredients

• 1 packed cup full-flavored brown sugar
• scant 2/3 cup agave nectar
• 3 tablespoons Meyer’s dark rum
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 3 eggs
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups broken pecan meats
• 9″ unbaked pie shell

1. Heat the brown sugar, butter, and agave nectar to boiling, stirring constantly and scraping foam from sides.
2. Boil for about 1 minute. Remove from heat and cool.
3. Beat eggs until creamy.
4. Temper eggs with sugar mixture, then combine along with salt, pecans, and rum.
5. Pour into shell and bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes. Cool before serving.

DIY necessities

I’m not much of a cheapskate by nature (I don’t raise an eyebrow at the price tag on a well-made skein of yarn) but I sure am when it comes to basic necessities that are made very cheaply by gigantic companies. Spending five dollars on sliced sandwich bread with scary ingredients, or buying a box of bandaids, or even spending a couple bucks on pasta makes me feel cheated.

I’ve been slowly but surely dispelling some of my own ideas of what “basic necessities” really are, and in every instance, my cheap, made-from-scratch solutions have been better than the purchased versions. No scary ingredients, no trips to the big box, no packaging to try to recycle, and, best of all, no gigantic corporations benefiting from my inability to provide for myself. Well, less, at least.

Of course, there’s a reason most people have allowed these things to pass from the realm of homemade to pre-made: it takes time! And making certain things, like clothes, requires serious skill. But for those of us who enjoy craftiness and practical applications for creativity, why on earth would we opt for convenience?

So here it is, Jenny’s List of Shit I’d Rather Make Than Buy, and How To Do It (part one).

• bandaids
• bread
• broth
• eggs
• mayonnaise
• pasta
• toothpaste

Bandaids

Use a tiny scrap of paper or cloth (the size of the cut) and a strip of masking tape. The tape will stay on when wet far better than a bandaid, and doesn’t hurt as much when you take it off. I also like that you can make the perfect size bandage depending on what you need, instead of maintaining a ridiculous supply of pre-made ones.

Bread

Now that I’ve been making bread fairly regularly for a couple months, I can’t imagine going back to the supermarket crap. I do still like the occasional loaf from a local artisan bakery, but it really doesn’t get better than homemade. I can’t decide what it is about homemade bread that I like best; the money-saving, that there’s no crap in it (just look at the ingredient list of your next supermarket loaf), the act of making it, the taste and smell of it, or the smug satisfaction and total ego-boost that comes when I pull two perfect loaves out of the oven. Homemade bread is just magical.

I’ve come to think of white “all purpose” flour as being special occasion flour—I use it for some desserts and specialty breads like challah and popovers, but that’s about it. For day-to-day bread, muffins, quickbreads, and pancakes, I just use whole wheat flour. (And none of that “half all-purpose, half whole wheat” bullshit that so many cookbooks recommend. If you have a good quality, relatively fresh whole wheat flour, you don’t need to dilute it to get good texture.) Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food convinced me that refined grains, like white flour, ought to be the exception, not the rule; we simply haven’t evolved to handle the white stuff. Besides, whole wheat flour really does taste better for most applications—try some yeasted whole wheat pancakes and you’ll see what I mean.

Like so many skills I’ve picked up, I didn’t have an experienced baker to teach me. Certain books have been indispensable, though. The Tassajara Bread Book has a gajillion recipes, nearly all using whole wheat flour, but the best part is the 40-something page illustrated guide to the basic method of bread making. It covers how to mix, knead, shape, and slash the dough, plus everything in between. Their basic “Tassajara Bread” recipe has been my go-to since I started baking in earnest.

The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book was one of the first tomes of whole wheat baking, and while I despise the ethereal writing style (what exactly does the dough look like when it “sighs”?) and have had exactly zero luck with the recipes, it’s packed with information that will help you understand some of the science of bread making in an approachable way.

Last week I picked up The Bread Bible at the library, and within a minute of flipping through it, I knew I had to buy it. It is incredibly precise, incredibly informative, and incredibly thorough. My only complaint is that the author is far more exact than I would ever want to be in my own kitchen, but that problem is easily remedied by not following instructions to the letter. I’ve only made two breads from this book so far—a loaf of braided challah and two loaves of cinnamon swirl bread—but both have been exceptional. I’m looking forward to trying dozens more.

Broth

This has got to be the best one yet. Since Chris and I have been making our own broth every few days from kitchen scraps, I’ve looked back on my years of buying vegetable broth with shame. How much money have I wasted— hundred dollars? Two hundred?—on underflavored, overpriced, overpackaged broth?

The recipe is so simple: take all your vegetable scraps that you think might taste good, and put them in a big pot. Fill the pot with water and some salt, and put the lid on. Bring it to a boil. Then simmer it. When it looks pretty and smells insanely delicious (anyone who walks into the kitchen should breathe deeply and say, “Ohh, what smells so good?”), turn it off. Strain or scoop out the solid bits (great for worm compost, once cooled) and put the liquid in mason jars. Use it for everything: soup, rice, quinoa, sauce, bread, muffins… now that I’m not shelling out big bucks for packages of broth, I feel free to use it to flavor everything, and my cooking is all the better for it.

I once read instructions for broth-making that warned against using scraps, reasoning that if you wouldn’t want to eat it, you wouldn’t want to make flavor-juice out of it. When it comes to scraps that are truly past their prime (like, if they’re fuzzy), sure. But leek tops? Carrot peelings? Completely dead, wilted celery? Papery onion skins? These are some of the best broth ingredients around. Prolonged boiling can coax flavor out of even the most pathetic looking veggies, and since you’ll take all the solid stuff out anyways, it doesn’t matter what the texture’s like.

There are some guidelines though. Unless you want a bitter broth, I’d stay away from brassicas entirely (e.g. cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, kale). Any kind of leafy green is just going to get limp and bring no flavor to the party—unless it’s good and herby like basil, of course. And make sure you get all the dirt off your veggies before they go into the pot, unless you don’t mind relinquishing the last inch or so of your pot o’ broth—I often don’t bother, since we have so many vegetables around here, and whatever we don’t manage to eat will go to the chickens or the compost.

The best part, of course, is that you can turn waste into deliciousness. The second best part, though, is that you can throw out the one-flavor-fits-all mentality of packaged vegetable broth and get into customizing. Imagine a vegetable broth made to complement its intended dish! Chris made an amazingly savory broth last night out of dumpstered mushrooms and wild fennel, and I can’t wait to find the perfect application for it. I’m thinking of trying an earthy, herby pilaf… or maybe turnip soup?

Eggs

Supermarket eggs are downright nasty (and useless) compared to the good stuff. Pastured eggs cost a bundle, but hens don’t! Seriously, now that I’ve gotten used to having a chicken coop in the yard, I can’t imagine going back to store-bought eggs. Having your own chickens is super easy (most days it they take less time to care for than kneading a loaf of bread) and incredibly rewarding. You can’t beat it for freshness, and properly pastured eggs (i.e. eggs laid by hens who get to eat plants and scratch around for bugs and grubs) are more nutritious, flavorful, and easier to cook with than the industrial versions. Besides, most egg-laying chickens in commercial settings live horrible lives. (Yes, even organic, vegetarian-fed, so-called “free-range” ones—check out chapter nine of The Omnivore’s Dilemma if you don’t believe me.) And who wants to support that?

Mayonnaise

No, Best Foods ain’t the best. Homemade, mayonnaise is actually edible, believe it or not. And easy. If you’ve got a whisk and a bowl, you’re already halfway there. Read my previous blog post on making mayonnaise.

Pasta

Homemade pasta is even easier to make than homemade bread, with many of the same benefits. It’s dirt cheap. It tastes about a million times better than anything you can buy. And there are no mind-boggling ingredients! Granted, it takes way more time than dumping a plastic bag of factory-made stuff into a pot, but it’s very nearly always worth it—especially if you have farm-fresh eggs.

Toothpaste

My last tube of Aquafresh ran out a few weeks ago. I thought I’d experiment with using straight baking soda, and I haven’t looked back since! Two dollars for a new tube every few weeks is hardly an exorbitant amount of money, but it’s still my money that’s going to GlaxoSmithKline, the second largest pharmaceutical in the world, and that tube still has some ingredients I’m not so sure about it. Of course, Arm & Hammer isn’t exactly a mom and pop operation, but two dollars of baking soda ought to be enough for a year’s worth of clean teeth.

Using it is just stupid simple: rinse your toothbrush, dip it in the baking soda, and brush. It took me a couple days to get used to the slightly salty taste, but now I prefer it to the artificial, tongue-deadening faux-mint flavor.

Molasses Oatmeal Muffins

Next time someone tells you muffins ain’t health food, stuff one of these into their piehole

I took these out of the oven during Bob’s afternoon lesson (held in our kitchen, as usual) and put them on the table with some butter and honey. We all dug in, and Hannah silently wrote “WOW” with an arrow pointing at the plate of muffins.

These guys don’t rise a whole lot, but they’re plenty moist and tasty. Serve them piping hot with butter and honey.

Whole Wheat Molasses Oatmeal Muffins

Ingredients

• 1 C whole wheat flour
• 1 C rolled oats (not quick-cooking or any of that bullshit)
• 1 T baking powder
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 1 T safflower oil
• ¼ C black-strap molasses
• 1 C water

1. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
2. Combine flour, oats, and baking powder in a large bowl and stir to combine.
3. Add the egg, oil, molasses (tip: measure the oil in a tablespoon first, and then measure out 4 tablespoons of the molasses — it won’t stick!), and water, and stir until just combined but still lumpy.
4. Spoon into greased muffin tins.
5. Bake for about fifteen minutes or until the muffins are springy to the touch.

So much to do

The other night I couldn’t sleep because I was lying in bed running through all the things I have to and want to do. In an attempt to stop freaking out about it, I wrote down everything I could think of in one ginormous list. Damn.

I’ve already done some of it though.

• * make English muffins
• * make a new noteboook
• get our own place & a dog
• start journaling regularly so I can remember the days
• do Aaron’s mobile gallery
• plant around the house
• * March newsletter
• get kitchen knife sharpened
• work with the high school agriculture program
• set a standard recipe template for the farm blog
• Bob’s yarn-spinning lady?
• ask Bob about hops farming
• make peanut butter cookies
• get Aaron to visit
• in_the_store.xml to Blogger?
• organize farm workdays
• harvest/make mustard
• lead a chicken workshop for kids
• make granola bars
• read everything in the world
• work for Carole on the weekends for $$$
• get peppermint oil for delicious baking soda
• brew beer
• finish Chris’s sweater
• make oregano mayonnaise
• make toothpaste
• bake lots of bread
• get bristol board from art store
• clean room
• make Mom a scarf out of that Cashsoft yarn
• get a Klezmer book
• grow hops
• hatch some baby chickens
• website insanity
• learn about having goats & sheep
• get Dave to visit
• get Dad to visit
• * write competition control copy
• learn to sew
• go to Italy for the harvest
• English essays
• draw my favorite rooster
• * print/bind calendar
• greenstringinstitute.org
• organize workshops
• knit Chris some slippers
• sell crafty stuff again
• visit Hidden Villa
• volunteer for Petaluma Bounty
• reorganize the mudroom/tools
• read the most recent “Best American Science Writing” book
• go to Point Reyes
• make Allie a calendar
• * SLEEP. Man, I’m exhausted.

English Muffins

This morning we had the most incredible brunch at the farm for a crowd of 17. Jeff made two massive piles of pancakes, someone brought fancy sausage, and Julia, Jessica, and I made eggs florentine with crazy fresh eggs, garlicy sautéed Swiss chard, velvety hollandaise, and made-from-scratch English muffins.

I’d never made English muffins before, and I was pretty sure they were going to come out more like hockey pucks than anything, but they were absolutely amazing!

I used the Artisan Bread Baking directions, but modified them so I could, you know, go to sleep. I set up the poolish after lunch, did the initial knead after dinner, and left the dough in the fridge overnight to ferment. I skipped the next couple rises and went straight to dividing the dough into 3½ ounce balls in the morning, shaped them, pressed them into the cornmeal, and cooked them on a baking sheet set over two burners.

If you have any sort of experience making bread, this recipe is absolutely worth the effort. The only tricky thing about it, really, is that you need to cook the muffins on very low heat, and flip them almost constantly — that way the inside will cook evenly before the outsides burn.

English Muffins

Ingredients for Poolish

• 5 oz AP flour
• 5 oz whole wheat flour
• ½ t dry active yeast, dissolved in 10 oz warm water

Ingredients to add to Poolish

• 19 oz AP flour
• 3½ oz milk
• 1½ t dry active yeast, dissolved in ⅓ C warm water
• 1 egg
• 1 T vinegar
• 2 T sugar
• 2½ T oil
• 2 t salt

1. Combine the ingredients for the poolish in a large mixing bowl. Let it sit on the counter or a draft-free, warm place, for 6+ hours.
2. The poolish should be nice and bubbly. Add all the remaining ingredients except the salt. Mix it with your hands — it’ll look like all there’s too much flour and not enough liquid, but just keep folding it in until everything is incorporated.
3. Knead, in the bowl, for a few minutes. Don’t worry too much about kneading it thoroughly — you’ll do that later.
4. Let the dough rest for 20 minutes.
5. Sprinkle the salt onto the bowl, and knead until you can stretch a bit of dough thin enough to almost see through without tearing.
6. Cover with a towel and place in the fridge to ferment overnight.
7. When you remove the dough, it should have increased in bulk tremendously. Fold each side of the dough into the center and press down, so that you end up with a ball about the same size as before it rose. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes in a warm place — a gas oven with the pilot light on is good.
8. Divide into 3 1/2 ounce / 110 gram pieces. The trick to making English muffins is to avoid overworking the dough. The less you work the dough, the flatter the finished English muffins will be. If you take the dough as it’s cut from the main dough and just pull it into shape, you’ll have a flatter English muffin. However, if you like higher English muffins, with loft between a regular English muffin and a round loaf, then round the dough and flatten it with your hand.
9. Round the doughs into balls and let them rest for 5 minutes.
10. Take each dough ball and gently pull it around the edge and in the center as if you were pulling the dough to start a pizza. They should wind up about 4 inches / 10 cm in diameter for this weight. Place cornmeal in a bowl and press the doughs flatter in the corn meal, turning once or twice to assure that you have cornmeal on both sides. The flatter you can get the doughs the better, within reason. They will puff up when you cook them, but if you start too round, they will be thick and may not cook on the inside.
11. Place as many muffins as will fit (you’ll cook them in several batches) on your griddle, if you’ve got one, or sheet pan, and turn on the heat to something between low and medium. Cook, shifting the muffins and turning them over every minute or so, until the muffins are done to your liking. The longer you can cook them without burning, the better they will be.
12. Allow the muffins to cool before splitting and heating. These freeze very well; put two or three in each plastic bag and freeze.