Posted in Cooking on Oct 29th, 2009
There is actually a real cookbook for Easy Bake ovens, The Easy-Bake Oven Gourmet. Various well-known chefs have submitted tiny gourmet recipes. Mark Bittman has Baked Chicken Breast with Cherry Tomatoes and Capers; Rob Feenie has Roasted Quail Breast; Molly Katzen’s got a Carrot Kugel.
Posted in Locavore on Oct 24th, 2009
In a very welcome development, there are now four artisan bakeries that I know of in my general area, a reflection of the North American renaissance in breadmaking that Peter Reinhart has written about, among others.
Posted in Cooking on Oct 22nd, 2009
This is one of the simplest, and paradoxically, one of the best breads in Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, a book bursting at the seams with great bread recipes.
How simple? Well, you do have to have the right tools for it: a baking stone and a spray bottle are the most important, and practice helps, but there are no fancy techniques, no kneading, and the bread itself is a revelation.
Posted in Cooking on Oct 17th, 2009
These are wonderful pancakes, and for someone used to regular baking-soda/powder raised pancakes, a bit of a revelation. They’re the first yeasted pancake I’ve made, and although this requires extra time and effort ahead of time, they’re well worth it.
Posted in Locavore on Oct 12th, 2009
The first frosts are here and so we disassembled the two giant tomato plants in the garden (early girls). We got about twenty pounds of green tomatoes.
Now to find some recipes… I have yet to do much with green tomatoes but it would be a shame to just compost them.
Posted in Locavore on Oct 7th, 2009
To be presented with table after table of apples of all shapes and sizes (and colours) is a delight. And Salt Spring on an early October sunny day is an additional delight.
Posted in Cooking on Oct 2nd, 2009
Our regular weekly pizza bake is based on my favourite dough recipe from Peter Reinhart’s American Pie. As he details in the book, pizza preference is highly individual, and strongly influenced by your experience. I tried a few of his doughs before settling on Neo-Neapolitan. It has, for me, just the right balance of crispy, thin and chewy – it can hold a reasonable amount of topping and is easy to work with.
