Cooking for a Cause

We had our premier this week as Guest Chefs at the Ronald McDonald House here in Portland.  Volunteers in the Guest Chef provide home cooked meals for the families staying at the house. Tom & I will be Chef-ing once a month and we're really excited to be combining our love of cooking with such a great cause.

We kept it pretty simple for our first menu - baked ziti, salad and plain and (of course) garlic bread. Since the families come back to the house at different times, we wanted to have something that would stay warm and be easily re-heated. It feels good to be able to provide warm and tasty meal for the families at RMH.

We already have some ideas for our next meal, mac-n-cheese being a leading contender - especially while we're still in mac-n-cheese season here in Maine. Truthfully though, other than our 3 hot summer days a year is there anytime that mac-n-cheese not great?

No Knead Bread for a Cold Weekend

It seems like everywhere I turn, I see another recipe for no knead bread. While I don't think kneading is a particularly arduous step in bread-making, I've been intrigued by the idea of this bread. With temperatures predicted in the single digits and teens for the weekend, I figured that bread making would be a good plan.

The process started Friday evening, and I mixed the dough and had it rising by around 5:30. My dough rise location of choice these days is in the microwave. I'm hard pressed to find a place in my home (in Maine, in January) that is a constant 70 degrees. My micro sits over the stove, and has a surface light. When the light is on, the inside of the microwave gets pretty warm. I've never actually checked the temperature in there, but it feels about right.

What makes no knead breads so approachable is that the "active" time involved is all of about 15 minutes. Mixing the dough is un-fussy, then it can rise for 12 - 20 hours. After the first rise, you gather the dough together in a roundish form, plop it in another bowl for rise # 2 (about 2 hours). After the second rise, the bread bakes for about 45 - 60 minutes.

Though the active time is pretty minimal, this isn't a bake it on a whim kind of thing. But really, is any bread baking a spontaneous activity? Quite the opposite, it's more deliberate and planful, which is part of the appeal of it, to me at least. My timeline for this bread was about 20 hours - I started this bread Friday evening, we were sampling it around 1:30 Saturday afternoon.

The dough.

I was pretty happy with how my final product came out, but I have to admit, I was a doubter throughout the process. My dough was probably a bit too wet to start. Sometimes you just have that inkling when you are baking, that something may not be quite right, but then you employ a bit of denial, or faith, depending on your mood. After the first rise, trying to work with the gooey, amorphous blob did not leave me confident about the final loaf. I think I threatened the dough with the trash can at least once.

After the first rise. This rise was about 16 hours.

Ready for the second rise.

Things were not looking better after rise #2. Despite flouring the towel, a fair bit of dough stuck to it. Trash can was considered again as the final resting place, but I figured that at this point I had about 12 minutes of active time invested in the bread, so I thought that I might as well throw it in the pot and in the oven to see what happens. This is the faith part of baking.

Truth be told, my doubt remained even through baking. About half way through the baking time, you take the lid off the pot (this bread cooks in a pot, more about that in the recipe below). It may have been the ugliest bread loaf in progress that I've ever created. However at this point I was committed to a household cu/pu effort (clean up / pick up), and I wasn't quite done. Since I wasn't going anywhere, the bread stayed in the oven to finish baking.

When I took the bread out and moved it to a rack to cool, I was thinking, 'huh, a bit flat, not nearly as attractive as pictures of this type of bread I've seen. But hmmm... it looks worth trying.' I let it cool on the rack for less time than it should have (honestly, I admire those of you who can let baked goods cool for as long as the recommended amount of time). Then we sliced. We oohhed. We sniffed. We ahhed. Tom said, 'get the butter.' The butter, in this case, is  Kate's Homemade Butter It's made here in Maine and if you love butter (and what's not to love about butter?), give this a try.

Ok, so this bread wasn't necessarily glamor-shot worthy. It did have a nice crumb, some good holes, a passable crust. But damn, it tasted good. Give this recipe a try.


No Knead Bread
This recipe first appeared in the New York Times on November 8, 2006. It was adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery.

Ingredients:
3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.
What to Do:
1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.
2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.  
3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.
(A note about a change I made here - as you can see from the picture - I did the second rise a bit differently than the recipe describes. Since my dough was so wet, I was worried that left without any structure for this rise, it would seep and ooze and I'd have a dough that was Kansas-like in it's elevation. I put the dough on the floured towel, then put that into a bowl so it would rise up, rather than out.) 
4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.
Yield: One 1½-pound loaf.

Good Times

So happy to stumble across a clip from a recent Saturday Night Live, resurrecting "The Delicious Dish." This is the SNL  "NPR" program that brought us Schweddy Balls several years ago. This latest installment brings us Betty White, talking about her muffin.
Since my blog is all about baking, I figured this was on-topic. Dig up the Schweddy Balls video if you haven't seen it. Though I do love Betty, I think Alec Baldwin has a slight edge.

Watch Betty here:http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/npr/1226057/

Pumpkin Coffee Cake

I was in search of a coffee cake recipe for brunch with friends, and I really didn't want to go to the store for any ingredients. A scan of the pantry turned up the usual suspects - pumpkin, dried cranberries, nuts. I also wanted a chance to incorporate some different grains. I got a copy of Good to the Grain (Kim Boyce) for Christmas, and am inspired to branch out into some lesser known grains. I found a pumpkin coffee cake recipe at Epicurean.com, which looked like it would be easy and tasty. I switched it up a bit, adding amaranth and whole wheat flour.
The resulting coffee cake was moist, spicy and had the grassy, sort of hay-like flavor from the amaranth that I've become quite smitten with. The cake played to rave reviews, and the amaranth provided a nice suprise taste. Not to worry if you don't have obscure grains hanging around. Use the cornmeal amount from the recipe below, and use all-purpose flour in place of the rest of flours amount.
Enjoy!




Ingredients:
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup amaranth flour
1/3 cup white or yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
2 large eggs
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1/4 cup canola oil (or applesauce)
1/4 cup nf plain Greek yogurt
1 cup pumpkin or winter squash purée, canned or homemade
1 cup fresh or dried cranberries
3 tablespoons demerara or raw sugar

What to do:
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter and flour a 9-inch square baking pan.
Spread the walnuts in a small baking pan and bake until lightly toasted, 8 to 10 minutes.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flours, cornmeal, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, and cloves. In a large bowl, combine the eggs, granulated sugar, brown sugar, oil (applesauce), yogurt, and pumpkin and beat with a large whisk or an electric beater until smooth. Add the dry ingredients to the pumpkin mixture and mix just until incorporated. Stir in the cranberries and 2/3 cup of the nuts. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Scatter the remaining 1/3 cup nuts on top and sprinkle with the demerara sugar.
Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, 30 to 35 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack and let cool in the pan to room temperature.
To avoid unnecessary temptation, I wrapped up the extra in plastic wrap and froze - the original recipe indicated this cake freezes well.

Welcome.

I'm glad you've found me.
I've started this blog to share my adventures in cooking - mostly baking - but we'll see what else eekes in. January in Maine is a good time to be in the kitchen, and a good way to keep the house warm and our bellys full. I'll bake most anything - breads, cakes, cookies, bars, more cookies, and I'm happy to adapt, change and experiment with my recipes.
As you might have noticed from the picture, I'm a batter licker from way back. I come from a long line of batter lickers and no, I don't worry about the raw state of what I'm tasting. Cookie dough makes me happy, and if you're reading this, I'm guessing it makes you happy too.
Enjoy.