Why yes, I'm making six loaves of bread today.

But I only have two bread pans!  So staggered baking it is.

At the time of this picture, I had two loaves rising, and had prepped the wet ingredients for the other four. When it was time, I poured the milk/water combo into a pot and heated it, then poured some of the warm milk/water back into the jar to loosen the honey.  Then I stirred in the butter--melted in the microwave--and that made it easier to pour the liquid into the dry ingredients while the mixer was going.

The bread turned out great.  But alas,  no pictures.

Kombucha update.

Brewing is going well.  I've established a rhythm. I brew on Sundays, transfer the scoby to the new jar and drop chopped up ginger in the finished brew.  The new batch goes in the oven with the light on and the finished brew gets a lid and sits for four days to absorb the ginger flavor.  Then I strain out the ginger (and the bits) and pop the finished kombucha in the fridge.  It's delicious, and so much cheaper than buying bottles for $3.29.

This is a new batch on the right and a finished batch on the left.  The scoby's grow "mothers" which are baby scobys you can give away or use to start more batches.  I've given one away and used one to start a new batch.  You can sort of see the scoby in the jar on the right.  It's that grayish looking thing floating on the top.

The nice thing about knowing two people who work in Specialty at Whole Foods?

I get a delicious cheese platter for my birthday.  I enjoyed every bite.

Bits-o-cheese

Oh bin with tiny bits of expensive cheeses I would otherwise not buy, I love you so!

A delicious lunch

I was rewarded by venturing out in the snow, by this delicious lunch.  An apple, Triscuits (my favorite crackers), kalamata olives, mini dolmas and bits of cheese.  I've just discovered New Seasons sells bits of cheese, which is great, because I can never justify buying the bigger pieces.

It was delicious.

A Manhattan-off

My Cocktail Book author said, "sometimes you just have to sit down and do the taste test to find out if you are a Bourbon whisky Manhattan person or a rye whisky Manhattan person."  A. and I accepted his challenge and did just that.  The result?  We are both Bourbon whisky Manhattan people. But we think maybe with lemon garnish instead of cherries, we might enjoy rye whisky Manhattans.  Further tests will ensue.

A stick-to-your-ribs soup.

The first time I made this soup I peered at the finished product and said, "Ugh.  Doesn't look too great."  Then I actually ate it and changed my tune. It's incredibly flavorful, packed with umani flavors.  Some of the ingredients are not ingredients I have on hand on a regular basis, like the seaweed, but I've made this several times and it's just what the doctor ordered on a freezing cold morning.  

To make it yourself, follow the link to Eating Well's Tofu and Vegetable Stew.

Kale Salad a la Casey.

This summer I had a great Kale Salad made by bride Casey for her wedding.  It was massaged kale and had quoina in it and was very, very good.

Upon receiving a bumper crop of kale from my colleague John, I put together this Kale salad inspired by her creation.

Here's the recipe:

Bring 1.75 c. water to boil and add 1 c. quoina.  Turn heat to low and cook until done, approximately 20 minutes.

Clean and remove the stems from a whole lot of kale.  2-3 bunches from the store, or a huge bowl's worth from your garden.

Put the cleaned and stemmed kale in a bowl and add 1 t salt.  Set a timer for five minutes and squeeze the kale in your hands.  Nothing will happen at first, but by the end of the five minutes, the kale will have nicely broken down.  Squeeze as much liquid as you can out of the kale and transfer your kale to a cutting board.

Clean out the bowl, discarding the salty kale juice, then finely chop the kale and return to the bowl.

Grate two carrots on top of the kale.

Cook 2-3 (or possibly 4?) rashers bacon, drain and cool.  The chop into small pieces and add to the bowl.

Put those on top of the kale and carrots.

When the quoina is done, add it to the bowl.

Mix up a curry vinaigrette.  In a separate bowl add 1/4 c. oil, 1/4 c white vinegar, 1 clove garlic, minced, 1 T packed light brown sugar, 1 T minced fresh chives, 1/2 t. curry powder and 1/2 t soy sauce. Mix until combined.

Pour over the salad in the bowl and toss everything to combine.  Good cold, also probably good warm.

Vintage Cakes. Texas Sheet Cake

Quite delicious and easy to make.
I encountered two difficulties.  One was that I had a 9 X 13 pan, but not a 10 X 15 pan.  My mom did, and I was all set to borrow it, but then left it at her house, and thus, ended up using the 9 X 13.  That didn't seem to make a ton of difference.

My second problem was that the directions didn't explicitly say to leave the cake in the pan and so I tried to remove it.  That was a bad idea and ended with me dropping the cake, causing part of it to shift, as you can see in the picture.  I wrote myself a note to leave the cake in the pan for next time.  You make the cake, make the frosting, pull the cake out of the oven, pour on the frosting and then let the whole thing cool.

Overall, very good cake and I'm excited to try the variation with cinnamon and coffee.

Vintage Cakes. Boston Cream Pie-lets.

Aside from being fun to say the name of, these are delicious.  I've never been a fan of Boston Cream Pie before, but I suspect this is because I've only had store-bought.

The recipe leaves you with a generous amount of leftover cake and a goodly amount of leftover pudding.  I found that to be just fine.

Boise Farmers Market

There were no farmers markets in Boise upon my last living there.  So I wandered down to check out the one near my hotel.

These girls were selling play-doh which I found kind of genius.  It also made me wonder just how much it costs to rent a stall at this Farmer's Market.
 

Coffee and pastries were selling well.
 

This guy's business was called "North End Lavender."  If only I liked lavender, I would have bought some.

My impression was that there were a lot more vendors of meat than the farmers markets I come across in Portland.  Also, I bought some cheese curds that were flavored.  They had many choices, but the one I went with was tomato basil.  I found flavored cheese curds to be a very good food product idea.

I also bought some cherries for friends I was visiting and delicious raspberries.  So good!

Dinner. I grew it myself.

Okay, not the sunflower seeds or the Parmesan or the flax seeds or the olive oil/vinegar I use as a dressing, but the lettuce is all me!  And the peas and the nasturtiums.  

Vintage Cakes' Cherry Chip Cake. Also Chocolate Ice Cream.

I've been busy this weekend making ice cream.
 

And a beautiful Cherry Chip Cake to celebrate the end of school.

It's Cherry Chip cake with a thin spread of ganache between layers and then frosted with a cherry buttercream frosting.

The cookbook author developed it because she missed the Cherry Chip cake mixes from her childhood.  I too enjoyed those and was happy to try this cake.  I assumed that the Cherry Cake mixes were no more, however when buying ingredients at New Seasons, the cashier told me that the Cherry Chip mix is still made and that New Seasons carries it.  It was rather deflating news.  I still made the cake from scratch anyway.

Sometimes, you just need a good grilled cheese.

All week long I've been craving grilled cheese.  Thanks to my sourdough starter, I keep myself in homemade whole-wheat sourdough bread, which is good for many things, but not the grilled cheese I was thinking of.  So I made a some perfect sandwich bread, bought some delicious ham, sliced up some Tillamook medium cheddar and made a pot of tomato soup to boot.

It really hit the spot.

Two headlines from today's paper

Reading this, I audibly gasped, mostly because I've been waiting for years for male athletes to start coming out of the closet.  Also: same last name!
 

Oh Grant Butler.  A few years ago you decided to experiment with being vegan for a few months and I thought, "I hope you can make it that long without cheese" because cheese is the number one reason I don't want to be a vegan.  The number two reason is that I don't think it's actually a healthy way of eating.  But you, Grant Butler, took to it like a duck to water and now your write columns that amuse me such as this:

Now I don't mind a good veggie burger now and then, but really, the bun?  The bun is the best part, in fact,  the main reason for eating the veggie burger.  When you get right down to it, I would eat the bun with a bit of butter rather than the veggie burger wrapped in lettuce or what have you.

I make a pizza.

Matt is out of town and I have the day off, so I will make pizza for dinner.  It's also the end of the month which means there isn't much left in the grocery account, so I'm going to make a pizza with what I have.  I picked some asparagus from the garden and sliced that up and sprinkled it on. Then I opened a can of sardines and added them.  There were Lima beans that needed to be used up, so on those went.   I had some leftover shredded mozzarella, which was good.  Then, after I baked all of that, I cracked four eggs on top.

This was a very fine pizza.

Potato recipe

So the Lint Project is going along.  Eating mashed potatoes every day has been easier than meditating every day, but I've been doing my best to do both.  It occurs to me, that someone might want my mashed potato recipe, so here it is, in all its glory. This is adapted from Cooks Illustrated.

Boil three pounds of skin-on potatoes (of similar size, if possible) in salted water until they are soft.  I check to see if they are soft by fishing out a larger candidate with a spoon, and poking it with a toothpick.  If the toothpick goes all the way through, they are done.

Drain the potatoes in a colander.  Put your potato boiling pot on the counter and get out your ricer.
An aside:  I used to always roll my eyes at mashed potato recipe instructions including references to using a ricer.  I had a potato masher, and why should I spend 20-plus dollars on a rather large kitchen gadget that only did one thing?  Then I made a few batches of for-public consumption mashed potatoes that had bits of unmashed potatoes in them.  And the next thing I knew I was forking over $20-plus dollars for a rather large kitchen gadget that only does one thing.  And let me tell you, that was money well spent.

That said, if you cook your potatoes well and mash enthusiastically, you will be fine.
 

Now before you start the peeling process, get out a stick of butter.  Yes, that's half a cup. Yes, you are putting that entire stick in the recipe.  Don't argue with me, here I know what I'm doing.  Get out a small pan and melt the butter (a low setting is best) while you are peeling the potatoes.

To peel the still-hot potatoes, take a fork, stab a potato and use your paring knife to slip off the peel.  Throw the naked potatoes in the ricer, and press, or throw them in the pot, ready for mashing.
 

When you've pulled all the skins off (if the potatoes are small and there are many, they will cool down enough so you don't have to use the fork after awhile) and riced or mashed, pour in your half cup of now-melted butter. You ricer people, now is the time for you to get out your masher and mash in all that delicious butter. Take one cup of cream and pour about one half of cup of the cream in and mash some more.  Add cream a little at a time, until the potatoes reach your favorite consistency.   For me, that's at about 1/2 cup of cream, but you might like more.  Mash in some salt, not too much, and you are done.

For this project, because I don't really want to eat a TON of potatoes every day, I portion them into 1/2 cup servings using the smallest jelly jars you can buy in the canning section.  Then I store them in the refrigerator. But first I serve myself up a bowl of delicious, hot, homemade mashed potatoes.

To sum up:

3 lbs potatoes, boiled, peeled and riced/mashed
1/2 cup butter melted and mashed in
1/2 cup to 1 cup cream, mashed in
Salt.

Mmmmmmmmmmm.

Potatoes. Sometimes, they are what's for dinner.

I remembered that I never finished harvesting the German Butterball potatoes last fall and dug up a pound of them.  They were in great shape, just muddier than if I had pulled them out of the ground last September.  I roasted them up and, man, were they good.  They were so good, I just had a double helping and called that dinner.

Transcendent Donut Experience

I head about this donut shop, something about quality ingredients, good donut, etc.  I like a good donut, so I wandered over.

The interior was industrial, spare and hip.

 

A statement.
 

More hipness.

Here's the donut in question.

The verdict.  A-mazing.  Here's how it usually works with me and donuts.  "I wish I had a donut." I say to myself.  Then, being gainfully employed and mobile, I get myself one.  Sometimes I get them from the grocery store bakery case, sometimes from an official donut shop.  I eat the donut and it leaves me feeling a bit empty.  It was okay in the moment, but the moment has passed, leaving me with a bit of grease and a few coins shorter in my wallet.

Here's what happened with this donut.  I paid my money, sat down and bit into it.  And it was chewy and substantial and burst with flavor.  The donut was a substance in and of itself, not just a carrier for the toppings. And the toppings!  The chocolate was rich, the coconut was toasted perfectly.  The whole experience was exactly what I'm looking for when I'm in the mood for a donut.  At $2.50, this donut wasn't cheap, but I'll take one of these over three of the standard donut, any day.

Truth on labels?

Oh look!  No High Fructose Corn Syrup.
 

But wait!  What's that first ingredient again?