Here’s a little quote for the day:

The smell of bread baking,
like the sound of light flowing water,
is indescribable in its evocation
of innocence and delight. . . . . M.F.K. Fisher

You’ll find very few yeast breads here on my blog. It’s not that I don’t like them, but I’ve just tended to cook other things, and there are so many good artisan breads out there now so we can find good breads in several markets close by. But back in my ancient history I used to bake all of my own bread. I know I wrote up a post about it once upon a time. I even used to sell bread to family and friends when I was a cooped-up young mom. At the time my ex and I had just one car and only twice a week did I get to have it, so the other days I was home trying to find things to do. Making my own bread was so much better to eat because the markets had nothing but the mega-bakery institutional kinds of breads. The kinds I didn’t like then, nor do I like now.

One year during the time I was baking every week I came across this recipe for Pumpkin Raisin Bread in a raised, yeast type. My old notes don’t tell me where I got the recipe, but I have changed it over the years, so it’s really my own anyway. I added more spices, more pumpkin, reduced the sugar and sometimes added walnuts too. This bread didn’t get baked all year around – just in the Fall months. It was very popular with my friends. And, I will tell you this bread is just fabulous with turkey sandwiches. I made it every year – for years and years – the day before Thanksgiving so we’d have some for sandwiches. It freezes well – whole, or you can slice it, freeze it in foil, then in plastic bags, and it will keep for several weeks. At Thanksgiving, though, it never lasts more than a day or so. Periodically I make it now, and it’s usually this time of year.

Pumpkin bread with apple butter – sublime!

Just realize this is NOT a sweet tea kind of bread. It’s a toast-kind of bread, or a sandwich-type of bread. It’s light and airy, not dense. And if you’d like to include more healthy flours, substitute about 1 cup or so of whole wheat flour for white bread flour. For some years I attempted to recreate this recipe in my bread machine, but have never been successful, except at mixing up one loaf at a time and using the machine for JUST the mixing process, not the rising and baking. This bread needs a different rising time than the machines offer. This time I mixed it up in my stand mixer, using the dough hook. Instead of combining and mixing things in separate bowls I just started with the water and yeast mixture in the mixer bowl and once it had bubbled enough so I knew the yeast was good, I just added the other ingredients to the bowl. That kept the dirty dishes down to a low level. Every house I’ve ever lived in I’ve had to find the right spot for raising dough. Yeast dough likes a quiet, warm place without drafts. This time the wide bowl sat on top of my espresso machine and within a couple of inches of the under-cabinet fluorescent lighting, which gave the bowl a nice warm place to do its thing.

My YEAST TECHNIQUE: I’ve mentioned it here before, but I have a technique for proofing (proving it’s viable) yeast. It’s not my own idea, but back in those olden days when I was baking all the time I read lots of bread cookbooks, and one explained all the chemistry of yeast. And this cook’s advice was to mix the yeast with warm water as usual, but to also add a tiny bit of ground ginger and sugar. Yeast is a growing thing, and it needs “food” to develop its skill, and the ginger and sugar help give it a jump start. My breads back then made a successful leap. I don’t think I ever had a yeast failure ever again.

So, this bread is fairly straight forward – you mix up a batter, add the other extraneous ingredients, mix, add the flour (not all of it unless you have to). One of the secrets to bread baking is to add only as much flour as the dough needs to keep the stickiness under control. If you remember that adage, you’ll not likely have any problems with yeast dough. I add the raisins and nuts after the first rise, but the recipe indicates it’s done during the first mixing. Your choice. And if you are doing this for turkey sandwiches, maybe you don’t want to add the nuts. They don’t serve much purpose for sandwiches. But they’re great if you’re making toasting bread.
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In trying to make more vegetarian meals, I ran across this recipe I hadn’t made in awhile. My friend Susan made this for us one night as a side dish to a roast chicken and a salad. It was really nice. I’ve made it a couple of times since. If you prepare it as a side dish, you likely could feed more people, but I make it as a main course, so it actually fed just four of us the other night. We had it plus a green salad, so one slice of the tart simply wasn’t enough – we all dug into the dish for seconds. I have added bacon to it a couple of times. And sometimes I don’t make the herb-enhanced crust, but use a store-bought pie shell. You can also substitute Feta cheese for the goat, or even Swiss cheese also. Any kind of chard will work – even the rainbow type. The leeks provide some good flavor, and the golden raisins and pine nuts add different texture. All good things. The original recipe is one by David Leite, published in the Los Angeles Times several years ago. The recipe says to serve at room temperature, so you could even take this to a picnic, or make it hours ahead of time. I like those options, although I served it warm. This isn’t a big, huge “wow” dish, but simple, hearty, satisfying.

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The other night we went to our friends, Cherrie & Bud’s house, for dinner. We used to have a more regular get-together where we both cooked the dinner together and our husbands got to enjoy the results. We always tried new things. Seems like we’ve both been busy; too busy to even plan it ahead. Cherrie made the entrée (a chicken Mediterranean dish – delicious), Israeli couscous (a Trader Joe’s box mix that was just really good), and a Sticky Toffee Bundt Cake with a rum sauce (more on that later in this post). I brought the ingredients to make salad (a fennel and orange one) and a vegetable side dish.

We enjoyed some champagne and appetizers on their back deck, then I started working on my part of the dinner. Let me start by saying that this dish is really very, very good. I’d make it again. BUT, to hand cut the zucchini and yellow crookneck into little, tiny linguine-like strips was tedious. Cherrie couldn’t find her mandoline (she has one hiding somewhere), but finally I needed to get started. She helped too, but still, it took us both about 20 or more minutes to carefully slice the squash. WAY too much trouble. If you want a very impressive looking dish, though, use your mandoline and make those little julienne slices. Much of it can be done ahead – there’s no reason it couldn’t be, although the recipe didn’t indicate it. The recipe came from the August issue of Food & Wine, from a Cleveland chef named Douglas Katz.

You blanch the squash in boiling water, remove to drain, then mop it with towels or paper towels to absorb the excess moisture. Meanwhile, you prepare some sliced shiitake mushrooms, shallot, garlic. Those things get sautéed, then you toss the “linguine” with a light oil dressing, toast up some pine nuts, combine things, sprinkle the pine nuts on top and put some little blobs of goat cheese on top too. I have some suggestions – I thought the flavors were wonderful – I’d make it again, but would probably just do it as a much quicker sauté and forget the linguine cutting, even if I do have a mandoline. It’s very colorful, and very tasty. It could even be a vegetarian entree as far as I’m concerned. I could have just had that for dinner.

So, the ending of the evening. . . Cherrie is the first to admit that she’s not the best baker out there. She says she has more failures than successes. Cookies she can do (and does almost every Christmas season with her sister Laurie), but just about anything else she’d rather buy than even try. This dinner we planned, however, Cherrie and I agreed we were going to use things from our pantry – that we had on hand. (Well, I couldn’t because everything I made was with fresh produce). But Cherrie did – chicken from the freezer, the couscous mix, and the dessert. The cooking school Cherrie and I used to visit with regularity, is no longer in business. We were so sad to see it go. The place sold some great boxed mixes, the Sticky Toffee Bundt cake was one of them. So, with trepidation, Cherrie decided to bake the cake. Even SHE was amazed that it turned out – looked beautiful on the elevated cake stand.

After we cleared all the dishes, Cherrie began slicing the cake and asked Bud to go out to the garage to get the special frozen yogurt they’d gone out to buy – from a new place called Juice? Or Juicy? Can’t recall the name. Bud returned to the kitchen as we were scooping the warm butter sauce over the cake slices. He had a rueful expression on his face. With long, drawn out words he explained . . . slowly . . . each word separated . . . “I … put … the … frozen yogurt … in … the … refrigerator.” Cherrie’s face fell. She said WHAT? She said “What ever were you thinking?” He just looked at her. No words from his mouth. No explanation. When they’d gotten home with the frozen yogurt it was his job to put it in the FREEZER. Nope, for whatever reason, he put it in the refrigerator. Needless to say, after several hours, the frozen yogurt was a kind of thickened sauce. Cherrie was more than a little bit upset – at first. But, we ventured on, just adding this “sauce” on top of the hot butter sauce. We returned to the dining room and began eating the cake and drinking good hot coffee. Cherrie was still niggling Bud about his mistake. But you know what? The yogurt “sauce” was really good on it – it was cold, liquidy, and a nice side note to the cake – which was sweet and rich. Eventually we all agreed it was almost BETTER than the frozen yogurt. Sometimes kitchen disasters turn out to be winners.

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Have any of you begun watching the TV show with Steve Raichlen, the grill expert and author of any number of grill cookbooks? He has a program on PBS called “Primal Grill.” His show is filmed somewhere in Arizona, apparently his ranch, cows grazing close by, an ancient pickup truck in the background, and several different kinds of grills behind him. I can’t say that he’s all that natural behind a camera, but I like his recipes. I own a couple of his cookbooks and haven’t ever been disappointed in anything I’ve made. The recipes for all his shows are available on his website, Primal Grill . This particular segment was about cooking lamb, and as I watched him sink a knife and fork into this burger and saw the goat cheese oozing out of it, I knew I had to make this.

Ground lamb isn’t available in my markets, so had to go to a butcher to get it – and all they had was frozen in one pound chunks. So, the burgers I made with two pounds made slightly larger burgers than indicated. And I used less goat cheese – the recipe indicated 8 ounces of goat cheese, but there was no way I could have enclosed 2 ounces of goat cheese into my burgers. I’ve altered the recipe to that effect. I ended up making 8 thin patties, putting the goat cheese between two of them and sealing up the edges. Our burgers were done in 8 minutes per side (instead of 7, but remember we used a bit more meat), and were absolutely delicious! My DH adores Greek salad, so the yogurt cucumber sauce dolloped on top of the burger, that oozed down onto the “salad” and each morsel combining a piece of meat (with goat cheese) and some lettuce, tomato, onion and cucumber was sublime. We didn’t have the pita bread, just the “salad” underneath, so you can do that as well. If you like lamb, this one’s a winner.
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It was a couple of years ago that our daughter-in-law, Karen, served this dish to us, and I liked it so much. She got it from Food & Wine magazine. In the few months after that, I made it several times, thought I’d entered it into my cooking software program, but somehow it dropped in the cracks. Recently Karen fixed it for us again with fresh Swiss chard from her garden, and I was reminded how good this dish is. And how EASY it is, too. How often can you make a dinner entrée (here it’s with pork chops) and NOT have to brown the chops? This baked casserole, if you can call it that, but not in the traditional casserole type meaning, is put together with relatively few ingredients. You might think it’s going to be blah. Au contraire.

Let me just tell you how easy it is: first you chop up a pound of (buy the pre-washed if you can) Swiss chard into ribbons and pieces. This is placed in a large Pyrex (or crockery) baking dish and you toss it with some olive oil and salt and pepper. You rub the pork chops (1-inch or thinner) with some oil too, season them and put them on top of the Swiss chard. Now, you know how much volume there is of the chard when you start – it will be mounding over the edge of the dish, but that’s normal. You drizzle the top of the chops with a bit more oil, then sprinkle on the two different cheeses. You bake it for exactly 18 minutes, remove it, cover the dish for 5 minutes and you’re DONE. Serve with a salad and some bread and you have a complete dinner. I sometimes add herb seasoning (like rosemary or thyme) to the pork chops, but that’s IT. I kid you not, this one is so simple and delicious.
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I’m beginning to sound like the cooking instructor, Phillis Carey, in my long-winded titles. But, you see, I don’t want you to flip on by this one without realizing what’s actually in this scrumptious soup. If simple comfort food is what you crave, this soup will fit the bill to a T.

We had invited friends over for dinner and they really like to eat light and healthy, so I said I’d make soup. So okay, what to make? I flipped through some of my tried and true recipes but finally decided to wing it – I’d create a new soup for the occasion. We try to limit the carbs we eat, so it was simple enough to put in just a bit of wild rice and a bit of barley instead of larger portions. If I’d done the normal, it would have made this a Wild Rice and Barley Soup with Mushrooms and Turkey Meatballs. No, I wanted the mushrooms to shine and the wild rice and barley to merely provide texture and some good healthy grains. It was perfect for a cold Sunday afternoon as I puttered in the kitchen, adding this and that.

The wild rice and barley were cooked separately because I didn’t want to overcook either of them. They take different cooking times, and I also wanted to add them in just at the last so they’d still have plenty of toothy bite to them. A variety of fresh mushrooms were used including some porcinis. Actually there were a LOT of mushrooms in this soup altogether, but that’s what I had in mind. I wanted it to seem like a real cream of mushroom, but without being loaded with cream itself (there’s just ½ cup in the whole recipe, so that’s one tablespoon per serving). Can I tell you, without sounding too proud of myself, that this is one heck of a good soup? I’m beginning to sound like a broken record since I’ve made some outstanding soups lately. Remember my story about my granddaughter Taylor asking me what was my favorite thing to cook?  I was baking a cake at her house and am sure she was expecting me to say cookies or desserts. And then I burst her bubble and she definitely gave me a funny face when I said “soups.” So, here you are with a new soup that will make your comfort genes happy.

You can add other vegetables to this if you’d prefer – I just had in mind the mushrooms being the star and anything else was a subtle note. The meatballs were easy to make – just remember not to boil the soup once you drop them into the hot liquid because they won’t hold together. I added some egg substitute to the mixture to give it some “glue.” And I added some olive oil to give the meatballs a bit of flavor, and because the only cheese I had with me was cottage cheese, I added a few tablespoons of that too. By all means, put in some other kind of cheese – like feta or cheddar, or jack. Even Parmesan. At the dinner table I heard raves from everyone, so I think this is another winner. Hope you agree. Serve with a salad (and bread if you want it).
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When I saw the photo and recipe in the November, 2008 Gourmet for this beef, pork and cabbage dish, it just sounded a resonating bell in my head. Years ago I used to make stuffed cabbage rolls, but always found it a lot of work, and . . . well, just not worth the effort. Hence I haven’t made them in decades. But I always liked the flavor. This particular recipe is a quick and easy version – most of the ingredients – but without the work of parboiling the cabbage leaves, stuffing, rolling (carefully) then stacking them in a pot, making a sauce to go over, etc. Then baking or simmering them for awhile.

This recipe is just so simple – it was in Gourmet‘s “Everyday Quick Kitchen” – you make the sauce – kind of like a soup or stew mixture (it sort of looks like tomato chili in a way), and then you simmer the cabbage wedges in broth (separately) and combine them briefly before serving them on a rimmed plate (or a wide soup bowl in my case). I thought this dish was just great – not something you’d serve to guests, perhaps, unless you share really casual meals together. It all could be made ahead and reheated. I doubt the cabbage would do all that well frozen, but I’ll probably freeze a portion or two of the meat mixture and just prepare fresh cabbage when I want to have it again. I cooked the sauce longer than indicated (because I had the time and thought the flavor would improve by longer simmering) and I added some fennel, caraway and thyme to the sauce. You could put this dinner together in less than an hour if you hustled the chopping and cooking of the sauce. The cabbage takes about 45 minutes – you could do that in the microwave or a pressure cooker to speed it up. The beef and ground pork sauce has a delicious tang (from the brown sugar and red wine vinegar) and the juices are so good you don’t want to miss a single slurp. So, try it!

What’s GOOD: this is such a great recipe – the umami of the sweet and sour, the dried cranberries, even, and mixed with the cabbage. Like eating a big bite of a juicy cabbage roll – but, without all the work. Make a double batch and have leftovers later.
What’s NOT: only that there is a bit of prep – plus 45 minutes cooking time for the cabbage (use Instant Pot if you have one).

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You can’t see the portabello very well here (mostly in the foreground) or the blue cheese which covered it, but it’s there underneath the fillet. All of it drizzled with a Port wine, Zinfandel and shallot sauce.

One thing you always know about Phillis Carey’s recipes, they’re going to have an expansive title. She doesn’t want you to miss a single thing in the title in order to get your taste buds sizzling. When I go to cooking classes I always hope to learn something (I think in all the classes I’ve ever been to, only one was a complete dud). Phillis’ recipes are usually fairly simple, but very high on the good-taste-scale, which is why I keep going back to watch her demonstrate. And I wrote “fab” on the side of the recipe – my code for a terrific recipe. Yup, indeed. This recipe takes less time than many, and is worthy of an elegant dinner. The wine and port sauce was delicious served alongside the beef, and each bite of beef was accented with a bit of mushroom and blue cheese. A great combination. Just remember to take the steaks out of the refrigerator for 45 minutes or so before starting.
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It’s no secret, I do love chocolate. Too much. But I don’t like it when the chocolate I might eat at night keeps me awake because of the caffeine. A chocolate dessert that is on the lighter side doesn’t bother me most of the time. And this one didn’t, either, although at the cooking class I didn’t get a very big portion. What I had was luscious. But then I really like a soufflé roll kind of dessert. Do you? My portion served to me at the class doesn’t even LOOK like a roll, but when it was cut into slices it did. My portion was at the end, so it got a little squished. The thing is, the filling was chocolate colored too, so it’s hard to see the rolled up cake and filling anyway.As usual, I learned something interesting at this class. You know those bottles of instant espresso powder you use for making desserts? I’ve had several over the years. And not too long ago I had to throw out the one I had open AND a new one I had on the shelf because they’d spoiled. Guess what? You’re supposed to keep it in the freezer! I certainly didn’t know that – but that’s why both bottles I had developed mold. I haven’t purchased a new one yet as it’s not carried at my local grocery stores. But now I know. . .

Years ago I used to make a chocolate soufflé roll – it was a particular favorite of mine. I probably made it 30 times over the course of 15 or so years. I mean really, what’s there not to like about chocolate and whipped cream? Seems like those two things are made to go together. But my soufflé cake roll you could see distinctly because the filling was white – whipped cream white. And the cake was a dark chocolate. Mine didn’t have nuts in it, nor did it have any coffee, as this one does. But I really liked the flavor here. A lot. It really didn’t take all that long to make (though it took a number of bowls and pans to do it all). The cake can crack when it’s rolled up – it happened at the class, but you just make do by trying to put the cracked edge on the bottom. Nobody will ever know! This would make a great dessert for the holidays. Phillis Carey obviously likes soufflé rolls too since she’s made a couple at classes I’ve attended in the past. It was served with ice cream – which you need to cut the rich cake. You can make it a few hours ahead, but that’s it – Phillis said it just doesn’t hold up longer than that (the whipped cream begins to deflate).
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Last week I had a few hours in between cooking classes before I met my friend Linda for a drink in Mission Bay, and then we went to the cooking class together. So I drove out to La Jolla. For those of you who don’t know how to pronounce it – it’s la hoy-ya. The J is prounouced as a y, as in yah. I’ve heard people in other parts of the world trying to say joll-a, as in jolly. Nope. Anyway, since I grew up in San Diego (La Jolla is a very upscale northern suburb of San Diego, right on the ocean) I know the main streets and the back roads. I parked at La Jolla Cove, a rather famous San Diego/La Jolla landmark and took out my pens, pencils and brushes and did some drawing and painting. It was very relaxing. I snapped this photo a few blocks from the Cove, although it was quite overcast. Cool too. Since we live about 10-15 miles from the ocean, we rarely go there, so it was nice to listen to the lapping waves and the squawking shore birds for a couple of hours.

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