Adventures with yeast.

As you know, ever since mid-March, certain things have been difficult to find at the store. Toilet paper and paper towels are among them, of course; ditto for hand sanitizer and sanitizing wipes. Around La Casa Cantwell, I've begun to see TP and paper towels returning to shelves, especially if I go fairly early in the day. (You have to actually go, I'm convinced; if you order it from a delivery service, you'll never get it.) I actually picked up a couple of bottles of no-name hand sanitizer at the grocery store a couple of weeks ago. I brought one inside and left one in the care of Eli, my Kia Niro. Eli lives in an underground garage, so there's zero danger of the bottle spontaneously combusting in sunlight (and Snopes says it won't happen anyway).

But other things have disappeared from store shelves, too. Flour, for instance. And yeast. For a while at the beginning of the stay-home order, 100% whole wheat bread was another thing that was always out of stock. Apparently once everybody stocked up on TP, they decided to spend the next six or seven weeks of their time at home baking bread.

I used to have little envelopes of active dry yeast that I kept in the freezer. Alas, when I checked them about six months ago, they were long past their expiration date, so I threw them out. If only I'd known!

So I could only look at posts on social media about the delicious baked goods my friends had made, and sigh. But then I read an email from our local Great Harvest Bread outpost, saying if you asked, they would sell you some of their yeast. So I stopped in and asked, and they did! Except it didn't come in a little packet like I was used to.

*Fresh* yeast? Whut?

It turns out that real bakeries use fresh yeast. It comes in a big block, I guess, and you lop off however much you need for the number of loaves you're making. I'm told it's the same as the compressed yeast, or cake yeast, that I used to see in stores when I was a kid. I haven't seen it in a long time, though, and I've never baked with it. I always just bought the little packets.

Luckily I have friends in the UK, where grocers are not as squeamish about selling fresh yeast to home bakers, and they told me how to use it. It's mixed in at a different point in the process. Dry yeast is added to the liquids (water or milk, depending), and you have to be persnickety about the temperature of those liquids or you will kill your yeast. (I used to make all my own sandwich bread. I might have killed the yeast a few times.) Fresh yeast, or wet yeast, is added with the dry ingredients, and then you add your liquids, and the liquids don't have to be quite as warm. (Here is more info about liquid temperature rules for different types of yeast.)

The process didn't seem difficult -- I mean, people have been making things with yeast for hundreds of thousands of years, and it didn't always come in little packets -- so last weekend I gave it a whirl. I had a can of poppy seed filling and a powerful need to make a coffee cake. But after I talked up the project to Amy, I realized I'd have to make it gluten free. No worries -- we had measure-for-measure gluten free flour.

What I forgot was that baking with gluten free flour is a science unto itself. The coffee cake rose, but not much. It was very dense. And I also put too much butter in the streusel topping, so it ended up in big glops on top instead of little crumbles. The coffee cake tasted okay, mostly, but it was a far cry from what I had envisioned.

Major poppy seed coffee cake fail. Sadness!

I put the remainder of the yeast back in the fridge. Last night I remembered it was there, and I also remembered a friend mentioning they'd made raised waffles using sourdough starter. So there I was at 12:30 a.m., mixing yeast waffle batter with gluten free flour -- and there I was at 2:00 a.m., stirring it down and putting it in the fridge so I could make waffles this morning.

Which I did. And they were good.

Raised waffles. Yummers!

At this point you're probably expecting a recipe, so here is the one my mother gave me for raised waffles. Looks like she got it from a bag of Gold Medal flour. I made half the recipe (using two eggs instead of three) and got 10 waffles, so we each had three. Also, because I was using the wet yeast, I did it backwards: I mixed the flour, sugar, and salt together, crumbled the yeast on top, and then added the milk and the other stuff. It was fine.

RAISED WAFFLES

Mix: 

2 cups lukewarm milk

2 tbsp. sugar

1 tsp. salt

Crumble into mixture 1 cake compressed yeast or 1 package dry yeast. Stir until yeast is dissolved.

Beat in:

3 eggs

1/4 c. soft butter

2 c. flour (The recipe calls for Gold Medal "Kitchen Tested" Enriched Flour. I used Bob's Red Mill GF cup-for-cup to use it up. King Arthur's GF cup-for-cup is better. The recipe also calls for sifting the flour, but I was not interested in sifting flour at midnight.)

Cover, let rise at 85 degrees for about 90 minutes. Stir down, cover, and set in refrigerator overnight or until ready to use.

Stir down again. Pour onto hot waffle iron. Bake until brown and crisp, 3 to 4 minutes.

Fair warning: The recipe claims to make about eight 7" waffles, but my handwritten note says, "Hah! Made about 18 waffles..." Which is why I mixed up only a half batch last night. Thanks for the tip, past me!

***

These moments of adventurously yeasty blogginess have been provided, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Whether you're cooking or not, wash your hands!

Cookie weekend 2018.

This year's spoils. One more batch to go!

This weekend was my annual cookie baking blitz, and I am happy to report that the Awesome Kitchen that came with the new apartment has performed every bit as spectacularly as I thought it would.

For my holiday cookie recipes, I rely mostly on old favorites, as I suspect most people do. I've been using the same recipe for Toll House chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies for 40 years now; I got it from my mother, who used it for as long as I can remember.

Every now and then, though, I try something new. Sometimes it works (the gluten free almond-cardamom snowballs are really good) and sometimes it doesn't (the chocolate molasses cookies at the far right are meh). But I'm struck by the differences in the way recipes are written now. Come with me as I don my Old Farts hat and compare a recipe of today to one of yesteryear...

Let's take those almond-cardamom balls. Basically it's a shortbread cookie with spices and stuff mixed in, except it uses gluten-free flour that has xanthan gum already added so it behaves like regular flour. The result is still kind of crumbly, but shortbread is mostly butter anyway, so it's not as noticeable here as it might be in other cookies.

My mother's Betty Crocker Cookbook (copyright 1950) has a recipe for almond crescents that's pretty similar, so I'll compare it to the almond balls I made today. That recipe came from our local grocery store. 

The snowballs call for confectioners' sugar instead of granulated in the dough. I have no idea why, unless it's to make the ingredient list a little shorter. Betty calls for less flour -- 1 2/3 cups to 2 cups of GF flour -- but that's not a huge difference. 

The big difference is in the directions. Betty's are very short: "Mix together thoroughly" the shortening, sugar and ground almonds, then "stir together and work in" the flour and salt. Then, "chill dough," she says. Her directions for forming the cookies and rolling them in confectioners' sugar are similarly perfunctory. 

The directions for the snowballs, by contrast, take up half a column and assume you're an idiot in the kitchen. Step 1 is to use a food processor on the nuts "until very finely chopped but not pasty." Step 2 tells you to use a hand mixer or stand mixer to mix the dough, then "cover and refrigerate at least 2 hours or overnight." Step 3 starts with, "Remove cookie dough from refrigerator" -- no, really? Then you're supposed to line your cookie sheets with parchment paper (they're full of butter -- what's the parchment for? It's not like they're going to stick to the pan) and then, "with mini cookie scoop, scoop and roll dough into 1-inch balls." Step 4 is to bake them; step 5 is to roll them in confectioners' sugar. Of course, the directions are far more detailed than that.

I know kids today don't have to take home ec., but wow. 

I was a rebel. I used a hand chopper for my nuts, a hand-held pastry blender to cream the butter and sugar, and a spoon to scoop my dough. The cookies still turned out fine.

Here's the recipe, with the directions re-written for those of you who aren't idiots. It's from the December 2018 issue of "Savory." 

Gluten-Free Snowballs (Almond-Cardamom Variation)

Cream together:

1 c. (2 sticks) butter

1/2 c. confectioners' sugar

Mix in:

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1/2 tsp. almond extract

1 1/4 tsp. ground cardamom

Work in: 

2 c. all-purpose gluten-free flour

1 c. chopped almonds

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1/4 tsp. salt

Chill dough for 2 hours or overnight. 

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Farenheit. Roll dough into 1-inch balls and place on cookie sheets 1 inch apart. Bake for 8-10 minutes. Let cool 10 minutes, then roll in confectioners' sugar. Let cool thoroughly and roll in confectioners' sugar again.

(The recipe says it makes 28 servings but neglects to mention how many cookies are in a serving. I got 4 dozen cookies. You do the math.)

***

These moments of sweet baking blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

Results of the great date experiment.

The ingredients (except for the squash, which I didn't use).

As you may recall from our last exciting episode, I had just received 12 oz. of fresh dates and asked for recipes to use them up.

I'd forgotten how many foodies I am friends with on Facebook. I received a ton of ideas, some involving equipment I don't own (a high-speed blender) and foods I'd never heard of (Lebanon bologna, which it turns out is sort of like salami).

And then I forgot about the project until this morning.

In the meantime, I'd eaten some of the dates by themselves (which a few people suggested -- good call!). I ended up with just 14 dates -- not nearly enough to make date squares or a walnut-date cheesecake crust. So I narrowed the project to just date-based appetizers. Then I bought the ingredients you see here and began to combine them in logical ways. Or ways that seemed logical to me, anyway. I surrendered to the bacon-wrapped brigade and set aside five dates for hot appetizers; another three were set aside to be enrobed in chocolate (sans rum bath, sadly, as I'd run out of time). That left six dates for room-temperature treats. I steeled myself as I de-pitted each date, knowing that if I ate any now, I'd have even fewer for the test. Then I set to work.

And then, when they were done, I ate them all -- in the spirit of science, you understand.

Here are my creations and my ratings from 1-10, with 1 being "never again" and 10 being "why didn't I make them all this way?":

On the paper towel are the warm treats. I baked them at 375 degrees Farenheit for about 22 minutes. Williams-Sonoma suggested putting a wire cooling rack on a rimmed cookie sheet and putting the dates on the rack, so I did that and it worked pretty well. I used turkey bacon instead of the regular kind; that may have been a factor in my results. Clockwise from top left:

• Cream cheese, fresh chive, walnut quarter and bacon: 4. Too much going on here, I think.
• Manchego and bacon: 8. I loves me some Manchego, and it melted better than I thought it would.
• Goat cheese, slivered almond and bacon: 5. Couldn't taste the almond.
• Goat cheese and bacon: 7. I would make this again.
• And in the center: goat cheese, fresh basil and prosciutto: 9. The fresh basil made it stand out for me. Prosciutto is ham cured to within an inch of its life and sliced paper thin. Technically, you don't have to cook it, but it sure didn't hurt.

On the platter are the room temperature treats. I got lucky with the perfectly ripe cantaloupe; I don't think the results would be nearly as good with the pathetic, mostly-green ones we get at most other times of the year. Clockwise from the point on the platter at the top left:

• Cantaloupe and fresh mint: 10. Using fresh herbs makes all the difference. Next time I might put the mint leaf inside with the cantaloupe, instead of pinning it across the top.
• Goat cheese, fresh basil and slivered almond: 8.
• Cream cheese, walnut quarter and fresh basil: 9.
• Manchego, fresh chive and prosciutto: 6. The fresh chives just didn't do it for me, and the Manchego is clearly better warm and melty.
• Goat cheese, fresh mint and prosciutto: 7. Again, the mint makes it. I think I prefer the prosciutto baked, although this was pretty good.
• Cream cheese and cantaloupe: 9. On the sweet side, but quite tasty.
• In the middle are the three dates dipped in dark chocolate. I'd give the plain chocolate-dipped dates an 8; I found the chocolate upstaged the flavor of the date. However, I'd shoved a fresh mint leaf into one of the dates before the chocolate bath -- that one earned a 10. 

So there you go -- some variations on the bacon-wrapped-date theme. Anything with a 7 or up would be worth making again, I think. And simpler is better -- one or two ingredients inside the date got the best results.

And of course, your mileage may vary.

***

These moments of scientific blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

In search of date recipes.

Alert hearth/myth readers will recall that some months back, I signed up for a service called Hungry Harvest. Every other week, I receive a box full of produce that would otherwise have gone to waste -- either the wholesalers bought too much of it, or the item is the wrong size or has surface blemishes that would make grocery shoppers pass it up. And it's all been perfectly fine, and perfectly delicious, so far.

For instance, this week's box included two green bell peppers and a seedless cucumber. I knew exactly what to do with those, thanks to a recipe I'd spotted in the Washington Post for Jose Andres's gazpacho. Gazpacho is a perfect summer soup -- a tasty alternative when it's too hot to cook and you're sick of salads. (Also, it's not spicy. Most Spanish-from-Spain food isn't spicy. You're thinking of Mexican food -- some of which is also not spicy. But I digress.)

I also received some apples and oranges, a bunch of kale (homemade kale chips, yay!), a broccoli crown, some little carrots (not baby carrots -- these are unpeeled and about four inches long each), and a pomegranate. Most of those will go in my lunch bag over the course of the coming week, but I think a bunch of the pomegranate seeds will end up mixed in with Greek yogurt as a snack. 

By the way, getting at the seeds inside a pomegranate is easy. Amy saw it on Facebook -- you make lengthwise cuts along the ridges on the outside of the fruit, then cut off the top, reach into the middle with your thumbs, and pull it apart. Presto! (See? Facebook is good for something, after all.)

Sometimes, however, the selections have me stumped. This week, it's my fault.

Gazpacho, pomegranates in yogurt, and those darned dates.

In addition to the regular box (which varies every time, depending on what's available), you can select add-ons. This week I bought a couple of avocados and an eight-ounce package of Medjool dates. The avocados aren't a problem; I use them in place of cheese in omelets, and there's always avocado toast. (I tried making guacamole once. It didn't end well.) 

The dates, though. I'm not sure what to do with them.

I checked through some of my cookbooks and didn't see anything date-related that floated my boat. I also asked Mama Google, but she wasn't much help. I'm seeing a lot of dates with coconut (which I'm not a big fan of), dates with bacon (honestly, you bacon people...), dates and pomegranate seeds (hey! I have those!) as a salad topper, and dates in various types of cookies and quick breads.

So dear hearth/myth readers, I turn to you: Anybody got a good recipe for dates? 

Thanks in advance. I'll report back next week.

***

These moments of bloggy inventiveness have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Happy gluten-free holidays, part two.

Clockwise from lower left: spiced nuts, lemon-poppyseed cookies,
chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, almond horns, peppermint bark,
raspberry bars. Fudge is in the fridge and meringue cookies are in
the oven.

This year's holiday prep is winding down at La Casa Cantwell. I finished the shopping yesterday, and the baking today.

Now don't put out a contract on me -- I'm not as far ahead as you might think. After all, Yule is Wednesday. And tomorrow is my last day of work before Christmas, which meant the baking had to get done today so I could deliver treats tomorrow.

I've always been old school about baking. I've never had a fancy stand mixer, preferring instead to use a pastry blender for creaming butter and sugar, and a wire whisk for beating eggs. I've even been known to sink my fingers into a stiff cookie dough in order to work in the chocolate chips. It seemed like cheating to use a power tool for the job, when I could get in an upper-body workout by baking.

But this year, I ran short of time, and had to do a bunch of the treat-making today. So I resorted to the mixer for some tasks I usually do by hand. It turns out that you really do need to have room-temperature butter if you're going to try to cream in the sugar with a hand mixer; the mixer only has so much oomph. Lesson learned.

Anyway, about the gluten-free treats: Because I'm making these mostly as gifts for the attorneys I assist, I've steered clear of most recipe adaptations. I don't use Splenda or stevia in place of sugar; I use sticks of butter instead of soft margarine; and I have yet to substitute regular flour for gluten-free. But as I said last week, some of the things I've been making are GF anyway.

Take, for example, the peppermint bark in the photo above. It's white and dark chocolate with a little flavoring and some crushed candy canes on top. I got the recipe from a simple-living bulletin board; the woman who developed it said she saw Williams-Sonoma selling the stuff for $18/lb. and realized she could make it for a lot less.

When I first started making it, I used chocolate breakup -- blocks of Ghirardelli white and dark chocolate -- which Trader Joe's sold cheap. Then Ghirardelli discontinued the product and started selling their own peppermint bark, which is okay, but not as good as mine (and I'm not the only one who thinks so). We passed a dreary, dismal holiday season with no homemade peppermint bark. But then I discovered the Ghirardelli folks sold what they call melting wafers that work pretty well as a replacement for the old chocolate breakup. Of course, the wafers are a lot more expensive. This is what passes for progress in our day and age.

Anyway, here's the recipe.

Peppermint Bark

1 10 oz. bag dark chocolate melting wafers
1 10 oz. bag white chocolate melting wafers
A few drops of peppermint extract
Candy canes or starlight mints

Line a cookie sheet (I use an 11" x 17" sheet) with aluminum foil. Melt the dark chocolate wafers in the microwave according to package directions. Stir the peppermint extract into the melted chocolate, and spread the mixture in the pan. Let sit 'til it hardens.

While you're waiting, place the candy canes or starlight mints in a heavy-duty zipper bag and crush them (I used the bottom of a coffee mug today, but whatever works). Then melt the white chocolate in the microwave according to package directions. Spread the white chocolate over the dark chocolate in the pan, sprinkle the candy cane pieces on top (push them down with your fingers, if you want), and allow to cool and harden. Break into random-sized pieces.

Enjoy! Happy holidays!

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These moments of candylicious blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

NaNoWriMo recipes for success.

Yes, folks, it's November 1st, and you know what that means: It's NaNo time!

For those just joining us, November is National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. NaNoWriMo, a.k.a. NaNo. This thing has morphed into a pretty good-sized event, with thousands of writers around the world taking part. The idea is to write 50,000 words in 30 days -- 1,667 words per day. Fifty thousand words is a novella -- or a really good start on a longer novel.

Now, just because you've spewed 50K words on a virtual page by the end of November, it doesn't mean you can upload it to Amazon immediately. Well, you can, but it's not a good idea. It's a much better idea to consider your NaNo work a first draft -- or, as some writers call it, a zero draft. Let it sit for a few weeks (at least!) -- until January, say -- and then dive into it and start hacking it to pieces. Eventually, with a number of rounds of editing, you'll have something you can be proud to publish.

But the thing is, you can't edit a book until you have a draft. That's the real value of NaNo -- it gives you a reason to write the first (or zero) draft in the first place.

I didn't do NaNo last year, although I did Camp NaNo in the spring, and I've done several of both over the past few years. The last couple of times I did NaNo, I thought I could beat the system by ignoring my book all week, and then writing like mad on weekends. The flaw in that plan, I discovered, is that people want to do stuff with you on weekends, and it made me cranky when I couldn't get my writing time in. So this month, I'm going to try pacing myself a bit better, by aiming for 1,667 words on as many days as I can and writing ahead when I can. I know already that writing ahead will be necessary, as I've managed to schedule myself out of town for not one, but two long weekends this month -- and the first one is next weekend, when I'll be attending the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, NY. (I'm participating in the Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading Thursday afternoon at 3:00 pm -- if you'll be at the convention, join us!)

Keeping yourself well fed is another thing to consider during NaNo. Novelists do not live by caffeine and junk food alone -- or they shouldn't, anyway -- and cooking from scratch doesn't really take that long. No, really. Stir-fries are ridiculously quick. Here's a basic recipe that I made for dinner tonight, in fact.

• 1 cup of uncooked rice (brown or white - your choice)
• 2 cups of water
• 1 lb. protein of your choice (beef, chicken, whatever - you could even use tofu, but I've never done it)
• 1 bag of vaguely Asian-style frozen vegetables (I used Trader Joe's Harvest Hodgepodge)
• Ginger-garlic sauce (see below)

First, put your rice and water a 3-quart pot. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and let it simmer for however long the rice bag says. If you have a rice cooker, it's even easier: plug in the cooker, put rice and water in the pot, and hit the start button.

Now, mix up your sauce. I use a half cup of water, about 1/2 tablespoon of cornstarch, 2-4 Chinese restaurant packets of soy sauce (so maybe a tablespoon?), and about 1/2 teaspoon of powdered ginger and granulated garlic. Stir it up in a one-cup glass measuring cup, then taste to see if you need more spices. Once you're happy with the taste, set it aside.

Go write while the rice cooks.

Cut your protein into 1-inch cubes (a little bigger or smaller doesn't matter). Spray the bottom of a wok or large frying pan with cooking spray. Dump in your protein cubes and saute (that means cook over high heat while stirring them around) until the sides are browned, which will take a couple of minutes. Dump in the frozen veggies and saute the whole mess for about a minute. Stir your sauce again, and pour it over the protein and veggies in the pan. Once it's bubbling, let it cook for another minute or so, until the sauce thickens. Serve the stir-fry over the rice. Makes about four servings. 

Now you've had a good dinner (with leftovers for later in the week) and you even got some writing in. Nice job! Now go write some more!

***

In other news, A Billion Gods and Goddesses dropped this week at Amazon and Smashwords, and the paperback is out, too. I've been gratified by the response so far; in fact, the book even made it onto Amazon's Hot New Release list in a couple of categories. Thanks very much! You're all my new best friends.

There appears to be a snafu with Smashwords' distribution system to other retailers -- so if you're interested in the epub version, you might want to buy it at Smashwords and sideload it to your device. Let me know if you need directions on sideloading.

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These moments of stir-fried blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.