I've lost my mojo, Baby.

No really, I'm stuck in a rut, and it's kinda freaking me out.  More than kinda.  I started this blog with all kinds of crazy awesome ideas and they're still floating around in my head.  Between school starting and trying to fit in regular workouts and a social life, eating from scratch has kind of turned into eating monotonous. Seriously.  I eat a slice of bread in the morning (challah this week), a cup of coffee the size of my face on the way in to school, the same salad for lunch every day, and one of two dinners, it would seem.  All my meals are very healthy (I'm counting calories in a big way right now) but things are getting kind of boring.  I need to spice it up. Even my lunch box is getting bored, and it doesn't have tastebuds.  It is, however, rather tasteful.


And then we come to the mojo issue. I'm a good baker. I'm confident in that. Lately though, the pastries I've tried to make have come out wrong.  I have a killer recipe for a fig cake i was making to mail my sister.  It turned out deflated and bitter.  Some carrot muffins I made turned out like hockey pucks, despite the correct amount of baking soda (I'm neurotic about that).  My trash can has been eating more homemade pastries than anyone else in my life.   The only thing that seems to consistently turn out right is bread, which is strange. Most bakers I know struggle with bread above all else. I can make bread with my eyes closed. 

I'm going to spend some time this weekend baking and trying to get my mojo back.  I'm not entirely sure what to bake. Do I go for something totally foolproof like chocolate chip cookies? Do I go for something intensely delicious but complicated? If I mess up chocolate chip cookies, that's gonna be a way bigger blow to my unstable ego than messing up something that's actually difficult.  But I don't know if I have the time to make something supremely difficult. Perhaps I'll go for pie. I'm good at pie.  Or I was. . .

I've got a few posts in the pipeline that are way less angsty than this one.  There's one  about the challah i've been eating this week, one about the messed up fig cake, and a few more about dinners that were so exciting  I've forgotten about them. 

Now tell me, cooking friends --- how do you get out of a culinary rut?

Breakfast. - a brief post.

So normally I make the same breakfast most days of the week.  I make a bowl of cereal (normally cheerios), mixed with yogurt and fresh fruit. I like my breakfast. I eat it most days.   So I realized that I wouldn't be having my breakfast the way I normally do, at least until I find a way to make yogurt (easy, but time consuming) and cheerios (no idea) from scratch.  I had baked some delicious bread the night before, and made jam and butter, so I could have jam and butter on toast, like I did today.  But normally I like a little protein on the menu, so I went with eggs.  Or, more accurately, I went with AN egg. One. The loneliest. . . . Never mind.

I decided on something pretty simple, but delicious.  If I were being fancy, I'd call it caprese breakfast sandwich or something.  See-- Insta fancy. But in my mind it was just egg and bread with some garnishes.

First, I sliced bread. That's pretty self explanatory.  Then  I fried an egg.  Yes, my pan was a little too hot.  The egg bubbled in a way that I wish it hadn't.  But it still tasted good. Once the white had started to set, I sprinkled some salt over the egg.


 ---A note on salt--- When I say salt, unless I specify otherwise, I use kosher salt, not iodized table salt.  Table salt leaves a one note bitter taste in the mouth. That's all. ---


While My egg cooked (Don't worry, I turned the pan down) I started assembling my sandwich.  I laid some good basil on the slice of bread. Because I like basil.  Then I turned back to the egg and flipped it over. I was going for over easy, since that works well in a sandwich.

Next, I put my over-easy egg on top of the basil. I poured a stream of good balsamic vinegar over the egg.  I like the whole acidic thing, and good balsamic makes almost everything just a little better.   I used a little more vinegar than what is shown here. I evened it out a bit.







Next, I put some slices of good, ripe, heirloom tomatoes (because that's what I had) on top of the eggs.  I sprinkled a little salt on the tomatoes too. Like eggs, tomatoes do a bit better with salt. It really brings out the sweetness of the tomatoes.








Next, The top slice of bread.  And, with a little squeeze, some of my perfect, over easy egg yolk oozed out. I like it when it does that. It makes instant sauce for my sandwich. And I like my sandwiches saucy. . .heh.



This is a pretty good, relatively healthy breakfast. If you need a little more fuel, or have a bigger calorie budget than I do, you can always add another egg, or a slice of cheese.   It was delicious as is.

Butter and Jam

As we learned, I was making bread.  And a lot of the bread making process involves waiting. And I'm not always the most patient person. While I was waiting for my bread, I tried cleaning my fridge and came across a jar of my favorite cherry jam.

     
"That'd be good on bread,"  I thought.  "But wait, that surely isn't homemade.  I better make my own."  I had cherries in my fridge, so I tried to come up with a way of making good cherry jam.  All my recipes involve the use of pectin. I had no pectin.  So I experimented and googled, and thanks to the genius of David Lebovitz, I came up with this technique.  I made a few tweaks, but that's just fine.  It's not like he used an actual recipe.

Where he used lemon zest, I used both lemon and orange zest.  Where he used white sugar, I used half brown sugar and half splenda.  Would it have tasted better with sugar only? Quite possibly, but I'm working on losing weight.  I also used significantly less sugar than the "recipe" called for, and just cooked it for longer.  It was absolutely delicious. I finished mine with almond extract, not kirsch. Why?  I had almond extract in the pantry. I didn't have kirsch.

I didn't can my jam in the traditional, will keep for ages kind of way. It's delicious, so I fully anticipate using it quickly. I put it in an old jelly jar I have. It was definitely clean, but not hardcore sanitized.  If I were making the jelly to keep for ages, I'd use more proper canning techniques.

The jam turned out amazingly.  It was delicious on toast in the morning, and was also delicious over yogurt. No, I did not make my own yogurt this week. I had a little bit that needed to be used, and instead of wasting food, I used the yogurt.  I'm imagining this jam as a beautiful filling in either lemon or chocolate cake as well.   Of course that's not healthy.

Along with Jam, I made butter.  It sounds WAY harder than it is. I had some heavy cream in my refrigerator, so I threw it into the mixer with a whisk attachment.  It's just like making whipped cream, only we're WAY over-whipping the cream  I made this butter very lightly salted. I generally don't bake with salted butter since I like to control the amount of salt in my food, but on bread, I like the taste of salted butter. I made it salted, since I know exactly how much salt ended up in the butter.

I brought my cream through beautifully whipped, to chunky and overwhipped, and kept it going.  I wasn't paying attention to the mixer. I was shaping the bread loaves.  When i started hearing liquid sloshing -- ok, when liquid sloshed out of the bowl and hit me in the eye-- i turned around and looked. Here's what I had. The liquid (buttermilk), and the butter had separated. I had beautiful, dense butter clumped in the whisk.  I shaped it into a log, wrapped it in saran wrap, and refrigerated it.  It is DELICIOUS.

Bread

One of those things I find absolutely irresistible is bread. I could eat bread and butter all the time.  I don't, but there's nothing better than good warm bread with melty butter. And maybe a little Jelly.  Plus, I like sandwiches, and I was realizing there's no good way to make cereal from scratch, aside from granola, which isn't the healthiest, so I set about making good, high fiber, healthy sandwich bread.

Here's the ingredient list.

1 ½ C lukewarm milk

¾ tbsp Yeast

1 tsp kosher salt

¼ c maple syrup

2 Tbsp oil

1 c All Purpose Flour

2 c Whole Wheat flour

1/3 C wheat germ

1/3 c rolled oats

Don't be thrown by the picture. I was making two loaves, one for me and one for a friend.   And I left the oil out of the lineup. But it made it into the actual bread. Don't worry.  

Now bread making seems intimidating to some, or so I hear. For me it's a relaxing, almost meditative process.  If I use good ingredients and do things right, the bread always comes out beautifully.  And makes my entire apartment smell awesome.

Step 1.  Proof the yeast.  Put the yeast, the maple syrup (use the good stuff people, not "pancake syrup), and the lukewarm milk in a large bowl, or in the bowl of your mixer. I did this bread by hand because-- hello! arm workout! -- but it works just fine in a mixer. You want the milk to be lukewarm but not too warm. don't want to kill the yeast.  Mix the yeast, syrup, and milk together until the yeast is involved. Leave it alone for 5-10 minutes and let the yeast bubble. if you don't get bubbles, you're using dead yeast. get fresh stuff.

Step 2.  Once you have bubbles, time to add about 3/4 of the flour (wing it), the oil, the wheat germ, and the oats.  if the mixture feels too moist, add more flour. if not, leave it.  When I was baking, it took about 2 cups more than it normally does It still turned out well in the end.  The texture you're looking for is not dry, it's slightly sticky but not tacky. 

It's kind of hard to describe the texture right. I'm sure there are bread blogs out there that do a far better job than i  do. But here's a picture of the dough, before it came together with kneading.  I turned it out onto a fairly generously floured board to knead it. I find that bread won't take a whole lot more flour than it needs to, even while kneading.   

Step3.  Knead the dough until it is smooth, elastic, consistently textured dough.  Yes, there will be bumps from the oats and wheat germs, but we're going for general consistency here.  I go by texture to tell when bread dough has been kneaded a lot, but I've made lots of bread. For less experienced bakers, use the windowpane test.  It took me maybe 10 minutes to knead by hand, but it really is quicker in a machine with a dough hook. I think I may do that with the next loaf.

Step 4.  Once the dough is kneaded, put it in an oiled bowl.  Cover the bowl with a clean, damp dishtowel and either put it in the refrigerator overnight for a slow rise or in a warm, but not hot, place for at least a couple hours. I put it out on my balcony in the hot LA sun, probably in the 80-90 degree range.  It rose beautifully.

Step 5.  Once the dough is risen, it's time to shape the loaves.  Here's the risen dough.   It had easily doubled in size and was sort of flattening out over the top of the bowl.  First, it's time to punch the dough down so that we don't get big air bubbles in our bread.  Punching risen dough down may be my favorite part of baking bread.  It's like punching into a whoopie cushion, a little.

This bread can either be shaped into boules   or made into loaves. Since I was craving sandwiches, I went the loaf route.  I used 2 beautiful loaf pans I got for my birthday a few years back, but any old loaf pan will do.  I greased the pans really well, but next time, lining them with parchment will work better. There was some stickage. Once the bread was in the pans, I left them alone to proof again, just on the counter, for 20 or 30 minutes.  During this time, I preheated the oven to 350 degrees.

Step 6. Once the bread had risen again and the oven was preheated, It was time to bake.  I just popped the bread into the oven.  The baking process takes 50 or so minutes (until a thermometer inserted into the bread hits about 195 degrees).  At about 40 minutes, I rubbed the tops in butter.  No, the butter isn't homemade, though there's an upcoming post about homemade butter and jam.  But I had an open stick of butter that needed to be used.  I don't use a ton of butter, just enough to thinly coat the top.  It makes it shinier, and, as it does with everything, makes it more delicious.

Step 7.  Now this is the absolute hardest part.  Once the bread is done, take it out of the oven.  Don't slice into it until it is cool.  Your kitchen will smell amazing, the bred will be warm, shiny, and delicious, but don't. sit on your hands. hide your bread knife. You don't want your beautiful bread to fall apart, do you?  Once the bread is easy to touch, feel free to take it out of the pan, but don't slice it till it's cool.





Step 8.  Once it's cool, go ahead and enjoy your bread. Enjoy it in sandwiches, enjoy it plain, enjoy it with butter, enjoy it with jam.  This is pretty healthy sandwich bread.  Lower calorie than the stuff in the store, and with way less weird stuff in it.