Chop and Stir

Time to rustle up some grub

We work up a big appetite here on the Lone Mountain Ranch, chasing after our chickens and all. Alex needs a hearty breakfast. He fixes himself some cowboy beans on the foggy San Francisco mornings. Good fueling for the bike ride to school, too.

It's a belly-filling combo of pinto beans, bacon, tomato, and garlic. Best of all, even an 8-year old can make it! As you can see, Alex does this all his own, save the mincing of the garlic.

Alex and I will post the recipe to Freebase in a day or two and provide a link to that. But why wait-- you can watch Alex cook in real time.

Two parts to this video blog, hmm, I wonder what they are called.... Alex shows off his editing skills on the second one. Thanks to Brigid for the camera work and the ceremonial tasting.

Chop!

Stir!

Going Green

You always hear that steaming your vegetables is the way to go. But, they end up tasting and looking kinda bad. Unacceptable. 

Here's a tip I first got from The Way to Cook by Julia Child. Use a big pot of boiling water, and blanch them to the point where they're still crispy and bright green. Then, shock them in ice water if you're going to be doing more cooking with them.  Or, if you're going to have them as they are, then hit them with some butter or extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, and they will soak in the flavor as they cool a bit.

They look and taste so much more appealing this way, as opposed to steaming them. The idea is that you and your family are gonna like your vegies cooked this way so much more, so you'll eat more of them. Can't go wrong with that. Bright green, slightly crunchy, shiny, and full of flavor. That's what we're looking for.

This blanching technique works great with any hard green vegetables-- asparagus, broccoli, string beans, brussels sprouts come to mind.  Cauliflower, too. 

In this video, I'm using a very handy fry basket, which you can get a restaurant supply store. In San Francisco, one of my favorite stores is Economy Restaurant Supply, at 7th where it hits the Caltrain tracks. If you don't have a fry basket, you can use a large slotted spoons, tongs, or a Chinese sieve spoon thing to fish out your vegies.

Country Sourdough Batard

Finally made a good one-day sourdough bread. It doesn't have the flavor complexity of the two-day, but it was still tasty.  Cheryl and Alex are the tasting crew in the video clip below. Pass the Irish butter, yum!

Here are the batards just after shaping, then after 4 hours of proofing and retarding (notice the big difference in size), and then after the bake. The recipe is on Freebase.

6 am on a Saturday. Time to Bake with Julia!

Cheryl's nursing team gets to feast on these danishes this morning, hot out of the oven At least I get the scraps.

One has an apricot filling, the other is an almond paste. With real almonds, no doubt. The recipe for the danish braid and the fillings is from one of her favorite baking books, "Baking with Julia" by Dorie Greenspan.

Cheryl rolled out the dough for the danish last night. It rests in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, she shapes the pastry and bakes.

Here's a short video on mixing the dough:

Here's a four-part video on the dough making process.

Pastry Dough 1/4

Pastry Dough 2/4

Pastry Dough 3/4

Pastry Dough 4/4

Baked Spinach and Asparagus Risotto with Sausage

A one-pot special from Cheryl! If you're pressed for time and hate washing dishes, this one is for you. Oh yeah, almost forgot it's very tasty, too.

Usually, risotto is a time-consuming, and laborious dish, as you've got to stir the risotto fairly constantly while adding hot stock one ladle at a time. This baked risotto delivers much of the springiness of the arborio rice in the stirred version, with the added benefit that you can run off for 40 minutes while it's in the oven, instead of stirring for 20-30 minutes

Image via Wikipedia

Use your 28 cup Le Creuset cast iron dutch oven for this. Or get one-- it's a great investment. These things last a long time, and you can use them for lots of things-- use them to braise, make sauces and stews, make casseroles, or deep fry.

The beauty of this dish is that you saute, simmer, and then bake all in the same pot. Gotta love that.

Everything in this dish comes from Trader Joe's, except salt and pepper. 

Cheryl says that using the fresh spinach is better than frozen, because the frozen stuff will mess with your water content, leaving the rice mealy instead of springy.

We use the frozen asparagus more out of shopping convenience and ease of preparation. If you've got some seasonal asparagus in hand, blanch that first, then add to the recipe instead of frozen.

The recipe for this baked risotto is on Freebase. We've been making it for years, gradually adapting it from a recipe in Patricia Wells' Trattoria. You can drop the sausage if you're feeling vegetarian.

 

Spicy Orange Chicken

We accidentally woke Alex up a few nights ago, shortly after he went to sleep, and he started babbling about Orange Chicken. He longs for the Orange Chicken of Panda Express. I've never been there, but clearly I needed to make something so he'd stop asking to go.

I suspect that the Panda Express variety involves battering and deep frying some frozen chicken pieces, which sounds messy and unhealthy, so let's not go there. Instead, we'll get some high quality fresh chicken thighs from Fulton Valley Farms and some sugar snap peas from Iacopi Farm.

Special thanks to my uncle Ken in Houston for the hot peppers from his garden!

I bought the ingredients today down at the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market market for a recipe on Epicurious for orange chicken,  only to later find the reviewer comments reporting the outcome as terrible. Unacceptable!

So, I juiced it up with some garlic, ginger, Shaoxing rice wine, chicken stock, sesame oil, black beans, and garlic. Hard to go wrong with all that flavor.

The recipe for Spicy Orange Chicken is on Freebase.

The Epicurious recipe cooks the snap peas with the chicken, which we don't do here, because that will either leave your snap peas tough or your chicken overcooked. Instead, you want to blanch the snap peas separately, so that they cook perfectly, and then add them back to your chicken and sauce.

The snap peas work well for the summer-fall version. If good snap peas aren't easy to find, just use some good organic broccoli. Blanch that in boiling water as well, after chopping into 1.5 inch florets.

Here's a short video on zesting an orange, a technique that Chef Suzette Gresham at Acquerello taught me a few years ago. It's much more effective to zest with a vegetable peeler and paring knife than to use a zester tool.

Spaghetti and Tomato Sauce

Sure, you could just get sauce from the jar, but where's the glory in that?

Here, we feature our go-to tomato sauce, and mix it with some simple spaghetti. We like this sauce a lot because it's easy and outstanding. You'll use a food mill to separate the tomato pulp and juice from the seeds and fibers. 

Equipment and Ingredients

Chop!

Mill!

Stir!

Flip!

Buon Apetito!

Country Bread

It's only taken me ten years to figure out how to make good bread. Well, OK, I did give up about 4 years ago, but I've been thinking about the process off and on during that time. Many thanks to Kathleen and Ed Weber at Della Fattoria for letting me spend 48 hours at their farm to learn some tricks.

Here's a loaf I baked yesterday, with that moist, irregular hole structure that I'm looking for. Dark brown, carmelized crust that is both sweet and salty. Yum!

I put the recipe on Freebase. Videos below.

I use a modification of the Country Bread recipe from the book Breads from the La Brea Bakery by Nancy Silverton. I'm using a 1.5x recipe, dropping the flour content by a bunch to get a very wet dough.

Here's a short clip of the boules, just before I loaded them in to the oven.

And, finally, a three-part video series on the whole process:

Mixing, kneading

Pre-shaping and shaping

Rise, Cut and load

Big batch o' yogurt-- a foolproof method for homemade yogurt

I make an enormous fruit and yogurt smoothie every morning for breakfast, and Cheryl likes to have yogurt with fruit or granola. We go through about 4 gallons of yogurt every 3 weeks, so we make mass quantities in each batch.  I found that if I'm making 4 gallons at a time, I needed a bulletproof process for making homemade yogurt. I've found that the most important factor for homemade yogurt is the culturing temperature, which I've gradually found to be optimal at 90 to 95 degrees.

You can make your batch as large as you need to, depending on how much yogurt you go through in 2-3 weeks. If you follow these steps, it will come out perfect every time, and last at least 3 weeks. This recipe provides ready-to-eat yogurt in about 24 hours. It allows you to cook the milk up after dinner, the yogurt does its magic while you're sleeping, you pop the yogurt in the fridge while at work, and you've got cool and creamy yogurt ready by evening or the next morning.

I culture from the Trader Joe's Organic Nonfat Yogurt, in the blue quart-size containers. There's a picture in the "Equipment" video below. Cheryl swears that this is a private labeling of Strauss yogurt, which Trader Joe's used to carry before switching to exclusively their private label.

I think that Strauss makes the best commercial yogurt around, though one can get it only in the San Francisco Bay Area, I think. If you're in other parts of the country, I'd recommend culturing with a yogurt that first of all tastes good, and secondly has as few additives as possibles, like pectin. I've never cultured with a yogurt that has anything besides milk and the yogurt cultures (Lactobacillus acidophilus), so I'd be curious to see what happens with that. I'm guessing after a batch or two, you'll have a nice clean culture that you can keep working with. 

I don't know of an ideal national brand to culture from. Nancy's Yogurt has nationwide distribution, as best I can tell, but its horribly sour, so I wouldn't use that, even though it has no additives.

Equipment

Heating

Cooling

Culturing

Final Mix

Extra Notes:

Most instructions will tell you to keep the yogurt at 105-115 when the milk is culturing. 95 degrees works much better- the yogurt comes out creamier and smoother, instead of lumpy and looking at times like cottage cheese. Some people don't heat their milk to as high as 180-- you can try that, but you'll likely get a bad batch every so often. I made a batch by heating the milk to only 100 degrees or so, and had to dump the entire batch.

You can order Cambro clear polycarbonate containers online or get them at a restaurant supply store.