Antique Modernism

Cinnamon Coffee Cake Muffins

2012-01-31T19:09:00.000-08:00

I struggled a bit with this month’s muffin recipe. Originally I was planning on making a new recipe with seasonal ingredients and being all “green” like that. Since I’m from Minnesota I associate January with a complete dearth of living things, so the spice cupboard is where I went to for this month’s “seasonal ingredient:” cinnamon.

I believe I have built up a tolerance for cinnamon, as I thoroughly love the spice. Andy thinks I over-use cinnamon on pancakes, in granola, french toast, apple sauce and oatmeal. He is just silly. Cinnamon is always welcome in those foods and more.

In addition to dreaming up a cinnamon recipe I had a (non)issue of what to do with a gift of coffee-flavored olive oil from Spain. My dear brother and his wife went to Spain for their honeymoon and brought us back a set of deliciously flavored olive oils. The lemon, garlic, and orange flavors went quickly; however, the coffee flavored olive oil lingered. What to do with it? Usually the taste of coffee doesn’t go well with my usual uses for olive oil; pasta, sauteing vegetables, and salad dressing. I finally broke down and admitted to Laura we hadn’t used a part of her gift, which resulted in her wonderful idea to use the coffee olive oil in a baked good. Thanks Laura!

Used up coffee flavored olive oil from Spain

With this in mind I perused my go-to muffin recipe collection and landed upon Cinnamon Coffee Cake Muffins. I know that coffee cake is usually an accompaniment to coffee, not an actual ingredient in coffee cake; but... why not?

In addition to the lovely olive oil, Tony and Laura also gave Andy a book for Christmas called Ratio: The Simple Codes behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. This is an awesome book if you’re interested in cooking without recipes or creating your own recipes.

Instead of just using the ratio and adding additional ingredients for my coffee cake muffins, I tried to go half recipe and half ratio. To disastrous results. I learned that I should pay full attention to the ratio and not try to outsmart it. You see, the coffee cake muffin recipe in the book called for cutting butter into the flour mixture with a pastry blender. I had just received a pastry blender for Christmas and I was more than excited to use it for the first time. Even if that meant not waiting for the butter to soften fully. This left large clumps of butter that sank to the bottom and burned (in my too hot oven, which was another mistake). The best thing about my first attempt was that I forgot to use my coffee flavored olive oil and therefore I could use it for a more successful future attempt.

I got this through airport security!

To improve my not-so-yummy-but-still-edible cinnamon coffee cake muffins I decided to put my faith in Ratio and only make slight changes to get the flavor I wanted. The first issue to address was burnt bottoms. The solution was to melt the butter for use in the main muffin, I could use the coffee olive oil in place of some of the butter. For the filling I would be patient and wait for butter to warm and then cut the soft butter into it with my awesome pastry blender. Instead of a filling I transitioned this bit into a topping so it could be fully enjoyed and not lost within the muffin.

The muffins were half whole wheat flour and half all-purpose flour, which added an unwelcome amount of density. I had two solutions for this issue, one that the average baker can fix and one that really shouldn’t be a problem. First, whenever using whole wheat flour it’s a good idea to accompany it with vital gluten for gluten development and increased fluff. In my case, since I ground the whole wheat flour I sifted out the bigger bits that didn’t grind fully. Also, stirring less vigorously always helps.

So how did it work out to put my faith fully in Ratio? It worked! These are probably the most beautiful and evenly textured muffins I’ve made. I’m completely converted on this ratio business and I plan on adjusting recipes from Muffin Madness 2011 to this ratio and see how they turn out. Especially these... and these. And probably these too.

At first I wasn’t excited to make the same sort of muffins again, but they couldn’t have turned out more different. I’m happy that I went for it and “tested” my recipe. It’ll be something I’ll have to do a lot if I really want to get into this muffin business. If you try this recipe out, please let me know how it works for you!

Ingredients
1 cup (4 oz) all-purpose flour
1 cup (4 oz) whole wheat flour
½ cup + 1 tbs (4 oz) granulated sugar
1 tbs cinnamon
2 tsp vital gluten
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 cup (just a little under) or 8 oz milk
2 large eggs
6 tbs butter (melted)
1 oz coffee flavored olive oil (or just use 8 tbs of butter)

Topping
¼ cup all-purpose flour
2 tbs brown sugar
½ tsp cinnamon
2 tbs butter (softened)

How To
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Prepare your muffin tin, mine made about 10 good sized muffins.

In a large bowl, stir together all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, sugar, cinnamon, vital gluten, baking powder and salt. In a smaller bowl whisk up your eggs, then add milk, melted butter and olive oil (if using). Add liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients bowl, stir slowly and carefully combine.

In another, even smaller, bowl add all topping ingredients and cut in soft butter with a pastry blender. Blend ingredients together until butter chunks are roughly pea sized. Allegedly you can do this with two knifes or some such magic, I’ve never been able to accomplish that feat, so I recommend getting yourself a pastry blender.

Add muffins to prepared tin, sprinkle topping on generously. Bake for 10 minutes, rotate pan and continue baking for 10 to 15 more minutes. Enjoy your muffins!

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T18:11:00.000-08:00

Happy 2012 everyone!

This past year has been a good one for me. I feel like I've gotten better at cooking and knitting. Despite my horrible slippers I made for myself, I've now made 2 successful projects! I'd like to make more things in the future. One project I have for the new year is to get our oldest sewing machine tuned up so that I don't tear my hair out when I use it. I've got some projects planned to sew, such as a tablecloth, napkins and possibly curtains for a new house (we're looking to buy one!). For knitting I plan on making socks for Andy, then from there I'm not sure what I want to do, so if any one has ideas or suggestions I want to hear them!

Fingerless mittens

Last year Andy took over most of the brewing and has done an excellent job. The beer in the picture is of a Bourbon Barrel Porter from Northern Brewer. It was delicious! The excerpt about the beer on the website says it's possibly the best beer ever and I totally agree. Andy did a wonderful job brewing this and it's been going quickly. It's a worldly beer, I wouldn't say it's a session beer but it's wonderful to drink and not too heavy. For Christmas my brother and his family gave us 2 all grain kits, which will get Andy and I going on some more interesting brewing. You'll be hearing all about in 2012. In addition to all grain brewing we're participating in Bock Fest at my (other) brother's house in March. Andy brewed up a wonderful looking Maibock and we're sure to win the competition (there will be prizes!).

Reading at night with toasty hands!

These fingerless mittens are from a pattern I found on Ravelry. If you are looking to get into knitting, join Ravelry and you'll have endless sources for patterns and help for knitting problems. These mittens are for reading at night, we keep the house fairly chilly at night and my hands get cold when I read. So fingerless mittens let me flip pages while keeping the rest of my hands warm. I've read a couple times with them at night and they work wonderful! Knitting these was pretty easy, though initially I was afraid of the thumb. Socks were less scary because feet don't have thumbs. The thumb ended up being pretty easy, it helped to have a tapestry needle to take the extra stitches off when then time came. I was on vacation when I worked on the first mitten and I used a paperclip, don't do that. It's amazing what you can make with just knits and pearls!

Up close and personal

Usually I don't make new year resolutions because I think they're silly. So this year I'm going to be silly and make some new year resolutions. I have three and I think they're reasonable, they'll be great to accomplish.

Go for a hike or go camping once a month
Make a new muffin recipe each month
Join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)

You, my dedicated reader, will get the benefit of more posts about all of our different projects. I would like to get more posts out there to encourage folks to get crafty, get brewing, and get cooking good food.

Canning Applesauce

2011-12-12T19:04:00.000-08:00

Finished rose applesauce, awaiting entrance into my belly.

I’ve already professed my love for applesauce and let it be known how easy it is to make. For happiness, everyone should try to make applesauce at least once. If it’s for your happiness, why not do it?

Prepping the Jonathan and Golden Delicious apples. It's best to core and quarter your apples. Don't be lazy like me.

Something that I admire in others is the ability to eat seasonally. I have not mastered this and one of the best ways to be able to eat seasonally, or at least not go to the grocery store as often, is to can. I love applesauce so much that it is a main priority to save when apples are in season.

This may look like a pot full of fun, but if you pile your apples into your pot like this you'll never stir them. Do a little at a time.

This year I was a bit lazy and didn’t actually get around to buying apples until Thanksgiving when my brother and his wife took us to a nearby orchard for apple fritters. The apple fritters and donuts were indeed delicious, and available for purchase was a variety of apple baking accoutrement, but I was eyeing the apples. My most favorite applesauce was from Jonagold apples. The orchard didn’t have Jonagolds when I was there, so I improvised. We purchased a peck each of Jonathan and Golden Delicious apples with the hope that an applesauce made of the combination of the parents of Jonagolds would be as delicious as Jonagolds themselves.

Applesauce in the making!

The result is a not-too sweet, pink applesauce. The initial boil of the apples was done with their skins on since we just used the food mill to take the skins out. I believe what happened is the red of the Jonathan apples colored our applesauce pink! Kind of like making a rose wine, apple-style.

The food mill set up.

We had a small catastrophe as our applesauce was jarred and making it’s way to the canner for sealing. One jar broke. This hadn’t happened before and I was desperately trying to save the applesauce to put in another jar. Thankfully Andy stopped me before I started licking applesauce off the counter with the sage observation that there may be glass shards in the applesauce, and we should probably dispose of it. It took me awhile to accept that we were a jar down and not get misty-eyed about it. (I do love applesauce.)

The food mill in action! One bowl catches perfectly textured applesauce, the other bowl catches skins.

Ultimately we ended up with 5 and ¾ quart jars of wonderful applesauce. I’ve been rationing it, as 5 jars won’t get me through to the next apple season. It’s great to have a shelf full of canned goods. Someday we’ll have a well producing garden and put up enough food to last the winter. For now, I’m satisfied practicing my canning techniques and learning from mistakes (make sure your jars don’t cool down before filling with hot stuff).

In memoriam: 1 quart jar of pink applesauce

Felted Slippers

2011-11-30T19:28:00.001-08:00

My favorite part of felting was shaving the slippers. This picture was taken before they were shorn.

For about a year now Andy has been complaining that his feet are cold and pointedly showing me the layers of socks he applies to his feet. Since it’s getting to be winter, and even in Tennessee it gets a bit chilly, Andy has been back at it and not so discretely letting me know that it was time that I got started on making his slippers. He threatened to buy slippers if I didn’t get going, so a couple months back I bought yarn and a pattern. I’m not sure why Andy felt confident in my ability to make him a pair of slippers, especially after seeing these. It may have been my insistence that he not buy slippers, after all, why should I have a skill (I use that word loosely) if we’re not going to use it?

The dog is everywhere.

I’ve knit lovely things before, hats and socks, but those horrible slippers just threw off my confidence. My biggest problem is not knowing what yarn to use, what size yarn and needle. The solution to this was to go to the yarn store with a pattern that specified yarn weight and needle size and stick to the plan, I would not improvise. No winging it! I asked the lady who runs the yarn store where “worsted weight” wool was located and when I made my selection and got up to the register she said, “Oh, looks like you decided on the chunky weight instead.” Chunky weight?! I had no idea there was even a category called chunky! The worsted weight yarns looked pretty chunky to me and I liked this so-called “chunky” color better. Ugh.

That’s when my plan went out the door and the owner introduced me to a pattern for felted clogs (this pattern was written by someone whose first language is English), showed me correctly weighted wool that was on sale and helped me pick out the correct needles. She ensured me that this was a simple pattern and that felting was easy (you’ve done it accidentally to a sweater before, right? ...of course). I left the store with a brand new plan and a daunting skill ahead of me, felting.

Felting supplies, pillow case tied with slipper inside, soap, old towel to help agitate.

The pattern wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. After watching many YouTube videos I learned how to M1, the overcast stitch, back stitching, and knitting two pieces together, I also learned the mattress stitch which I accidentally used when I should have done an overcast stitch (oops!). Without the Internet I really wouldn’t be able to make anything, the videos on this website are amazing. I think a private knitting instructor who hangs out at my house while I attempt to make stuff would be really handy. Kind of like a knitting nanny. It’d be nice if they would do laundry too.

Learning everything and putting it into practice took a lot of time and therefore I wasn’t making the slippers fast enough for Andy’s liking. I finally made a deal with him that if he made dinner I would make his slippers. A mini Glee marathon over the weekend helped me to finish the second slipper and... my God these are slippers?! They’re huge! They are slippers for giant’s feet! Whose feet are these going to fit?

These slippers are much to big for the dog's feet.

From my accidental sweater felting experiences I know that felting shrinks things; however, I had no confidence that these creations would shrink to the appropriate size. They’re so big! I couldn’t get excited about the felting process because I was worried all my work was for naught.

The slippers turned out beautiful and Andy’s feet are nice and toasty warm. He won’t say it, but his feet might even be too warm.

Here’s how to felt, a very general guide to felting.

Supplies:

Pillow case
Washing machine (or a big tub and a long stir stick)
Old towel, jeans or if you want to be crazy, shoes
Mild soap
Item(s) to be felted*

The Gist:

Put your item(s) to be felted into your pillow case and tie the pillow case shut. Your items should have room to move around a bit.

Place your pillow cased items into the washing machine, with the towel/jeans and some mild soap. Make sure hot water will come out of the machine and turn it on to the first setting of the regular wash cycle and let your wool get agitated!. You’ll want to run through this cycle a few times.

I learned that it took people anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes. It took me hours to get the slippers felted down to size. I think this is because my machine doesn’t agitate like many other machines, it’s very slow, which agitated me. If this is the case for your washing machine, it may be best to let the tub fill with water and use a long stir stick to agitate the wool yourself. Your stuff will be done when it's either the right size or you just like it or if you can't distinguish the stitches anymore

The pillow case is for catching run away strands of wool, and there will be lots!

*Item(s) to be felted should be wool. Acrylic yarn wont felt. If the wool is “superwash” then it has been treated so as to not shrink in the wash, this means it won’t felt.

Slippers complete, drying and being formed with plastic bag stuffing.

If anyone out there has more tips or tricks for felting items, please share! I’m a beginner at this but I might like to try felting something else. I would definitely do these slippers again, I just need to learn how to knit faster!

A Flock of Cupcakes

2011-11-06T13:38:00.000-08:00

I received a request from my brother for cupcakes when he came down to visit. He specified these cupcakes, which are indeed the most adorable and edible thing I’ve seen in a long time. I actually just like to look at the picture to swoon about how adorable those little sheep are. Adorable and perfect.

In reality I think my brother was joking about actually wanting the cupcakes, but he knows that I think sheep are wonderful and sent me the picture as a way to combine my love of food and my love of sheep. He may have been joking but I interpreted it as a challenge.

And I am crazy. I have no cake decorating experience and I had no idea how to even start on these amazing creations. Unfortunately, Mrs. Stewart just supplies pictures of the cupcakes and no direction on how to make them. The only advice given is that the “wool” is made of mini-marshmallows. As my mom would say, “No shit Sherlock.”

If you look closely, you can tell the wool of these "sheep" is made of mini-marshmallows.

A search of the Internet informed me that all other sheep cupcakes online are 100% not as cute as these. I suggested to my brother that I learn to make fondant, since I believe that’s what the face is made of. That was shot down faster than you can say, “Baah” or “gross”, which is what my brother said. Other sheep cupcakes have chocolate covered almonds or Brazil nuts, which I didn’t even bother running by my brother, his distaste for nuts in desserts is well known.

A trip to my local natural food market was in order and I was determined to find a chocolate covered nut that would be delicious and make it past my brother’s scrutiny. Just a note, natural food stores are not the place to try and find unnatural foods such as mini-marshmallows. Luckily though I didn’t need to figure out which chocolate covered nut would be acceptable, instead I found malted milk balls! No nuts, more chocolate, and they will make chubby-cheeked sheep. I also found cacao nib pieces that looked like they could make cute sheep ears and the littlest bits could be eyes.

Cacao nib pieces make irregularly shaped eyes and ears, which adds character. Right?

Before decorating the cupcakes I got nervous. My cupcake recipe made 22 cupcakes and that’s a lot of sheep to make. Dare I say, it’s an entire flock? I thought that maybe I would make 4 cupcakes one for my brother and his wife, as well as Andy and I. However, once I started decorating the sheep I tons of fun! I liked putting the wool on and seeing how each of the faces turned out. Some looked better than others, some had googly eyes, one definitely had a sleepy eye.

Sheep creation. It helps to have your work elevated.

As fun as it was to make these, I would only put this much work in to making food cute for another special occasion. A request from my brother and a visit is special enough.

An Ode to my Great Grandma and Applesauce

2011-11-03T10:43:00.000-07:00

As a kid whenever my family visited my great grandma Murphy's house in Indiana she always made a feast. It didn't matter when we visited, there would always be a spread on the table and everyone remotely related to us gathered around. One dish that she would make that I adored can't really be thought of as a "dish". It was homemade applesauce. It was incredible.

I remember eating it hot. It was sweet and chunky and I never had anything like it before. Sometimes I wish really hard that I could remember those days better, visiting with my great grandma in her kitchen. But I was young and more concerned with playing hide-and-seek with my cousins and exploring the edges of her yard that opened up to a field.

So when I first made applesauce it took me back to those days in my grandma's house and those faint memories I have of her cooking. I served it to Andy hot, the way I remembered, and he wasn't impressed. Perhaps my grandma gave me the hot applesauce as a taste test to see if it needed more sugar. Even if that's not how I ate it as a kid, I still can't help myself scooping the fresh, hot leftovers out of the pan.

Applesauce it incredibly easy to make from scratch. I was surprised how easy it is. Most of the work
comes from peeling and slicing, so it helps to have good tools for that. The key to making delicious applesauce is to use delicious apples that are right for sauce making. In these pictures I used Jonagold apples and they were fantastic and really sweet. I added barely any sugar. My batch after I used a different variety and the sauce wasn't nearly as sweet and the apples didn't breakdown well into sauce. Applesauce apples will breakdown really easily, other apples, which would be better in pies maintain their shape.

There are lots of places to look online for which apples are best to use. I can never remember them, so I rely on vendors at the farmer's market or orchard to help me out. If I'm on my own at the grocery store, I usually end up with the wrong kind of apples.

My applesauce recipe came from Cookwise, but really it's more of a technique than a recipe. So I will give you the technique and you can take it from there. Applesauce can either be made on the stove or in the microwave. It takes less time to cook in the microwave, but I've been doing it on the stove recently since we don't have a microwave and it's quite easy.

Applesauce Technique

Peel, core and slice about 5 apples. You can use more or less depending on the size of pot or microwave-safe dish you're using.

Microwave: place all your apple chunks in the dish, cover it with plastic wrap and cook on high for about 10 minutes. When removing the plastic wrap open away from your face because a lot of steam will come out.

Stove top: place all your apple chunks into a pot, add about 3 tablespoons of water (this doesn't need to be exact) and cook on medium for about 2 minutes. Stir occasionally and you can watch the apples slowly become sauce!

When the apples are soft mash with a potato masher until you get the consistency you want (if you've gotten pie apples then run them through a food processor to get a smooth sauce). This is where you can add a little salt (1/2 tsp), brown sugar or cinnamon to taste. I find that I don't like as much sugar as most recipes call for because the apples are sweet enough. Also, Andy doesn't like cinnamon in his applesauce so I just top my portions with it and leave Andy's plain.

Voila! You have applesauce that is wonderful, chock full of memories and is a really easy step to making food from scratch.

The Start of Fall and Pumpkin Muffins

2011-09-17T19:50:00.000-07:00

First Puffins of the season.

Fall hasn’t officially started yet, and it only recently got under 90 degrees for a high. But it’s September and that’s essentially when fall starts in my mind. When I was a kid my favorite season was summer. With the tomatoes, my birthday and swinging in the hammock, summer was the best. As much as I loved summer I was ready for fall because that meant school started! Yes, I know I was (am) a huge dork because I looked forward to the new school year. Hear me out though, fall meant new sweaters and shoes! I got to color coordinate new notebooks and folders according to subject! What could be better than that?

I could use a bigger knife.

Pumpkins. I don’t have school to look forward to now, so my fall enjoyment has been transferred to pumpkins. And I have to admit, pumpkins are better than new shoes, matching notebooks and folders, and dare I say it... Trapper-keepers. I love pumpkin in everything. Pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, toasted pumpkin seeds, heck, even pumpkin wedding cake. Most of all I love the blending of muffins and pumpkin, fondly known as Puffins.

Andy and I are trying out Car Free Sundays, and last Sunday we moseyed over to the Nashville Farmer’s Market for lunch with a friend and to pick up some probably-not-locally-grown produce. There we saw a bounty of pumpkins; giant ones, jack-o-lanerns and pie pumpkins for a steal. Since we were travelling by bicycle a small pie pumpkin was more a more realistic option to bring home. My first pumpkin of the season! Oh life is good.

I like to roast pumpkins. The flavor isn’t much better than canned, it’s definitely not easier, and it takes longer. But when you buy canned you don’t get pumpkin seeds! Yes, you can also buy toasted pumpkin seeds, but they’re not nearly as exciting as toasting your own and adding exciting and fun flavors yourself. Plus, this blog is called Antique Modernism, so there needs to be some antique methods used. Roasting pumpkins is easy if you have the right equipment and pumpkin. Roasting pumpkins is a pain the behind if you have a $12 blender and you cut your pumpkin into tiny pieces. Also, be sure to get pie pumpkins and not just any old jack-o-lantern, pie pumpkins are meatier and meant for food. Jack-o-lanterns are grown for size and ease of carving and are watery/flavorless.

The pie pumpkin is small and my chunks look like happy pumpkin smiles!

First things first, roasting pumpkin. Wash the pumpkin and then take your biggest knife and split the pumpkin in half. Some people leave it there and roast the pumpkin halves (and I might try that next time), I cut my pumpkin into eighths to make it easier to scrape out the flesh later. Place your pumpkin bits on a baking sheet (face down or not) and roast for about an hour in a 350 degree oven. Adding just enough water to fill the bottom of the pan about a quarter inch will help soften your pumpkin and cause it to not stick.

Pumpkin smile done and happy to be delightfully roasted.
I believe the black tips came from the little fireball (see below).

I heard somewhere (that should be a giveaway statement for a bad idea) that you can flavor that water with a little whiskey for some nummy puree. Since I like my whiskey, I saved that for drinking and used the ¼ bottle of Southern Comfort I received from my Grandpa. Since it seemed like there was enough liquid with just the SoCo I didn’t add any water. A little while after popping the pumpkin pieces into the oven I heard a whoosh and saw a little fireball in oven. It might be better to add some water to your flavoring alcohol when roasting pumpkins. Your pumpkin is done the flesh can be pierced easily with a knife. Then scrape out the flesh and puree it in a blender or food processor.

Before puree.

Pureed.

If you have a crappy blender that you bought for cheap, buy canned pumpkin.

Once you have delicious pumpkin puree you can start your fall off to a great start by making Puffins (not the bird or the cereal, but a delightful baked good).

Fresh puffins cooling off before being devoured.

Pumpkin Muffins
Adapted from 500 Best Muffin Recipes, Esther Brody

Ingredients
2 cups whole wheat flour (you can use 1 cup all-purpose and 1 cup wheat if you don’t have vital gluten)
2 tsp vital gluten
½ cup lightly packed brown sugar

¼ cup chopped candied ginger (if you have some leftover from making Sticky Toffee Pudding)

1 tbsp baking powder

1 tbsp cinnamon

½ tsp nutmeg
1 egg
½ to ¾ cup milk (you might need to add more milk after mixing, depending on how much liquid is in your puree)
1 cup pumpkin puree
¼ cup oil
½ tsp vanilla

How To

In a large bowl combine flour, brown sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Make a well in the center.
In a smaller bowl whisk up the egg, then add milk, pumpkin, oil and vanilla. Add to dry ingredients and carefully stir until just moist.
Spoon batter into prepared muffin tin (greased or lined), this should only make 12 so you can just fill all cups equally (unless you’re not into equality). Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, turning the pan ½ way through.

Enjoy your muffins right away or wrap them in plastic wrap and tinfoil and freeze for delayed gratification! Next recipe: how to toast pumpkin seeds.

The Apron is Done!

2011-09-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

Remember my troubles getting the sewing machine to work? I would like to take full credit for getting the machine functioning again and for ensuring it’s continued smooth operation. However, my dear husband (AKA official taste tester and machine fixer) took the time to untangle my tangle of thread and chaos and set the machine straight. As I went to work on the apron this past weekend Andy told me seriously, in a calm voice, “If anything goes wrong, come and get me right away. Don’t try to fix anything yourself” This was very reassuring and I attacked the apron with renewed confidence.

Winding the bobbin, before it all went to hell.

Laying out the pattern pieces for cutting.
Accurate cutting is key to getting your bias tape to fit correctly.

Thankfully a lot of sewing on the machine wasn’t required and I spent much time hand sewing bows. I really don’t enjoy bows. It’s kind of a girly-girl thing and I’m not into that much (as I write about sewing an apron!). These bows are lovely though, truly lovely. If you’re ever sewing a project that calls for bows, don’t skimp! They cover up mistakes and ugly spots! Granted, if I were to actually use bows to cover up all of my mistakes then the entire edge would be a series of bows, perhaps some curly ribbons too.

Bows are your friend.

It may be 60 years old, but a resourceful husband can make it work.

Overall, I think my biggest trouble with this apron was using double-sided bias tape. I probably would have been better served to have read about how to attach bias tape in advance of sewing it on, instead of looking up afterward to see how I could fix it. The best way for Sewing for Dummies to be ineffective is for me to be a dummy and only use the book as a weight to cut out fabric.

The second biggest trouble with this project were the cats. A large part of sewing successfully is ironing your projects to ensure straight edges and crispness. My cats think the ironing board is the best place to take a nap. It also happens to be the best place to iron. Which means all of my fabric is covered in cat fur and I have to spend a lot of time sticky-rolling it off. The obvious solution is to kick the cats out of the room, but who has the energy for that? My life is a constant struggle between doing what is logical and letting the cats do what they want (they’re so soft!).

Step 2: ironing the fabric you just washed.
Step 1 1/2: shooing the cat off the ironing board.

He's being so cute! Who cares if I have to iron?

I’ve learned a lot from this experience. Mostly, that I should take the time and learn how the sewing machine works. That would make the sewing process easier and most definitely faster. During my stand-off with the machine I read this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson at Chiot’s Run:

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier,
not that the nature of the task has changed,
but our ability to do has increased.”

The rest of her post is about taking failure as a lesson in learning, and noticing that as you do things again and again it gets a little easier each time. This was a poignant thought as I was working on giving up on the apron and sewing in general. But, I won’t give it up. I’ve got ideas for other projects (including a bag for dog poo bags!) and these bowls. I want to learn and get better at sewing because I love being able to create things.

D-I-Y Lotion

2011-09-05T19:23:00.000-07:00

Lavender Cream

If your husband says, “Let’s make lotion!” you stop what you’re doing and make lotion. I’d been putting off making stuff from the Grow your own Drugs book because there’s a lot of ingredients to buy. We had gotten some basic ingredients, beeswax, almond oil and essential oils. But there were some ingredients we were missing. Along with containers too, I didn’t know what to do about containers, so much money to spend!

So Andy’s spur of the moment excitement (“Let’s have fun!”) got me excited and I forgot about my worries. Plus he found a recipe that only called for what we had on hand, which made the process quick and easy.

Actually, to be more specific the making of the lotion was quick and easy, the clean up was a little tougher. Beeswax is a bit tricky to clean up, wiping everything down with paper towels worked to get the beeswax off of everything. Here’s how the creation process goes.

Beeswax melting in almond oil.

First melt beeswax in sweet almond oil in a double boiler. You want to make sure your oil is warm to the touch, but not too hot you can’t touch it. At the same time warm water to the same temperature. Once the beeswax is melted pour the warm water into a blender and turned it on. Then we poured in the oil/beeswax combination to make an emulsion (you know, like making mayonnaise). To this we added 5 drops of lavender essential oil, gave it a little more whirring, scraped the sides, another blitz (as the British would say, since it’s been that kind of week), and we’re done!

Emulsifying the oil and water.

Bam, making it was easy! Next step it so simply scrape out all of your delicious smelling lotion and put it into adorable (and clean) jars. There you have it! Home made lotion! Leave the cleaning to someone else! The lotions from Grow your own Drugs call for using emulsifying wax, which I believe would cut out the need for a blender, which would mean lots less cleaning.

With half a recipe we made 2 small jars of lotion.

If you look at the ingredients in any natural lotion you should see these same basics, plus a little more. One of the exciting realizations I’ve had after reading my natural care books is recognizing ingredients in products and understanding what they do. I’m not entirely sure how the costs compare to buying ready-made lotion, but it certainly gives you control over what kind of scents you want and, obviously, how environmentally friendly your lotion is. I’m really excited to use this wonderful lotion. It’s already spread all over my arms and legs just from cleaning up. My elbows are already softer.

Back in Action!

2011-09-04T19:36:00.000-07:00

Patience is key when making toffee sauce.

Hey there folks! Sorry it’s been awhile. There are no excuses for abandoning my legions of fans (hello again mom!) for roughly a month. One thing I blame it on is my evil, evil sewing machine. “Sewing machine?” you say, “It is simply an inanimate object created to ease the lives of humans, a sewing machine cannot be evil.” And there, dear reader, is where you’re wrong. My sewing machine has conspired against me and my effort to create my first paid-for apron. Which is the reason I haven’t been posting. This apron was supposed to be done the first week of August and then I could post about it and then move on to other projects. Alas, no amount of hitting or yelling could move the machine to work like it knows it should. I’ll post something once I get this *$@#ing machine to work. Without Andy’s cool head and mechanical knowledge sewing just doesn’t happen. So once the machine realizes it can sew just fine (and perhaps, I learn to put a bobbin in correctly) apron #2 post isn’t going to happen. I’ve learned to accept that.

But we still have to eat. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing for the past month. Working and eating, some sleeping. But not taking pictures and blogging. Until today!

The makings of toffee sauce, without the brown sugar...

Sticky toffee pudding. What more can be said? Possibly... what is it? I’d never heard of this dish until a seminal episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares where the sticky toffee pudding was the best dish in the whole restaurant, despite the head chef’s chagrin. As I’ve mentioned before, I love toffee. So this dish intrigued me, despite never having made a British “pudding” (or an American pudding without use of a packet for that matter). It’s like a cake, or a quick bread with dates and a toffee sauce.

Artistically adding molasses to heavy cream and sugar to start making toffee sauce.

One trouble with making this dish is that I’ve not seen a lot of fresh dates in the grocery stores around here. I figured our local natural market would be most likely to have dates, and before I saw dates I found figs! I’ve been seeing people gush over eating figs recently and I was really curious to try them (outside of a Fig Newton that is). With my fresh figs in hand I went about finding the ingredients for sticky toffee pudding. I was asked by a clerk if I needed help finding anything, and at that point I was under the impression I needed dried dates, so I asked the clerk to point me in the dried dates. But I think I actually said figs, since I was on a fig finding high, and inattentively I went home with both dried and fresh figs. While home Andy asked me why I bought both dried and fresh figs and I told him that I had actually bought dried dates and fresh figs, can’t you read the labels?!

Oh.

I treated the figs like they were the dates called for in the recipe and at first things weren’t smelling successful. This made me nervous. But if the recipe only called for boiling dried fruit and water then it would be disgusting. Luckily, there’s more to it than that and the batter I taste tested was delicious! Roughly an hour after starting I had delicious sticky toffee pudding on my hands.

Before it's pudding it's kind of pale.

Post baking it looks like chocolate! Though, there's no chocolate involved.

Official Antique Modernism Taste Tester Andy was delivered a plate to and by the time I had returned with a drink, the pudding was gone! Now that’s a hearty endorsement.

I used David Lebovitz’s recipe from his blog. He calls for some mighty pricey ingredients, which by all means, if you can, use those. The money tree we’re starting in the back yard hasn’t flowered yet, so I used what I had on hand (besides the figs/dates). I also read a recipe from an Australian that called for both fresh dates and dried figs (!), so both can be used (and from what I see, then can be either fresh or dried). If the date/fig thing freaks you out, just try it! It’s very tasty and not weird at all (like most British food). If you don’t like it, well at least you end up with a pan full of toffee sauce.

Warm Sticky Toffee Pudding, from David Lebovitz

Ingredients
Toffee Sauce
2 cups (500ml) heavy cream
1/2 cup (90g) demerara or muscovado sugar (or another dark brown sugar)
2 1/2 tablespoons golden syrup or molasses
pinch of salt

Pudding
6 ounces (180g) pitted dates, snipped or chopped
1 cup (250ml) water
1 teaspoon baking soda
optional: 1/3 cup (40g) candied ginger, chopped
1 1/4 cups (175g) flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
4 tablespoons (55g) unsalted butter
3/4 cup (150g) granulated sugar
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1. Preheat the oven to 350F (190C) and butter an 8 1/2-inch (24cm) porcelain soufflé dish (or similar-sized baking dish.)
2. Make the toffee sauce by bringing the cream, demerara or turbinado sugar, golden syrup (or molasses) and salt to a boil in a medium saucepan, stirring often to melt the sugar.
3. Lower heat and simmer, stirring constantly for about 5 minutes, until the mixture is thick and coats the spoon. Pour half the sauce into the prepared soufflé dish and place the dish in the freezer, and reserve the other half for serving.
4. To make the pudding, in a medium saucepan, heat the dates and water. Once the water begins to boil, remove from heat and stir in the baking soda. Add the ginger, if using, then set aside, but keep it slightly warm.
5. In a small bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.
6. In the bowl of a standing electric mixer, or by hand, beat the butter and granulated sugar until light
and fluffy. Gradually beat in the eggs, then the vanilla. (Don’t be alarmed if the mixture looks a bit curdled.)
7. Stir in half of the flour mixture, then the date mixture, then add the remaining flour mixture until just mixed. Don’t over beat the batter.
8. Remove the soufflé dish from the freezer and scrape the batter into the soufflé dish and bake for 50 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with moist crumbs attached.
9. Remove the pudding from the oven, and let cool slightly before serving.
Serving: Spoon portions of the cake into serving bowls and douse with additional warm toffee sauce.

Eleven Jars of Tomatoes and One Delicious Dinner

2011-07-27T18:57:00.000-07:00

It’s prime tomato season now and that means we need to save the flavor of the season. Andy purchased so many tomatoes last year from one farmer at the Murfreesboro Farmers Market that he remembered Andy. This year Andy got a good deal on tomatoes and was even able to gather some “ugly” ones for free. Since he planned on making sauce the beauty of the tomatoes didn’t matter. They may not have been pretty but the scent of the tomatoes was heavenly, like the smell of summer sunshine captured for one sweet, brief moment.

Summer used to be one of my favorite holidays. Minnesota had such fleeting good weather that you had to be out in it all the time to try and soak it all in before it disappeared. My most favorite thing about summer was (and is) the tomatoes. My parents had a vegetable garden where they grew green beans, peppers, chives, pumpkins and most importantly- tomatoes. I’d like to say that I helped with the vegetable garden; but honestly I mostly supervised via the hammock down the hill. There was only one thing that concerned me in the vegetable garden: tomatoes. The point in summer when red globes of tomatoes adorned the tall vining plants was like Christmas in July. I relished the hunt, peering through the branches for that special red ball at just the right time. At some point during summer days you could find me sitting somewhere with a salt shaker in one hand, a tomato in the other and juice running down my face.

Now summers are a bit less dreamy, mostly due to this oppressive southern heat and the lack of summer vacation. To preserve this tomato harvest for the non-summer times Andy took the sauce making duties upon himself. My role was to help fill jars and then make dinner. The process for making tomato sauce is fairly straightforward. You first chop up the tomatoes and cut out the stem end. Andy cooked them for a little bit to soften them up for the food mill. The food mill is a great investment for making tomato sauce (and applesauce too!), it takes the skins and the stem bits and (as Andy says) “poops” them out one end and keeps the juicy pulpy goodness pure. Then the tomato juice is put back into the stock pot to boil for a good long while to reduce and concentrate the flavors.

This looks like a bit of a process but it's not that complicated. The slightly cooked tomatoes are in the big stock pot. They're ladled into the top of the food mill attached to the mixer. The mill "juices" the tomatoes and squirts all the seeds and skins out front. The pulp and juice comes out the middle where you can see the bowl catching it.

Once you feel good about where your sauce it at (and you’ve prepared your jars) it’s time to fill jars and process. Prior to filling, add 1 tablespoon of lemon juice to each jar. Then leave ½ inch head space, add your lid and screw band to finger tip tight and then process for 30 minutes. Let sit for 5 minutes in the water and then pull the jars out and wait for the delightful “pop!” sound of the seals being formed.

In our canner there was only enough room for 10 jars of sauce at a time, so we made one extra jar to use within the week and I cooked dinner with the sauce leftover from that. It smelled so good and was probably one of the freshest sauces I’ve ever had. I love making pasta sauce because you can readily improvise and use what you have on hand. There’s something satisfying with using up ingredients in the fridge.

Birthday Cake! (and cookies)

2011-07-22T14:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my birthday! I love birthdays. I’m incredibly bad at remembering other’s birthdays and getting gifts to them on time, so I feel kind of selfish in that respect. But when it comes to celebrating the fact that someone is here for another year, birthdays are great. As I’ve gotten older I realize I don’t need a big party or mounds of gifts. But I do need cake. Preferably chocolate.

Not too long ago I finished the previously mentioned book A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg. The final chapter was about her wedding cake, dubbed the “Winning Hearts and Mind” cake. I’ve been trying to find appropriate times to make this cake and nothing was working out right. Finally I gave in and just had to make it for my birthday. It seemed a bit odd to make a cake for myself, but I like the logic of it. After all, it’s my birthday and no one else should feel pressured to make or buy me a cake to celebrate. I should be feeding others so they have a reason to be happy that I’m around. So I made the winning hearts and minds cake for Andy and I, and delightful Toffee Chocolate Snicker doodles for work buddies.

The nice thing about birthdays is that they help you reminisce about birthdays past. A great birthday isn’t about the gifts, it’s more about the friends and family around you. And, if we’re going to be honest, it’s also about the cake. As a kid I had a birthday that was flower themed and a lot of fun to put together with my mom. It came complete with a cake that looked like a garden, with Oreo crumble dirt and gummy worms peaking out of the soil. There was the memorable birthday I had in Cuernavaca, Mexico where I actually received two cakes, one of which was involved in a food fight (that I later helped clean up). Then there was the year when my mom took a business trip to Florida and invited me along because I had nothing better to do and it was my birthday. We upgraded to first class for the occasion and went out to dinner with her coworkers. One got a little too tipsy and explained to me the wonders of asparagus pee, a delight I had yet to enjoy. After dinner we ate cake from Publix, which I thought sounded like a wonderful, for-the-people kind of grocery, and this birthday with strangers was a delightful one.

There were some, shall we say, not so great birthdays too. Such as the one in Indiana where my brother got a pair of Rollerblades for my birthday, thereby stealing my “this day is all about me” thunder. And by the time my brother’s birthday rolled around my family conveniently forgot that we now gave siblings gifts on birthdays too. Once I had to run the mile during weight training class. There was the year I had to go to band practice after getting a tamagotchi and had to keep feeding the damn thing when I should have been crashing cymbals. One year I had to clean the bathrooms of our house, which was probably more my fault for putting it off than my mother being mean. The worst of all birthdays was the year my Grandma Summerville died. We were leaving for Indiana shortly after the celebration to visit her in the hospital. Opening gifts that year didn’t have much joy and she passed away a couple days after my birthday.

Despite what it may seem, that’s what I like about birthdays. They help me to remember the good and bad, and the not actually-bad-but-rather-kind-of-funny-now-that-I-think-about-it times. It gets me to thinking about other people’s birthdays and the things I’ve done for them, the people I spent time with, and how the years keep rolling by, no matter what you do. I love birthdays and celebrating life.

Did I mention cake? I’m sorry to entice you with pictures and then blather on and on about memories. You’re probably interested in some cake. Andy graciously offered to make me Special K bars I declined. Mostly because I need actual cake on my birthday, but actually more because I’ve been dying to make the Winning Hearts and Minds cake. It only has FIVE ingredients! Five! That’s so easy. Andy doesn’t like cake much and requests brownies frequently for his birthday celebrations. When I answered his question as to what was in this cake he responded with, “So it’s like a brownie cake?” Yes. And he loved it. He said he wanted it for his birthday. And I’m more than happy to oblige. It has a delightfully crunchy crust and a soft, ooey center.

The only advice I have to give is to get high quality ingredients. This cake would cost you around $30 if you were to purchase a similar one from a particular Scandinavian bakery that I used to work at (in 2007 dollars). The one I made cost me roughly $10. Next time I would up the ante with a little Olive and Sinclair chocolate and hope to score some free range eggs from Andy’s coworker. Here’s the recipe that you can also find on Orangette.

7 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
1 ¾ sticks (7 oz) unsalted butter, cut into chunks
1 cup, plus 2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon unbleached, all purpose flour
5 large eggs

(Whipped cream for serving)

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees and butter an 8 inch round cake pan (I used a 9 inch one and it turned out just fine). Line the bottom of the pan with parchment paper (craft time!) and grease the paper.

Melt the chocolate and butter in the microwave or a double boiler. When the mixture is smooth stir in the sugar and then set aside to cool for 5 minutes. Then add the eggs one by one (be sure not to lose count!), stirring well after each addition. Add the flour and stir well. The batter should be dark and silky.

Pour the batter into your pan and bake for 25 minutes, or until the top is lightly crackled, the edges are puffed and the center of the cake looks set. It’s best to set the timer early and check on the cake every couple of minutes by jiggling the pan. It’s done when the center only jiggles slightly, if at all.

Cook the cake for about 15 minutes in the pan. Turn it out of the pan and flip it back onto a plate (or better yet, a cake stand!). Be careful with this, as I turned my cake out onto the edge of my dish and broke the edge. Cool completely before serving with a dollop of whipped cream (best if you whip it yourself).

Preserving Summer

2011-07-10T17:02:00.000-07:00

It’s high black berry season here in Tennessee and that means our second annual trip to Beechgrove, TN for some wild black berry picking. If you recall from last year I ran into some trouble with chiggers and was embarrassed to wear shorts for roughly a month. After much anecdotal research Andy and I learned that the best way to avoid chiggers while berry picking is to either wear kerosene soak rags around your ankles or use bug spray. Despite my grandpa’s logic we settled on the latter and geared up for berry picking.

These wild blackberries grow at the farm of one of Andy’s coworkers, he just lets people show up at his house whenever and pick to their hearts delight. Another lesson we learned from last year is to go early, because the heat will knock you out quicker than the chiggers or flying beetles. So we roused ourselves early this morning, doused ourselves in bug spray, tucked our pants into our socks and we were on our way. Before the heat got to us we managed to pick enough berries for one batch of preserves (which is like jam, but without mushing the fruit).

Our blackberry hosts last year let me know that a good way to clean the berries was to soak them in water. All the leaves and unwanted stuff will float to the top (last year this included an inch worm) and can be simply swept off the top.

Making preserves is quite easy. All you need is half the amount of sugar as fruit. For us that was 8 cups black berries and 4 cups sugar. Stir it all together and let it macerate for about 10 minutes. This lets the juice from the fruit seep out and it becomes the cooking liquid. While that’s going on you prepare the canner and jars, we had about 5 half pint jars. Once the maceration has happened stir the fruit up and boil hard for about 10 to 15 minutes until you reach gel stage. Then take your preserves off the heat, skim off the foam and pack into hot jars. Process for 15 minutes, let rest for 5 and you’ve got a delicious treat!

Andy is currently making biscuits for us to try out our newest batch of canning delights and I can’t wait to taste it in action. So far neither Andy or I show evidence of chigger bites (knock on wood). I hope that means when we go white water rafting later this summer I won’t have to explain away the rash on my legs like I had to last summer. I’ve learned that it’s not a good way to make a first impression by first saying, “Don’t worry, it’s not contagious.”

These are Ugly Slippers

2011-07-09T17:17:00.000-07:00

I’m not being too critical when I say that these are ugly slippers. My husband disagrees with me, he thinks they’re “awesome.” But he’s being nice, and I’m not being hard on myself. They’re pretty ugly. I might even say damn ugly slippers. First off, they don’t match. One has a sort of square toe, the other a rounded toe. Gracefully the strap made it to roughly the same place on my foot, despite my best efforts to move it closer to my ankle on the second slipper (the one on the right). If I fold one in half it doesn’t even match itself.

Second, the construction is really shoddy. Truthfully, I did make these myself. This isn’t the half-hearted creation of a 6th grade art project, despite what it may seem. I think it comes down to making sure my yarn is in the right spot when I change sides. And also maybe not be so stubborn when it comes to looking up YouTube videos on how to complete a stitch. It’d be great to have someone by constantly as I knit to ask them questions. I’ve knitted with friends before and they’ve been helpful, but I feel like a pest asking questions all the time.

Cotton says, "These slippers are ugly, but I'm cute."

You might think that if I thought these were so ugly that I should just remake them. I did. More than once. After awhile I just got tired of working on them. And I lost one of my pages of instruction and kind of made up how to finish the slipper (hence one round toe). The instructions (in rather poor English, which could have been a problem) tell me that I could finish my slippers by “making crochet” around the edges. That would cover up some of my mistakes and make the slippers look actually cute. However, I don’t know how to make crochet and if I learned on these slippers they would probably turn out worse.

At least I’ve made cute things before and I can take solace in this picture. Maybe the socks I’ll make for Andy will turn out more like my last knitting project.

We Need to do Something about these Bananas

2011-06-27T19:28:00.000-07:00

While in Minneapolis (land of many, many good book stores) I couldn’t help but pick up a book that I had heard about on Design Sponge while browsing at Magers and Quinn. I am currently reading it, A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg, and to be honest, at first I really didn’t like it. The structure of the book is a memoir that ends every chapter with a relevant recipe or two, sort of like how most food blogs work (and that’s how the author got her start). I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t like the book, after all I love stories and food, and this book combines both with humor and emotion.

After some thought I realized I didn’t like the book because I was jealous, and that’s a tough thing to admit. The author isn’t that much older than me and she’s much more accomplished and well versed in cooking. Did I mention that she spent considerable amounts of time in Paris and speaks French? And, oh isn’t Paris just wonderful? But really what it comes down to is that I would loved to have spent considerable amounts of time in Paris and speak French. Though I did learn to cook for myself in Dublin (and I can count to ten in Gaelic), much of my short time abroad was spent studying (shock!), adventuring, and focusing on the liquid culinary offerings of Ireland. If I really thought harder about it too, if I went to Paris now and spent most of my time eating at wonderful French bistros, cafes, and bouchons, I would probably fawn over the food too, and perhaps even don a scarf. With my jealousy aside I was able to read with an open mind and appreciate the meld of food and stories.

One vignette in particular that I enjoyed was about how the author struggled with improvising and straying from a recipe. For a time I was like that and I reveled in my carefully controlled little food world. Then Andy walked into my life and scoffed at my dedication to a recipe and can whip up a delicious dinner completely off the cuff. It takes practice to be able to improvise well, which sound a bit contradictory but it’s true. Figuring out what flavors go well together means cooking more and if something doesn’t work out, generally it’s still edible.

The following recipe is one that I improvised a bit (not much actually) and is taken from A Homemade Life. This is the first time I’ve made a recipe from a book that I was currently reading. Which goes to show you how wonderfully this banana bread was described. I improvised this recipe on purpose and on accident. I didn’t have candied ginger at the time, though I did have piece of ginger root. Initially I was going to candy my own ginger but that took more time than I wanted to devote to cooking. My second, accidental improvisation came when I realized there wasn’t enough liquid. Adding some more yogurt solved the dry problem. I thought everything was going well until I was sliding the loaf pan into the oven and discovered I hadn’t added the melted butter. There sat my melted butter on the stove, explaining without words why the loaf was a tad dry. In the interest of not wasting good melted butter I fashioned up a new bread recipe using the formula from the book. An accident of de-panning caused the bread to end up more like cobbler than bread, so a second attempt will be made before sharing that recipe with the world.

Here is the delicious Banana Bread with Chocolate and Crystallized Ginger recipe from A Homemade Life.

Ingredients
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
¾ cup sugar
¾ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
¾ cup semisweet chocolate chips (I didn’t have much ginger, so I made up for it with 1 cup of chocolate chips)
⅓ cup finely chopped crystallized ginger (Here is where I used about 2 inches of fresh ginger root, minced)
2 large eggs
1 ½ cups mashed banana (about 3 large bananas)
¼ cup well-stirred plain whole-milk yogurt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

The How To:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a loaf pan (9 x 5)ish. In a small bowl melt your butter (we don’t have a microwave so I do it on the stove. Don’t forget about it!) Set aside to cool.

In a large bowl whisk together flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt. Add the chocolate chips and crystallized (or regular) ginger and whisk well to combine. Set aside.

In a medium bowl (let’s hope you have a set), lightly beat the eggs. Add the mashed banana, yogurt, melted butter, and vanilla; stir to mix well. Pour the banana mixture into the dry ingredients and stir gently, scraping the sides. Do not over mix. The batter will be thick and somewhat lumpy, but there should be no unincorporated flour. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.

Bake until the loaf is a deep shade of golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean, 50 minutes to 1 hour. If it’s browning too quickly, make a tent over the top with tin foil. Cool the loaf in the pan on a wire rack for 5 minutes (10 might even be better). Let it cool completely before slicing (I did not wait and therefore my slices were smeared with melted chocolate. Yum!)

There are so many delicious recipes from this book that I’m just giddy with waiting to make them. Next up, this weekend I’ll be baking the Winning Hearts and Minds cake in honor of Independence Day and our Minnesota visitors! It sound decadent and I can’t wait.

Here's a taste of the apple bread to come!

Grinding Meat

2011-06-11T19:03:00.000-07:00

Recently I’ve come down from a steak craving high and once again I can enjoy other forms of meat. I didn’t always like meat very much, which is why my steak cravings were so surprising. As a child I was an animal lover, so much so that at one point I wrote in my elementary school diary entry to “wear more animal shirts.” Since wearing images of animals on your clothing is the best way to support the cause of animals world wide. A little while later I decided to up my animal commitment from shirt wearing to vegetarianism. That lasted until my dad made hot dogs for dinner that night.

For many years I didn’t think much about the meat that I ate. Humans are omnivores and therefore there’s nothing wrong with eating meat, that’s how we evolved and survived. Recently there’s been a lot of discussion about our meaty food system, from a health and food safety point of view. I don’t want to gross anyone out by getting into too many icky details. Though, sometimes difficult to take knowledge helps to make decisions. So I only have 2 bits of info and then we’ll get on with the meat of this post (sorry for the pun!).

Awhile back I read an article from the New York Times that really got me thinking about beef. The gist of the article is that a woman ate a hamburger that was contaminated with E. coli and became paralyzed. Paralyzed! Now if that doesn’t make you think about your food more seriously, I don’t know what will. It’s food! Food is supposed to nourish us, not hurt us. One of the main issues in this woman’s case was that meat from hundreds of cows can go into making a burger, so it becomes difficult to determine where the contamination came from. Jamie Oliver had a piece on his show Food Revolution about ground beef and the addition of something un-tasty called “pink slime.” I’ll let you watch the video if you’re curious about learning more.

So what’s the solution to ground beef that could make you sick? Some think you ought to take ridiculous care with ground beef and not let it touch your hands or anything else in your kitchen. But that doesn’t solve the problem of what’s in the meat itself. Jamie’s solution to guarantee that you know what’s in your ground beef is to go to a butcher and have him grind it right in front of you. Andy and I haven’t found a decent butcher in Nashville, so our solution is to do the meat grinding ourselves!

Who doesn’t like taking a hunk of raw meat and churning it through some contraption to get ground meat? Today’s Antique Modernism takes us more into the “antique” realm of things, but for modern reasons. Meat grinders come in many forms. We have one that attaches to our kitchen aid mixer and a hand crank one that was once owned by my Grandma Summerville. We’ve been using the hand crank one because the one that attaches to our mixer is also a food mill, it seems safer to have one that is dedicated to meat only.

Grinding meat is quite simple and gives you full control of what goes into your food, it can also be cheaper! First you need meat to grind, what kinds is best? We’ve gotten a few kinds of meat and chuck or sirloin seem to be the best. Don’t get taken in by the low cost of a rump roast or something you would cook in a slow-cooker. That kind of meat doesn’t do well in your ground beef as it probably won’t be braised and therefore turns into a gristly burger (trust me, I know from experience).

Ghost hand not necessary for meat chopping.

Once at home make sure your meat grinding area and equipment is clean and sanitary. Also, there is a bit of splatter, so I recommend keeping that in mind when choosing a grinding location, put on an apron for good measure. Next, chop the meat into chunks small enough to fit into your grinder. You can add raw, chopped bacon for tenderness if that’s what you like in a burger (or casserole or pasta sauce). If you want leaner beef, then added bacon probably isn’t for you. Now you grind! Usually we do a bunch at once so we weigh out 1 pound portions and put it zipper bags for freezing.

If you made it this far in the post raw meat probably doesn’t make you too queasy and hopefully you’re interested in grinding your own. I highly recommend it for many reasons. First and foremost is taste! There’s nothing like having control over the leanness or juiciness of your food. Pre-ground beef just doesn’t compare in flavor with what you can do yourself (barring meat ground in front of you at the butcher). Second is food safety, as I’ve already talk about above. You can know what’s in your food and you know the meat in your burger comes from only one cow. Third is cost, the more processed your food is, the more expensive it will be. A large chuck roast will cost less than ground beef and you’ll get more meat from it. It’s especially rewarding if you get it on sale!

Ultimately I don’t think vegetarianism is for me and as much as I like grass-fed meat, it’s not usually in the budget. Grinding meat ourselves is a great way to bridge the gap between these two worlds and stay true to our omnivore roots.

Summer Drinks: Sun Tea

2011-06-05T17:54:00.000-07:00

The bottle with the white cap is green mint and the black cap is rhubarb oolong.

There are a variety of blogs that I read and Design Sponge is one of my favorites. It’s all about various takes on design from refurbishing old furniture, to home design to (my favorite) food and drinks. After all, good food is designed well.

One of segments that I enjoy is called Small Measures with Ashley. A few weeks ago Ashley posted about Herbal Sun Teas and Simple Syrups. I hadn’t heard of sun tea prior to an unfortunate episode of 30 Rock, thankfully real sun tea is quite delicious. In addition to the herbal sun teas that are described in Design Sponge the more traditional way is to use actual tea. Poking around at the farmer’s market today I coudn’t find any fresh herbs for sale, so I went with actual tea because the sun was shining, and herbs or not, I wanted to try out sun tea.

We couldn't resist trying some of the mint tea before taking pictures.

Andy wanted some mint tea and our mint plant hasn’t quite recovered from the Kentucky Derby and mint juleps. So we got Northwest Minty Green tea from Whole Foods, it has peppermint and spearmint in addition to the green tea. In addition to that, I had purchased some Rhubarb Oolong from Franklin Tea last night and thought it’d be great as a sun tea.

The concept of sun tea is that you use the warmth of the sun to steep the tea or herbs instead of using boiling water. Since temperatures brushed up to 100 today not spending time in the kitchen with a hot oven sounded like a good idea. Ideally, you want the tea to steep for 5-8 hours in a bright sunny spot, for some reason it decided to rain today so my tea only steeped for 2 hours. I used ½ gallon jugs and about 4 tea bags (or teaspoons) per jug. Since my Rhubarb Oolong tea is loose leaf I fashioned tea bags from coffee filters and string. I was quite proud that my make-shift tea bags leaked fewer leaves than the commercial made bags.

Despite the lack of steeping time my sun teas turned out delicious! I can only imagine what kinds of flavor would come out with more time in the sun. This is a great summertime drink because it’s cool, refreshing and doesn’t take much effort. Let me know if you make sun tea, I’m curious to hear about what other teas and herbs you use. Enjoy!

Summertime Drinks

2011-05-31T19:16:00.000-07:00

Do you ever run into the problem where you buy an ingredient for a dish and then you never use it again? I try to avoid that and if something has an odd ingredient I’ll see if I can leave it out. Sometimes though, you can’t get away with it and you just have to get some random ingredient and hope you use it up in the dish.

We ran into this problem last year when Andy and I canned a Blackberry Framboise sauce. Framboise is (as I’m just realizing now) a raspberry brandy (also raspberry beer), as you can see from the picture, I purchased a raspberry liquor. At any rate, this liquor didn’t get drunk as I wasn’t sure what to do with it and beer is just easier.

Since Andy is storing our beer in our creepy basement, and I’m not fond of traipsing down there, I’ve been drinking more mixed drinks. Shuffling the raspberry liquor around finally got me figuring out what to do with it. Consulting the experts was the first step; however, I didn’t have campaign or some of the other essential ingredients. Improvising was in order! The end result is quite tasty, with a refreshing lift of raspberry and a beautiful maroon shade that fades darker toward the bottom.

The Ingredients:

1 shot vodka
1 ½ shots raspberry liquor (or perhaps another fruity liquor?)
3 ice cubes (I’m a stickler for this)
1 can “citrus soda”

The Process:

Put your ice cubes in the glass. Pour over vodka, then liquor. Top glass off with soda and stir together. Enjoy! (Responsibly please, I’m not to be blamed for raspberry overindulgence)

First Salad from our Garden

2011-05-15T14:57:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago we harvested our first salad from our garden. With the warmer weather our lettuce actually did better. Since lettuce is a cold weather crop, I didn't think it'd like the 80 degree days, but it was better than days in the 60s. Since the first salad we've harvested another salad, including spinach, radishes and green onions. We have a tough, clay soil. So I think the radishes didn't grow big because the soil was dense, or maybe since our trees have leafed out it's too shady for them.

It's incredibly satisfying to pull food from the garden and enjoy it right away. My dastardly cat Buster discovered that he loves green onions, possibly more than we do. As I was carefully weighing the harvest (to keep track of yields) Buster jumped on the counter and absconded with a green onion. Since green onion leaves are like strings, he was just as excited to bat at the onion as I pulled it away as he was to chew the end. Who thought a cat would like onion?

At any rate, we did get some good radishes harvested and more are one the way. Andy ordered a mortar and pestle online and it's been in frequent use since it arrived. This delicious radish butter was his first creation and used both the leaves and the bulbs of the radishes. The leaves are a bit prickly, so they do well with a bit of smashing.

If you're looking to try some radish butter yourself. All that is involved is a bit of soften butter (1-2 tablespoons), a couple of radishes (with their leaves), and some salt. Cut up the radishes and mash with the salt, once it's a bit creamy add some leaves. Gradually add leaves until they're all used up and everything is creamy. Add the butter, mash and mix thoroughly. Enjoy on toast, eggs, pasta or ice cream! (Just kidding on the ice cream bit) Since this isn't really a recipe as a jumping off point for improvisation, you can really adjust this butter to how you want. If you're not interested in using radish leaves, you could use fresh thyme, basil or parsley. Instead of butter this could be a mayo seasoning for burgers or sandwiches. There's a lot you can do with one simple idea!

The one plant going absolutely nuts in the garden are the potato plants. Andy planted four seed potatoes, and we can see already that we've got some potatoes grown! He built potato boxes around them, so they continue to grow up. I will have pictures of that later. The potatoes have impressed me with their massive growth, and I'm pretty excited to harvest them.

We be Jamming

2011-05-08T18:23:00.000-07:00

Nothing says spring has arrived better than fresh strawberries! Yesterday Andy and I, and our friend Allie ventured north to pick strawberries at Bottom View Farm. It was super fun plucking my own berries and seeing my basket fill up. The last time I picked berries I think I was about the same size as the blueberry bush and ate more berries than I collected. This time around all the berries made it to the basket. With our fresh berries Andy wanted to make 2 batches of strawberry jam. Our poor judge of quantities and fuzzy memory of the amount needed led us to pick and purchase roughly 2 gallons of strawberries. It wasn’t as expensive as I thought it would be, and we weren’t daunted by our gigantic leaking bag of berries.

When I was looking up strawberry canning options the “old fashioned” strawberry jam caught my eye (this is Antique Modernism after all). Old fashioned just means that the jam is made without pectin and utilizes the fruit’s natural pectin. This sounded appealing to me so we attempted this as our first batch. After about an hour we realized that “old fashioned” actually meant boil the crap out of it until you can’t stand it any more, then fill jars and process as usual. From the way things look in the jar it has set nicely and our patience lasted just long enough. The book claimed that this jam caramelizes more and has a different taste than pectin-made jams. It certainly turned out a beautiful deep burgundy color.

Just keep boiling, and boiling, and boiling...

It ends up turning this scrumptious color!

Next up, Strawberry Sauce. I was doubtful about the utility of this one since we don’t put a lot of flavored sauces on things. However, Andy said it sounded delicious and we brainstormed other uses for strawberry sauce. It could be made into to frosting, muffins, tarts, perhaps even a layer in a cake. So strawberry sauce could be versatile. The recipe called for using corn syrup and our corn syrup has high fructose corn syrup, which isn’t something I want to use in my cooking, so I swapped it for honey. I wasn’t sure how it was done, but it turns our you can swap honey for corn syrup one for one. In addition to honey there was apple juice, orange juice and zest. This one was very fragrant with the honey and orange scents. I’m excited to try some leftovers over some pie later this evening.

Strawberry sauce is a brighter red.

Last we made strawberry jam with pectin. Andy concluded that powdered pectin was a worthwhile invention as this jam took only about 20 minutes to make. I’m glad we made both kinds, so that we could learn what it spoon tests were all about and learn to fully appreciate powdered pectin. This was the batch where we finally remembered to let the jars sit in the canner for 5 minutes after processing. So, hopefully the lack of sitting doesn’t affect the jam and sauce too much. I’m feeling confident though that it’ll turn out okay.

Right to left: Jam with pectin, jam without pectin (old fashioned), and sauce.

If you didn’t think that 3 batches of jam/sauce was enough to use up 2 gallons of strawberries you’d be wrong! We had enough berries left over to fill a cookie sheet for freezing. These little guys will be used for smoothies and... well, probably nothing else since smoothies are awesome.

I’m jazzed about the success of our first canning adventure of the season. We came out with 20 jars of jam/sauce and only 1 serious jam burn. On our list for other canning adventures include tomatoes, tomato sauce, pickles, peaches, blackberries, and applesauce. This is a good start; however, 3 batches in one day is a lot of canning activity and we were both dog tired after the kitchen got cleaned up.

Our new dog Cotton! He's tired from jamming too much.

Brewing is not Just for Men!

2011-05-06T13:50:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the slow posts this week. Here's an short video from Minnesota Public Radio about the increasing number of women home brewing. Since I'm a woman and I home brew I'm pretty excited about more women getting into brewing, and for that matter, drinking beer. Here's to the ladies!

Calzones!

2011-04-28T18:56:00.000-07:00

I don't have a "finished" calzone picture because I was hungry. Please admire my raw calzone.

Recently Andy discovered an early British show with Jamie Oliver on Netflix, Oliver’s Twist. We both love Jamie Oliver and support his food revolution. We also have one of his cookbooks but have yet to see one of his TV shows, so we were intrigued. In two of the shows we watched Jamie made calzones (pronounce the word “calzo-neighs” and you’ll be in the British spirit of the program), both a sweet and a savory.

Watching this got us hankering for calzones, especially since we’ve never made them before and so it became a bit of a challenge. After making the calzones a couple nights later we realized that they’re just pizzas folded over and cooked a bit longer. There’s really nothing to calzone making. For all those calzone novices and pizza experts, you are just 3 simple steps away from making a delicious dinner (or lunch).

Andy's ingredients. Our small plates were a bit too big for one calzone.

Making pizza dough is super easy, even more so if you have a stand mixer to knead the dough for you (or an overactive child who likes to mush things). Andy usually makes the dough and he uses a recipe from Cooking for Dads, which is a website I highly recommend; though I’m sure Jamie Oliver has a recipe too that you could use, since we’re making these calzones at his urging. You could get a pre-made dough if you don’t have time to do your own. Once you get your dough made, roll it out all at once and use a small plate (these are individual sized, unless you only have large plates) to cut out circles for the calzones. For pizzas I usually make them free form, but it’s good to have a symmetrical shape for calzones so that everything seals up evenly.

Load up your calzone like a pizza. Don’t worry about putting all the ingredients on one side, the dough should easily stretch over. We used tomato sauce, sauteed onions and peppers, olives, goat cheese and Parmesan. This is a good meal to use up leftovers, don’t be afraid to try new combinations and use up the odds and ends in your refrigerator. Alfredo sauce or pesto would be good sauce options. The typical pizza toppings such as sausage, pepperoni, you could try chicken or ground beef (maybe cheeseburger calzone?). Different cheeses would give your calzone unique tastes and are always fun to try. You could even take a cue from Mesa pizza and make mac and cheese calzones, but maybe it’s best to take things slowly. To seal up the calzone pull up one side and fold it over the other. To make sure it's really shut it helps to kind of roll up the edge, plus it looks pretty. Slash the top a few times with a knife to let steam out. And the calzone is ready to go into the oven at 400 degrees for about 10 minutes (or until you think it looks done).

My calzone, it looks a little pathetic after seeing Andy's, but it was scrumptious!

Extra calzones do fairly well refrigerated (after baking) and eaten the next day for lunch. Just make sure your lunch bag is big enough to handle it. If you want to show off for a crowd these are pretty simple meals to create for people in advance. Or you could have a DIY calzone party, which is always awesome. If you want to get really crazy, you can do like my friend Matt and make a Stromboli. Whatever you choose to do calzones are really easy and make a satisfying “gourmet” meal!

A Great Day is Brew Day

2011-04-25T18:04:00.000-07:00

A completed and delicious maibock is best enjoyed in the great outdoors (or your backyard)

Brew Day is the best day of the week. With maybe the exception of the day you unseal and pour the first bottle of a new batch of beer. The very best day would be if these two days fell on the same day, but lets not get crazy.

Earlier I posted on how to bottle beer, which is only useful knowledge only if you have a nice batch of beer waiting to be bottled. So today’s post will be all about brew day and the steps to making your beer. If beer making seems complicated don’t despair. Allegedly if you can make tea you can make beer and (according to Craft Beer Talk) you’re pretty dim if you screw it up. As someone who has messed up 2 batches of beer, I am not an expert. But I’m not all that dim and I’ve learned from my mistakes. Hopefully that means I can help others avoid similar mistakes.

Get used to this view, you'll be seeing it for quite awhile on brew day

Step One: Assemble your Ingredients and Tools
This is important to make sure you have everything you need and don’t freak out halfway through the boil realizing that you don’t know what happened to the hops, or that your smack pack hasn’t been smacked yet, or the cauldron stir stick has been used to trellis the beans. While assembling your tools it’s important to sanitize everything. While you may be boiling the wort (pre-beer) and killing off bad guys in that situation, you don’t want to be sticking other contaminated things in your clean beer and leaving that to ferment for a few weeks. Though, don’t be a spaz about it, otherwise brew day looses it’s glory. Be sure to get a beer kit, or have some nice person at a brew supply store help you assemble a clone recipe.

Step Two: Start Boiling
Many kits and recipes have you start of by not-just-yet-boiling some specialty grains. This is usually your malted barley, wheat, roasted barley, oats and what have you. This is basically like making tea, warm up your water to between 150 - 170 degrees. Pour the specialty grains into the grain bag, tie a loose knot at the top and steep for 20-30 minutes. Quality of water is important here, we get two 2.5 gallon jugs from the grocery. Don’t use hose water, tap water or rain water. Next, bring your wort up to a boil now and while that’s working, take out the grain bag and let it just drip into the pot. Your grains are spent and you can feed that stuff to your horse, chickens or compost pile.

Specialty grain sack draining into the pot

Step Three: Hops, Malt and a Cold One
Depending on what kind of beer your making, you may need to add some hops at this point. Once the wort is good and boiling, add your liquid or dried malt extract (if you’re not awesome and have the capabilities to make an all-grain beer). Use your giant cauldron stick and stir in that goodness. Careful to not boil over, adjust your heat as necessary. Generally you’ll have to boil for about an hour, so this is the best time to, as my book tells me, “relax, don’t worry, and have a home brew.” If this is your first home brew, I recommend relaxing with a local craft brew. Keep an eye on your time if you need to add more hops, and give the wort a stir now and again.

Adding liquid malt extract to the mix

Step Four: Be Cool, Add Yeast, and Lock
Once you’re done boiling and all the grains, malts and hops are added to your wort, it’s time to cool it down and transfer to the sanitized primary fermentor. You can be super fancy get get a wort chiller. Or you can be like us and pull jugs of water from the freezer (did you remember to put those in before boiling?) and pour the cold water into the fermentor. Add your wort by siphoning, pouring, or using a funnel with a screen, just avoid adding the gunk at the bottom. Once the carboy isn’t warm to the touch (about 80 degrees) add the yeast. Stir it all up and seal with the airlock, we use vodka (or whiskey if we’re out of vodka). Keep the carboy in a cool dark place.

The hardest part is the waiting! But your beer will make it all worthwhile when it starts to bubble and foam. That’s the yeast working by eating all the sugars from the malt extract and grains. Those bubbles are helping make alcohol and are turning wort into beer. I can spend an embarrassing amount of time watching the beer bubble.

Transferring from a primary to a secondary is an activity best completed under observation

If you only need to do a primary fermentation, then you’re in luck! After a couple weeks (or longer if you’re patient) then you can bottle, which is awesome. Otherwise, get out your sanitizing gear again and clean out a secondary fermentor and siphon. Transfer beer from one fermentor to the other and you’ll have lovely clearer beer in a few weeks. While you’re waiting, if you don’t have a store of bottles built up, keep drinking! Or get some friends to donate brown, pop-top bottles to you.

Cheers!

The Simple and Complicated Life of Bread: Part I

2011-04-20T18:53:00.000-07:00

When I tell people we make our own bread they usually respond with, “Do you have a bread machine?” (that’s if their first response isn’t “You can make bread?”). Depending on my level of snarkiness that day, my usual response is: No, I have a husband. Now, I know that not all husbands make bread, but I’m pretty sure all wives would be jazzed if their husbands did. To clarify, when I say we make our own bread, that truly means my husband, Andy, makes our bread. Despite the fact that Andy prefers to be the sole bread-maker, bread making has changed both our lives. Bread may have simple ingredients, but bring fresh loaves into your life and you may get complicated (and delicious!) results.

You may start with bread, but you'll end up making pizza dough...

Andy’s bread making began with the convergence of two books; Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food and the larger-than-convenient Country Wisdom and Know-How. In Defense of Food provided the “why” of making your own bread, and Country Wisdom and Know-How presented the “how.” Andy and I both began reading labels more often at the grocery store, trying to purchase foods with the smallest ingredient list possible. We did really good at picking better foods and it was shocking to read about all the “food” we didn’t realize we were eating. One trouble spot was bread. The only bread I found with a short ingredient list cost $5 and wasn’t practical for a recent grad.

... or even spinach spaghetti!

Commercially made breads have ridiculously long ingredient lists, all to make one of the world’s most basic foods softer, whiter and sweeter. From Country Wisdom and Know-How we learned that bread is really simple (in addition to learning about how to build a rabbit hutch and weave baskets). It’s made of four basic ingredients: flour, yeast, water and salt. Andy wanted to make bread that would be inexpensive yet more nutritious than anything we could buy, so he set to work.

Andy is a tinkerer at heart and bread is an infinitely tinkerable food. This is a hobby that was destined to last. Since he started making bread he owned it. Bread is his territory, and I can be invited in, but it’s not my business. Though I am all about the taste testing. We began to buy bread less and less and with Andy’s first few loaves we realized that bread has taste, good taste, it’s not just a stale encasing for sandwich bits.

Not all bread needs to be loaf shaped, it can be braided, pretzled, or just smushed into an oblong form

To be honest, there were some bad aspects of the early breads. As with any new activity, things are not always going to turn out perfectly. A lot of my early sandwiches were held together by mustard and cheese slices, the bread was too crumbly. It took practice, patience and time. The bread was so delicious that I was fine picking it up in pieces from off the table to eat, instead of in the “traditional” slice form. We stopped buying bread altogether and would run into troubles when Andy was on bread making hiatus, we learned to live without.

Our revolutionary mixer and a honey whole wheat loaf resting.

One of the biggest breakthroughs with the bread came when we got married. A wedding gift from his parents was a KitchenAid mixer and it revolutionized our bread options. We had a garage sale bread maker at one point, but the loaves turned out large and cube-like and really didn’t improve the process that much. The mixer on the other hand was a fantastic addition. Recipes from Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise were put into rotation and delicious honey whole wheat and focaccia loaves made their way into our lives. We were eating better than ever and quite content. Andy tinkered with abandon on his recipes and I lunched on sandwiches that stayed together.

An option for a focaccia lunch, prosciutto wrapped asparagus, with dipping sauce, and of course beer.

Believe it or not there’s more to our bread lives! I’ll let you know all about the glories of stone ground flour and mayhaps share a recipe. Because it just wouldn’t be fair to talk about all this delicious food without sharing.

Herbs, Medicines, and a New Hobby

2011-04-11T17:29:00.000-07:00

With the weather getting better every day, my husband and I have been out in the garden more and more. Andy suggested splitting up our gardening duties to ensure we both take responsibility for the gardening and then we can be held accountable for our areas. I thought it was a great idea because sometimes we can forget to harvest, or weed, or water. So now we each have an area to care for, which is helpful because we keep adding garden to our garden. Andy is in charge in of vegetables and I’m in charge of herbs and flowers.

Parsley and Cilantro

Additionally (since we’re not weird enough) Andy requested a medicinal herb garden. At first I wasn’t too into this request. I wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Lotions? Teas? Brews of eye of newt and children? I didn’t know where to start with a medicinal garden, which herbs to grow and how to make them into medicines. Later on Andy specified that he wants to have an herbal remedy for headaches so he doesn’t take so much ibuprofen, and the medicinal garden is an idea he got from a tour of the Hermitage. So that sounded legitimate, less backwoods hippie-ish and potential illegal, and gave me a starting point to look into which herbs would be best to grow.

I quickly back-tracked into the backwoods hippie-ish and potential illegal frame of mind when I was found Sunday afternoon browsing in the Wicca section at the bookstore. Thankfully I didn’t find anything there and instead found a fantastic book called Grow your own Drugs by James Wong (still sounds a bit potentially illegal doesn’t it?) in the crafts section. This book is great because it spells out in plain language how to make tinctures, decoctions, and poultices. My other herbalist book just says to make a tincture or a salve with such and such ingredients, but doesn’t explain how to do any of it. Already from Mr. Wong I’ve learned what a tincture is (like tea but with alcohol), how do I make it? (chop herbs and steep in vodka), and how long does it keep? (up to 5 years).

I don't have a lot of pictures of herbs yet, so here's one of our potato plants.

Mr. Wong gives his top 10 herbs to grow if you don’t have a 5 acre lot and I was happy to discover that I already had 5 of the 10 herbs prior to his sage advice: German Chamomile, lemon balm, rosemary, marigolds (not sure if they’re the right kind though), and peppermint. Pretty good for a novice eh? You can also forage for ingredients, such as horse chestnuts, and I think that sounds fun. It’ll give purpose to some of my walks with my husband. It’s best to be careful when foraging, you don’t want to eat something that looks similar to what you want but is actually toxic. I’ll be playing it very safe when foraging. But that’s just such a fun word, forage, and it’s like treasure hunting so how can I resist?

So what can I use my herbs for already? Here is a bit of information from Grow your own Drugs.

Dill: Good for easing digestive disorders and cramping, expelling gas, treating colic, toning down bad breath.
Lemon Balm: Soothe nervous tension, relieve anxiety, promote sleep, inhibit cold sores.
Parsley: Use for a diuretic, antiseptic, helps anemia, sweetens breath.
Peppermint: Soothe digestive problems, relieve pain and tension headaches, reduce muscle spasms, relieve nasal congestion.
Rosemary: Improves memory and concentration, relaxes digestive muscles, helps mild depression, also sweetens breath.
Thyme: Is an antiseptic, expectorant, soothes sore muscles and rheumatism.
Chamomile: Helps with indigestion, colic, inflamed skin, anxiety and poor sleep. This is common in tea and can ease gout, cause relaxation. It also helps with teething pain, for all of my infant readers.
Marigold: Use as an antiseptic, anti-inflammatory, and to speed up healing, soothe sunburn and minor burns.

Here are some random healing plants that I think are fun, also from Grow your own Drugs.

Elderberry: Can be anti-inflammatory for coughs, sore throats, and bronchial infections, loosens sinuses, antiviral, also use stems for creation of wand of destiny.
Hops: Not just for beer anymore! Used as a mild sedative, calms and reduces anxiety and helps with menopause.
Chili/Cayenne Pepper: Acts as a antiseptic, stimulant, skin soother by increasing circulation and desensitizing pain, protects against gastrointestinal infections.
Marshmallow: I was pretty excited to use marshmallows for a remedy, but then I found out that in this case marshmallow is a root, not a sweet, poofy treat. Soothes and reduces inflammation, expectorant and cough preventive, also can soothe and soften skin.

Swinging the Axe

2011-04-08T15:17:00.001-07:00

You hear a lot these days of local food, locavores, and locomotion. One thing that isn’t in the mainstream, unless you’re going to a state park, is local wood. There are some benefits to harvesting the fire wood from around you instead of buying it from a big box retailer. First, it’s free, and free is always better than not free (even if not free is on sale). Second, you don’t spread pests that live in wood, such as emerald ash borer.

That sounds all well and good, but I live in the city and I don’t have acres of trees to choose from! Never fear, there are two simple ways you can get local wood, even if you’re a city dweller. First, you can look up sellers of firewood on Craigslist, there’s a surprising amount. Second, you can do what we did and wait for a windstorm to knock a bunch of trees down.

We only had a few branches/limbs fall in our yard, but we needed more wood to last us the season. Local residents were really quick about chopping up their fallen trees and placing them alongside the road. Local government was really slow about picking up said trees, and my dear husband saw his opportunity. After purchasing the correct sort of axe (there’s a difference between a log-splitting axe and a tree-felling axe) and a saw Andy discovered his new favorite activity: log splitting.

I say “we” a lot, but to be honest, I have nothing to do with this log splitting activity. I recently turned 92 and threw out my back, also my clumsiness forbids most activities with sharp, heavy objects. Andy didn’t grow up having ever split a log. He learned it the hard way, with long hours watching You-Tube videos and shards of wood banging against his shins. So if you burly men and women are a bit shy about swinging the axe (is that a euphemism?) here are some tips to harvest and store your very own local wood.

Safety First!

Wear a helmet, gloves, shoulder pads, shin guards, and a mouth gaurd, you can never be too careful.

Actually, Andy only recommends steel toe boots (if you have them), gloves, and eye protection.

Stand back an arms length away from your to-be-split log.

A piece will attack your shins at some point (or somewhere even less desirable), so keep as far away as practical.

Stack your wood chunks so that they can dry out, which means it’ll burn better later.

This is called “seasoning,” don’t mistake this for how to “season” cast iron.
It helps to keep them covered if it’s going to rain.

Get a stump of a firm surface for chopping on, this way you don’t have to lean over as far.
Don’t swing for the fences. That’s literal, don’t chop up your fence. But also, don’t try to show off whilst chopping wood. You’ll probably hurt yourself.

Sorta Sorbet

2011-04-06T18:15:00.001-07:00

I love sweets. So when someone gives me blackberries in exchange for muffins (of Muffins Madness fame), I get pretty excited. There was no way I could eat all those blackberries before they went fuzzy, so I had to figure what I could do to best utilize them. Time for sorbet!

When I don’t know how to make something the Splendid Table is one of my main go-to resources. I know the information and recipes will have been tested, and also it’s a creative and down-to-earth. Simple and straightforward is good, and that’s what I get at the Splendid Table. (This isn’t a paid advertisement by the way, I’m a public radio member so I pay them, they unfortunately, don’t pay me.)

In the case of the blackberries Hungry Woman’s Simple Sorbet pretty well stood up and said “Make me because my name explicitly describes what you are and what you want to eat.” I couldn’t argue with that logic so away went the blackberries into the freezer.

If you want to know a little trick to freeze berries so they don’t form one large berry mass follow these directions. Wash them good, dry them off, and put them on a cookie sheet and place in the freezer. This way all your berries freeze individually, so when the time comes to make your sortbet you have nice individual berries to utilize. If you’re not going to to use the berries right away, after they’re good and frozen just pour them into a zipper bag continue utilizing that space for such important tasks as frosting beer mugs. As an aside, the cookie sheet technique works well for freezing veggies and homemade meatballs as well.

The recipe infinitely improvisational. I actually didn’t have the amount of fruit called for, and I was lazy and not about to get more. All you have to do is adjust the amounts of the other ingredients slightly, since there’s not much of them it should be pretty easy. Pay particular attention to the amount of salt though. Salt lifts up flavors and in a sweet dish you shouldn’t be able to taste the salt. Inadvertently I did not proportionally decrease the amount of salt I put in my sorbet, so instead of a pinch, my sorbet had a relative dash of salt. This made for a salty sweet treat, which is what my husband likes, but not me.

Despite the saltiness this was an excellent (might I say guilt-free?) dessert. You can use any fruit you have on hand, cut out the sugar, change out the flavorings, and save many a fresh fruit from having a green, fuzzy end. I most like at the end of the recipe is that it calls not for putting the sorbet in bowls, but in teacups or wine glasses. We have these tiny purple wineglasses that never get used because a laughably small amount of wine fits in them. But they’re an heirloom and cute, so I haven’t gotten rid of them. Putting the sorbet in these little wineglasses cheered me up so much that I didn’t mind this recipe going from down-to-earth to slightly fancy.

Here’s the recipe from the Splendid Table website:

Hungry Woman’s Simple Sorbet
© 2005 Lynne Rossetto Kasper. All rights reserved.

This cross between a fruit ice and a sorbet sidesteps the usual sorbet formula of sugar syrup and smoothing out in an ice cream machine. It's crumblier and more rustic than a sorbet, and takes 3 minutes in the food processor.

The whole idea here is how to make even mediocre frozen supermarket fruit taste very fine, and how to make great frozen fruit even better. All you need are my flavor boosters: almond extract, salt and lemon. Almond lifts fruit flavor as does salt and citrus. Consider them insurance policies.

1 14-ounce bag frozen peaches, or other fruit, or 41/2 to 5 cups home-frozen fruit chunks
1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon almond extract
Pinch salt
3 tablespoons sugar, or to taste
Juice of half a small lemon

1. Turn fruit into a food processor. Add other ingredients and puree. Taste for sweetness and balance, adding more sugar or extract as needed.
2. Immediately pack into teacups or wine glasses. Top with shavings of fresh ginger, or mint, or whipped cream. Serve very cold.

Muffin Madness: Runner Muffins

2011-03-31T19:09:00.000-07:00

I received a request! This was the one and only muffin request for the month of madness, so it had to be obliged. My brother, who is training to run Grandma’s Marathon, requested a muffin that he could eat before and after a run. Preferably one that had oatmeal, banana and no nuts. To me, such a muffin should be fairly healthy and sustaining. This called for whole wheat flour and no refined sugar. It takes your body longer to break down and digest whole grains, and honey raises your blood sugar slower than refined sugar, so honey would be the only sweetener for these muffins.

Using honey instead of sugar is a bit tricky. This website was the most helpful at making the substitution. The key to cooking with honey is to realize that it’s also a liquid and takes care of some of the liquid in the recipe, as well as the sugar. It is acidic so you need more baking soda. Additionally, it browns quicker than white sugar, so turn your oven temp down 25 degrees. I did not heed this warning and the edges of my muffins crisped and almost burnt while the insides were still cooking. I’ve adjusted the oven temperature for the recipe to follow. One more thing about honey, is that it’s touted to help mitigate allergies, and local honey is best. This may not be scientifically proven, but who cares, it can’t hurt.

While my brother requested no nuts, and I actually don’t like nuts either, I was tempted to add almonds because I have a new found love for them. We had some sliced almonds already for making granola, so I borrowed some of those, whacked them a bit in a plastic bag and came up with some nice crushed almonds. I dislike eating something soft and coming upon a hard, unwelcome nut. Which is why I chose to crush up my almonds. You can add any nut you like to this recipe or skip them altogether. If you keep the nuts they’ll had some more health benefits. The sliced/crushed almonds blended well with the shape of the rolled oats, so they didn’t interfere with the texture of the muffin much.

An ice cream scoop is a handy tool for doling out batter.

Please note the wonderful texture of the batter, mmmm!

Really, this is a great recipe if you’re looking for a good healthy, sustaining muffin. Also, if you have anger that you need to get out, mashing bananas and smacking a bag of almonds is cathartic. But if they’re healthy they probably taste like cardboard, right? NO! These are quite delicious. The official muffin taster enjoyed them and said that they didn’t taste healthy. Which I take to mean that they didn’t taste like cardboard. At work these little gems went surprisingly quick considering I touted them as “good for you.” Bear in mind, I have no science or data to back up my claims of health. However, what is good for the soul must also be good for the body.

Banana mashing: more stress relieving than yoga.

Some recipe notes: I found a banana oatmeal recipe that used allspice for seasoning, most banana muffin recipes didn’t have spices and I found this intriguing. As a result of our canning last summer, the only allspice we had was whole, and I was too lazy to grind it up (I already ground the flour, that’s quite enough). So I smelled the allspice, realized it smelled a lot like cloves, which I did have, and I used those instead. It’d be lovely to try these with allspice too, but you can really use whatever spice you like. Also, my bananas were fairly large, so I used two. You don’t need an exact amount of banana, but if you feel your batter is too dry or wet, adjust the amount of milk you use to make it all okay.

The Stuff
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup rolled oats
½ cup sliced raw almonds, left as is or bashed up
2 ½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
½ tsp allspice/cloves/whatever you like
2 ripe bananas
1 egg, beaten
½ cup milk
½ cup honey
¼ cup butter, melted
1 tsp vanilla

The Process

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, oats, almonds, baking soda, salt and spice. Make a well in the center.
In a medium bowl, peel (I shouldn’t have to tell you that) and mash the bananas. Add the beaten egg, milk, butter and vanilla, whisk together thoroughly. Add the honey (this is where a kitchen scale is really useful) and stir together completely.
Add wet ingredients to dry and carefully combine. Once all ingredients are incorporated, divide into muffin tin until just to the top, there should be enough batter for 12 muffins.
Bake in a 325 degree oven for 15 to 20 minutes. Turning once. Stick a toothpick in them to make sure the centers are done, but don’t be confused if you hit a banana chunk. I believe these are best after being fully cooled.

Enjoy!

Muffin Madness: America Muffins

2011-03-27T11:16:00.000-07:00

If you don’t like these muffins you don’t like America.

My husband and I recently moved into a new house in East Nashville from the suburbs and we want to have people over to see the new digs. So we had a small party themed: America! (the idea was not mine, but my friend Monica’s). It was like Independence Day in March. But with more cold, rain, and staying inside. But we still managed to grill out, have a fire, and eat lots of food.

Of course for an America party we needed America muffins. Andy wanted to dye the muffins red or blue. When I worked at a bagel shop one summer they dyed the plain bagels red and blue, and unfortunately the colors blended and the end result was odd-looking purple bagels. So I wasn’t into dying the muffins. But I remembered making blueberry muffins once with frozen blueberries and the batter turned blue from the squished berries, so I thought that might work well. It didn’t.

Even without blue muffins, I could achieve the red, white and blue with blueberries, strawberries and a cream cheese center. And that worked just great! The official muffin tatser, Andy declared that the muffins were fluffy, though they had too much fruit to stay together well. Additionally, these were the healthiest tasting muffins he’s had in Muffin Madness. I made a strawberry cream cheese topping that even my cat Buster enjoyed while the rest of us were out around the fire.

All balled up and ready to roll.

Some recipe notes: I used up the rest of my buttermilk and then topped it off with regular (soy) milk. Either would work well for this recipe. One thing that I learned from Cookwise by Shirley Corriher is that heavy ingredients, such as blueberries and strawberries, stay up not because you dredged them in flour, but due to the thickness of the batter. As a result this is a thick batter that can hold up the berries and the cream cheese, and I stir the berries in at the end. Since the official tester thought there were too many berries, I cut the amount of each from a heaping half cup, to simply a half cup. Last, if you want to make a cream cheese topping reserve some cream cheese (I bought an 8 oz. package and used the leftovers for the topping), chop up a few strawberries, a little powdered sugar and stir together vigorously. It helps to refrigerate this and let your muffins cool completely before applying.

The Good Stuff
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
½ cup sugar
2 ½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt

1 cup milk/buttermilk (you may need just a tad over 1 cup, stir the batter together to get a feel for if you need more)
¼ cup melted butter
Zest of 1 lemon
1 egg

½ cup blueberries (fresh or frozen)
½ cup strawberries, chopped
3 oz cream cheese (or more if you’d like a topping)

The Elbow Grease

Whisk together your flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Make a well in the center.
In another bowl, beat your egg. Add milk, lemon zest, and melted butter. Stir until combined. Add chopped strawberries and blueberries.
Pour wet ingredients into dry and stir carefully until fully combined. Portion out ½ of the batter for each muffin into the tin.
Cut up cream cheese enough for 12 muffins. Roll into little balls, if you care about esthetics. Add a ball to each ½ fill muffin cup. Top with remaining batter.
Bake at 375 degrees for 15-20 minutes. Turning once. Poke with a toothpick to ensure done. Let cool completely before topping. U.S.A.!!