Perfect, Except For the Main Point

As you may know, in preparation for our upcoming long-distance move, we’ve been using up as much fridge-door and pantry food as we can. Tonight’s supper, for example, consisted of a mound of kale the size of Kahoolawe and two sausages, each lightly dressed with 1/3 cup zucchini relish. (There would have been potato pancakes as well, but I forgot to make them.)

Cruising the web for ways to use up our flour the other day, I came across an intriguing claim that bread can be made in one’s rice cooker. Sure enough, several recipes surfaced. I was game.

My version of the recipe follows.

1.   In a small bowl, stir 1 tsp (5 ml) sugar into 3/4 cup (180 ml) slightly warmed, leftover potato-boiling water. Sprinkle 1 tsp (5 ml) yeast overtop. Let foam 5 minutes.

2.   In the rice cooker pot, stir together:

• 1 1/2 cups (375 ml) flour
• 1/2 tsp (1 metric smidgen) crushed fennel seed
• 2 Tbsp (30 ml) sugar
• 1 tsp (5 ml) kosher salt.

3.   To the dry ingredients, add:

• 2 Tbsp (30 ml) milk
• 1 generous Tbsp (40 ml) room-temperature unsalted butter
• the yeasty water.

4. Mix everything together, knead the dough five minutes (add a few more spoonfuls of flour if it sticks too much to your fingers), cover the rice cooker with the lid and let rise one hour.

5. Punch down dough, let rise a second hour.

Everything went fine until this point, the point wherein one is to turn on the rice cooker, cook the bread for half an hour, flip it upside down, cook it another 30 minutes, flip it rightside up again, and give it one more half hour for good luck.

Well. Mine being a small, semi-cheap rice cooker with teflon insert and glass lid, the button stayed down for all of five minutes before it popped up again, and nothing could convince it to do otherwise.

Not that I was going to argue with an electric appliance. So my version of this recipe continued thus:

6. Place three metal cookie cutters in the bottom of the largest cooking pot. Fill pot partway with water and bring to a boil.

7. Place rice cooker, with lid, onto cookie cutters. Cover with largest cooking pot’s lid. Lower heat to medium-low. Pretend you’re making Boston Brown Bread, and let it simmer 45 minutes.

8. Remove pot lid and rice cooker lid. Pinch lips in disgust over pale appearance of bread. Turn on oven to 400°F (200°C).

9. Place unlidded rice cooker insert in hot oven for 30 minutes.

10. Remove bread from insert and let cool on a rack.

The verdict? Delicious! It was browned on top, wonderfully moist, and perfectly chewy. One of the best breads I’ve ever made.

Tonight, I’m going to assemble the ingredients for “Easy Bread”. I’ve seen two versions of this on Youtube, but I like the one in which the fellow sings “Easy Bread” to the tune of “Spiderman.” No accounting for taste… but I’ll let you know how it turns out.

The Morning After the Night Before

A signature E.g. work.

I actually enjoy doing dishes. It can take a while to psyche myself up to it sometimes, but once the sink is filling and the first few glasses are swishing through, I usually start whistling or singing.

However, there is no beauty in my dishwashing beyond the cleanliness itself. As soon as all the glasses have landed on the rubber mat in the second sink, I start tossing them onto their shelves while the plates soak a bit. Very efficient am I.

ON THE OTHER HAND, when E.g. washes the dishes, she builds little empires of beauty and ingenuity.

Yesterday we had Jane and Robert over for roast beef supper. The roast was served with mashies and collards and parsnips and gravy and vinegar for the greens and pickled beets and zucchini relish and apple crisp and freshly-whipped cream and water and wine oh and some Italian salami and two types of cheese and two types of salty biscuits as an appetizer, and thus we managed to dirty nearly every dish in the house.

Somehow E.g. decided that since I had made the mess, she should clean it up. I didn’t argue too hard.

So this morning, I came downstairs to this lovely living sculpture, whisk, collander and all.

Friday Night Date

I’m taking a page from Gina’s blog for a quick report, then off to spend the rest of the evening with the “fambly”.

E.g. got home almost an hour early tonight, so we decided to make the most of it and go out to supper. We longed for our favourite restaurant six blocks from home, which we haven’t visited in two or three forevers, but decided that since it’s still insanely cold, we would go to the one two blocks away.

The restaurant was about one-third full. One booth was empty, and another had only one fellow reading a newspaper, so we took the empty booth. The waiter asked us if we were waiting for anyone. When we said we weren’t, he moved us to a skinny two-seater table. “That other table’s dirty anyway,” he said.

That was enough for us. They can’t bother to wipe tables between customers, the sign “Please seat yourselves” is a lie, and the place is less than half-full. We tucked ourselves into our coats and walked the extra four blocks to our favourite pub.

The place was busy, but not yet jammed. We were given a nice seat near the window. Our long-time, favourite waiter, who is also a neighbour, served our drinks. We said hello to another couple we know. We chatted with the couple at the table next to us. We had one of our long, earnest discussions over our favourite pints and excellent food. We had missed this place.

E.g. had barbecued spareribs plus chicken plus fries plus a lovely red-cabbage slaw. I had beef brisket with garlic mashies and green and yellow beans. We shared an apple-walnut crumble topped with mango ice cream for dessert, paired with a decaf. And when we left, the place was bursting.

Ah.

Buy Beer, Save on Groceries

I really wasn’t going to post again about beer today — especially as there’s a slim possibility that E.g.’s teetotalling father may occasionally peek at this blog — but this story is too good not to write up immediately.

We buy our beer in sixpacks. One carton in the coat closet takes up very little room, and two cartons are still modest, cozy lodgers. So we tend to be lazy, and forget to return the empties for the deposit when we go to buy more suds.

After several weeks things come to a head, as it were: we must either stop buying beer, or throw out some shoes. Then there’s the third alternative, so this afternoon, on the way to the grocery store, I dropped off three sixpacks and two extra empty bottles at the Beer Store, and received $2.60.

Then I headed over to the Cheap Thrills grocer’s. Pasta for supper tonight, so let’s see, a big fat green pepper, three “portobellini” (oversized cremini or undersized portobello) mushrooms, and a tin of Romano beans oughta do it. We already have the crushed tomatoes, garlic, pasta, and seasonings at home.

The beans were a great deal at 69¢. The produce items needed to be weighed to determine their price; the green pepper was 88¢ and the mushrooms came to $1.02. The total, for this expedition, was $2.59.

It’s almost as if the Beer Store paid me 1¢ to get groceries.

Chicken Soup Instead of the Sole

Well okay, it’s not sole in the freezer, it’s kippered herring. We don’t always see kippers in the freezer section at the grocery store, but there they were two weeks ago, so one of them came home with us.

I was in Whitby once, the one in northern England.

There’s a hostel right there beside the old abbey. I could look out the window from my upper bunk and see the ruined walls in the moonlight.

By day, Whitby felt to me a lot like Port Dover here in Ontario: a small seaside resort catering mainly to people living in the region. Most of the town is at the bottom of the cliff — shops and houses and the pier and the beach — with mostly the guest houses and ruins at the top of the cliff.

But on a little road still commanding a high view, and not very far at all from the hostel, is a little building, with a little chimney, out of which pours the most delicious odour of smoke and salt and fish. It’s a kipper smokery. I walked by it on the wrong day to buy, but I hadn’t known it was there, and was grateful to have experienced it.

The next morning, the hostel had choices for breakfast. One was kippers from the little building down the road. Guess what I chose?

Tonight I’m making chicken soup for supper. It will be tasty and nourishing and all those good things.

E.g. doesn’t care for kippers. Maybe I’ll have them for breakfast tomorrow, after she leaves for work.

Domestic Bliss

Spooky Cookies

Okay, maybe I touched up the colour a little.

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Today’s recipe, appropriate to Hallowe’en, is for dog biscuits made with beef liver, parmesan, and Scottish oatmeal.

Scottish oatmeal is a horror story in itself. You can — if you dare — purchase it in little plastic bags packaged by Bob’s Red Mill, an American company. My package describes it as “the original…porridge of ancient Scotland” which, interpreted, means “before anyone knew any better.”

It is not Irish oatmeal, which is sturdy steelcut grains that make a hearty, chewy dish. It is not big, flat rolled oats. It is closer to instant oatmeal, without the flavourings. It makes gross, disgusting glop. I now see why the English used to tease the Scots (and yes, my mother’s mother’s mother was an Aberdonian) about their oats.

OATS. n.s. [?, Saxon] A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. – Samuel Johnson, 1755

Moving right along.

The most gruesome part of this recipe is tossing raw liver into the blender. If you have children, this step in the procedure is guaranteed to increase their bonding to their beloved waggletail friends.

I found the dough rather sticky. You could either increase the flour a little or, like I did, cut apart the rolled dough into four pieces so as to have smaller slabs to sling onto the cookie sheet. Anyway, here are…

Liver Biscotti for Dogs

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F/175°C.

2. Prepare a large cookie sheet. I lined mine with parchment paper. I think greasing the pan and sprinkling it with cornmeal would work too.

3. In a mixing bowl, stir together:

• 2 cups whole-grain flour(s) of your choice
• 1/3 cup sprinkly Parmesan cheese
• 1/2 cup Scottish oatmeal (or quick oats)

4. In a blender, puree:

• 1/2 cup beef liver
• 1 raw egg

5. Dump the sticky slop into the dry ingredients. In the blender, slosh

• 3/4 cup milk

to pick up all that wholesome livernegg goodness, and add it to the mixing bowl.

6. Stir everything into a dough and empty it onto a floured surface. Roll out to 1/4″ (.5 cm) .

7. Set on cookie sheet. Score in half-inch (centimetre-wide) columns. Bake about 25 minutes.

8. When cool enough to handle, break apart the strips. Slice the strips crosswise to resemble little biscottis.

Yield: 6 cups (1.5 l) .

Keeps: 1 week, covered, in fridge. Freezable.

These teeny bickies are a hit with Cai and Fergus, and might even be acceptable to — dare I mention them? — the Were Corgis.

Happy Hallowe’en!

Brew

Home Cookin’

Oops — couldn’t delay the photo shoot any longer.
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Steak and kidney pie for supper tonight!

Chop a slab of steak into happy little cubes and fry it a bit in the cast iron pan; set aside in a big bowl.

Fry up two chopped onions, throw in a diced potato, a large diced carrot, some thyme, some salt, some pepper, and a spoonful of flour.

When the flour starts sticking to the pan, toss in maybe half a cup of water and stir with the wooden spoon to make gravy. Throw in your finely sliced kidney (er, that is, your finely sliced beef kidney) and cook another minute or so.

Add this mess to the bowl with the beef and stir. Realize you’re out of Worcestershire sauce, and make do with a dash or so each of red wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar, and umeboshi vinegar.

Pour the whole mess into a large pie pan.

Whip up enough pastry for a top crust by cutting 1/3 cup unsalted butter into a cup or so of flour with two dinner knives, and adding 1/3 cup cold water. Roll out. Realize you’ve made a 9″ piecrust for a 10″ pie plate. Shrug. Smile.

Bake at 350° for an hour and a half.

During the final half hour, cook up the quick-cook mushy peas that you started soaking two hours ago, adding a spoonful of sugar and a dash of salt to the pot.

Serve up. Accompany with a bottle of Moosehead Lager. Ahh…

Think Happy Thoughts

Sometimes life gets kinda stressful. But hey, we got groceries today. Nice comfort meats to go with cabbagey veggies. And look, E.g. made me a sandwich.

Tonight: oven-roasted pork spare ribs and collards and something novel, a mushroom-barley risotto from Mollie Katzen’s Vegetable Heaven recipe book.

And… there will be leftovers! Be still, my beating stomach walls!