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.

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.

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.

donut option

even when you make a goal to put only luminous and whole things into your body, you sometimes need to eat things that are only silly, only gratifying and only impractical. and in such situations it seems  sensible to seek out the very best of these things- to honor the break in the routine.

and so, perusing here i found these! and saturday morning frivolity commenced.

crisps

i was recently give something most exciting, sitting at a high bar counter and slugging am oversized ice cube around and around in my glass of whiskey. it was a board and some cheese. these are exciting on their own of course, but what was really exciting were the snapping and fiercely crunchy rye crisps that came with them. formidable in texture (seedy, dense, molasses stricken and deeply brown) and at the same time ethereally light and fragile. because they were so thin. rye and sesame and millet winking around in a bowl at a bar? (true it was this most excellent bar) but something both startlingly delicious and truly nourishing rarely happen to a lady with whiskey when she's out of the house.  i am quite certain they were these little things, which i can say with certainty i have never tasted before nor ever thought about purchasing because of their outrageous price tag (9.99??) but as it turned out, perhaps i had been missing out. big time.

it seems though that a good many folks have yearned to fill up their pockets with these but have been equally hindered. and since the internet trumps kinds of poorness, recipes for these things abound!
and so i undertook to recreate them and i think it was a good thing. all in all.

seed crisps

(adapted from all the above sources but mostly from here)

1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup apf/bread flour
2 teaspoons of baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
2 cups buttermilk (I amended one cup of whole milk with one cup of yogurt)
2 tablespoons brown sugar or rapadura
2 1/2 teaspoons honey
2 1/2 teaspoons molasses
1/2 cup apricots, currants and sour cherries, soaked 20 minutes and then chopped
1 cup mixed seeds, nuts or grains (i used chia, hemp, steel cut oats, buckwheat groats, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds and millet)

preheat the oven to 350

sift the dry ingredients together with the seeds. shake the buttermilk or milk and yogurt with the molasses, honey and sugar. stir until just combined and then stir in the fruit.

divide the batter into papered and/or greased loaf pans. (a mini loaf pan will render more manageable sized crackers. a full-sized loaf pan may need to be cut into smaller pieces once baked.)

bake for 30 - 40 minutes until a toothpick inserted into the loaves comes out clean.

let the loaves cool (speed this up by freezing) and slice very thinly.

return the sliced loaves to the oven for a second time at 325 for 10 minutes. flip these and finish them for another 15 minutes, or until deeply brown.

let cool completely before storing to ensure these stay crisp. if you can resist eating them long enough to have any extras.

god and sandwiches

i got a present

 

profundity in the woods in the late part of a Sunday afternoon. not many leaves left here, and not many aspens in a conifer forest, and not many sunbeams in a mostly east-facing canyon and yet! one tree with the lights in it. right in front of me.

we are not always this lucky - to have something so close to a blessing ring and shine at us. but, when the conditions are right: solitude is certain, quietness abounds, light blows and bends in the sky, stillness  radiates from the walking body (however that seems to happen), the mind is unfurled, reaching and open, well, you can be struck like a bell if you put yourself out there.

and so often such profundity is a flash and a retina burn. but for me, on this walk, it wasn't. it was long and drawn out and dreamlike. and i wavered like the autumn grasses myself, rooted to the spot but also surging away from myself, squinting into the blown beacon of one lit and gilt aspen tree as if the only thing in the world that mattered was my standing there, in muddy clogs, with a snarled braid zipped partially into my jacket, with numb fingers and a dry mouth wondering if Divinity could be so powerful and also so mundanely present in the regular world. 

i should say i am not usually moved by a thing so electric and huge as some people call God. but i do, absolutely and surely, believe in the large and complex plans of the Universe. i like that the Universe lets you in to those plans sometimes, and sometimes shocks you to your marrow, and then lets you carry on and maybe get startled by not one, not two but three pairs of moose later on the walk that force you to run back to the car for fear of being flattened. i like that, because i feel at once small and immensely relevant (though still weak and inconsequential.)

after the present i felt i should give back and so, because we had a nice heap of eggs, and some lovely growing things and (importantly) a nice velvety square of cheese i made a magical and lit up sandwich in honor of the Golden Tree.

mostly the stain of these beets is what revved me up. like egg yolks. steamed them in their paper thin jackets, a few drops of water and some salt in a warm oven.

 

caramelized some onions with fennel, thyme and himalayan salt 

 

scarped out the onions, added a thick slice of butter and this mountain of spinach and beet greens

 

meanwhile charring some poblano peppers from the market on a spare burner (the crackling smoke was green, how strange.) tipped in 5 eggs whisked with a little cream and some salt and pepper and cooked it over low until it pulled away form the skillet and rose high at the edges 

 

rubbed some sourdough bread with garlic and toasted under the broiler 

 

dotted the frittata with a few nuggets of saint andre, and finely chopped up one last, and very soft, yellow tomato and...

   

voila! add a tangle of parsley and there is a sandwich fit to honor a glowing tree.