Need More Bread!

After being away from home for a week, it's good to be back, even if I did have a great time at my niece's wedding and had a long and relaxing visit with my sister in New Jersey. 

Now it's time to make more bread.  We were almost completely out of bread.  Yesterday, I made some whole wheat bread for toasting.  Today, I'm working on sourdough bread for soups.  The recipe I use for sourdough is from the website The Fresh Loaf, and is called San Joaquin Sourdough.  I played with the recipe somewhat, using 200g whole wheat flour and 250g of Eatwell Sonora wheat along with the 50g of rye flour.  It will be a hearty loaf for sure. 

It was also time to refresh the sourdough starter I keep in the fridge.  I did that and also used a bit of the starter leftover from the San Joaquin bread to make more starter for a sourdough oat breakfast bread recipe that was given to me by a friend.  I want to try this bread recipe out and see if I can weigh my ingredients as I go to get a more reliable recipe. 

All fun bread games and tasty too!

A Simple Diet - Soup and Bread

Since receiving a weekly box of fruit and veggies from Eatwell Farm, our diet has changed dramatically.  We are eating seasonally, locally and more simply.

Many of our lunches on a winter's day consist of soup, bread, cheese and perhaps a salad.  Today, I made a large pot of what we call 'Grammie Soup'.  It's basically an Italian minestra (not to be confused with minestrone).  This week's box from Eatwell contained spinach, mustard greens, leeks, collard greens and kale, all good soup ingredients.  I added some broth leftover from our great haggis experiment as a base along with some mild Italian sausage, celery, onion, carrots and spaghetti broken into noodle size lengths.  A flavorful soup was the result.  We will be enjoying the soup with some homemade sourdough bread or a slice of rye topped with melted Jarlsburg cheese.

In the morning I had set up a soaker and wild yeast starter for 100% whole wheat sandwich bread from Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads book.  After the soaker and starter sat at room temperature for about 6 hours, I finished building the bread dough using some freshly milled flour from my store of hard red winter wheatberries along with a cup and a half or so of Sonora wheat flour milled by Eatwell Farm.  The combination produced a fragrant loaf of whole wheat bread that rose well to fill the bread pan and has a light texture and crumb.  We love this bread in the morning, toasted and then topped with homemade preserves or orange marmalade (Seville oranges also thanks to Eatwell Farm).  A soft-boiled pastured egg from Eatwell rounds out the breakfast along with a cup of tea.

Simple foods but oh so nourishing because they are made with local ingredients at home in our own kitchen.  It also means we know what's in our food and from whence it comes. We appreciate the work that Nigel Walker and his farmers have put into growing the crops and caring for the chickens.

Thank you, Eatwell Farm.

The Box From Eatwell Farm 2/27/2013

For the coming week, here's what's on deck from Eatwell Farm -

Grapefruit.. our own fruit
Lemons
Navels
Spinach.. very clean with no rain!
Lettuce.. Baby Romaine
Romanesco... beautiful
Leeks
Collards
Bok Choi
Green garlic.. so good with eggs
Red cabbage
Broccoli

Grapefruit in the morning - great eye opener to greet the day.  Lemons can be preserved in salt for future use.  Lots of spinach so creamed spinach with lamb chops seems like a given.  Broccoli and bok choi says shrimp stir fry with some green garlic - oh so good in a stir fry.  Red cabbage slaw for a salad.  Baby Romaine for lunch sandwiches.  Collards and leeks sauteed on the stove with oven baked chicken for dinner.  Navel oranges for lunches and snacks.  Sounds like a week full of good food!

Homemade Thickcut Orange Marmalade

Yesterday I picked up the seville oranges we ordered from Eatwell Farm.  The seville orange is a bitter orange used primarily for making orange marmalade.

We have an old copy of Putting Food By and it has a good recipe for orange marmalade.  2 lbs of oranges, 2 lemons, 8 cups of water and 8 cups of sugar(4 lbs) will yield about 6 pints of wonderfully fragrant orange marmalade.

Starting this morning, we washed the oranges and lemons and removed the 'buttons' on the ends of the fruit.  The fruit was placed in a large pot and enough water to cover them was added.  The fruit boiled for 90 minutes, until the fruit is fork-tender.  At that point, we will remove the fruit from the pot to cool.  Once cooled, the fruit is sliced and any seeds or pith removed and placed in the pot of juices to boil for an additional 10 minutes.  The juice in the pot is strained, returned to the pot along with the fruit.  Now we are ready to make marmalade.

Bring the fruit and juices to a boil, then add the sugar and boil stirring occasionally to prevent scorching.  Do this until the fruit temperature reaches 9 degrees beyond the boiling point in your kitchen(at least 220F).  Remove the pot from the heat, skim off any foam and spoon the jam into hot sterilized pint jars, leaving 1/2 inch of head room.  Seal the jars with the canning lids and place in a hot water bath in a canning pot for 10 minutes.  Each batch makes 5-6 pints of marmalade.

This marmalade is very flavorful and wonderful on whole wheat toast in the morning.

Baguettes Revisited

I am practicing my baguette making skill.  Again, and again and again, I will make baguettes until I am happy with them.  They are getting better.  This time I raised the oven temp to 480F instead of 460F as in the recipe.  I also steamed and steamed in the first 10 minutes of baking, then went to convection bake for the last 10 minutes.  These little guys bake fast.  I like the crumb and the taste is very good - I used about 10% whole wheat flour in the formula to make a tastier baguette.

 

Baguette crumb -

 

What's in the Eatwell Box 2/20/2013

Another great box coming our way from Eatwell Farm includes:

Baby Romaine lettuce
Romanesco
Lemons
Mandarins
Tangerines
Leeks



Asian green.. in the photo
Spinach
Mustard
Red kale
Butternut
Green garlic… Yes its back.

We are so glad to see green garlic coming back this year.  It is definitely our harbinger of spring.  With green garlic, leeks, spinach, mustard and red kale in the box, Grammie soup has to be made this week.  I will leave some for Michael to eat next week, while I go back East to my niece's wedding!  Mmm chicken piccata is always a good use for lemons, along with a salad using the baby romaine.  A stir fry has to be made with those wonderful Asian greens.  Butternut squash - hmm - in the grammie soup, perhaps?  That only leaves tangerines and mandarins which will be citrus for Michael's lunchboxes throughout the week.  Wow, that went quickly.  Bon Appetit!

Rye Sandwich Meteil Bread

Yesterday, I decided to make a loaf of Peter Reinhart's Rey Sandwich Meteil Bread, so that afternoon I put together the soaker and wild yeast starter for the bread.  They sat out about 6 hours at room temperature and then I put the starter into the fridge overnight.

This morning I took the starter out of the fridge to rest at room temp for about 2 hours and then proceeded to make the final dough.  The bread 'rose' sideways and almost split in half in the oven, I guess, because of my scoring, but it tastes fine - quite tasty with rye and caraway seeds.

This loaf will go very well with our borscht.