stacey . smoore . the staceyfish . 
Life in a Northern Town: the exploits of an ecstatic Alaskan
Lens: the adventures of a girl and her camera
Let's be real for a minute. We all know that beefy burgers are bad for us, right? Even if you're like me and you don't particularly like 98% of the burgers out there (the rosemary burger at the Bear Tooth Grill in Anchorage is the lone exception, in case you were wondering. And while we're on the topic of the Bear Tooth, that burger is served with scrumptious garlic-cilantro fries - utterly unfair. Again, I don't particularly like the fries at 98% of restaurants, but the Bear Tooth is the one place I will get them. Holy digression, Batman!) it doesn't change the fact that sometimes you just want to eat something that you can hold like a burger, like a sandwich piled so high you have to unhinge your jaw just to shove it in. Ahi burgers are a great way to fill this niche, but what if you live in, ahem, a desert and have spotty access to good seafood?
A lot of people turn to gardenburgers, and they are... oh, how do I put this delicately?... absolute rubbish. I once heard a Brit say that the idea repulsed him, since they call their lawns gardens over there, and he imagined it being full of yard clippings. Really, I don't think he was far off the mark.
So, because of those disgusting facsimiles of real food, vegetarian burgers get a bad rap that they truly don't deserve. Done right, they're substantial and full of flavor. No, they don't taste like beef, but they're not supposed to, and in my opinion, they're much more delicious than all but 2% of the cow burgers out there. They're far more healthy and honestly I think they're even heartier and more filling.
You may be thinking "Sure, Stacey, it's obvious that a tree-hugger like yourself would love these, but what about people who really enjoy meat?" I'll bring in Exhibit A, The Hubs, one who is much happier than me to eat beef. He actually requests these on a regular basis, so, to borrow an awesome phrase from Heather, they get the stamp of Manproval!
Of course, in a recipe like this ingredients matter. I can't stress enough how much better these are when used with heirloom beans that I know to be less than a year old, as opposed to the five-to-ten years-old beans that you'll find in on supermarket shelves. As usual, I have been gaga over the results I've gotten with Rancho Gordo midnight black beans, but you will still get good results with supermarket beans - you will just need to cook them longer and use more aromatics and spices to flavor them. Canned beans will work just fine too if you want to make these on short notice.
I think that the only thing that could really make these black bean burgers even better is a good homemade whole-wheat burger bun. I have yet to branch out into those but I shall soon! These were photographed on bagels that had been baked that day. Unconventional, yes, but who am I to say no to using whatever fresh homemade bread I have on hand as an alternative to store-bought buns?
So pull out your stores of black beans and get a-soakin'. Treat yourself to a real black bean burger and revel in the fact that you can finally have a burger that tastes great and is actually good for you!
Click here for the recipe for "Black bean burgers with chipotle ketchup" »
By now, you've probably been able to tell that I'm having a love affair with Rancho Gordo beans. They're just so damn good (and good for you) - I can't help trying to put them into every food imaginable. I love them so much that someone who possibly lives in my house may have possibly placed an order for 45 pounds of beans from them a couple of weeks ago. My thinking was that I was buying a year's worth of beans, but at the rate I'm finding fantastic recipes, the ten pounds of garbanzos may only last a couple of months. We're not even going to mention the fifteen pounds of black beans and fifteen pounds of borlottis that arrived in the same shipment. But I digress.
I've recently started reading the Rancho Gordo blog and was ecstatic to find this particular recipe on there last week. It sounded so delicious, so healthy, and so satisfying, that I had to hurry up and make some chicken stock post-haste (as we had just run out two days before - like I've said before, the stuff burns a hole in my freezer) so that I could put this soup on the table.
Clearly, I hadn't really been paying attention when I read up on the ingredients - I must have just been skimming for the produce I would need to add to the grocery list. So I didn't really notice that it called for cinnamon until I was mise en place-ing everything. It was such a pleasant surprise though - we Americans are really missing out by regarding cinnamon as a wholly sweet spice rather than something that can be used to great effect in savory dishes. It brought a whole new dimension to the soup: adding a fullness not otherwise present and bringing to mind the most comforting of comfort foods. Try this on a cold, dreary winter night with a glass of lush cabernet and discover it for yourself!
Click here for the recipe for "Chickpea soup with Swiss chard and barley" »
Right now I've got bagels for the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge retarding in the fridge, but I decided that I'm kinda overdosing on all that white flour and it's high time that I posted a whole grain bread. This particular bread is one of my favorites for its challenges, its fun, and its textures and I can't believe that it's taken me more than two years to get around to sharing it.
First, its challenges: this bread contains a lot of chewy, delicious bulgar wheat berries. However, all those grains can really get in the way with the formation of long gluten strands. As a result, I don't usually achieve the humongous rise that my basic whole wheat and oatmeal loaves have spoiled me with, but really, it's ok - the flavor more than makes up fr it! Also, this dough is very soft and slippery (more on that later), which means that if you start daydreaming while you're supposed to be focusing on push, fold, rotate, push, fold, rotate, then it could end up shooting across the room. Now, the last challenge: occasionally the dough will tear, freeing an avalanche of bulgar across the kneading board. Not to worry, you'll learn soon enough how to poke the grains back into the dough, conceal the tear with a couple of folds, and keep kneading like a pro. Crisis managed!
Secondly, this dough is a lot of fun. This was my first truly enriched bread and it uses a novel way to incorporate the butter into the dough: you smear it across the board and let the dough soak it up as you knead! It's pretty ingenious, and if it wasn't for the bulgar dotting the surface of the dough it would be the poster child for satiny and supple. It also makes the dough very soft, so if you're looking for the culprit causing the above challenges, look no further.
Thirdly, the texture of this bread is just out of this world. In addition to the butter doing marvelous things to the taste and texture, the buttermilk acts as a dough conditioner, making it even lighter, more complex, and more delicate tasting. Throughout baking, the bulgar keeps its toothy texture and it even makes me want to nibble at the bread little by little, picking out the grains so I can eat them separately. If you can tear yourself away from eating it plain, it's pretty devastating on a sandwich piled high with some home-roasted chicken and some fresh produce.
So if you're in the mood for a whole-grain bread that is still wholesome and delicious but puts a new spin on the old formula, try this recipe on for size. It's well worth the effort!
I've never been a big fan of rice. The way Americans do it is just so... blah. Brown rice suffers even more than the typical white rice. Some inspiration is needed, and fast!
We're not going to even talk about boxed products like Rice A Roni - all I can taste is chemicals, and if you're daring enough to face the three-inch list of ingredients, you'll find MSG or its precursors. Yuck! Many people have tried to liven up rice by adding chicken broth or stock, but this too is problematic. If you use commercial broth, you're left with something unpalatably salty. If you use homemade stock, the gelatin interacts with the grains somehow, leaving a gross, sticky mess that is incapable of absorbing all of its cooking liquid. I have tried many, many times to find a good water-to-stock ratio that will flavor the rice but won't leave it gummy and waterlogged but have failed every time. Clearly, another approach is in order.
First off, I gave up any hope in making plain brown rice interesting. I needed to infuse some other flavors, and fast. So one day at a local health food store, I parked myself in front of the bulk bins and started picking and choosing some different grains to make my rice more interesting and more textured. I was very happy with my chosen blend - brown rice, wild rice, wheat berries, and rye berries - because it definitely had more flavor and it had a marvelous toothiness to it, but I still wanted more.
To find something suitable, I took my cue from a land where rice is actually a staple grain, figuring that they, of all people, would know how to make it interesting. I settled upon some inspiration from spiced Indian rice dishes that I love so well and opted for a pilaf that begins with whole spices. This, too, was better, but it still needed something more. Little by little, I whittled my way down to the solution, adding and subtracting things, until last night, I finally hit upon a solution I loved. Even The Hubs liked it! At long last, rice - and most especially, healthy brown rice - has been delivered from tasteless purgatory.
Ain't life grand when you have the luxury of throwing a pizza in the oven on a Friday night? And isn't it even better when that pizza is homemade? We definitely hold by that line in our house.
I've always eschewed the line "Even when it's bad, it's still pizza" (quit rolling your eyes, I know that comes as no surprise whatsoever if you've even spent two minutes reading this blog) and I take great joy in making every component for my pizza that I can. Really, it's the only way you know you're going to get a good one.
I love to use pesto as a base for pizza, especially in the summer. Few things give me more pleasure than shearing my basil plants (Fred has recovered from his confined-to-a-pot days and is loving all the room he has to stretch his roots, for those of you who had met him when he wasn't looking so hot), bringing the green stuff inside, and pulling the leaves off the stems. It fills the kitchen with a wonderful aroma!
The only problem with fresh pesto is that it's really easy to overdo it on the garlic, especially if you're like me and habitually triple - at a minimum - the amount of the tasty stuff called for in a recipe. Luckily, I ran across a technique with which you toast the unpeeled garlic cloves on the stove to mellow out that bite it's known for. It works like a charm and I no longer have to work about whether or not I'm going to OD on garlic. You just have to make sure to toast up enough so that you have extra to put on top of the pizza!
The only thing left to do is to load it up with other high-quality ingredients. Once you've done all of this, you'll have created a pizza night to remember!
Lasagna - there is so much to love about it. It's cheesy, it's gooey, it's a meal in itself, it's comfort food. It's easy to make to boot. This was something I could make in my dorm kitchen, following the recipe on the back of the Barilla box. What that recipe lacked in finesse it made up for in cheese. Not that we minded - we were college students starved for a homemade meal, and so we always had fun popping this into the ovens in the dorm kitchens, opening a bottle of wine, and making a meal such that we were the envy of most dorm residents.
Now that I'm out of college though, that cheese-laden flavor-lacking thoroughly Americanized version isn't going to cut it anymore. And that Souffer stuff? Forgetaboutit. Why oh why would you buy something like that when lasagna is like the easiest thing to make ever??? Anyway, I'd been looking for a good recipe for a several years until this winter when we had a dinner party at my swim coach's house and my friend Ginger brought a tray of the most fantastic lasagna. It had just the right amount of cheese and wasn't greasy and had some substantial herbs to it, which is really something that most recipes lack. So what did I do? I asked her for the recipe, of course.
"Oooh, I don't know, I'll have to ask my mom about it!" Apparently the lasagna recipe is akin to a state secret - Ginger's mom worked really hard to develop the recipe (it shows!) and only gave it to her daughters under the condition that they would keep it as proprietary information. Lucky for me though, Carol agreed that it was ok for Ginger to give me the recipe because I had shared my family's pumpkin cookie with her. Totally a great swap, if you ask me. And in case you're wondering, yes, I do have permission to share this recipe on this blog! I've modified it only a little bit, because the core premise of the recipe is so solid. It uses cottage cheese instead of ricotta, which I think is a really great idea because it's really tough to find good ricottas in the States. I absolutely love the sauce that you make for the recipe, and it's fantastic with both either and turkey Italian sausages. I did substitute dried Italian herbs for dried basil because basil's flavor is so volatile in the presence of heat and the dried version retains so little of the fresh's flavor - but I just added in the fresh basil later in the recipe. The overall effect of the recipe is a way-less heavy version of the typical lasagna, but still retains all of the flavor that you want.
Thank you so much, Carol, for sharing this recipe with me! You did an awesome job creating this lasagna and I really appreciate being let in on the secret!
"Ugh! I hate Italian pizza! It's so gross! It's not even Italian, it was invented in New York! Let me eat the pizza at Boston's, it's so good!"
Wait for it....
KA-BLAMMO!
Yep. That was my head exploding.
It exploded not for just one, but three very good reasons.
1. Hating Italian pizza is impossible. The ingredients are so fresh and the results so simple that it's quite simply easier to divide by zero than to hate it.
2. I'm not a food anthropologist, but I'm gonna call shenanigans on pizza originating in New York. The research I've done shows that it in fact came from Naples. It's funny how a place can do such great things (invent pizza) and such monumentally stupid things (like stop collecting all the garbage so it piles up to third story windows). But I digress.
3. Boston's pizza (god, I feel dirty typing in that URL for that link) is disgusting. You all know that I get pissed about paying good money for bad food, and not much makes me angrier than having to go there and pay the bill. In fact, the first time I ever went there (my bosses love it so we go there all the time for working lunches, much to my chagrin) I was sitting across from someone who had just read a few of my thoughts on restaurants and he could tell on the look on my face that I was livid about paying seventeen bucks for a shitty meal that I could have made one hundred and twenty times better by just lifting a finger and giving a shit about the food I was preparing. Anyway, their pizza is even worse than that first meal - a salmon caesar salad - that I had: the cheese was laid on way too thick and rubbery as only really bad American-made mozzarella can be, the crust suffered from being stuffed with ten times as much yeast as it needed to rise which made it utterly bland and sour, and the basil - this was supposedly pizza Margherita - was DRIED. DRIED, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???
*steps aside to breathe for a moment.... long deep breaths....*
Ok, I apologize for that "Oh FUDGE!" moment there. I just get sent into spasms of anger when I think about that place. Let's get back to my happy place, and for me right now, that happy place is homemade pizza, even if, no matter how hard you try, it's not quite like the Italians make it.
For some reason I don't make pizza as much as I should. There's really no reason not to - I have a wealth of dough recipes whose prep times vary from 24 hours to 90 minutes. My pantry is always stocked with the requisite ingredients for the crust and toppings. I even have two 8-inch pizza stones, perfect for a cozy binge-free pizza night. But for some reason, I just... don't.
Well, I had been craving good pizza for a couple of weeks and last Friday it because wholly apparent that that night was the night. The stars were aligned - the grocery stores were hemorrhaging fresh (FRESH! Not DRIED!) basil, I had plenty of fresh mozzarella in my fridge, and I had made a batch of marinara the night before. All I had to do was find a dough recipe.
So I called up my Mom. When I talk to him on the weekends, it's not uncommon for my Dad to give me a rundown of the pizza my Mom made the previous Friday and for him to gush about how her pizza gets better every single week. No dice on the recipe from the Mom front though - she was really busy with some elderly relatives, no big deal, it's not like she's the sole source of pizza dough ever (though I still want her recipe!). So at one point, needing to get my current events fix, I brought up NPR and lo and behold, on their rotating blurbs about featured stories, was a Kitchen Window ad, whose topic just so happened to be pizza. It was like the skies had parted and I was sitting in my own little personal ray of sunlight. I was fated to make pizza that night. The gods had willed it to be so.
So when I got home, I got to work on my pizza. After the dough was done rising, I attempted to get the dough nice and thin, but the thing about kneading is that it make dough very elastic. Every time I stretched out the dough it just shrank right back up. I eventually adopted the mannerisms of a, well, special Italian, trying to toss this tiny disc of dough up into the air, catch it on one finger, and let gravity do the work. It certainly worked better than countertop stretching, but clearly, my method needs work if I am to continue to aspire to Italian-standard thinness.
Thicker-crust-than-desired aside, this pizza was marvelous! I loved the warm, garlicky, basily sweetness of the sauce, topped with just a bit of mozzarella a plenty of fresh torn basil, all atop a crispy, grain-flavored crust. That pizza was not long for this world, and though I expect that it would have made a mean cold pizza breakfast, it never got the opportunity to prove itself. But even though I loved the process, the experience, and the taste so much, I think the best thing that came out of it was the inspiration to try again with a myriad of toppings. That's one of the best things about pizza - almost anything is a choice candidate to grace your pie, so you're only limited by your imagination.
And if you still think the pizza from Boston's is better than this, well, do us both a favor and don't ever talk to me about food. Unless, of course, you like watching my head explode.
Click here for the recipe for "Pizza Margherita, take due" »
Muffins get a bad rap, and none more so than bran muffins. See, regular muffins are sugar-and-oil fests, full of empty calories, and most bran muffins are healthy but, well, made of twigs. Can there be a happy medium between these two extremes?
Of course there can be! Enter my breakfast-on-the-go juggernaut, the 150% whole grain banana nut muffin! Now, you may be asking yourself how the hell something can be 150% whole grain, and here's your answer: grains are made up of the germ, the bran, and the endosperm. White flour and other processed grains get poo-pooed (and deservedly so) because the nutritious and tasty germ and bran are removed, leaving behind the starchy endosperm which, while semantically being a complex carbohydrate, is treated by your body just like sugar, a simple carbohydrate. While most muffins are made of only white flour, this recipe is made up of whole-wheat flour (germ, bran, endosperm), oats (again, germ, bran, endosperm), wheat germ, and oat bran. Lots of good-parts-of-the-grain yumminess, see?
An astute reader like yourself may have picked up on the fact that while a couple of those ingredients are the fiber- and nutrient-rich parts of the grain, they do not in fact contain all three parts. So I guess it's not technically whole-grain, but really, when you're only removing the bad stuff and keeping the good stuff it's easy to see that it has way more of the good stuff than the bad stuff, so it's like an endosperm with twice the bran and twice the germ, and hence, 150% whole grain! Don't argue with me on this one, I majored in math and I'll come up with some convoluted argument to prove that It Is So.
So that's enough science geekery, let's stop talking nutrition and start talking yumminess!
This recipe is awesome because it manages to be low-fat without tasting overly low-fat. Yes, when you bite into these muffins you can tell that they are healthy and nutritious, but they are still wonderfully moist and flavorful. That's because applesauce, oil's favorite understudy, has gotten its chance to shine in this recipe, and when it teams up with the bananas you get a moist, remarkably un-twig-like consistency. When you add in things like toasted pecans, flax, raisins, and the grains, you get a complex flavor profile that keeps your tastebuds happy.
These are ideal for early-morning athletes and snooze-button-hitters since they are easy to take with you and eat, ensuring you get those morning calories your metabolism needs to function properly throughout the day. I always eat one on the way to swimming in the morning and if I think there's a chance I won't get to eat my daily oatmeal I always bring along a couple extra to tide me over until lunch. That's another benefit to this muffin's ingredients: in addition to being flavorful, they also keep you full for a long time. So what's not to love? Skip that chemical delight breakfast you were going to grab on your way out the door and eat one of these instead!
Click here for the recipe for "150% whole grain low-fat banana nut muffins" »
Tonight was Cooking Binge Night (bread, muffins, sandwich meat, chicken cacciatore, minestrone soup, oatmeal...). I'm going to be starting a very unpleasant work week tomorrow night and will have zero time for cooking so I had to get it all done tonight.
Last night I was supposed to start a batch of bread and let it do its twenty-four hour thang. But sleepier heads prevailed and I went to bed without so much as pulling the yeast out of the fridge.
Y'know, it must be a pretty sweet life to be yeast. Just think about it: you're born, you go to sleep, then you get woken up with huge feast and you eat like crazy for a couple of hours, and then you die. Along the way, it's not only normal and accepted to, well, burp and fart, it's required.
Yep, those little critters have it pretty good. Don't let anyone tell you that being a single-celled organism is dull.
But I digress.
So I finally got around to starting the bread tonight. I had forgotten to put oatmeal or any other grain on so that was right out and needed to find a recipe make. I was tempted by my herbs de provence loaf but realized that the only blend I had on hand was the one with anise. Yuck. So I took a page from L'Aroma and settled on a rosemary loaf.
As I was kneading and shaping (and waiting) I was thinking about how I would post this (I know, I'm such a nerd). I was originally going to post it as a variation on the herbs de provence loaf, but....
See, the loaves came out of the oven, and they were exceptional. They rose impossibly high - so high that the bread was so light that I had to slice very carefully so I didn't smoosh it. And the flavor - I can't believe it, it's so delicious. The wheat brings out the best in the rosemary - even though I used a very heavy hand with the herb the flavor is well-rounded, delicate, and almost sweet. I never thought I'd say it, but I think my version is way better than L'Aroma's Pan Marino. Theirs is a white bread with sea salt sprinkled on top and I really think the rosemary needs something more than refined flour. Rosemary is a fantastic herb, but really, it's not that good on it own. It needs something to support its flavors. I've known that for a while, but I never would have guessed that whole wheat would be the perfect complement.
Click here for the recipe for "Whole wheat rosemary bread" »
Growing up, I never quite understood why chicken noodle soup was supposed to be such great comfort food. Then again, all I had had back then were Campbell's or otherwise canned versions, and frankly, I think it would be more comforting to be beaten up with a can of soup than it would be to eat that not-very-chickeny-really-freakin'-salty-and-gross stuff.
But then I remembered my Mom's famous turkey soup. It wasn't so different from a chicken noodle soup, yet it was infinitely tastier. Maybe there was hope for this much-maligned recipe after all...
I first tried my hand at a, well, decidedly modern take on the stuff that I found in the Mayo Clinic cookbook. It had a chicken stock and soy milk base with edamame in the soup, and well.... it was weird. I didn't like it. But then.... last winter I was just getting into making my own stock and had had wild success with using it as the base for soups - even with recipes I had panned when I had made them with commercial chicken broth (forgive me, for I knew not what I had done). So I got to thinking that maybe it was time to give chicken noodle soup another shot, and this time I was determined to give it a fair shot.
Disillusioned by my first disaster with the stuff, I swore off recipes and struck off on my own. Amazingly, I hit paydirt on my first try. I had stumbled upon the First Law of Soups (anything made with a homemade stock is guaranteed to not be bland, boring, or disgusting) and the Second Law of Soups (always cook your noodles or grains in the stock).
Unfortunately, stock tends to burn a hole in my freezer. I just can't keep the stuff on hand, I use it as soon as I make it. If I do happen to have some in there, I'm usually saving it for something specific. But tonight I found myself with quarts and quarts of it in my freezer, even above and beyond what I will need for my upcoming minestrone soup. I also just so happened to have the salvaged chicken from my last pot of stock handy, and I realized that once again, this soup's time had come. I mean, it's been a tough week. I could use some comfort food. Thankfully, I've finally found a way for this time-honored classic to actually be comforting.
Click here for the recipe for "Actually comforting chicken noodle soup" »
Imagine 100% whole grain bread bought from the grocery store: bland, bitter, gross.
Now, I'd like you to completely forget that.
Instead, I'd like you to imagine a bread that's fluffy, tender, mellow, rich, and complex.
That bread is also 100% whole grain. The difference? It's been made by hand with a secret ingredient -- cooked oatmeal. This bread is outstanding for all purposes but makes a singularly spectacular sandwich -- especially when paired with homemade roasted chicken, red leaf lettuce, and tomatoes.
As I write this, there are a couple of loaves rising in the kitchen. I practically start to salivate when I think about the utter sensory bliss that this bread will bring about. I often wonder why I bother making any other recipes at all -- this one is that good. It's even better when you use fancy leftover oatmeal that's been cooked with cinnamon and buttermilk - the cinnamon complements the bread in a savory way somehow and manages to not remind you at all of sweet cinnamon raisin bread, and the buttermilk conditions the dough to give it a special tenderness. It's just utterly fabulous and unique - you won't find anything like it in a bakery!
I first got trapped in this recipe's tractor beam one day while flipping through my favorite baking book, Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. Here's what the author has to say about this particular bread:
"When ... made with rolled oats, the bread is light and bright; it has a rich creamy flavor -- very subtle, but with great warmth... You get bread good for toast, good for any kind of sandwich. We consider this one of the best basic breads for everyday eating."
Hear, hear! They speak the truth -- this bread performs as advertised! Let me know if you need convincing... you may just end up with a loaf or two on your hands.
Click here for the recipe for "100% whole grain oatmeal bread" »
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" »
Who doesn't love biscotti? This Italian twice-baked crispy cookie is wonderful with a cup of espresso or an after-dinner cordial, but let's admit it: sometimes we get tired of the usual almond or lemon flavor.
Enter the humble cranberry and pistachio, the two secret ingredients that make the flavor much brighter and crunch more satisfying. I like this recipe so much that when
I recently learned my friend Jeremy was studying for his impending bar exam and I resolved to make him some yummy treats for a morale package. Cookies were a given, but what else to add? And it occurred to me: Jeremy is probably drinking lots of coffee right now, so biscotti were the logical choice to add to the list of goodies. Using this recipe was a no-brainer. I mean, we all love chocolate and I make a mean chocolate-almond biscotti, but I ended up eschewing this because Jeremy doesn't like almonds in cookies. Surely he has access to lots of great biscotti (he lives in Seattle!) so needed a departure from biscotti boredom.
He, it seems, agreed. They were the highest-rated of the three types of baked goods I sent him, and he called them "exceptional." The bonus? These are relatively healthy (for a cookie, at least), so feel free to indulge in an extra one or two the next time your nose is stuck in a book and your hand is cramping from all of the essays you're writing.
Click here for the recipe for "Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti" »
My love affair with pizza margherita can be traced back to my absolute smittenness with caprese salad. It's really not all that surprising -- you start with basic, fresh, delicious ingredients, then you put it on a pizza. What could go wrong????
I had made this pizza before about two years ago. The first time, Cory was my dining companion and instead of a tomato sauce base we used freshly made pesto and topped the pizza with tomato slices. Delicious, but I would recommend custom-making the sauce for the pizza and using a lighter hand with the oil, as it will mix with the fat in the mozzarella. While I loved it, it certainly wasn't truly authentic.
So, of course, when Cory and I went to Italy, one of the things I had to eat over there was the pizza margherita. We wasted no time on that count -- our first lunch in Florence was in a trattoria outside of the city's famous Mercato Centrale. Cory had a pizza topped with prosciutto and I, of course, indulged my tricolore tastebuds.
The pizza was unlike any I had ever had before. The crust was very, very thin but not cracker-crunchy and the sauce was, for lack of a better description, true tomato red. I thought it was pure, simple, and delicious, and Cory was known to say "the sauce is so fresh it still had seeds in it!" The pizzas we were served were probably a good 12 inches, but they were nowhere near as heavy as their American counterparts. Since we had had a typically light Italian breakfast and had been walking all day and climbed to the very very top of the duomo (the Santa Maria del Fiore) Cory polished his off easily. I packed my leftovers out and devoured them later that day.
Of course, upon returning to the States, I wanted to make it, but the whole-grain fiend in me wanted a whole wheat crust. I finally found a recipe for it, and of course wasted no time making it. Next time I make it I will probably try to lengthen the rising time (true Stacey fashion) and I will make my crust much much thinner, even if I have to discard some dough. And I will buy a pizza peel. Save yourself the anguish -- buy one too!
Click here for the recipe for "Pizza Margherita with a Whole Wheat Crust" »
Since I've discovered all of the wonderfully yummy things you can do with bread, making plain ol' whole wheat just seems so... blasé. You can add herbs or bulgar wheat or seeds or oats or hundreds of other things. So when I got back from my honeymoon I wanted to make something delicious, but since I was tired I didn't want it to be too taxing. I was looking for the ease that comes with familiarity with a recipe.
I first gravitated towards an herb bread I've made before. That particular recipe is labeled as a good soup bread because it will rise and bake and give you a wonderfully high-rising loaf in about the time it takes to make a pot of soup, but there was so much yeast in it (how else could you get such eye-pleasing results that quickly without it?) that it was very sour and not very yummy.
So, I'll admit it -- I took the basic whole wheat bread I've posted here and just added herbs to it. There is something special about it though -- this bread is the first I'd used the long-rise methods with. I was simply amazed with the results! Allow me to extoll the virtues of long-fermented bread once again:
The dough was a joy to work with. It was soft, supple, contained plenty of air to press out during deflating, rounding, and shaping, and shaped more easily than any loaf I've ever formed. It also filled out the loaf pan completely -- all the way to the corners -- something no yeast dough of mine has done before.
In short, this loaf defied my already raised expectations. I had looked forward to a loaf with superior flavor but stiff dough and a lackluster rise. Instead, I feel like I'm eating bread like it is supposed to be now -- light, airy, wholesome, with great texture, flavor, and shape. Consider me a long dough convert! (A note: my bread-baking methods have improved considerably since this picture was taken -- I now achieve oven spring with each loaf. Next time I bake it I'll post a new picture of the impossibly high-risen loaf.)
Click here for the recipe for "Whole wheat bread with herbs de provence" »
Bread baking has become a bit of an obsession of mine. As I mentioned in my writeup for The Herbed Bird, I started doing it around Thanksgiving when I got really, really tired of store-bought bread and realized that I could probably do a much better job myself.
Well, I turned out to be right. Since I had never kneaded before and didn't have anyone to show me how to do it, it took me a couple of months to really figure out what the heck I was doing. My first couple of loaves were, well, bricks, but they were much better tasting bricks than the stuff you buy from the grocery store! I probably wasn't doing myself any favors by skipping the refined flour either -- ask just about anyone who bakes bread and they'll tell you that whole wheat bread is much more difficult to make. I didn't care -- I was going to make delicious whole wheat bread and that was final.
I did see many improvements in my bread over time, as my mom came to visit and showed me how to knead, as I read more on the subject, and finally, as I bought the cookbook that taught me just about everything that matters about whole-grain bread baking, Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. The acquisition of my Kitchen Aid stand mixer might have something to do with it too. Once all that came together, I started making what I would consider very good bread.
About a month ago though, I started making what I would call outstanding bread. I credit this entirely to the low temperatures long-rise method outlined in the book mentioned above. By letting the dough ferment for 24 hours instead of the usual 3, you get incredibly light dough whose flavors have developed marvelously without any of that sour taste that is so often found in bread. Let me assure you that you do not need to stuff two teaspoons of yeast into your dough to get your loaf to rise! I also find it much easier to fit this rising-deflating pattern into my daily life. I can make bread any day of the week with this method because I do not need to block off six hours to attend to dough that must be deflated every hour or so. Another bonus: for reasons that I can't explain, the loaf is more nutritious and keeps longer than its rushed cousin.
So what are you waiting for??? Go make this loaf! I find it's perfect for anything from sandwiches to toast to eating with soup to dipping in olive oil. You (and anyone you bestow this magnificent loaf upon) can thank me later.
Growing up, while probably no different than most other American households, I was familiar with startlingly few grains. I knew of wheat, oats, rice, and.... that's about it. Since I've struck out of my parents' house own and have had a kitchen -- and some cookbooks! -- to call my own, I've been making a conscious effort to branch out.
This recipe is adapted from one of my favorite cookbooks. It's odd that it's one of my favorites, give that I'm usually somewhat dissatisfied with the way the recipes turn out. Luckily, the recipes are usually a good 70% solution and I find it very easy to take their recipes and solve dissatisfaction with a few simple -- and still healthy -- substitutions. The original recipe for this dish called for (perfectly revolting) mushrooms but still lacked a thing or two in terms of taste and color. So I varied the cooking method a little bit, added in some much needed flavor, and here is the result!
Click here for the recipe for "Quinoa Pilaf With Arugula and Sun-dried Tomatoes" »
I've always been a breakfast person. Not really in the way that many other Americans are, where they like lots of eggs and bacon and other really unhealthy and non-nutritious foods, but more in the way that I like to get something healthy in my tummy that will stick with me until my mid-morning snack. This is sufficiently different, versatile, receptive to substitutions, and, of course, yummy, to meet all of my needs. They do take longer to cook than their gloppy rolled cousin, so I cook a week's worth at a time and reheat as I need it. Nowadays it's impossible to open my fridge without finding a massive batch of these oats, just waiting for their turn to be consumed.
And just look at them! It's easy to see why!
Click here for the recipe for "Indulgent Irish oatmeal with berries" »