something cool

heat here. followed by more of those lushly cloudy and still afternoons. proper stone fruit weather, cherries and plums and apricots abound. there's only so much jam a person can make. especially if they know it tends to sit in little gloriously jewel bright heaps in their cabinets without being scraped across enough toast. and a person can try in vain to eat all the paper bags full of cherries stationed on the counter and fish apricots out of the big baskets hoping to make a dent in the stock. and one can fail miserably at that, or at least their stomach can object mightily. so the latest is in, and, don't laugh, it's froyo. or is it fro-yo. it's yogurt and it's frozen and it's not pale or wimpy or a fierce let down. it's delightful and refreshing and it takes all of twenty minutes active work. so get after it. or get after someone who has, because you'll be pleased you did.

frozen yogurt, let us say, is different than ice cream. partially because yogurt typically has less free-floating fat, partially also because true frozen yogurt will have tang that can be offset or tempered with something sweet and spicy. or both, as is the case here. frozen yogurt also has the tendency to become slightly crystalline because, unlike the aforementioned milk fat, yogurt's bulk is mostly water. when frozen yogurt can have an unappealing stiffness, or the tendency to leap from the spoon, spin across the kitchen and make mysteriously sticky spots on the floors and counters that take weeks to discover and scrub off. luckily there are some solutions to all of these otherwise irritating drawbacks of frozen yogurt and some benefits to boot.

as you've likely seen, yogurt cultures, used for making yogurt at home, can be purchased freeze dried. this is a clue that the probiotics in yogurt, you knew it was coming, can withstand a stint in the freezer thus reblooming happily in your belly. this is great because cold milk protein is, notoriously, one of the hardest ways to digest milk, especially if a person is already prone to struggling with lactose, etc. nice yogurt (not dannon or yoplait, ahem,) also has an intriguing flavor profile and can be less stodgy at the end of a summer meal than the potentially-gloopy scoop of commercial vanilla ice cream.

and on to the troubleshooting with frozen yogurt. firstly, do yourself a favor for this, and from now on in general, and buy full fat yogurt. it is inevitably easier on your digestive system to eat milk protein with the fat that comes with it. the proteins and fat-soluble vitamins in milk are most efficiently broken down, used and flushed through the system with milk fat. indeed, de-fatted milk taxes your body by foraging for other fats that are less compatible in unravelling the proteins and making use of the healthful vitamins and other nutrients in milk. (this is true with any animal product.  eat chicken with the skin, eat the fine rind of pork on a pork chop, etc. etc. it's not that we don't seek to avoid saturated fats, its that we honor the animal by eating it in moderation, in tact, to be used by our bodies as we evolved to use them. just a thought.) the upshot of all of this is that the fat in the yogurt guards against the ice-cube like hardness that can crop up when making lowfat or fat-free frozen yogurt. it produces a velvety softness. the other strategy for avoiding hard frozen yogurt is to temper the custard with an egg white which adds to the nice texture. (if, like Liana Krissoff says, however, your immune system can't take it, omit the egg from the recipe below.)

so the recipe at last. this is adapted with love from Liana Krissoff's Canning for a New Generation. this book is vital for anyone seeking to put up food or scrabbling to make use of an over-large CSA share they were talked into going in on. essentially it is a recipe for jam (her recipe for plum cardamom jam is a delight,) cooked but pulled from the heat before the sugar can set it, folded into full fat yogurt and tipped into an ice cream maker for fifteen minutes.

for the fruit:

5 large plums, any variety, pitted and diced

2 cups coconut sugar

3 tablespoons lemon juice

1 tablespoon freshly ground cardamom seeds

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1/4 teaspoon coriander

1/4 teaspoon freshly grated ginger

for the yogurt:

1 1/2 quarts whole milk, coconut, almond or soy yogurt.

1 egg separated

1/4 cup coconut sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 teaspoons bourbon whiskey

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

in a small pot combine all ingredients for the fruit and bring to a boil, reduce to low and simmer about ten minutes, or until fruit is tender. remember that the fruit needs to be strongly flavored so as not to get lost in the yogurt. when slightly cool slowly whisk in the egg yolk. cool to room temperature and freeze until completely cold. overdo this step. chill it a while longer than you think, you and the ice cream maker will be happy you did.

beat the egg white with the cream of tartar and salt until soft peaks form. add the sugar and continue beating until stiff peaks evolve. (omit this step if you're not into the raw egg bit. omit also the salt, cream of tartar and remaining 1/4 cup sugar.)

in a large bowl whisk the yogurt until homogenous and then fold in the plum mixture. deftly fold in the egg white, pour into ice cream maker and churn according to instructions. 

alternately, lacking an ice cream machine, pour the mixture in a wide, shallow pan (a roasting one works well.) leave in the freezer and take out after twenty minutes. scoop the crystallized edges in towards the runny middle and spread the runny middle out to the edges. repeat every twenty minutes to half an hour until  the middle no longer runs. then leave until completely frozen.

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high summer

Summer is here. It took its time.

We are getting rain and wind all the time, which stuns us. We look up and squint and put our noses into the breezes, we extend our palms upwards, cupped, to feel in disbelief  for the wet weight of thunderstorms. It is gloriously green and unusual. And the markets have fruit. Fruit! Not just the nine dollar a pint raspberries but heaps of apricots and cherries. This is a shock, usually the season for those is a blink and a start and is over.

Of course, when one has fruit to use, one must make cake. One must make cake as if it is one's only purpose in life and one must also eat the cake on shaded patios, with the basil and cornflowers blowing softly and the hummingbirds tangling with one another in the trees.

This cake was adapted from the sprouted kitchen's most recent and lovely idea. The novelty of almond flour has yet to escape me as a replacement for grain flours. While the above recipe was put together to make muffins I knew that, too often, muffins sit swathed in parchment, folded into ziplock bags, and left to fur over with mold in despair. There's something unromantic about fishing a slightly gelatinous-topped muffin from a bag and wishing it had retained its former lofty, somewhat crusty and fragrant glory when first turned from a muffin tin.

So, on the other hand, there is tea cake. Read: muffin batter baked in a loaf pan. Tea cake is seductive, it sits low slung and dark in a loaf pan and beckons knives and fingers to shave it down until only crumbs remain. With coffee or after dinner or in the middle of the day in bare feet at the countertop after one has recovered from miles trekked in the mountains and returned home ravenous. (Or maybe this person goes on treks into the mountains with the sole idea of using the alluring tea cake as a magnet for the return trip, imagining bits toasted with sweet cream butter with every step until the car comes back into view. Just maybe.)


Blueberry, Apricot and Almond Teacake

1/2 cup almond meal (pre-ground or make your own using whole raw almonds whizzed in your food processor)
1/2 cup cornmeal
1 cup 50/50 whole wheat-white flour (or any combination of other grain flours)
1/4 cup oats
1 heaping tablespoon hemp seeds
1 rounded teaspoon flaxseeds
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground or grated ginger
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup coconut sugar or other thoughtful sweetener
2 eggs
3 tablespoons coconut or olive oil or butter
1/4 cup plain yogurt

2 tablespoons raw honey

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

2 fresh apricots diced 

(*fancy option: crack one of the apricot stones open, fish out the fragrant soft inner kernel, dice up finely and add to the batter. The inner kernel is faintly reticent of roasted almonds and can impart a mysterious herbal note to recipes that call for apricot. Beware however as too many can overpower anything with a fierce bitterness.)

 

 

Preheat the oven to 350. Combine the dry ingredients (including the sugar) and set aside. Combine the remaining ingredients except for the fruit and whisk vigorously to aerate. This batter is somewhat dense and benefits immensely from a good swish about with a whisk before incorporating the dry ingredients. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and fold until about 75% combined, tip in the fruit and finish folding everything together. Use a gentle hand here now that the grains and the eggs are in the same bowl, an overly thorough mixing is grounds for a touch cake. Smooth into a loaf pan which you've buttered and papered and put into the oven for 35-50 minutes. Test with the blade of a knife for doneness. If the knife comes out with more than a crumb or two give it another 5 minutes and check again. Cool thoroughly before slicing: the cornmeal will remain somewhat firm and will crumble if cut before its had a chance to firm up and cool.

On another note the beginning of July marked some beautiful loops come full circle. It's important to have love move through you, the fierce kind, no matter what kind or where it comes from.

        \

shakti and the midges

As I mentioned, I had the good fortune to be taken to a migratory bird refuge north of Salt Lake City- literally an 80,000 acre of asylum in the middle of the desert. The birds there make the air breathe and they are brave and ravenous. Every one of these birds comes to be nourished before they're gone; some stay on for a while, others just blow through, but no one stays permanently. So I thought it was a perfect setting to give up and be nourished. There happened to be a midge hatch- a lunacy of bugs so heavy it bent the grass. These bugs do not bite do not even have jaws. But they serve as a kind of living energetic scrub- you move through the clouds of them and emerge feeling more awake and aware (and a little put off.) I made myself stand near them. Uncomfortable at first (the way I feel with any act of receiving,) and then more at peace and finally completely stilled. It was rocky and disorienting at first. Like that idea of inhaling and exhaling equally: when I make my inhale equal to the exhale it has always been somewhat unpleasant. A strange thing to be so thrown off by one's own breath... But I'm sipping a little at a time, readying myself to let It in. Whatever It might be.


 

tuesday brioche (a la Bernard Clayton)

Cold today, cold yesterday, probably cold tomorrow. But not as cold as today. Which means? Obviously spending the day cold-proofing an egg-heavy butter-forward bowl of brioche dough. Clearly. It keeps a gal from feeling like she's going to keel over if she wakes up one more time this April, clutching both down comforters to her throat and dragging the dog up into the bed to warm her up before braving clothes. (Ugh..)

So!

This dough is lovely and it's a mess. Bernard Clayton , who seems to have this dream job of traveling the world, eating bread and making bread, warns us of this when we set out to get after something like brioche. Maybe because brioche (like croissant) strives to defy physics by maintaining integrity under stringent conditions and demands- mainly, more butter and eggs than you can imagine getting into three pounds of dough, and doing it all, like a champ, in the blustery cold of the fridge (or the frosty after-hour counter tops courtesy of a mountain spring.) He's very charming about it :

"...Continue slapping back the dough for about 18 -20 minutes. Don't despair. It is sticky. It is a       mess. But it will slowly begin to stretch and pull away as you work it."

Which of course makes you feel like you should try to struggle through it, in the name of buttery pastry.

Brioche has a history, and fierce historian, and many people feel it should be done in one specific way, with no deviations whatsoever. And there are as many ways of making brioche as there are brioche historians, I imagine. For example, you could decide to do this over a period of four days (four?!), with a starter, without a starter. With a starter made from wild yeasts attracted to grape skins, or one made over the course of a month in a jar of a specific size. You could use cream cheese to enrich the dough, you could use anywhere form three to nine eggs. Truly. You have to have a decisive hand, and, most importantly, a clear idea of how much of your time you want to give to this dough. Because you could end up giving a lot. 

Luckily for us, Bernard gives us a recipe for Brioche Without a Starter (pages 611 - 612.) Which can be done in one day if you start early, or over the course of two if you employ your refrigerator overnight.

This is what I did:

Into the bowl of a stand mixer I put:
2 cups of flour
3 teaspoons of yeast (I used extra because of my cold kitchen)
1/4 cup dried milk (I know right? but it's worth it, it adds silkiness)
1 tablespoon of sugar
1 cup of hot raw milk (or you could use water)

When that was homogenized I added, a few tablespoons at a time

2 sticks of butter (soft)

and, one at a time

6 eggs (we have a glut of teenage eggs right now- the product of chickens new to laying who make many, luminous small and wompy eggs. Bernard requests only 5.)

And then, the balance of the flour (about 4 cups) a half a cup at a time until the dough comes together to form a heavy, sticky, mess of a dough.

This is the despair he warns about. Because it looks like pancake batter for a while. And then five minutes more. Then ten minutes more. In all it should stay in there for about twenty minutes. Switch to the bread hook when you can't imagine it needs more mixing. And then, in a flash (when you step away to warm more milk for your coffee,) it will become this beautiful, shiny, elastic dough that does actually clean the sides of the bowl. And you will be thrilled! And so glad you had a mixer instead of rock-hard french peasant woman arms that would be, otherwise, beat all to hell. Do no under any circumstances decide that your dough just won't come together and take it out from under the hook early. You will be so sad and so may eggs will have been wasted. Keep after it! And then get over it:

Then you leave it to double (about 3 hours.)

Then you fold it over itself, cover it in plastic and linen and leave it in the fridge for at least four hours, preferably overnight.

And, after folding it over on itself yet again to deflate it,  you can divide it and shape it. This recipe makes three pounds of dough suitable for two loaves of bread. Knowing that I can easily sit down and eat almost an entire loaf of bread on my own, I made one loaf (the shape, made by laying balls of dough in a zig zag pattern along the bottom of the pan is called Brioche Nanterre,) and many small buns using a variety of little ceramic teacups I had greased and papered.



Shape the dough on a well floured work surface. Brioche is meant to be a stiff dough (like challah,) and this is due mainly to the abundance of butter that firms up as it chills. As with puff pastry or croissant dough, if you feel the dough softening under your hands as your work and becoming very elastic this is a sign that it has warmed up a bit too much and can cause the oven lift to be a bit weak and the shaping to lose its integrity. Despite pining to get this in the oven already, put it in the freezer for about ten minutes before going on. Why waste all your efforts now?




These need a while to warm to room temperature and to do their final rise. Give them between 90 minutes to two and a half hours. If baking in a loaf pan you want the dough to just meet the edges of the pan. With the teacups it's a softer time frame because they vary in size. Go for a rough doubling from them and hope for the best. Then in a 475 degree oven (dry heat for these,) put them in together and test after 25 minutes. As usual, the bottom of the loaf should ring hollow when wrapped with the knuckles.

 

And that is what we call a productive Tuesday morning. Whew! If you're lucky you might have some sweet raw butter to eat with these. We're not that lucky. But we do have a lovely ruby slab of membrillo in the fridge, and some fiercely fresh eggs which perch so nicely when fried across the saffron crumb of still-warm brioche. I figure that's almost as good.

did you ever know about birthdays?

Did you ever know about birthday dread?

It feels like that a little. When you turn 30 I mean. Which I did, recently. No big deal right? Except that it did feel like a big deal, and that made me feel silly. I'm not usually a person who plays into things like existential angst, or aging phobias. But I did feel like a door closed a little harder than usual (with a little gust to follow, which came in the form of a two day snow storm....) It was more like leaving the husk of a soul-shaped skin behind and wriggling forth into raw and silvery newness. Not particularly pleasant, but bracing at least. 

So I decided I shouldn't invest in that new german eye serum or go get grown up looking lipstick. Instead I endeavored to surround myself with profundity, potency and power. Light, too, and laughter. 

These things have made all the difference:

Outrageous Openness by Tosha Silver (An actual life changer. The kind that comes when the Virgin Mary shows up in your yogurt.)

Honey From A Weed  by Patience Gray (It has been so long since I have read something so beautiful.)

Vegetable Literacy the newest by Deborah Madison. (Divided into family?! For example: the Knotweed Family and The Former Lily Family, in case you need to shriek with joy when you peruse a cookbook.)

The Round House and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse: A Novel  both by Louise Erdrich.  (Bone strippingly powerful writing. Yeesh.)

Light on Yoga  by B.K Iyengar. (In case you haven't recently been floored by a need to reform in the direction of humbleness.)

And I've been carrying around my squat little notebook and watching happily as it gets thicker and more bent and more tattered. 

So these have been blessings. The key being, I think, to relinquish the tar pits of the surface and plumb clearer, cleaner depths. Spring struggles here (as it always does,) and I am reminded that the effort to be drawn up and out of our closed-circuit cycles of self-criticism and the angst To Do Something With Ourselves is neither surefooted nor swift. Rather it is mucking about and accepting the mire as part of a larger plan, even if we don't have the right maps and scale weights. Thanks goodness.

rifts

H and I spend summers apart. It's ok. We stretch ourselves to gauze, aching across many thousands of miles and then homecoming, like a comet, smashes the world apart with light. Sometimes this is the best part of the year, but during the actual time everything feels abstracted and thin.

I save myself by writing letters, maybe he is saved by them. For me, loading all of my words and pictures into an anonymous blue box and knowing it will sit unassuming on a communal table, winking and shivering until he picks it up, is gleeful.

And sometimes I really like to look back through what I've made. It doesn't feel like Work with a formal W. But it is shockingly relevant to that word, which is odd. For love.

but really

Whew!
But really.

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When I was at the age, I had a diary. I didn't keep it very long because of diary-guilt- you know, where you  come back to the diary after letting it digest its contents quietly and you feel so terrible? "I'm so sorry I've just left you here!" That commitment was difficult so I ditched the effort. It wasn't until RISD (well, more accurately, CCAC,) that I realized a sketchbook is a different deal. It waits with inexhaustible patience and this is the kind of light that really matters. And somehow, after time away, you can't wait to get back to it. No one's feelings hurt.

So maybe that's what's happening here. But anyway. Speaking of sketchbooks, some pictures here. Old ones, new ones - mostly old ones.

on pizzi (a loose, visual recipe)

sometimes we make pizzi. it is a stretched out effort made all the easier by doing it slowly, with good company and a few bottles of beer.

we particularly like this recipe for the dough (but, be warned, it needs to sit overnight or the scant helping of yeast can't be coaxed into a billowy crust.) on days when we haven't had enough foresight we use this recipe to an equally delicious if more swift effect.

I think half of this company likes pizza because it enables us to use the grill in the winter time. (Crank it  to upwards of 500, or as hot as it will go, add the bread stone, let it sit for a while...)

And also because we can reenact the college job of throwing pizzas while in our new, less poverty-stricken and Scandinavian-mega-store-furnished nest.

 

And then the best part. Crowding the counter with any manner of things to put on top of the pizza. (Plus a sauce of whole tomatoes, a glug of olive oil and a smashed garlic clove let sit to sputter and melt into the sauce. Simple and light.)

we are frequently inclined to use cheese we make ourselves, but just as soon not. 

and we get in a frenzy, and we burn our tongues instead of waiting for three minutes for the cheese to solidify instead of swooping off the end of a slice, or we get confused about what pizza has just come off and when we need to dash out and put a new one on...



and in the end all of it is good medicine.

and. so. the point is that you can venture onto the deck in your muck boots to peel pizzi on and off the hearthstone just as easily as in the summer, and it is always rather exciting to find such a novelty as summer-fare on the table when the frost is blowing sidelong and you're already (!) beginning to ache for green buds to appear.