A butcher with a passion, his job. From a 95 kilo pig only 500 gr. are thrown away.
A very good short clip showing, in a beautiful way, where our pork chops are coming from.
The Pig & The Butcher from Paper Fortress on Vimeo.
Vatican Assassin Warlock (I’m Winning!)
A few weeks ago I was reading Feed. Feed is the blog for America’s Test Kitchen. It’s a great resource and supplement to working in the kitchen. To my delight, they announced they were giving away 5 scholarships to their new online cooking school- to food bloggers! Well you can imagine how exciting this was for me! Naturally I wanted it- Lord knows I need it! I entered my blog, and was fortunate enough to be chosen! I’m so excited to be a part of this. As you guys know I’m a new cook- this is going to help me immensely on so many levels and in so many recipes!
Here’s how it works: I was chosen to focus on the lessons about making pies, specifically apple pies. I will follow the lessons on making pie and write a blog post about it that will be featured on Feed this summer. (Apple pie in the summer! How perfect!) Until then, I’m going to be exploring the cooking school and learning as much as I can! How cool is this? My intention is to post about the cooking school here on my own blog once a week. I’ll share with you whatever lesson it is that I’m working on at that time, it may or may not be about pies, you never know! I will post photos and maybe even videos of myself “in class”.
Today we had our first conference call between my fellow winning bloggers and Bridget, Amy, Steph and other folks from America’s Test Kitchen. What a nice group of food lovers! And I am already learning!! I have found out that my latest obsession can be improved . Stay tuned friends! Things are about to get seriously delicious up in here! I’m Winning!
Game changer.
YOU can make this bread!
Wow! What an incredible week I have had here on the blog! Those of you who have been here lately are probably here because you found me on the Word Press Freshly Pressed page. How exciting that was! And what profound change in my blog traffic for those two days. Thank you to everyone who visited and read about my muffins, It is really amazing to know how many people are out there! I was so blessed and honored by so many of you who took the time to say hello and to offer compliments. I thank you for that! It really lifted me up! Thank you to everyone, and to you who are here reading today about this unbelievable bread.
So, today I’m writing to you about bread. I was not planning to write about bread, I was going to write about cake. I’m sure there is a joke in there somewhere about “let them eat cake” and I agree, “let them eat cake…. I’m eating BREAD!.” Bread. Bread. Bread. Bread is such an issue isn’t it? I always say there’s just no good bread in my neighborhood. There is one place that opened down the road that sells artisan baked bread. And this particular Baker has delicious bread. But it’s expensive, and I really don’t like going every day. Most breads that I enjoy eating go bad after one day- so it IS a daily dilemma for me. When I go to my normal grocery store such as Kroger, there is no bread there. That place is a bread desert. They try to cook bread but it’s not right. It’s soft, it’s mushy, it’s gross. One of my other favorite stores have it, but they are a 15 minute drive. It’s a problem. I want to make bread. I LONG to make GREAT bread!
Yes, yes I’ve been making bread. I’ve made a few loaves. I’ve made a cinnamon raisin bread, I’ve made honey wheat bread, (by accident) I’ve made breadsticks, pitas and crackers of all sorts and of course the biscuits! But things changed in my life today. Today I found out I can make bread that is better than I can buy. I’m going to say that again because it’s true and I believe it. I can easily bake better bread than I can buy. The good news is so can you!
flour trails
Somehow a few days ago I found Mark Bittman’s recipe via youtube video of no knead bread. He was at Sullivan Street bakery in New York making bread with the Jim Lahey. They demonstrated in the video how easy it is to make this bread. I watched the video couple of times and went Googling to find the recipe written down. I found it here. My 1st batch did not work. This recipe calls for 1 5/8 cups of water. I mixed my dry ingredients with 1 5/8 cups of water with total confidence that it would work, no problem. I covered it with plastic wrap, set it on top of my toaster (the toaster was off but I did turn on my undercounter lights.)That was a mistake. 18 hours later it had been too warm. It was a gloppy watery mess. The truth is it didn’t look right when I first mixed it up but I went on. Maybe it’s because were down here in Houston and it’s so humid, I don’t know. I made a change though- the second batch I used only 1 1/2 cups water. It was perfect!
This is the easiest beautiful bread in the world to make. I cannot tell you how thrilled I am. I probably will make this bread every day. EVERYDAY. I’m not kidding. No. I. Am. Not. Kidding.
I'm no expert, but that looks pretty darn good!
Here’s what to do:
Mix the flour the salt and the yeast together in a medium-size bowl. Use a whisk to mix the dry ingredients. Pour the water into the dry ingredients and mix with your hands until shaggy and just barely coming together. You don’t have to make sure it’s all perfect. Please don’t try to make sure it’s perfect just leave it alone. (Watch the video to see what I mean. My 1st batch I tried to mix too much, of course it had too much water in my opinion) Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and sit it aside for 12 to 18 hours. Heavily flour your work surface, pour the mixture out of the bowl onto the counter. Sprinkle some more flour on top and on your hands so that the dough does not stick to you. Fold the dough over itself once or twice and then cover loosely with your plastic wrap and let rest for 15 minutes. It seems like this step isn’t really necessary. What difference could 15 min. make? It makes a huge difference! The dough starts to bubble and get happy!
While you’re waiting for the dough to get happy for 15 minutes- take a smooth flat surfaced “cotton flour sack- type” tea towel and heavily coat it with flour or bran or coarse cornmeal. After 15 minutes has passed, remove the plastic from your dough. Sprinkle your hands with flour, gently press the dough down into a circle. Don’t be rough here! Just gently press it down so that you don’t burst the bubbles that we spent so much time creating. Sprinkle the dough with flour and fold the dough bottom to top, top to bottom, right and left into the center- shaping a ball. Place this ball seam side down on top of the floured tea towel. Sprinkle the top of your dough with more bran or corn meal. Place another tea towel lightly on top- then place one more tea towel on top of that. Let dough rest and rise for 2 hours. It will double in size.
Once you have put your dough to bed for an hour and a half or so- put a 6 to 8 quart covered cast-iron pot, or your favorite Dutch oven that has oven safe handles into the oven. Preheat the oven and the pot with lid at 450° for at least 30 minutes before the dough is ready. When the dough is ready carefully remove the pot from the oven, remove the lid, place the dough seam side up in the pot. Work quickly flip it using the tea towel.(watch the video for a good lookie lou at this… it matters a little) It will look like a mess in there, you can shake the pot a little to try and even things out, but no worries! You’ll see… amazing things happen in that oven! Put the lid on and bake your bread in the oven at 450° for 30 min. After 30 minutes take the lid off and bake the bread for 15 to 30 minutes longer. My oven is kind of hot – next time I will bake the bread may be 25 minutes with the lid and 10 minutes without the lid you’ll have to decide according to your oven.
This is what you get! Beautiful, chewy, crunchy tasty ciabatta bread! Enjoy!
You oughta make some ciabatta!
Meyer Lemon Muffins
Lovely Meyer Lemons
Meyer Lemon Muffins
I was bummed when I heard the LA TImes was discontinuing their food section. Perhaps they’re not discontinuing it – maybe it’s that they are consolidating and into another newspaper section. Anyway- I love the Los Angeles Times food section! I hate to see it made smaller! I’ve got lots of recipe inspiration from there. Just like the other day when I had all of those Meyer lemons and blood oranges. You remember? I posted about it here. It was a regular citrus fest! A couple of days later I made these beautiful Meyer lemon muffins. I found this recipe in the Los Angeles Times food section. I absolutely adore these muffins! They came out beautiful, as you can see. A couple of things I had problems with: the wetness that the lemon slice on top created in the muffin it’s self. The lemon that I reserved to use as decor was rather soft. So the mandoline was unable to cut slices as thin as I wanted them to be. Also, the recipe clearly states to fill the muffin pan only halfway full with batter then add the lemon slice. That’s a very good idea … And they say it for a very good reason. You can see how the lemon is a little bit lost once the muffin is baked. What happened in many of the muffins is: as the batter cooked it overtook the lemon slice and the lemon slice sank. I think the combination of the thicker slice, and too much batter in the muffin tin where the culprits here. The muffins that came out good were really, really good. I encourage you to give this recipe a try, I intend to use this recipe again, next time perhaps with regular lemons or pink grapefruit. And I definitely intend on getting as much inspiration from the LA Times website as possible!
Muff Muff Muffins!
Make “Greenies” for your dogs
“Greenies” are dog treats. If you are a dog owner you know this- and probably have very definite feelings about them. Dogs love them. There was some issues with “Greenies” a few years back about their digestibility and whether or not they are “bad” for dogs. I know MY dogs LOVE them. Like dog crack- they gobble them up. I stopped giving them to my dogs a few years back because they are pretty pricy and they never really do digest. I think you know how I know. The benefits of GREENIES were supposed to be- improved breath and dental cleaning. They were even shaped like a toothbrush! I always doubted the dental cleaning part- Greenies always seemed to stick to the dog’s teeth… like gummy bears. I have wanted to make my own greenies for a while now. I knew there was no way that I would get the texture- I didn’t want to have plastic in the treat! I knew I could get the color but also the benefits plus more benefits- and go all natural! With a real “get teeth clean” crunch I felt confident!
Franks GREEN Breath Brushes
Since I’ve been cooking so much lately, and since dog treats are my very favorite thing to bake, I went online to look for possible recipe ideas. There was one recipe floating around that made sense. It needed a few extra things so I added those. Also I wanted the treats to be something that I could roll out and shape with a cookie cutter, the other treats that I found that were breath freshening all were spoon/ or dropped treats including this one. So I added more flour to the recipe to make it roll out easily. These Breath Brushes came out pretty good! The dogs love them and they are CUTE! Today I give to you my version of greenies. Please give them a try! Recipe follows.
Dough and cute toothbrush cookie cutter
Geo “thinks” it might be good
Frank’s Breath Brushes
3 1/2 brown rice flour plus 2 cups more (rice flour for crunch)
1 tablespoon of activated charcoal (I opened 12 capsules for 1 tblspn.)
4Tbsp. Vegetable Oil
1 egg
1/2 cup packed fresh mint
1/2 cup packed fresh italian parsley
1 cup chicken broth
Liquid chlorophyll (whole foods/health food store)
Preheat over to 400F. Line baking sheet with parchment.
Combine charcoal with 3 1/2 cups brown rice flour set aside.
Put parsley, mint, oil and 1/4 cup of broth or water into food processor. Process until very chopped, like pesto. Add 3-4 droppers full of chlorophyll. Pulse a few times to mix. Add this green paste to flour mixture and mix well. Beat egg lightly and mix in. Knead adding remainder of water/broth. By this time you should have a very sticky dough ball. Heavily flour the work surface and knead dough until an even green color. Divide dough into workable portions and roll out to about 1/4 inch thick, or whatever thickness you prefer. Add flour to work surface and dough surface as needed to take away stickiness as you work. Cut out with your favorite shapes, and dock with a fork to keep puffiness down.Bake for 25 or 20 minutes. Cool and store in an airtight container in the fridge.
I used a toothbrush shaped cutter from my favorite cookie cutter supplier Copper Gifts. Aren’t these presh??!!
Here is another green recipe for pups, gluten free and tasty! Green Hearts- made with minty peas!
You know they LOVE it when they go away to eat the treat! He’s moving fast!
Blood cake and curd with sorbet
Blood Orange carnage
Gorgeous Blood Orange Juice
I’m not really sure what inspires me in the kitchen. It changes every day. Sometimes it changes hour to hour. This time I’m pretty sure that the ingredients influenced the cooking. I cannot resist Meyer lemons. The beauty of blood oranges captivates me every time. So I ended up with quite a bounty of beautiful citrus from my visit to Central Market. Sorbet is the obvious choice for me when it comes to fruit because I have a wonderful ice cream maker and my darling husband loves to have sorbet.
Blood Orange Sorbet
Meyer Lemons
That’s rather mindlessly easy for me now: Meyer lemon sorbet, blood orange sorbet- Mix the juice with simple syrup and freeze it in your ice cream maker.
Meyer Lemon Sorbet
I was hoping to make something more exciting, something new.
Maybe something like Lemon curd. The recipe for this came up when I was poking around on the Internet. I love Pinterest. I follow links on tastespotting also and find much inspiration there. Nevertheless, lemon curd was completely new for me and very exciting! I love it! I made this lemon curd in my Vitamix. It was so easy. Instead of cooking it on the stove and stirring endlessly, I just let the Vitamix run on hot soup mode and measured the temperature with a thermometer while the machine did all the work. Nothing could be easier. The curd came together effortlessly.
Meyer Lemon Curd
The search for what to do with the blood oranges was not so easy. I kept finding recipes for blood orange oil cakes. Or olive oil cakes that used blood orange juice. These did not appeal to me. This one did. It was called Blood Orange Yogurt Cake. And it seems like a great recipe. Once I got into making the recipe I realized that it actually had a good bit of oil.The Blood Orange part- a syrup you pour on top and a drizzle of blood orange glaze. It came together easily- I prepared the cake as directed. (but I had to bake it a little longer than the recipe called for)
It’s incredibly moist and delicious thanks to the greek yogurt and oil. So moist though- I think I can cut the oil in half and still get a great cake. I will try that next time. I did pour the blood orange juice syrup on top of the warm cake. As you can see it didn’t penetrate very deep though it did seep in.
Blood Orange Yogurt Cake
Also, to note: I cut the cake in half before I glazed it simply because I did not like the pink color of the glaze. It looked a little like Pepto-Bismol! I made the coating but rather UNenthusiastically glazed half. HA! The sugar gave it a nice sweet flavor. I will glaze the entire cake next time but I might use half regular orange juice and half blood orange juice to change the color. It is delicious! (did I say that already?) I had a great time creating with all of this fruit- now what to do with the lemon curd? Did someone say “Make some scones?” Hummm……
With Blood Orange Sugar Glaze
Manatee to Hippo to perfection!
My second of two more attempts to make cinnamon raisin swirl bread brought success! As you might recall reading in my last post about cinnamon raisin swirl bread the breads came out looking a bit like manatees. Adorable and tasty but not beautiful. I really wanted to make a beautiful bread.
The first of the two attempts didn’t rise properly. I’m certain that the water that I added was not the correct temperature. It was too cold. I knew it when it was going in but I thought that it wouldn’t be such a big deal. The recipe says to mix the wet ingredients separate from the dry ingredients. The yeast gets mixed with the flour, not directly with the water. So I assumed that the heat of the oven and the rising processes would make that happen. Uh, no. Another thing that I did differently I retarded the dough overnight in the refrigerator after I formed the loaves and put them in their pans. When I took them out the next morning I sat them in an oven that I had turned on, warmed up and turned off. I waited five hours for those loaves to rise and they never really did. Hope springs eternal- so I baked them anyway. You can see it did not go as I had hoped.
It never rose. It looks like a log.
This one looks like a yummy sleeping hippo. But not bread.
Two days later I decided to try it again. This time I paid careful attention to the temperature of the water, I did not retard the dough but let it rise 3 times and I baked the bread exactly as the recipe said. Another thing- I think this was the biggest issue starting with the very first Manatee loves–I changed loaf pans. The loaf pans with the Manatee and Hippo loves were larger than the pans that I used on the successful third try. I think the original loaf pan was so big that it couldn’t support the dough to shape properly when rising. Perhaps if I had used all of the dough for one loaf it would’ve worked in the larger pan. Nevertheless, mistakes were made and lessons were learned! HA! It’s wonderful to know that I can bake beautiful bread!
Lovely loaf
No large water mammals here, just swirl!
Pretty and delicious. Success!
Sorry Frank. Dogs can't have raisins. ;-(
Healthy Dog Treat Recipe (original)
Pumpkin Hearts
Little George our new puppy came to us full of- to put it delicately- Intestinal parasites. As disgusting as that is it’s common for puppies especially when they 1st leave their mommies. Needless to say he has had a tummy ache since he got here! Upon our 2nd visit to the vet we discover he indeed has SEVERAL parasites! GROSS! And they make his skin flaky and dry. The veterinarian suggested that I give him a little pumpkin every day to soothe his stomach and help firm up his poop. The treatment would not help with the poo for a while- but they would make him feel better. Also adding some oil to his diet would help immensely with the dry skin. I could certainly give him a spoonful of pumpkin everyday but I also wanted to help out with the dry skin. It sounded like a treat recipe was in the making!
I went online (of course) and discovered flax seed and it’s oil is good for skin. I did not have any flaxseed oil on hand- but I did have flaxseed meal and olive oil. I also read that ginger is soothing to the doggy tummies- that makes sense doesn’t it ? Ginger is very soothing for humans. Apples are good for your tummy so I decided applesauce would be a good idea as well. This treat contains everything that the pup needed. I also decided to minimize the processed wheat using several alternative grains and alternative flours.The results are below. These treats I call “Feel better Little Puppy” Pumpkin Hearts. Why don’t you give them a try?
“Feel Better little Puppy” Pumpkin Hearts
1/2 cup applesauce
1/2 cup pumpkin
1/2 cup of olive oil
2 eggs
1 cup instant brown rice
1 cup rice flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup millet flour
1/2 cup bulgur
1/2 cup wheat germ
1/2 cup powdered milk
1 teaspoon ginger powder
2 tablespoons of ground flaxseed or flaxseed meal
1 cup cold chicken broth or cold water
Heat oven to 350°F.
Combine all dry ingredients into a large bowl and mix together well. In a separate bowl combine all wet ingredients except for the water and mix together. Combine wet ingredients and dry ingredients- mix with a large wooden spoon and then your hands- inside the bowl to minimize mess. Add half cup of water/broth and then more as needed to combine. Mix well. Roll one third of the dough out on a well-floured surface at a time. Roll to ¼ inch thickness. The dough will be sticky. Add flour liberally as needed on both sides to keep dough from sticking to the countertop or the rolling pin. Use cookie cutters to cut into shapes. Place on baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Poke holes on the tops of the shapes t keep treats from puffing up too much. Bake at for 25 minutes or until golden brown. Store in airtight container or the fridge.
Fear and loafing.
Last night I made cinnamon raisin swirl bread. I found the recipe in Fine Cooking magazine last month. I was having a special guest over for breakfast so I wanted to do something delicious and showy. Cinnamon raisin swirl bread in the shape of manatees was the perfect solution! This is my 1st time to make cinnamon raisin swirl bread. This is my 1st time to make cinnamon raisin bread at all. I like to make bread. It’s fun, although I find myself afraid of handling it too much. I think it’s because I make so many biscuits. Anyway here’s a shot of the breads right after they came out of the oven. I didn’t plan for them to turn out looking like big lazy sea going mammals- but there’s no denying it.That’s exactly what I see when I look at them. I am a little bummed- It was pretty late when I finished last night, so the 1st photographs are kind of dark. The next group of photographs aren’t quite as dark, but it is kind of gloomy and overcast today, so they’re not as bright as I would like for them to be either. I am eating bread to feel better. Do scroll down if you decide not to read any further… the photos of the toast are lovely.
Cinnamony manatees in the midst (mist)
Here the loaves are this morning showing off the center. Those big globs in the swirl are HUGE raisins from Central Market bulk. WOW! They were big! I will probably use “normal” sized raisins next time. It’s very cinnamon-y. The recipe called for a total of 6 TB of cinnamon. Some folks who reviewed the recipe online complained about this, they thought it was too much. I thought it was perfect. There are some things I will do differently next time, and there will be a next time, sooner than I’d like to admit. I’ll try to roll the bread out to a more even thickness and pay more attention when I’m rolling it into shape. Sometimes I get so caught up in the technical part and I forget the important artistic pieces at the end. Again, it’s mostly about fear, and loafing! (Sorry I had to!)
swirly insides
I also made a frittata for us this morning. During last night’s session I also made a loaf of the easy little bread that I posted about a few days ago. It was again really really delicious. We needed salsa, so I made a batch of that this morning while we hung out, and we had that with our eggs. Once this beautiful cinnamon bread was toasted it became something super extra special that I cannot even describe! Butter took it to an entirely new level. Give this recipe a try when you’ve got a little time on your hands, and want to make something special. You won’t regret a single bite.
Toast like yo' mamma never made you!
Winner winner!
Congratulations to the lovely and lucky Eve Agush! She is the randomly chosen winner of the Massive Yoga Book Giveaway!
Thanks to everyone who entered. I will do this again in a few months, so stay tuned!
Smooch!
darla cooks 
