Whole Wheat Bread

I decided to make bread. It's the season for baking, and I'm getting tired of so much sugar. Candy, cookies, cakes, pies, brownies, eggnog... it's all getting me down. I don't like to be down. So I got some dehydrated fungus and made a bread out of it. Please, go make some more. It's not difficult, and you don't need any fancy equipment.

Just an oven, really.


WHOLE WHEAT BREAD

2 1/3 cups warm water (110°F is ideal, but anywhere between 105° and 115° is fine)
1/4 cup honey
2 packets (1 1/2 tbsp) active dry yeast
3 tbsp shortening
1 tbsp blackstrap molasses
3 cups whole wheat flour
3 1/2 cups bread flour
1 tbsp sea salt

1. Dissolve the honey thoroughly in the warm water. Whisking does this pretty effectively. It will take longer with old honey that has crystallized some. Yeast loves to eat sugar, but will get overwhelmed if there are huge bits of undissolved sugar, so it's best to take care of that before the yeast enters the pool. When the honey is dissolved, whisk in the yeast.

The yeast should mainly fall flat to the bottom of the container. Let it sit for a few minutes (five or so should do it) to allow the yeast to wake up. You'll know it when it does.

2. While you wait for the yeast, melt the shortening with the molasses until it's just barely melted (you don't want it too hot because you'll be adding it to the yeast; you want happy yeast, not dead-from-burning yeast).



It should be done melting about the same time the yeast is done blooming. It should look pretty foamy on top of the water.



3. Whisk the shortening/molasses into the yeast water really well. In a separate bowl, mix together both kinds of flour and the salt really thoroughly. Add about 3 cups of the flour mixture to the yeast mixture and mix it until there is naught but smoothness. I tried doing it with a spatula but had to revert back to a whisk. It should look like batter and smell kind of good.



4. Now you can add the rest of the flour. Mix it in a bowl, either with a wooden spoon or your hands, until you get a big craggy-looking ball of dough and all the flour is mixed in.



5. Dump it onto a countertop that has been thoroughly sanitized since the last time the cat was up on it, and start to knead. Push, fold, turn. Over and over and over, constantly moving and working the dough for five minutes. It should look considerably smoother afterward.



Take a brief rest; wash your hands if you want, drink some water. Then get back to kneading and do it for five more minutes. It should look smoother still, but the difference this time will be much more subtle. You are now done kneading the dough.



(By the way, during the early stages of my time kneading the dough I thought about how much easier it would be with a KitchenAid stand mixer fitted with a dough hook. I could just watch it spin and knead and not cramp my fingers. But then I considered the fact that people making bread in the Middle Ages didn't have a KitchenAid stand mixer at all, not even one that was not fitted with a dough hook. This made me feel delightfully smug that I was kneading dough the right way. The original way. But it occurred to me furthermore that people in the Middle Ages also didn't have an electric oven to bake their bread, or an electric stove to melt their shortening and warm their water, and still they baked bread. So then I felt as though I need to make my own oven and power it by fire if I want to really make bread right, and melt my shortening in a hand-forged pewter mug over the firepit. My common sense told me, however, that I was unlikely to fashion myself a firepit or fire-powered oven in the near future, and would then probably just buy bread at the store if I was to refuse making it altogether if I had to utilize the help of electricity. It hit me, then. I was finished kneading and I had reached the conclusion that I, much like the bread-bakers of the Middle Ages, was simply using the best tools I had at my disposal. No shame; no wrong. But if you have a KitchenAid stand mixer fitted with a dough hook, or something, you can probably just use that.)

6. Put some water on the stove to boil, and place a rimmed baking sheet in a cold oven. Oil a very large bowl and place the dough ball in it. Roll the dough around to coat it all over with oil, so it doesn't stick to anything when it expands.



Then dust a clean kitchen cloth with flour.



Place it over the bowl, flour-side down. Then it won't stick. Pour the boiling water into the baking pan in the cold oven, and then place the bowl with the dough on a higher shelf in the oven and close it up. Leave the oven off (should be warm and steamy in there, though). This will be the first rise; it will last about an hour and a half.

7. Take the dough out of the oven after about an hour and a half. It should be doubled in size from the yeast eating sugar and farting all over and stretching out the gluten with its gaseousness.



8. Deflate the dough and divide it into two very equal clumps. This is best done with a sharp knife, so you don't tear the dough too much. Pat out one at a time into a relatively even rectangle (about 9"x12").



Roll it up so that the roll is 9" long, and pinch the seam closed. Plump it up so it's relatively the same width all over, like so:



Do the same with the second blob of dough.

9. Place the rolls seam-side down, each in a thoroughly greased 9"x5" (or similar size) metal baking pan and press them out a little so they touch all four sides.



Cover again with the floured towel. But don't keep them in the oven this time, because you'll need to preheat it (also, take out the rimmed baking sheet with water in it. You won't need it again).

10. Preheat the oven to 400°F, while you let the dough rise in the pans for another 45 minutes or so. Your time may vary, but when they're done, the sides should just barely be clearing the top of the pan.



11. Stick the pans in the oven, carefully so you don't deflate the dough, right next to each other. Bake them for 35 minutes. If you have an instant-read thermometer, check one of the loaves before taking them out (should be between 200°F and 205°F). But if you don't, and they look done, they probably are.



12. Unmold immediately and place them on a cooling rack. If you don't, they'll get soggy; yuck! Mine didn't get soggy. Look how pretty they are.



You're really supposed to wait until they're cool before slicing, but I didn't, and nothing terrible happened. The inside was all steamy and the butter I put on it melted right up and it was pretty heavenly, to tell you the truth. Look how perfect the inside is. My bread is awesome.

Unless you're going to eat the bread within three days, it needs to be kept somehow. Dried as croutons, frozen, or *gasp* in the refrigerator. Not ideal, but trust me when I tell you that it will mold quickly. It lacks the calcium propionate of Wonder Bread to prevent timely spoilage. I don't think they had that in the Middle Ages, either.

Lentil Stew

So, I had this jar of dried little French lentils sitting in the back of my cupboard. Before I moved to Arizona a year and a half ago, it was sitting in the back of my food shelf in Washington. I'm pretty sure it traveled around to at least three different places of residence with me over the years. Anyway, I rarely cook with lentils.

It may be because they do not share the American culinary ubiquity of, say, black beans or pinto beans or chickpeas. Lentil burritos? No. Refried lentils? No. Lentil hummus? No. But I'm actually inclined to believe that my reluctance to use them originates in my childhood.

We had dried lentils in our pantry, too. They were in an old cylindrical plastic food container, opaque with scratches, with a yellowed snap-on lid. A little paper label on the front read, in my mother's handwriting, "LENTILS." I don't know how long they'd been there (probably about as long as my French lentils stayed unused in my own supply).

It was afternoon. I felt adventuresome, and I wanted candy (bear in mind, not that it changes the story, but I was about 5 or 6 years old at the time, and my parents weren't the type to freely give candy to their offspring). Bored with my usual crime of grazing on pinches of flour out of the container, disillusioned by my recent experience trying to eat baking soda (it looked like flour), and probably running dangerously low on tubed decorative icing nabbed from the spice cabinet, I remember distinctly that I decided to broaden my horizons a bit.

"Lentils," I wondered. I didn't know what those were. I evaluated the shape of a lentil. It was notably comparable to the shape of an M&M. But lentils were smaller, and relatively colorless. "Flour has no color," I thought. "Flour tastes good." As it often does, my sense of exploration overcame my trepidations. I took a small handful of lentils, and I ate them.

The texture was unpleasant. Hard, stale, and simultaneously crunchy and chewy, they had no satisfying give when masticated. The lentils tasted like old, musty rags. I remember making a face and thinking something along the lines of, "yuck," as I grabbed a second handful and swallowed those whole. Positively gag-inducing; certainly no better than the first bunch and likely a little worse. I remember tossing back another handful and a few more individual lentils before deciding, with great disappointment, that this venture was better abandoned.

I don't remember what went on for the rest of that afternoon and evening, but I do recall with clarity the feeling of nausea. The continual aftertaste of musty rags. A dull, building headache. Rolling discomfort in my stomach, and the wrenching quease that never brought relief. I tried to bring them back up to no avail. I didn't want to tell my parents because, well, it's embarrassing when you intentionally eat a bunch of dried lentils and then feel shitty. Besides, I was pretty sure I wasn't supposed to snack on dried goods out of the pantry.

(Looking back over this experience, it seems apparent that, as a child, I had some sort of eating disorder.)

In any case, lentils have never really enchanted my adult self like other legumes. I got the French lentils during some crazy scheme I had one day to have available in my own personal store, every type of dried legume on which I could get my hands. You know, just in case I needed them for something.

After about four years (read: a few weeks ago) I decided to finally cook up my lentils and serve them in a coconut-squash soup. I was excited, because it sounded good, and it's soup season. This is all really beside the point, because it took about 2 hours for the lentils to mostly cook, and the soup didn't really turn out that well.

I don't like giving up on myself, though. I got more lentils (regular ones, this time) and made a soup in which to put them, using neither squash nor coconut milk. It turned into a stew, but whatever. It's amazing when it's cold out. And cheap, which is good when you're living more in the red than you've ever lived before.


LENTIL STEW

1 cup dried lentils, rinsed and picked and then cooked
cooking oil
3 stalks celery, all chopped up
3 carrots, all chopped up
1 onion, all chopped up
2 lbs potatoes, all chopped up (1/2 inch cubes is great)
5 cloves garlic, all chopped up
1 tbsp oregano
1 tbsp dried thyme
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
2 bay leaves
few leaves kale or spinach or other green, all chopped up

1. Cook the lentils in 2 cups of water until the water is absorbed and the lentils are thoroughly hydrated and not at all crunchy. This can take anywhere between 20 minutes and an hour, depending on how old your lentils are. Stir every so often toward the end, and add some sea salt to taste.

2. While the lentils cook, toss the carrots, celery, and onion in a little cooking oil in the bottom of a stockpot and put it on medium-low heat. I was going for a sweetening-of-the-onions effect, but I didn't consider the fact that the carrots and the celery were hanging out too and they got kinda bored in the pan. That, and I didn't even have a whole onion to work with like I'd planned. Just half. So... that didn't really do anything. Make sure to stir them every so often.

3. While the vegetables are cooking, you can cut up the potatoes. I like red potatoes. You can leave the skin on, and the texture is nice, and they don't fall apart too much.



Look. Look at that relative uniformity.

4. Maybe, by the time you're done chopping, the vegetables will have relaxed rather a lot in their pot. They cooked in there nice and slowly for about 20 minutes. Maybe more. I don't remember, to be honest.



5. Toss the garlic, oregano, thyme, paprika, salt, and red pepper flakes into the cooking vegetables and let that cook another minute or two.



6. Add the potatoes to the pot, and cover with water. I think I added about 6 cups total. Add the bay leaves. Give it a bit of a stir, cover, and turn the heat up to medium-high to bring to a boil.



7. After it's boiling, reduce heat to medium-low again and cover the pot just partially. Let it simmer away until the potatoes are tender, then stir it every few minutes for 10-20 minutes more, so some of the potatoes break up and thicken the stew. Yeah. Then it gets good.



8. Dump in the lentils. Stir it up a final time, and taste for salt. Add if necessary. You can add your green bits at the end. I leave them out altogether and drop them in when I'm heating up individual portions for leftovers. They should really only be hot for 5 minutes or so. Otherwise they go rather limp and become somewhat gray. Not appealing.

Cooked lentils are easier on the stomach than are dried lentils, come to think of it. They're a lot more palatable in general. There's nothing to fear from lentils in a stew, anyway... especially this one, since it's amazing. Slightly spicy, but it's cold out so that's warranted.

That's really all I have. Go forth and consume more expensive things in my stead.

Green Rice (and Things That Go With It)

I haven't really been cooking much lately. I think it's because they raised my rent but not my wages and I can't afford food anymore. So I haven't really been eating much lately, either. Let me tell you, it's like poverty for an eater like me to live on so little food. I should stop doing anything social and just spend my money on healthy comestibles, I suppose. I reduced my grocery budget but not my weekly coffee/pastry budget. It's funny the things we choose when we have to choose, you know?

(What's actually funny is that I have an entire shelf in my cabinet full of dried pasta. But honestly, I'd rather go hungry than eat plain pasta with no sauce. And I have no sauce, so the pasta is just sitting there. Yes, it's true. I make tons of sense. I promise I'm not complaining.)

But once in awhile, a lady needs a square meal to hold her down. And I really wanted to cook something; I've been in a slump. Originally, I was going to go with risotto. But I've been out of the game for some time, now, and making risotto seemed daunting for someone hungry, devoid of energy, and out of practice. It's got the wine... and the broth... and all that stirring. Actually, just thinking about making risotto makes me want to take a nap right now.

The alternative? It's comparatively cheap and easy. Green rice. It's pretty much just finely processed vegetation into which cooked rice is stirred and heated.

And you can't have just rice, regardless of color, for dinner. Not in my home, anyway. So I sauteed some shrimp and made a really [un]healthy salad of avocados and hearts of palm with grape tomato wedges. I swear, it didn't look big on my plate. But now that I've consumed it all I happen to be one stuffed duckling.

You can have whatever you want with green rice. I've had it with panfried trout. I've had it with black beans and smoked salmon tacos. I think it actually goes pretty well with seafood. I guess maybe because the sea is green, too.


GREEN RICE
based on Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without

a bunch of cooked rice (3 cups or so), white or brown or both
4 green onions, cut into lengths of whatever handlable size you prefer
big handful each of spinach leaves, parsley leaves, cilantro leaves, and mint leaves
olive oil
2 garlic cloves, pressed or minced
sea salt 'n' freshly ground pepper
chopped walnuts, pecans, or whole pine nuts
lemon wedges

1. Cook your rice however you like; unless you have some cooked on hand. If you start with 1 to 1 1/2 cups of uncooked rice, you'll end up with the right amount. I always rinse it first. I guess it removes starch and makes it less sticky after it cooks.

After you cook it, set it aside to prepare your green things.



2. Toss all your leaves and green onions in a food processor. Maybe a blender works too, but I don't know. I guess you could also spend 3 hours chopping it into miniscule pieces by hand. But I live in Arizona now, and that's not how we roll here.



Process away until it gets as fine as it will get and sticks to the sides instead of processing further.



3. Heat some olive oil in a pan over medium heat. When it gets hot enough, toss in the garlic and stir around for a little less than a minute, and then add all the green stuff.



Stir this a lot over the course of five minutes. Try to prevent it from sticking to the pan; this shouldn't be a problem because of a) all the water in the leaves, and b) the oil you've put in the pan. Or you could use a nonstick pan, if you want cancer of the body.

After five minutes, it should look pretty much the same, albeit a little drier.



4. Now is the time to add rice, and season to taste with a fat pinch of salt and some pepper. Just dump it in and stir it well enough to coat all the little rice grains with green. At first it might seem an impossible task. But plug away, o friend, and you'll be amazed at how far the green truly stretches.



If the starchy, starchy rice sticks to the pan, turn off the heat and add a little water and stir it around. This should make it possible to unstick the sticky bits. I like to cook with a wooden spatula, which makes a good firm yet unsharp scraping surface for pans. It unstuck the rice like magic with a little water.

5. Meanwhile, toast some nuts.



Shown above are chopped pecans. Pine nuts work best, but I didn't have any and they're pretty dad gum expensive. I have a bunch of pecans in my freezer, though. I thought, hey... they're fatty and soft like a pine nut. Why not? So I used them. Just toast them in a little pan for several minutes over medium low heat until they start to smell, then stir them a lot until they start to darken, and then transfer them to another container. Put some on the rice when you serve it.

6. Whip up whatever else you're having. I made a quick avocado and heart of palm salad a la My Kind of Food, except I added tomatoes. I then sauteed peeled, deveined shrimp very quickly in some olive oil and garlic, and took it out and sprinkled some sea salt and red pepper flakes on it. Don't forget the lemon wedges - one for the shrimp, and one for the rice. And there we have it, kids. A square meal for a hungry lady.

The soundtrack for the making of this meal was provided by the Jimmy Cliff station on Pandora Radio; the digesting, Paul Simon; the blogging, Alice in Chains. I am surprised I've never mentioned it before, but it's the sagest of advice of which I am currently capable:

Always cook with music.