A Christmas Breadmaking Miracle

The husband's inability to follow simple instructions continues to astound me.

--The Faudie
Inspired by The Faudie's recent success baking cinnamon bread without the assistance of a machine, I thought I'd attempt to make my own handmade bread. King Arthur's savory Christmas cheese bread* seemed to be a good recipe for a beginner such as myself--a pure quick bread requiring no yeast should be simple to prepare, shouldn't it?

Yeah, right.

Here's the recipe, copied-and-pasted directly from King Arthur's website, not hastily scribbled on a scrap of paper as I did on Christmas morning (an important plot point we'll return to later):

Savory Christmas Cheese Bread

3 C unbleached all-purpose flour
2 t baking powder
1 1/4 t salt
1 C fresh-grated Parmesan cheese
1 C shredded sharp cheddar, mozzarella or the cheese of your choice
4 T softened butter
4 large eggs
1/2 C whole milk or half-and-half
3 large garlic cloves, crushed (optional)
1/2 C finely chopped scallion tops or chives, lightly packed; or green bell peppers
1/2 C finely chopped sun-dried tomatoes, lightly packed; or diced red bell peppers, or diced pimientos
1 teaspoon pizza seasoning (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 9" round cake pan or 9" round casserole.
2. Mix together the flour, baking powder, salt, cheeses and softened butter until well combined and crumbly.
3. Mix in the garlic, scallion tops and sun-dried tomatoes.
4. Whisk together the eggs and milk (or half-and-half). Set aside 1 tablespoon of the mixture to brush on the top of the loaf.
5. Add the remaining egg mixture to the dry ingredients, stirring just until everything is thoroughly moistened.
6. Turn the stiff batter into the prepared pan. Using your wet fingers, smooth it to the edges of the pan. Make it slightly concave, so the edges are slightly higher than the center.
7. Brush the top of the loaf with the reserved egg mixture. Sprinkle with pizza seasoning, if desired.
8. Bake the bread for 35 to 40 minutes, until it's a light golden brown on top and a cake tester or toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
9. Remove the loaf from the oven and run a heatproof spatula or table knife around the edge of the pan, to loosen the sides. Turn it out of the pan onto a rack to cool.

Yield: 1 9" round loaf

Nutritional Info
Not provided.

The Husband's Futzings
The recipe offers some flexibility with the ingredients, so I used a hot pepper jack cheese in place of the cheddar or mozzarella, and I used red bell peppers and green onions as the red and green ingredients.

The recipe does not, however, suggest using anything but half of a cup of milk or (in this case) half-and-half. Somehow, though, in my aforementioned handwritten copy of the recipe, I wrote down that I needed one-and-a-half cups of half-and-half, not half a cup. I've never been great at math, but even I know that's three times more half-and-half than I needed. The result, I discovered, was a very wet mixture that was clearly not going to bake properly. (For one thing, it wasn't even going to fit in that single 9" round cake pan.)

It's moments like that when I'm really, really grateful for my significant other. I'm not always the best at swallowing my pride and asking for help when I need it, but in this instance, I sooooooooooooooo needed The Faudie to come to my rescue.

With her guidance, I added three-quarters of a cup of white whole wheat flour and a full cup of additional pepper jack to help thicken the gooey mess I'd made. Crossing my fingers (figuratively, of course, as it's hard to cook with your fingers actually crossed), I poured the mixture into two 9" cake pans, put 'em into the oven and waited to see what would happen next.

Okay, okay, maybe calling the result a Christmas miracle is a bit of hyperbole. But still. Against all my expectations, the two loaves came out looking perfect. I even have the photo to prove it:

Merry Christmas to me!

The bread tastes good too, though not exactly the way I'd expected. I think the flavor of the cheese and the bell peppers and the green onions gets overpowered by the taste of the eggs. I can't complain, though--I'll happily take a fine egg bread over the disaster I thought I had on my hands. And it was a perfect accompaniment to our holiday lunch of jambalaya and the 598th showing of A Christmas Story on TBS.

*Honestly, I'm not sure exactly what this bread has to do with Christmas other than the fact that it's red, yellow and green. Don't worry, though--if you want to make it on some day other than December 25th, you could always call it "savory traffic light cheese bread." Sounds yummy, doesn't it?

Nuts

The husband took over the kitchen Sunday morning. Here's his report on the morning's activities.

--The Faudie
As you may have noticed, daylight saving time ended last weekend. Circadian rhythms were disrupted, clocks were adjusted, nightfall now begins depressingly early in the evening and people on the Internet got something new to complain about. (My favorite take on the whole thing comes courtesy NPR: "How Bush Ruined Daylight Savings." Surprise, surprise: He changed it in such a way that it helped no one except big business interests.)

Personally, I think we should ditch DST altogether and let nature be nature, but no one really cares what I think of DST. I must admit, however, that this year's "fall back" and the resultant extra hour weren't entirely unappreciated. We'd received the Autumn 2010 issue of The Baking Sheet quite a few weeks ago. I'd been wanting to make the recipe pictured on the cover but never really had the time--at least, I never had the time until DST ended. A 25-hour Sunday may defy all laws of nature and time and space, but it's convenient if you want to bake something.

The recipe was appropriately seasonal and perfect for marking the end of DST:

Butterscotch Acorns

Dough
1 C unsalted butter, melted
3/4 C brown sugar
1 t vanilla extract
1/2 C pecan meal or finely chopped pecans
2 3/4 C King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
1/2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt

Topping
2 C butterscotch chips
1 1/4 C finely chopped pistachio nuts
1/2 C extra butterscotch chips, unmelted

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Combine melted butter, sugar, vanilla and pecans.
3. Whisk together flour, baking powder and salt; add to the butter mixture, mixing until combined.
4. Scoop batter by the teaspoon and place flat-side-down on greased baking sheets. Pinch tops to a point to resemble an acorn.
5. Bake for 15 minutes.
6. Melt two cups of butterscotch chips.
7. Use a dab of the melted chips to "glue" a whole chip on the flat end of the cooled cookies.
8. When chip has set, dip the flat end (tops) of the cookies into the melted chips, let the excess run off, then coat with the chopped nuts.

Yield: 60 cookies (serving size: 1 cookie)

Nutritional Info
Calories: 104
Fat: 6 g
Carbs: 11 g
Cholesterol: 8 mg
Sodium: 40 mg
Protein: 1 g

The Husband's Futzings
I don't have any significant changes to the ingredients to report, but the method of preparation...well, I found The Baking Sheet's instructions to be a little nuts, if you'll pardon the expression.

The cookie part of the acorns (steps 1 - 5) came together without major incident. I do think the guidance to use only a teaspoon's worth of dough for each cookie is an underestimate; the boy and I found that by using more than this amount, we were better able to shape appropriately acorn-ish acorns. And even with the larger acorns, we were able to make some 72 cookies by the kiddo's somewhat shaky count. The real fun, though, came when it was time to make the acorn "caps."

In my world, butterscotch is a flavoring, not an adhesive. I don't think melted chips can do what the recipe says they can do. I had zero luck using the melted chips to "glue" a whole chip to the flat end of the cookie. (Which just begged the question: exacly what purpose was that glued-on chip supposed to serve? Neither The Faudie nor I could figure that one out. I suppose it was supposed to help form the cap of the acorn, but I would have appreciated it if the recipe had been more clear on this point.) Also, I had zero luck dipping the cookies in the melted chips and then getting the chopped pistachio nuts to stick. So instead, I futzed.

Recalling our near-fiasco with the midnight mice, in which we were forced to hand-coat each cookie to obtain the desired effect, I combined the melted butterscotch chips with the pistachio pieces, resulting in a compound I could use like modeling clay. Each acorn cookie received a carefully sculpted cap...or maybe a not-so-carefully sculpted cap as my patience started to wear thin after the first 50 or so cookies. Suffice to say, some of the cookies came out looking a lot more like acorns than the others.

We made 72 cookies, and these were the only ones that actually looked like acorns.

To be fair, the cookies on the cover of The Baking Sheet didn't bear that strong of a resemblance to real acorns either, so I don't feel too bad about the way mine turned out. Appearance, after all, is second to taste, and these acorns taste pretty good. They're similar to pecan sandies (or, as The Faudie pointed out, besan ladoos), albeit with a funky butterscotch-pistachio topping.

Switching back and forth from DST still sucks, but at least I was able to do something productive with the extra time!

Battle of the Bread Machines, Day 7

As promised, here's the husband with the latest installment of the Battle of the Bread Machines.

--The Faudie
Yes, I know we haven't played this game lately. But you don't think we'd be continuing our little bread machine contest unless we had a really good reason to, do you?

Well, we do.

Competitor #7: The Zojirushi Model BBCC-X20

The Faudie has already profiled today's contestant, the Zojirushi BBCC-X20. Go ahead and read her post about this double-paddled lil' wonder. All that I can to add to what she's written is: A $240 bread machine for $14? Daaaaaaaaaaaamn. Thank you, Goodwill! From out of nowhere, the Zo has become the machine to beat in this competition.

Anxious to get started with the Zo, I didn't spend a lot of time deciding what kind of bread to make. I just went with the first reasonable recipe I came across, which happened to be:

Homestyle Whole Wheat Bread

1 1/2 C water
3 C whole wheat bread flour
heaped 3/4 C white bread flour
1 1/2 t salt
2 t sugar
2 T butter, diced
1 t instant dry yeast

1. Add ingredients to machine according to manufacturer's directions.
   
2. Use Whole Wheat or Multigrain setting, if available.
   

Yield: 1 lb. loaf

Nutritional Info
This particular recipe came from Anne Sheasby's The Bread Machine Bible, which has the Donna Rathmell Germanesque quality of not including nutritional information.

The Husband's Futzings
None to report other than the addition of three teaspoons of vital gluten.

As The Faudie mentioned in her post, our Zo came complete with its original instruction manual (helpfully titled "How To Enjoy Your Home Bakery Supreme"), and thank goodness it did. The BBCC-X20 is capable of a lot, but it's almost impossible to use the controls using intuition alone. For example, to bypass the preheat process, you have to press the "TIME" and "CYCLE" buttons at the same time for three seconds. I can safely say I wouldn't have known that without having the manual on hand.

Official Results for Competitor #7
I'm guessing there's a reason Zojirushi bread machines sell for north of $200, and that reason is because they're awesome. Don't believe me? Just take a look at the loaf of homestyle whole wheat our Zo produced.

The Zo made it so.

The loaf came out perfectly cooked, the crust was the right darkness...I even love the shape of the loaf, which simply looks more "bread-like" than the carbohydrate cubes most of our other machines produce. I couldn't have asked for more. (Since then, I've also used the Zo to prepare a sourdough pizza crust, and the machine continued to perform like a champ.)

By now, we've tested a lot of different appliances over the course of the Battle of the Bread Machines, some of which have found a permanent home in our kitchen. But the Zo has jumped to the front of the pack. I'd hate to think this is the end of our competition, but I have a hard time believing we're going to find a bread machine better than the BBCC-X20.

And yes, it scores extra points for being a $240 machine picked up for just $14. (When was the last time you got a 94% discount on anything?)

It only cost us $7 a paddle!

Spaced Out

Star Wars: In Concert was in town last weekend, and the husband has the photos to prove it.

--The Faudie

So did the boy and I have fun at the concert? Oh, yes, we did:

A Tale of Two Starters

The problem with having two sourdough starters is that they take up a lot of space in the refrigerator...and, of course, you can't use a sourdough starter for much beyond making sourdough. Here's the husband with an update on how he's trying to put those starters to good use.

--The Faudie

I find it interesting how our two sourdough starters turned out. As I noted in my last sourdough post, the one made with molasses formed a dark brown hooch fairly quickly; in comparison, the one made with sugar has never developed anything more than a pale, almost clear liquid that may or may not be hooch. This observation led me to believe, based on my (admittedly limited) knowledge of such matters, that the molasses-based starter developed better than the sugar-based starter, but it's hard to tell. Both had a distinctively boozy aroma, which I gather is a good sign. And while the sugar-based starter didn't have the appearance I was expecting, it did have the appropriate texture when stirred, similar to the consistency of pancake batter. The molasses-based starter, in comparison, was more silt-like underneath the hooch, and the two portions didn't seem to mix well.

Fascinating, isn't it? I've decided that, when the time comes for the boy to begin participating in science fairs at school, I want him to research different ways to make sourdough starters. Which, no doubt, would result in the same problem my experimentation has gotten us into: too many starters taking up too much room in the fridge. Thus, I've moved on to stage two of my experiment, which involves finding new ways to use these starters.

Donna Rathmell German's always-reliable Bread Machine Cookbook offers plenty of sourdough recipes, including the following:

Sourdough French Bread

1 C starter
1 1/2 t sugar
3/4 t salt
3 C bread flour
1 1/2 t yeast
1/2 to 2/3 C milk

1. Place ingredients into bread machine in the order suggested by the machine's manufacturer.
2. Select the Basic option on the machine, then start the cycle.

Yield: One 1 1/2-pound loaf

Nutritional Info
Not provided, because Donna Rathmell German's books are also always-reliable for not including such information.

The Husband's Futzings
I didn't see any need to change this recipe. I included only half a cup of milk, as the starter seemed to be providing plenty of liquid on its own.

I won't lie to you--I chose this recipe because it was simple, an easy way to get rid of part of the sugar-based starter. Fortunately, I was pleased with the results. The sourdough French bread was a nice, crusty loaf, admittedly fairly nondescript in taste, but enjoyable enough with raspberry jam. And it served its primary purpose of giving me an excuse to use a good portion of my starter.

Note that I prepared a one-and-a-half-pound loaf, whereas normally I'll only make a one-pound loaf. That was a decision made solely because it allowed me to use up more of the starter.

Did I mention these starters take up a lot of room in the fridge?

As you can probably imagine, I was more excited about the recipe on the following page of the book:

Sourdough Pizza Crust

1 C starter
3 T olive oil
1 t salt
4 C all-purpose flour
2 t yeast

1. Place ingredients into bread machine in the order suggested by the machine's manufacturer.
2. Select the Dough option on the machine, then start the cycle.
3. Add water as needed.
4. When cycle is complete, roll out dough, then cover and let rise about 30 minutes.
5. Place in a preheated 500-degree oven and bake until crust is brown, about 5 to 10 minutes.

Yield: One large pizza crust

Nutritional Info
Not provided, and you should know why by now.

The Husband's Futzings
I added some of King Arthur Flour's Pizza Dough Flavor--a must-have for pizza-making, IMHO.

I've actually made this crust twice, once using the molasses-based starter, and once using the sugar-based starter. To tell the truth, I couldn't tell the difference between the two in the results. Both resulted in a dough that was almost clay-like, much easier to roll into shape than any of the other pizza dough recipes I've tried.

The unusual consistency of the dough, predictably, resulted in crusts with an unusal consistency, at least in comparison to my previous attempts at pizza-making. The sourdough crusts seemed denser, chewier. Their consistency was almost like that of a Bisquick biscuit, of all things. They boy didn't seem to enjoy them much, but Angela and I liked them well enough. Flavor-wise, they were pretty tasty (I'm glad I added the Pizza Dough Flavor), and they certainly weren't the worst I've ever made. And they were quick to prepare, which is the whole point of using a bread machine to make pizza dough.

A delicious chicken and meatball pizza...

...and a delicious sausage and pepperoni pizza!

Having used up a good portion of our starters to make the sourdough French bread and the two sourdough pizza crusts, but still not knowing which of the two was the better starter, I decided to combine them into one. (If nothing else, that allowed me to go from having two containers to only one taking up room in the refrigerator.) I haven't used the combined starter yet in any recipes, but I'll be sure to let you know when I do.

Purple Zucchini Bread?

It's been a crazy couple of weeks at Chez Boeckman-Walker, and we haven't had much time for posting. Here's the husband to reassure you that we haven't disappeared.

--The Faudie

Angela recently gifted me with a subscription to The Baking Sheet, King Arthur Flower's bimonthly newsletter for all things carb-related. As a nifty bonus with that subscription, we received a CD-ROM containing PDF versions of their 1990 - 1999 newsletters. I cannot describe to you how much fun it is to peruse a full decade of this company's early desktop publishing efforts--just look at all the lame clip art!

Of course, in addition to the painfully dated design work, these newsletters have recipes. And even though I've only skimmed through a few years' worth of issues, I've already flagged several recipes that have caught my interest. Here's the one I tried last weekend:

Zucchini Spice Bread

1/2 C water
2 t vanilla extract
3/4 C cottage cheese
3/4 C grated raw zucchini, lightly packed
3 T butter
2 T sugar
1 t cinnamon
1 1/2 t salt
3 T chopped walnut pieces
1 C 100% white whole wheat flour
2 C unbleached bread flour
2 t instant yeast

1. Place ingredients into bread machine in the order suggested by the machine's manufacturer.
2. Select the Basic and Light options on the machine, then start the cycle.
3. Check the dough's consistency about 7 minutes after the kneading cycle begins, adding water or flour to form a smooth, soft ball of dough.

Yield: One 1 1/2-pound loaf

Nutritional Info
Calories: 1411
Fat: 4.2 g
Protein: 5 g
Carbs: 21 g
Cholesterol: 8 mg
Sodium: 241 mg

The Husband's Futzings
I didn't mess with this recipe, other than adding vital gluten.

I don't think we've used zucchini in a bread recipe since Angela made chocolate chip zucchini bread way back in our pre-bread machine days. What struck me most about this recipe, though, was the odd assortment of ingredients in addition to the zucchini--what exactly was this bread going to taste like? I needed to find out.

The aroma coming from the bread machine as the ingredients began mixing was promising, with the scents of vanilla and cinnamon combining quite appetizingly. By the time the loaf finished baking, however, it didn't smell much like either of those ingredients any more. And it didn't taste like vanilla and cinnamon, either. In fact, the finished bread has a rather indistinct taste, with only the walnuts really having any flavor. Don't get me wrong--the bread isn't bad at all. Despite the fact that the loaf fell about 30 minutes from the end of the bread machine's cycle, it has a nice texture and a good chew. (And I do like a bread with a good chew.) It's just that the taste is surprisingly plain. Unremarkable, even. Maybe all of the flavors are just canceling each other out.

Ummm...should zucchini bread be purple?

As for its color--what can I say? Neither Angela nor I can figure out what combination of ingredients might have turned the bread purple. This bread is so confused, it doesn't even know what color it should be.

Wild Thing, You Make My Heart Sing

Here's the husband with the second part of his sourdough story.

--The Faudie

So we'd made ourselves some starters--now all we needed to do was leave them out long enough to catch some wild yeast and become suitable for making sourdough.

King Arthur Flour's sourdough primer notes that "keeping a sourdough starter is somewhat like having a pet because it needs to be fed and cared for." Well, I have three cats (plus several freeloaders), and I can tell you with absolute certainty that the reason felines are higher up on the evolutionary chain than yeast is that when a cat needs something, it will tell you so. Our yeast, on the other hand, was not so communicative. By day two, any activity in the starters had ceased.

Science factoid! The brownish liquid that had appeared by that point on the starter to the right (the one that was made with molasses) is called hooch--it's the alcoholic byproduct of the fermentation process. You're supposed to stir the hooch back in or drain it off, depending on whether the starter is looking to dry or too wet. I'm not sure why the starter on the left (the one made with sugar) never developed any hooch. Maybe it was the molasses in the one starter that did the trick, or maybe it was because that starter had more surface area exposed, or maybe it just managed to catch more wild yeast than the other one. Heck if I know.

Anyway, back to the conundrum of the inactive starters. Most websites I checked regarding sourdough starters call for you to "feed" the starter one cup of flour and one cup of water each day, but King Arthur's site only instructs you to feed the starter after you've removed some of it to make a loaf of bread. Concerned about my inactive starters, I decided to go ahead and feed them--and sure enough, they both bubbled and grew again...only to go inactive once more the following day.

Understand that this was about mid-week, and I wasn't looking to bake any bread until the weekend. Realizing that I didn't want to keep feeding two starters each a cup of flour a day, I decided to refrigerate the starters instead. I would have preferred to leave them out to continue catching wild yeast, but we can't afford to go through that much flour. Remember, I have cats to feed!

Friday morning I removed the hoochier starter from the fridge to let the yeast get warm and active again, then I gave it a good feeding before going to bed. That's a picture of the starter post-feeding at the left. See how bubbly it is? From everything I've read, that's the look of a happy, healthy starter. Which meant that the next day it was (finally) time to make some sourdough. I'd planned on using a King Arthur recipe since I'd followed their instructions to make the starter, but since they didn't seem to have any recipes that use a bread machine, I had to look elsewhere.

Sourdough Bread

3/4 C starter
1 T margarine or butter
1 1/2 T sugar
1 t salt
2 C bread flour
1 t yeast
2 T to 1/3 C milk

1. Place ingredients into bread machine in the order suggested by the machine's manufacturer.
2. Select the Basic option on the machine, then start the cycle.
3. Adjust the consistency with the milk while the dough is kneading.

Yield: One 1-pound loaf

Nutritional Info
This recipe came from one of Donna Rathmell German's books, so no, it was not provided.

I have to admit, it was a little odd to be baking with something that had been sitting out in the kitchen, bubbling away for the better part of the week. But hey, if it's good enough for the early pioneers, it's good enough for me! (Does anyone know what model of bread machine the early pioneers used?)

Want to know how it turned out?

It turned out freaking fantastically!

Isn't that a great-looking loaf of bread? I think that may be the single most attractive loaf we've produced. I've got many more pictures in addition to the ones I've posted here, just because that loaf was so darn photogenic.

It gets even better though: the bread actually tastes like sourdough, and a decent sourdough at that! Which is good, as we now have two starters taking up space in the refrigerator, and there's nothing to do with them but bake more bread. Good thing our cookbooks have plenty of variations on sourdough to try.

Where the Wild Things Are

The husband is trying something new. Here he is with the first part of his story.

--The Faudie

For all of the bread-making we've done since we bought our first bread machines last summer, there's one type of bread I've shied away from: sourdough. It's not because I don't like sourdough--because I most certainly do--but rather because every chapter on sourdough in any bread cookbook has an opening such as this one from The Bread Machine Cookbook:

As the early day pioneers traveled west across the United States, they carried a mixture of flour and milk or water which was used to leaven bread.

And it gets worse from there. Here's what King Arthur Flour has to say about that mixture--known as a "starter"--on their sourdough primer page:

To the early prospectors, a starter was such a valued possession (almost more than the gold they were seeking), that they slept with it to keep it from freezing on frigid winter nights.

Excuse me? I bought a bread machine because I want my bread-making to be easy. I don't want to hear about the labors and sleeping habits of early pioneers!

But recently, my curiosity got the better of me, and I set out to explore the strange and amazing world of sourdough. And that journey began with a better understanding of the mysterious starter. For those who don't know, to make a loaf of sourdough bread, you'll need to use a portion of a starter. No other bread we've prepared needs a starter, but sourdough does. Most of our bread cookbooks include a recipe for making one (all slightly different from one another), but King Arthur had me hooked when they said this:

The easiest and most successful method of making your own starter is to combine water, flour, and a tablespoon (or packet) of active dry "domestic" yeast which is available at any grocery store. By letting this brew sit for several days...the domestic yeast will go "wild" and develop the familiar tang of its truly wild cousins. You'll probably catch some wild yeast in the process as well.

Oh, yeah. The opportunity to create anything that can "go wild" is not one to be passed up. This was an experiment I needed to try.

Here's the full recipe for the starter, from King Arthur's site:

Sourdough Starter

2 C warm water
1 T sugar or honey (optional)
1 T active dry yeast
2 C King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour

1. Pour the water into a two-quart glass or ceramic jar or bowl.
2. Add and dissolve the sugar or honey and the yeast in that order.
3. Stir in the flour gradually.
4. Cover the jar or bowl with a clean dishcloth and place it somewhere warm. By using a dishcloth instead of plastic wrap, you'll allow any wild yeast in the area to infiltrate and begin to work with the domestic yeast which itself is beginning to develop "wild" characteristics and flavors.

Yield: One starter

Nutritional Info
Not provided, because who would want to eat this? Yeeeech.

The boy readily volunteered to be my lab partner for this particular experiment. Once he understood the basic functioning of yeast--or at least, once he got hold of the idea that the yeast eat the sugars in the mixture, then "fart" out gases in return--there was no way he was going to be deterred from making a starter too.

Thus we ended up preparing two starters, different only in one regard: for one, we used sugar (evaporated cane juice, specifically, which Angela had picked up for us earlier that day), and for the other, we used molasses (an ingredient suggested by other sources).

King Arthur warned us it wouldn't take long for the mixture to start bubbling and brewing, and they were right. When we checked on the starters a few hours after we'd prepared them, there were plenty of bubbles rising to the surface. (The kiddo, in particular, was delighted with this by-product of the "farting" yeast.)

In fact, the starters were so active that the one in the smaller container quickly began outgrowing its habitat.

Time for a larger bowl!

We switched this starter to a larger bowl...which it outgrew by bedtime.

Time for an even larger bowl!

That was yesterday. When we checked the starters today, expecting them to be huge by that point, we were surprised to find that they'd actually shrunk somewhat overnight. Even worse, they didn't seem as active as they'd been before. I was worried at first, but King Arthur's sourdough primer assures me that everything is proceeding normally (I think). Apparently, a starter begins to separate after a day or so and needs to be stirred to blend it back together and to help distribute the yeast evenly. See how much I'm learning about sourdough? This is the best science lesson ever!

Now we're just waiting--we're supposed to let the starters rest at room temperature for two to five days, catching wild yeast until the bubbling ceases and a yeasty, sour aroma has developed. And then (finally!) it will be time to use a portion of the starters to bake some loaves of sourdough. Check back in a few days to see if we can tame these wild, farting yeast!

A Year Older, But No Wiser

The husband's careful attention to detail astounds me. Really.

--The Faudie

Sunday was my birthday, and we'd planned a memorable event for the day: After attending a wedding in Houston on Saturday, we'd head over to Galveston for a birthday lunch at Gaido's with family. Sounds like a great plan, doesn't it? Unfortunately, the wedding left a certain little boy sluggish and (even worse) puking when he awoke the next day. As tempting as lunch sounded, it just wouldn't be fair to submit a sick-to-his-stomach six-year-old to a trip to a seafood restaurant. Reluctantly, we packed up and headed back to Austin with the boy attempting to convalesce in the back seat. (Just how sick was he? Well, he's fine now, but he felt so bad on the trip home that he couldn't even play LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga on his Nintendo DS. So yeah, he wasn't feeling well.)

Thus it was that we ended up back at home instead of at a table at Gaido's eating fresh snapper. And what can you do when your lunch plans fall through? You bake some bread, of course!

With more free time on my hands for my birthday than I'd anticipated, I started leafing through our bread machine cookbooks for a recipe that could be prepared with ingredients on hand. I ended up picking this one from Bread Machine Bounty:

Wheat 'n' Seed Bread

3/4 C plus 2 T milk
1 T honey
1 1/2 t shortening
1 1/3 C whole wheat flour
2/3 C bread flour
1/4 C sunflower seeds
4 t sesame seed
1 t poppy seed
1/2 t salt
1 t active dry yeast or bread machine yeast

1. Add the ingredients to the machine according to the manufacturer's directions, adding the sunflower seeds, sesame seed and poppy seed with the flour.
   
2. Select the Wheat cycle on the machine, and then press the Start button.

Yield: One 1-pound loaf

Nutritional Info
Calories: 81
Fat: 3 g
Protein: 3 g
Carbs: 14 g
Cholesterol: 1 mg
Sodium: 74 mg

The Husband's Futzings
One particular ingredient caught my attention when I was considering this recipe, and that ingredient was the shortening. I wasn't even sure we had any shortening in the house, but Angela assured me we did (though for what purpose, I have no idea). As you can probably surmise from the recipes on this blog, we don't do a lot of cooking involving shortening. [I bought some Crisco sticks ages ago--I think when we were still apartment dwellers--but I don't remember why. And we don't do any cooking that calls for Crisco. I consumed enough of that atherosclerosis-inducing colloidal complex as a youth, thank you very much. --The Faudie] Probably due to my unfamiliarity with this item, I didn't pay much attention to the fact that our leftover shortening was giving off a particularly sour odor. Does anyone know if shortening can go bad? Because if it does, then ours did. But I didn't know this at the time, and I proceeded to use the expired ingredient for this loaf of bread.

Oh, and I accidentally used one-and-a-half tablespoons rather than one-and-a-half teaspoons. That, I admit, may also have had an affect on the recipe. (As it says in the title above, I may be a year older, but no wiser.)

If you haven't guessed already, this particular loaf did not come out well. Oh, I'm sure it looks fine in the pictures, but trust me, of all the breads we've made with our machines, this one's the worst. It has an overpoweringly odd taste; Angela describes it as "bitter," but she's being charitable, I think. It probably doesn't help that the seeds used for this bread--sunflower, sesame and poppy--aren't terribly flavorful and probably don't have much chance of leaving an impression against an overly generous amount of expired shortening. The seeds that go into my favorite six-seed bread are much more flavorful.

Bad, bitter bread

I honestly haven't eaten any of the bread since trying the first, disappointing slice. The bread just tastes strange. It's bad enough to make you as sick as...well, as sick as the kiddo after a wedding celebration.

I Have Great Buns

The experiment with the pitas combined with the cooler weather had us contemplating a daunting task: making our own buns. Hamburger buns, specifically, to accompany the burgers the husband was making for himself and the boy from the gift of a pound of ground chuck I gave him. Yes, I know, I'm terribly generous, Gentle Reader. But I'll let the husband tell the tale.

--The Faudie

We had crunchy coconut and lime burgers again this weekend...or, at least, I had them again--the coconut-disliking boy got a plain hamburger patty while Angela abstained from the red meat altogether. And what was so special about these burgers that warrants a post? This time, they had homemade buns!

It was Angela who suggested I try making hamburger buns. With her relative success at making pita bread fresh in my memory, I decided to give it a shot. The Bread Machine Cookbook has a recipe for hamburger buns, but we decided to adapt a healthier-sounding recipe instead.

Whole Wheat Sandwich Rolls

1 1/8 C water
2 T vegetable oil
1 T honey
1 1/2 t salt
1 C whole wheat flour
2 T wheat or oat bran
1/4 C wheat germ
2 C bread flour
1 1/2 t yeast

1. Place ingredients into bread machine in the order suggested by the machine's manufacturer.
2. Select the Dough option on the machine, then start the cycle.
3. When the cycle is complete, remove the dough from the machine.
4. Form the dough into 12 balls, make into desired shape of rolls and then let rise for 50 to 60 min. on a lightly greased baking sheet.
5. Bake in an oven preheated to 375 degrees for 20 minutes or until done.

Yield: 12 rolls

Nutritional Info
Not provided, so there's no telling what too many of these buns will do you your buns.

The Husband's Futzings
The only real change I made to the recipe was the number of rolls I prepared. Because I wanted them to be large enough to hold a hamburger patty, I made nine largish rolls instead of a dozen smaller ones.

Five of the rolls I baked on a baking stone; the others on a baking sheet. The ones on the baking sheet unfortunately got a little too hot and burned on the bottom. But other than that, they came out fine.

It ain't pretty, but it's pretty good-tasting

The bun in the above picture is actually two of the burned buns after the blackened bottoms had been cut off. Whatever works, right?

I'm wondering if Angela and I might want to invest in some stone baking tiles. I could get used to having fresh-made rolls with dinner!

Happy little buns

Batman Wants You to Eat Your Vegetables

The husband found this book in the "collectibles" section at Half-Price Books and had to blog about it.

--The Faudie
Remember the end of the first Superman movie, when Superdude turnes back time by reversing Earth's orbit? No, it didn't make one damn lick of sense, but I'm not here to complain about that. Instead, I'd like to pretend Superman is spinning the planet backwards again...

...and now it's 1982! And this cookbook is available at your neighborhood bookstore:

Yup, it's the DC Super Heroes Super Healthy Cookbook. This no doubt well-intentioned oddity tries to get children excited about eating healthy foods such as sprouts and wheat germ (seriously, half of the recipes include wheat germ) by having the likes of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman pretend that these recipes are really, really exciting. Don't take my word for it, though. Let's examine a few select pages together.

Yeah, this is messed up. Here you have two winged superheroes, admiring a breakfast that looks like a bird...made from eggs. So enjoy the cheerful little birdie, if you can get past the creepy infanticide/cannibalism vibes it's giving off.

Remember when Batman was fun? Because this is 1982 and Frank Miller hasn't been born yet (at least, I hope he hasn't been born, as that's the only excuse I can think of for his juvenile writing), Batman is still a nice guy, dressed in baby blue and almost--almost--cracking a smile as he wastes his time investigating a plate of French toast.

The highlight of this picture is, of course, Robin's comment about "putting the banana in the Batman." Say what?!?

Okay, this one's actually kind of cool. Dig those crazy-lookin' sandwich monsters! Green Lantern spends most of the book fighting peanut butter-based antagonists. I have no idea why.

Supergirl has the same powers as Superman, but because she's female, she gets stuck making dinner. Nice. (But you do have to love these instructions: "Bake in oven for one hour at 375 degrees or cook for two minutes under heat vision if you have superpowers." If only.)

Not more bananas! William Moulton Marston would be having a field day with that illustration.

Here's the cookbook's big finale: a party to celebrate the founding of the Justice League of America, attended by everyone...everyone except the Martian Manhunter, who's mysteriously MIA. (I like to think J'onn is maybe in disguise as the punch bowl.) Again, as this is 1982, our heroes actually get to cut loose and have some fun.

If only they knew what's in store for them in the years following this party. Superman dies. Green Lantern dies. Green Arrow dies. Aquaman dies. The Elongated Man dies. Hawkman dies. Hawkgirl dies. Batman dies (or gets stranded in time, or gets lost on the way to the bathroom, or whatever). Kind of a bummer, isn't it?

Oh, well. On a more positive note, Zatanna returns to the fishnets and ditches the Count Chocula outfit.

So the DC Super Heroes Super Healthy Cookbook succeeds in making healthy eating fun, but more in the way of giving me an opportunity to snark about something than by me actually preparing any of the food. There is one recipe, though, that I may try someday if I have the time and the wheat germ. Until then, I'll return you to the year 2009. Get that globe spinning, Supes!