stacey . smoore . the staceyfish . 
Life in a Northern Town: the exploits of an ecstatic Alaskan
Lens: the adventures of a girl and her camera
I'm experiencing some technical difficulties (ie. I've totally run out of hard drive space), so I can't at the moment transfer all the photos I've taken to the computer and then to my webspace. I'm still cooking like crazy though, and here's a glimpse of recipes I've been playing with and will post in due time:
I'll try to dig through archives when time permits (but right now is the last of Alaska's summer so I'm feeling the call to get outside) and post other recipes I haven't gotten around to putting up.... Thanks for the patience :)
This bread is one of those jewels in my culinary collection: impossibly simple to prepare yet impossibly delicious, it's a great recipe to pull out when you want to serve homemade bread so fresh it's still crackling from the oven and impress your guests with your bread-baking prowess. One of the reasons this bread is perfect in this role is because when you're attempting to impress guests with the previously mentioned baking prowess, you're likely trying to impress them with other aspects of your general kitchen prowess and don't really have time to mix and knead and ferment and deflate and knead and rise and delfate and shape and proof and bake your bread. Count those steps! Just count them! While perfectly reasonable for your weekly or bi-weekly sandwich needs, it's a bit excessive when you're simultaneously trying to prepare a four-course authentic Italian meal for seven guests.
In steps the Magic Bread: the bread that has much more flavor than its four-ingredient recipe would imply and that gets those amazing "look at me and how much I rise" holes in the crumb without you ever so much as flouring a countertop or stuffing in two tablespoons of yeast. As an added bonus, the fermentation time is flexible. I often let the dough sit for longer than the recommended time, which is something you can get away with even better if you put it in a cooler place.
So, in short, this is a bread to impress. I recently served it at a dinner for friends, and one of my friends was amazed at the artisanal crust. "How did you get your crust like this?" he asked.
"Oh," I said, "I put it in a Dutch oven."
And let's just say that when your friends haven't ever heard of the cookware made famous by Le Crueset but they do associate the Dutch oven with the famous method to terrorize your spouse in bed via olafactory means, that is the most impressive answer of all.
The KitchenAid SIlicone Spoon Spatulas are a kitchen tool I really, really want to love.
The handle is nice and large, the head is shaped great for sauteeing and scraping out bowls, and the heat resistant materials are easy on all of my cookware.
The trouble is that the construction is, well, crap.
The first one I bought met its demise when its head snapped clean off right above the metal bit on the handle when I dropped it on the floor. Dropped it on the floor, people! What kind of self-respecting kitchen tool throws in the towel the moment the cook's hands get slippery? The second one kept losing its head -- the spatula part refused to stay on the handle, especially if you were using it on anything remotely sticky. It later broke in the same place as its predecessor as I was scraping kneaded bread dough out of my mixer's workbowl.
So, as much as I love these spatulas during their short time of functional life, I have to recommend that you never buy these due to their severe shortfalls in quality and durability. Save the heartache and the seven bucks and buy a different brand.
When I woke up this morning i was craving something yummy and delicious and different than my usual oatmeal. Pancakes were sounding pretty delicious, but despite my large collection of health food and whole grain cookbooks, I failed to find a recipe that met my criteria whole ingredients I already had in my pretty well-stocked pantry and fridge (curses on forgetting to buy milk last time I was at the market!) exactly what I was looking for. Then I remembered a recipe that I had discovered around last Thanksgiving.
I'm, well, a pumpkin fiend, and this recipe had some whole grains in it, so it was looking like a strong contender. And luckily, it called for soy milk (something I always keep on hand for oatmeal) instead of the from-cow variety. We have a winner!
Now might be a good time to expound on the flour I used. No, white whole wheat is not in any way related to the nutritionally devoid all-purpose flour or flour used to make white bread. It is an honest-to-god whole grain flour with all the bran and germ, but made with a different variety of wheat. Most flour comes from red wheat, which is a more strongly wheaty-tasting (and more bitter or sour to some tastebuds) flour when ground in its whole state. White whole-wheat flour is more mild and can be more readily substituted into baked goods. So when I was making these waffles in which I use a fairly heavy hand with the pumpkin pie spices, I wanted the pumpkin and the spice flavors to shine, not the wheat. Since I didn't want to sacrifice the nutrition, white whole wheat was the clear choice.
White whole wheat flour is a little more difficult to find but it is gaining in popularity since at least a few Americans want to use more healthy grains but aren't gaga over the way whole-wheat flour tastes. I use King Arthur Flour's variety, but Hodgson Mill and and Bob's Red Mill also produce it.
The flavor results of the flour substitution? Undetectable. This recipe definitely hits the spot.
Click here for the recipe for "Whole-grain pumpkin spice waffles with blueberry syrup" »