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This is just a heads-up for those of you who are interested in cooking or food in general. I’ve been collecting recipes that we particularly like for some time, mostly for my own benefit and future reference. Recently, though, I’ve starting adding photos and narrative to the recipes, and posting more frequently, and lo and behold, I seem to be writing a food blog.

So come check out The Persnickety Palate from time to time to see what we’ve been eating and why (also when, how, and whence). We’ve also added a link to it from here, in the Links box at the right. A taste for you: Last night we had wild sockeye salmon, broiled and served with a roasted red pepper sauce and sauteed snow peas, and homemade cheesecake ice cream for dessert.

…are too good not to share. An example of this is the lamb kefthedes I made for dinner last week, which came out to be the best meatballs I’ve ever eaten, bar none.

The photo doesn’t do them justice: They were perfect fresh from the skillet (crisp outside and succulently moist inside), tasted just as good at room temperature, and held up admirably in the form of reheated leftovers, warmed in a 350F oven for 15-20 minutes. I served them with a mound of sauteed spinach and the Greek roasted potatoes here (which also reheated nicely in the oven).

Since my recipe was an adaptation of several different meatball recipes, I’ve written it out for you. We’ll definitely be making them again soon.

So between all the driving around in the snow, what did we do while visiting Littleton? I’ll break it down into a few categories, ‘cause that’s just how my brain works…

1. Animal watching

We had great fun watching the flocks of sparrows, house finches and juncos swarming over the bird feeder out the back windows. They persisted in coming throughout both of the storms, and after the first few hours of the first blizzard, my mom went outside to refill the feeder and put out a new one (read: old perch of my parrot, Pogo’s) so even more birds could get in on the fun. You can see some of them in most of Jeremy’s bird feeder photos. We also had visits from several blue jays on several occasions, always readily apparent because they shrieked out warning calls to the little birds to get out of their way just prior to arrival. After the second blizzard, there were flickers hanging out both in the backyard ash tree and on the feeder, and even a little downy woodpecker, who incited a lot of photographic action in the house.

The other stars of the backyard show were the squirrels. We watched them in fascination, as, every time it stopped snowing, they would forge a path through the snow in a brave effort to reach the feeders. We think they were staying in the big evergreen tree in the back corner of the yard, and would virtually swim at top speed through the surface of the snow to the ash tree, after which they had a big decision to make: drop down from the branches of the tree to the roof of the feeder or wade through more snow and climb up? We saw them go both routes, though the former was more entertaining, especially with several feet of snow on the feeder’s roof. It took us a while to realize what had caused the big hole in the middle of that pile of snow.

And I can’t talk about animal watching without mentioning my parents’ cats, Addie and TooCute. They were just as fascinated by the birds and squirrels as we were, and when there was a lull in the wildlife activity, we entertained the cats. TooCute really hated Jeremy and me, and would hiss at us and strike at us whenever we tried to pet her, but she was also constantly hanging around and sometimes even rubbing up against our legs, strangely. The most we could do with her was dangle a gold string in front of her to play, but that was good for hours of entertainment for both cats. I guess we were all easily amused.

2. Knitting

I got in some knitting time over the course of the two weeks we were in Littleton. I was knitting myself a pair of socks from STR Lightweight in the lovely Downpour colorway, using the famous Conwy pattern from Nancy Bush’s Knitting on the Road. The first night there I started the cuff of my second Conwy sock, but after that I concentrated on Christmas knitting. I had ordered a skein of STR Lightweight in Petrified Wood to make socks for my dad (and maybe a skein of the Meteorite colorway for myself, down the line), and it arrived just before we flew out. So I wound up the skein and set myself to knit those socks in the week before Christmas. I didn’t bring any sock knitting books with me due to space constraints, but I had been happy with how Jeremy’s Gentleman’s Fancy Socks came out, so I decided to go with that. The pattern was fairly easy to remember, aside from calf shaping, which I made up to no detriment. I used #1 needles and started with 84 stitches, eventually decreasing to 72 to accommodate my dad’s petite ankles. The colorway received fatherly approval and held up beautifully against the texture pattern and the changes in circumference with no flashing. I used a short row heel and a standard toe, and used up virtually every scrap of the skein, down to the last yard. It was a little nervewracking there at the end, but they came out perfectly, and seem to fit Dad well. I finished them up by the Friday before Christmas, no sweat.

While doing some of our Christmas shopping the Tuesday before the first storm, we just happened to go in a yarn store in downtown Littleton, A Knitted Peace. My mom got a pattern and some needles to make hats, and a little kit for me to knit her a pretty scarf, along with a bagful of Rowan Silk & Wool DK in a gorgeous silver color they call clay, earmarked for the Ogee Tunic in Norah Gaughan’s Knitting Nature. I worked up the scarf, which uses a strand of Kid Silk Haze and a strand of Katia Sevilla held together and worked in a simple garter/drop stitch pattern, after I finished my dad’s socks. That took all of a few hours to polish off in an evening. Then I went back to my Conwy socks, and got the second one finished off the night before we left for Oregon. Not a bad way to bookend the trip, though I had a skein of purple Trekking all lined up to (hopefully) do a pair of knee socks for myself. I’m working on those now with #0 needles and a simple clock pattern from Folk Knitting in Estonia for some visual interest.

3. Cooking and eating

We made some lovely meals over the course of the trip, including both old standbys and some new recipes on the menu. I didn’t write everything down, but here are a few mentionables:

• Our favorite pork loin with leeks from Cooking Light: We’ve made this many times and it came out great, as always.
• Braised lamb shanks with porcini: This was a meal just for me and Jeremy, as my parents had a Christmas party to attend.
• Zinfandel-braised pot roast with glazed carrots from All About Braising: The meat was very tasty but the carrots were awesome and we didn’t make nearly enough of them (this coming from someone who doesn’t care for cooked carrots under normal circumstances).
• Rice-asparagus soup with pancetta and pepper from Zuni Café Cookbook: This was a light, tasty soup that we served with a grating of parmesan and slices of fresh bread.
• Vietnamese braised scallops from All About Braising, served with a whole grain asparagus salad with soy-ginger vinaigrette from Once Upon a Tart: I’ve made the scallops once before, and made them here at my dad’s request. My fish-wary mom bravely ate a scallop and didn’t think it was too bad. The barley-wild rice salad with asparagus went well as a side for the scallops, though the amount of dressing called for was excessive, in my opinion. This was our Christmas Eve meal.
• Leg of lamb stuffed with feta and chard: This was our Christmas dinner. It came out so well the first time we made it that Jeremy and I both really wanted my parents to try it, and I think it was a success. We had a beautiful fresh piece of lamb, and leftovers for days. We kept the sides simple and went with mashed potatoes, fresh steamed broccoli, and the red wine jus from the lamb.

We also did quite a bit of baking, though we had planned to do more, and got cut short a bit by the abruptness of our flight on Saturday. Mostly we did Christmas cookies, but a few other items as well:

• Chocolate chip cookies: I used my favorite recipe, which tweaks David Lebovitz’s fantastic cookies with the addition of toffee bits for a subtle extra hit of flavor. These didn’t last long.
• Sugar cookies: These came from a can, but sugar cookies are really just a vehicle for frosting anyway, right?
• Pumpkin cookies: These are one of my favorite cookies of all time, and we made them partly because we had a partial can of pumpkin left from a batch of pumpkin waffles (very tasty, served with maple pecan syrup). They have chocolate chips and almonds in them, and an almost cakey texture from the moistness of the pumpkin.
• Buckwheat cookies: I’ve made these a bunch of times at home, and they are one of my favorites with tea. This was the first time I’ve made them with a mixer instead of a food processor, though.
• Harvest squash bread: My mom had a butternut squash on the counter when we arrived, waiting to be made into bread. We tried it out with this recipe from Macrina Bakery and Cafe Cookbook, and it came out well, after burning a batch of walnuts and pecans based on the amount of time indicated in the book for toasting them. If I made this again, I’d used hulled pepitas instead of the whole pumpkinseeds we had on hand, as the hulls were not the greatest eating, though a good source of fiber, I’m sure.

Jeremy thought I should be the one to post about our Thanksgiving dinner this year, probably because he spent most of the day out in his studio painting while I was in the kitchen. I guess that’s fair. We did a fairly traditional Thanksgiving feast for the two of us, in thanks for the opportunity to finally spend the holiday together after two years apart.

I did desserts the day before Thanksgiving, and had grand plans to do more in advance, but we got sucked into watching episodes of Project Runway. On Thursday morning, I dove right in after breakfast and got some things going: bread cubes toasted and stuffing mixed up to go in the slow cooker, sweet potatoes baking, dough mixed and kneaded for the whole wheat butterhorns. Around the time I was dividing the dough into portions for shaping, Jeremy started looking around for lunch, so while the sweet potatoes finished up in the oven, I shaped the rolls and got started on lunch: a mushroom bisque. Jeremy kept me company while I worked and sliced shallots for me, commenting partway through that the contents of the sauté pan would make the best burger topping ever. I saved a ladleful of mushrooms to stir back into the pureed soup at the last minute, and by the time the soup was ready, the rolls were coming out of the oven, soft, wheaty and crunchy with walnuts. Jeremy told me that this was the best soup he’s had in a long time, and there certainly weren’t any complaints about the butterhorns either.

After the lunch dishes were cleaned up, I got started on the next wave of food, meaning the turkey and trimmings. We did a simply roast turkey with herb butter rubbed under the skin on the breast meat, and I also topped the breasts with foil for the first hour to keep them moist. I kept a turkey stock simmering on the stovetop, full of giblets and all the veggie trimmings from the morning’s preparations. A few cups of that got ladled over the turkey (sans foil) for basting and also went into the porcini gravy we made from the pan drippings. While the turkey cooked, I prepped the green bean casserole (a homemade version of the popular canned-food casserole), chopped and acidulated the Brussels sprouts, and peeled and pureed the sweet potatoes. After the turkey came out of the oven, we made a pot of Brie-mashed potatoes, tucked the green beans into the oven, finished off the vanilla sweet potato puree, and quickly sautéed the sprouts. Jeremy had just enough time to carve the turkey while I finished off the gravy, and we sat down with sparkling cider and groaning plates. A few hours later we had pumpkin chiffon pie and apple crisp for dessert.

So how did we like everything?

• The mushroom bisque was a definite winner, but rather on the spendy side with all those wild mushrooms and dried porcini. Still, I think we’ll be making that again.
• The whole wheat butterhorns were just as soft and tasty as when I made them for my folks last year.
• The turkey came out beautifully, glazed brown on the outside and moist inside with a flavorful gravy that worked nicely with all of our sides.
• Jeremy thought the green bean casserole smelled like curdled milk; I didn’t get that at all and really liked it, but wish I had let the beans cook a minute or two longer before saucing.
• On the other hand, I didn’t care for the Brie-mashed potatoes, which didn’t exactly taste bad, but kept making me think, “What’s up with these potatoes?” before remembering the cheese.
• The sweet potato puree was an unadulterated hit: I don’t care for sweet potatoes personally, but still ate a small portion, and they made Jeremy break out into spontaneous expressions of bliss. The recipe is also really versatile in terms of leftovers, and we used a portion of them to make sweet potato pancakes for dinner one night as an alternative to straight leftovers.
• The slow-cooker stuffing is a recipe I’ve made for the past few years, and I like it because it lets me start it first thing in the morning and not think about it for the rest of the day; this year we used day-old pain a l’ancienne from Jeremy’s bread-baking repertoire, and it held up beautifully.
• The Brussels sprouts were tasty, and since I could prep them in advance, incredibly quick to make during the cooking finale. We weren’t huge fans of the poppy seeds in the recipe, so maybe I’ll cast my eye around for some mustard seeds in future, or just stick to Lidia Bastianich’s garlicky recipe for skillet-cooked sprouts.
• The pumpkin chiffon pie, for which I made my own puree for the first time by roasting a sugar pumpkin, had a lovely flavor and texture, but the crust came out pretty rock-like at first, and then basically dissolved in the fridge. I would consider using the pie filling in a sort of parfait with crumbled gingersnaps and candied nuts instead, but would otherwise stick to my standard pecan-topped pumpkin pie or a paradise pumpkin pie.
• The apple crisp was good, but I don’t seem to have good luck cooking with Braeburns, so it was a bit liquidy, and Jeremy requested more topping next time.

Whew! That was a mouthful, in more ways than one. We finished off the bulk of our leftovers on Monday night, but still have a container of turkey to contend with. Any ideas?

This weekend, Jeremy and I rented a car to do errands, take the ferrets up to the vet, and generally get out of Salem. The rental agency gave us a PT Cruiser, a car we had both been a bit enamored of, but after riding around in it for two and a half days, I think we’ve lost some interest in it as a potential purchase. Not that it was a bad car by any means, but it just didn’t have the same farfegnugen as our cute little Jetta.

In any event, the main purpose of the rental was to get the ferrets up to their vet in Lake Oswego for vaccines and annual exams. (In case you’re wondering why we chose a vet that is 40 miles away from us, let’s just say that experienced ferret vets don’t grow on trees.) We got everyone in the carriers and up to the office without incident—I think, but more on that. Niki got a clean bill of health. Ajax’s occasional wheezing and snorting was determined to be a minor upper respiratory sort of apnea caused by the fact that he’s a big boy with a big ol’ neck, so nothing to be concerned about unless he actually starts having trouble breathing. His very dirty back teeth were determined to be a good candidate for scaling, which could be done without anaesthesia and made a vast improvement in just a few minutes.

Pandora, as might be expected of an older ferret, had a few more issues. The primary one dealt with was the fact that she lost her top left fang sometime in the past few days without our noticing. We’ve been racking our brains trying to figure out when it might have happened, and we think the most likely scenario was after we bathed them all on Thursday night: we were also washing all their towels, so all three were out at once, and Ajax grabbed Pandora hard at one point. When we pulled them apart, she was biting his scruff just as much as he was biting hers, and his skin is thick enough to bend vaccination needles, so it’s possible she snapped the tooth off then. At any rate, the fang broke off right at the gumline, which is a recipe for abcess. Fortunately, our vet agreed to stay after hours to do dental surgery and got the rest of the tooth out. Pandora will be on antibiotics for the next week or so, and we have a medicated wash to keep the sutured hole in her mouth good and clean. She’s putting up with the meds beautifully so far, and feels well enough to roll and carry her jingly balls all around the house like always, so she should be just fine. I only wish we knew for sure when she broke that tooth; it really caught us by surprise.

Other than that rather eventful vet visit, we ran lots and lots of shopping errands with the car this weekend. Since I ordered a bunch of clothes last month for my birthday, this month we caught Jeremy up with a trip to Washington Square for some spiffy new duds (and possibly one more dud for me). While there, we also had great fun exploring the new stores that were built since the last time we got up there (several years ago, admittedly), including a Teavana, where we purchased three new kinds of loose leaf tea to try out. We’ve sampled all three by now, of course, and are very happy with our choices of a traditional Moroccan mint, a slightly nutty Darjeeling called Margaret’s Hope, and a green blend called Japanese Cherry Blossom. Plus, it was just really nice to be able to sniff all the different types before choosing. We should really get out more.

We ran around Bridgeport Village on Saturday while the ferrets were otherwise occupied at the vet, and went a little wild in Whole Foods, as we have been really missing having decent grocery options sans car. Would it be silly of me to outline some of our prizes? It may totally expose us Salemites as country bumpkins, but I’m too excited not to. We got a beautiful hunk of Parmagiano-Reggiano cheese and some ricotta salata, which I keep reading about but could never find; some sherry vinegar, salt-packed anchovies, and Italian tuna in olive oil; dried porcinis for half the price they were going for at Safeway; some Cyprus black lava salt with gorgeous pyramidal crystals that I have no idea how to use; a chunk of Scharffenberger bittersweet chocolate, some cacao nibs, and way too many Endangered Species bars; a sugar pie pumpkin; and tons more stuff that is going to be a lot of fun to play with.

On Sunday, we ran errands around town, mostly to Lowe’s for supplies so Jeremy can make a still-life box (I’m sure he’ll tell you more about that as he starts building it), but I also got some buttons and grosgrain ribbon to finish off my tweedy cardigan, and we did more grocery shopping for the perishable sorts of foods that we didn’t want to lug all the way down from Lake Oswego.

So that was our rather extravagant, car-powered weekend. Did I mention that while we were doing all this, it was pouring rain almost non-stop, and hasn’t let up yet? This is soaking rain, not your typical Oregon drizzle-mist. Perfect weather to ditch the rental car and curl up inside with a hot cup of Moroccan mint tea and a new sock on the needles while dinner finishes braising. (And by the way, if you like pork chops at all, you owe it to yourself to run straight into the kitchen and make Marcella Hazan’s Pork Chops with Tomatoes, Cream, Porcini from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. I left out the button mushrooms and just added the porcini soaking liquid with the drained tomatoes, and they were maybe the best pork chops ever. Marcella’s the best!)

In his last post, Jeremy put the onus on me to update you about a few more things we’ve been up to in quiet Salem. I have a feeling he mostly meant for cooking updates, but I am going to sneak in a big ol’ knitting post too (heh heh!–oh wait, that wasn’t very surreptitious…).

We’re now the proud owners of two stainless steel All-Clad pans: a 10” fry pan and a 3.5 quart sauté pan/braiser with a domed lid. We started out with the fry pan, and have been very happy with it, but I think we will have to keep a non-stick skillet to make things like eggs and pan-fried chard-onion-gruyere panade. Then, over Labor Day weekend, we were at the mall to see a movie, and stopped in Meier and Frank (now Macy’s, but I don’t know if I can accept that just yet) to see what might be on sale. We found a beautiful 3.5 quart sauté pan with a domed lid for under $100 for some unknown reason (the 3 quart with a flat lid was $185); to make a short story shorter, it followed us home, along with a red silicone handle cover, for when I want to finish a dish off in the oven. I’ve only used it once so far, to sauté vegetables for the aforementioned panade, but it performed admirably. And for the sake of full disclosure, I must tell you that as soon payday rolled around, we ordered a rack from which to hang our lovely shiny new cookware, so that it won’t be sullied by too much close association with our other pots and pans in the drawer under the oven.

We have a few other new additions to the kitchen as well, such as a red Le Creuset stoneware gratin dish and a Lodge cast iron skillet, the latter of which I have been dutifully seasoning with platefuls of bacon and fried zucchini strips. But the real prize is the one that arrived last night, and which we have been looking forward to getting for the past year or so: a pasta-maker attachment for our stand mixer. Jeremy immediately tried it out with a batch of play-dough (just flour and water, to clean any residual grease or debris from the rollers), and then set about making our first real batch of fresh pasta, a simple egg fettuccine from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, which we just so happened to pick up from the library at lunch. While he gleefully slid the dough through the rollers and cutters, I made a quick batch of creamed chard ribs, a recipe we’ve enjoyed before, to sauce the noodles.

To conclude, between our new pasta-maker, Marcella, and Lidia Bastianich (whose book Lidia’s Family Table we have already renewed at the library once), there’s a heckuva lot of Italian food in our future. And since I picked up a bagful of gorgeous cranberry beans (or “French horticultural beans,” as they were labeled), I think we’ll start with some pasta e fagioli.

Next up, a knitting post if I ever remember to take photos, and Jeremy has some news to share as well.

After Jeremy’s prodigious post on the bread-baking frenzy at our house this summer, I feel like I should write a bit about what I have been up to baking-wise, lest you think I have just been laying about stuffing my face with the fruits of Jeremy’s labors for two months.

Yes, I did relinquish yeasted bread duties to Jeremy’s willing hands. Although I very much enjoy baking fresh bread, the amount of work and planning that goes into it means that I just didn’t get around to it as often as Jeremy would like. I am, however, much better about making quick breads, muffins, and biscuits, so I have been concentrating on those this summer in the baking department.

Along with the requisite banana bread (which sacred recipe I am not allowed to modify in any way, shape or form), I’ve recently tried out a number of new quick bread recipes, all of which got gobbled up without getting a glamor shot for the blog. For instance, with lovely fresh zucchini from the farmer’s market, I made three loaves of zucchini-prune bread from the Good Enough to Eat cookbook a few weekends ago (one loaf was given away, and another put in the freezer for future emergency snacking). This recipe made delicious bread even though, with three loaf pans in the oven together, the middle pan refused to cook through: we ended up slicing off the cooked outsides and heating them on the griddle. I will definitely make this recipe again, and scale it back to the original single loaf, as it really had outstanding flavor. I didn’t even think I liked prunes, but they suited this bread perfectly.

Since I had more zucchini to play with, I made a batch of chocolate zucchini cupcakes once the Z-P bread was gone. As recommended, I used coconut oil for the first time, which was an interesting experience. Coconut oil has a melting point of something like 75ºF, and when I went to make the muffins, it was a warm afternoon after a cooler day, so our coconut oil was half-liquid, half-solid, and rather a challenge to get out of the jar and measure without creating a mess. Once in the mixer, however, it blended in easily and added a lot of moisture to the finished muffins. The cupcakes were ultra-chocolatey, with no hint of the two cups of grated zucchini that went into the batter.

A few weeks ago, I whipped up a batch of buttermilk biscuits to accompany pasta on a night that we didn’t already have fresh bread ready and waiting. I had a notion the very sticky dough would be hard to work with, but it turned out to be easy as (well, frankly, easier than) pie, and the biscuits really were fantastic.

Other than that, at least off the top of my head, I’ve made waffles and pancakes several times—do those count as quick breads? We had some very tasty multigrain cinnamon banana waffles, and just yesterday a batch of buttermilk and brown sugar waffles topped with roasted cherries. But the real revelation has been in pancakes.

I’m not really a pancake girl; give me a plate of French toast instead anytime. But I have met my match in praline ricotta pancakes, which I can safely say are the best pancakes ever. My recipe is a riff off of the hazelnut-lemon-ricotta pancakes posted on The Wednesday Chef, from an Amanda Hesser article in the New York Times. Since I had leftover ricotta taunting me from the refrigerator, but no hazelnuts or whole lemons on hand, I improvised with almond praline, and the result was so delicious that we still haven’t gotten around to the original recipe, several batches later. For those of you who have been patient enough to read this long-winded post with no photographic relief, here is your prize: the reason we will have ricotta on hand at all times in future (and a good enough excuse to try making fresh ricotta myself sometime).

Praline Ricotta Pancakes

1 C flour
1/3 C sugar
½ C finely ground Almond Praline (note follows),
plus more praline for garnish
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp kosher salt
1 C milk
3 T butter, melted
2 eggs, separated
1 tsp vanilla
1 C ricotta, strained of any liquid

Almond Praline:
This is more of a guide than a recipe, as I am sure there are more authoritative ones out there. What I do is take a double-handful of slivered almonds, and begin toasting them over medium high heat until they begin to smell good. At that point I add a tablespoon of unsalted butter and around 3 tablespoons of granulated sugar, plus a sprinkle of cinnamon, and stir it all around until it begins to form a sticky syrup around the almonds. The moment it begins to look beige, I take it off the heat and pour it on a small plate covered with foil (if I am thinking ahead, I spritz the foil with canola oil first), and chuck it in the fridge while I make the pancake batter. By the time I am ready for the pulverized praline, it has hardened and is ready for the chop. I’ve done this successfully with walnuts also, and imagine pecans or hazelnuts would work admirably.

Pancakes:
Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, soda and salt. In another bowl, whisk the milk, butter, egg yolks, vanilla and ricotta. Fold this into the dry ingredients. Pulverize 1/2 C of the praline and stir it in. Break or chop several additional tablespoons of praline into small chunks for garnish. Whip the egg whites just until stiff, then fold them into the batter.

Heat a pancake griddle, and lightly coat the surface with spray oil. Use a ¼ cup measure to scoop the batter onto the griddle. Cook until the pancakes appear dry around the edges, about 3 minutes, then flip them and cook for another minute or two. Serve with real maple syrup, garnished with chunks of praline. Serves 4.

Most of you who know me know that I don’t mind referring to myself as a bread-fiend. I love bread. During the past couple of years, Julie has been learning quite a lot about cooking in general. Wanting to do my part to encourage this behavior, I bought her a fancy bread-baking book about a year ago. While Julie, in my humble and unbiased opinion, has become an excellent chef, she seems to have little interest in baking bread.

So, I’ve decided that, after graduation, baking bread would need to fall within my domestic purview. Besides, apparently artisan bread baking is one of the more masculine cooking disciplines. While Julie isn’t terribly thrilled with the amount of time that goes into baking bread herself, she enjoys a fresh loaf almost as much as I do.

Over the last two months I’ve made over a dozen loaves of bread, almost all of them recipes from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. This is an excellent book which seems to focus on cold fermentation for making world-class breads. The cold fermentation process means that the breads normally take two to three days to make as you retard the leavening process to allow as many of the complex sugars to be converted by the yeast as possible. This is intended to bring out as much flavor as possible. Here’s a sampling of some of the breads:

This was the first loaf I made, a boule of Pain a l’Ancienne. This bread is the poster child for the cold fermentation process as it contains nothing but flour, water, salt and yeast (note that there is no added sugar to feed the yeast and the salt will slow the fermentation process: this is why you have to let it ferment overnight). However, by letting the dough ferment in the refrigerator overnight, the finished product has a complex, subtle and mutli-layered flavor. Still one of my favorite breads.

These are a couple loaves of simple Italian Bread, also made with a cold fermentation.

Here’s a couple of different loaves. One the left is a boule of Pain de Campagne, which is made with a mix of unbleached white and wheat flours. On the right is a loaf of Pane Siciliano, which is made with a mix of unbleached white and semolina flour. The Sicilian bread actually takes three days to make: you proof the bread overnight after it has been shaped, which of course happens after a night of cold fermentation for the dough. The result is wonderful, however, and this is one that Julie and I both love. I think I’ve made it four times now.

Julie made an excellent shrimp and avacado salad, and these rolls turned them into wonderful sandwiches. Unfortunately, I can’t remember which recipe I used for the rolls, but they were hearty and quite tasty. The baguette on the right is a loaf of Pain a l’ Ancienne.

Here are a couple loaves of Ciabatta bread. Ciabatta dough is quite wet compared to most bread dough and needs to have a ‘couche’ for proofing. I used a scrap of heavy linen fabric leftover from making canvases, well-rubbed with flour to make it non-stick.

This is our other favorite: Vienna Bread. I’ve made it two or three times now. This is the most recent loaf, and for an added flourish I slathered a slurry of Dutch Crunch to the top, which adds a bit of sweetness and gives a nice mottled appearance to the top.

I’ve baked several other types of bread as well, including Rosemary Potato bread and a very large batch of bagels, but don’t seem to have taken photos of those.

I’m really enjoying baking bread and am grateful that Julie is sharing the kitchen and all of her cooking toys with me. The Kitchen-Aid stand mixer in particular is a godsend. For our anniversary this June, we purchased a bunch of kitchen tools, most of which are most useful to bread baking: a bakers peel, a digital cooking thermometer and a kitchen scale. More bread to come…

– Jeremy

Yeah, yeah. We’ve been very neglectful of the blog since I went to NYC and brought my husband home with me. I had every intention of writing up a big detailed post about my trip to NYC, but it seems so far back in the misty past now that I probably couldn’t remember everything we did anyway. But since that probably isn’t good enough for our rabid blog fans (heh), here are a few highlights:

The Met, the Cloisters, and the Frick, Revisited: Still no Madame X at the Met, and the lovely Ingres portraits of the Princesse de Broglie and the Comtesse d’Haussonville (from the Met and the Frick respectively) were also gone, but at least I got to see the latter two in October. The Cloisters was very busy the day we were there, and since we hit the Met the same day, it was more of a refresher visit than anything. There were street performers doing acrobatic tricks outside of the Met, and I had my first fizzy Izze there.

MoMA and the Neue Galerie: I had never been to visit these before, and Jeremy hadn’t been to the Neue Gallery either. We went to MoMA during their free Friday evening, and although it was very crowded, I’m glad we didn’t have to spend money for tickets. They had one floor with a large number of famous and/or important paintings (Dali’s Persistence of Memory, Matisse’s Red Studio and Dance, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, to name a few) and the rest of the museum we ran through almost without stopping; I’d take the Met over MoMA any day. The Neue Galerie was of course much smaller, even more so because they were currently between special exhibitions and only one floor of permanent collection was available to us. We went there with Jeremy’s friend Bain, at his suggestion, and saw some interesting pieces by Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka.

Upright Citizens’ Brigade: We got tickets for this show and it’s a good thing we did, because the place was packed, probably beyond capacity. There were people sitting on the floor at the edges of the stage, and standing behind the back seats. But it was a great show, with—count ‘em—three familiar faces on the stage: Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers of SNL, and Stephnie Weir of MadTV.

Seeing Mandy Patinkin on Broadway: Literally. We walked past him on the sidewalk, talking on his cell phone and looking just like Jason Gideon in Criminal Minds. Since The Princess Bride is one of my favorite movies of all time, that was pretty cool.

Central Park: I finally got to see more than the edges, as we walked across it about three separate times. Also, there were vendors selling chocolate éclair Good Humor bars, which I haven’t seen in the store for years, so I got one and was very excited about that. Totally made my day. Well, that and going to the Frick.

Strand: We spent a lot of time here looking at books, and I don’t think we actually bought any. That was probably a really good thing, considering the volume of books and other packages we had to mail home as it was. Jeremy’s amassing quite the art book collection. At any rate, I did get a little canvas satchel with the Strand logo, just the right size to hold a hardcover book and my water bottle, and maybe a sock-in-progress.

Restaurants: Even though we only hit a fraction of the places on my list, the ones we did get to were all very good. Just to name a few:

-Fried egg sandwiches (twice!) and graham cracker ice cream sandwiches at ‘Wichcraft
-Pesto pasta at Ruby’s Café
-Roast chicken at Ouest
-Devil’s food cheesecake at Junior’s
-Ricotta and roasted pepper pizza at Lombardi’s
-Everything at Good Enough to Eat (with all the restaurants in New York City, Jeremy still contrived to get us there twice more before leaving!)
-Roast chicken at Pio Pio (but sorry, honey, I still think the yucca frites tasted like fried blocks of starch. And by the way, don’t walk there after spending an entire day wandering around the Met and the Cloisters—my feet were dead).

A special mention goes to the chocolate chip cookies and hot chocolate at City Bakery, which, in combination, nearly sent us into a sugar coma. It was the homemade marshmallow (put in our hot chocolate unrequested, so no charge) that pushed us over the edge.

Hope that satisfies for the time being. I need to post a knitting update as well: yes, more socks, but something infinitely more interesting as well. Also, we’ve been diligently documenting Jeremy’s rapid progress with artisan bread-baking over the past month, so perhaps he can be persuaded to write about that sometime soon.

So here is my belated update, seven posts with one blow… ready for an awful lot of photos and rambling?

1. Parisian Flan

Week before last, the day before the plague struck the library, we had a potluck to celebrate the departure of our graduating student workers. In retrospect, we really just threw a party for the flu bug, but we had all the best intentions going in. My contribution was a Parisian flan, a lovely custard pie with deceptively few ingredients that come together in 8 or 9 short hours. It set beautifully, and tasted pretty good, but other than the wonderful (if a bit temperamental) crust, it is probably not something I would make again.

2. Happy little basil plant

Three weeks ago there was a plant sale at Bush Park, and I brought home a hardy lavender plant, a tri-colored sage, and a little basil plant. The first two went right in the herb garden, but the basil made me paranoid, because although I purchased two or three basil plants last summer, I was unable to get them to do anything but wilt and die. I decided to keep my new basil indoors for the time being, living on my narrow kitchen windowsill (so I would remember to water it) and going outside on the front porch on warm, sunny days. Miracle of miracles, it grew and thrived, and is now twice the size it was when I brought it home. I am so happy with its progress that I named it Presto the Happy Basil Plant (because its growth is magical and it will one day turn into pesto), and talk to it every day as I move it in and out of doors. I think this means it is time for Jeremy to come home so I can start holding two-sided conversations again.

3. Printed bookmarks

My mom commissioned a printed bookmark to give as gifts to folks at her school, and here is the finished product. It is just a simple little linocut, about 2.5×9″, printed in black oil-based ink on Rives lightweight paper, and handpainted with watercolors for a little additional visual interest.

4. Curlicue

I finished the Curlicue coverlet while I was recovering from the scourge; even knitting was almost too exhausting, but I drew upon unforeseen reservoirs of strength and knit up the last two sections. Sorry about the folded photo; I need to come up with a good place to photograph it where I can get high up enough to capture the whole thing. Plus, it still needs blocking and ends woven in. I doubt it will block out perfectly, but I am still quite happy with the way it turned out, and also the fact that I have at least a third of the last skein leftover to make an accompanying baby hat or something.

5. Socks and more socks

I finished two pairs of socks since my last knitting post: the Spey Valley socks for my grandpa, and the pair of socks for my aunt. I’m quite pleased with both. The Trekking tweed is lovely and entirely camera-proof; I ended up abandoning the Chutes-N-Ladders pattern and doing a simple garter rib on #1 needles, and I like the effect, simple but elegant. The Spey Valley pattern is a nice one that I would certainly consider doing again, perhaps in a solid color to better show off the textured band at the top. Each sock used just shy of 1 skein of the Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock, which did some funky pooling stuff, but not entirely to its detriment, I think.

With the remaining skein and two bits of LL, I dared myself to knit a pair of socks for me. Since I have such small feet, I thought I could at least squeeze a pair of ankle socks from it. I carefully divided the skein into two equal balls (no mean feat for someone lacking swift, ball winder, and scale; guess we’ll see how well I managed it soon…), and cast on for a toe-up sock. Here is what I ended up with from one half-skein ball:

A perfect little ankle sock based on the Child’s French Sock pattern in Knitting Vintage Socks. I needed the socks to be toe-up rather than cuff-down to allow the maximum cuff length for my yardage. Although I immediately considered my standard short-row non-pattern, I really preferred the way the sock looked with the side lace motifs flowing into the gusset; so, I opted for the reverse heel-flap method in Sensational Knitted Socks, adjusting for my stitch count. It was a nice change of pace, and I think came out well, though I’ll still use the short-row method as my default pattern. I decided to put the lace motifs (which are of course reversed) only on the sides, leaving the more simple texture pattern on the instep. I turned out to have just enough for a nice little ankle sock, with a bit left over to assuage my paranoia for its mate. Altogether a success… now if I can just remember what I did for the second sock…

6. Fancy clothes

In preparation for the upcoming event, I did a bit of shopping these past few weeks. The weekend before I got sick, I spent something like 8 hours trekking around Salem from Value Village to the mall, most of that time with a backpack full of library books on my back (don’t ask). I had great success, and spent more money than I probably should have, partly because I had to keep returning to the mall… really, I HAD to!

The first image is the beautiful dress I am going to wear to Jeremy’s graduation, barring blizzard conditions. It was part of the reason I had to keep coming back to the mall, because Nordstrom’s didn’t have it in my size and had to order it in for me. The second pic is the skirt I got just in case the smaller size dress didn’t fit me after all, and which turned out to cost more than the dress. The shell with it is another reason I kept coming back to the mall: it cost $50 the day I bought the skirt, so I refused to even try it on, but when I went back to pick up my dress, it was 50% off so I had to get it. A few days later I went back and got the matching cardigan, which turned out to be 65% off by that point. It’s so nice to see clothes that fit my (pear-shaped) body type at last!

7. NYC this week

Finally, as if y’all didn’t know, I will be going to New York later this week for Jeremy’s graduation and diploma show. I can hardly wait to bring him back home and know he won’t be going anywhere in a few months. So if the blog is quiet, that is probably why.