Feb 07 2010

Super Bowl!

What a great game! Sure I was excited that the Saints won, but even if the Colts had won, it would have been an enjoyable game to watch. 

One thing that surprised me was how disappointing the commercials were this year.  Not really a stand out among any of them.  For as much money as these companies are spending on these things, put a little work into them.  I did however have two interesting connections to commercials this year.

First, the main guy in this Budweiser spot goes to my church…in fact my girlfriend and I sat next to him and his wife this morning:

And in this spot, one of my friends from church in High School is mentioned by name (turns out the writer of the spot is a buddy of his):

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2010/02/super-bowl/

Jan 24 2010

French Bread

French Baguettes
French baguettes are going to take some practice.  While the bread tastes fine, it doesn’t have the gassy texture you should have with a good baguette.  Also my scoring lines were apparently not deep enough, as the bread didn’t crack on them.  This however my first attempt at hearth style baking in my oven.  I cooked these on my pre-heated round pizza stone, which is why two of the loaves are shorter than the third.  Maybe the next time I attempt this formula, I’ll have a rectangular stone, so all three loaves can be equal.

French Baguette

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Jan 24 2010

Kaiser Rolls

Bison Burger on Kaiser Roll

My journey through the Bread Baker’s Apprentice continues with Kaiser Rolls (inspired by the pictures of Pinch My Salt and What We’re Eating’s Pulled Pork on Kaiser Rolls).  I considered substituting brown sugar (per the advice of Pinch My Salt) as I was having a hard time finding barley extract powder or barley malt syrup at the store.  When I found it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend $5.99 on a 16oz jar of which I only needed 1 1/2 teaspoons of.  But in the end I decided to splurge and get it (figuring I could use it the next time I make the Anadama Bread for instance).

My second bump in the road making these rolls, was that I didn’t have a spray bottle.  This was needed both for creating a little steam in the oven at the beginning of baking and for putting on the seeds on the tops of the rolls.  I ended up using flax seeds instead of the more traditional sesame or poppy seeds.  They fell off the finished rolls easier than I think the sesame or poppy seeds would have, but they still tasted good.

Kaiser Roll

I made these in mind of using for buns for bison burgers.  To match the size of the rolls, I made my patties a little smaller than normal, between a “slider” sized patty and a regular sized patty.  The burgers were kept pretty simple with a single slice of provolone and a piece of lettuce.  They definitely made a tasty MLKjr Day dinner.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2010/01/kaiser-rolls/

Jan 23 2010

Anadama Bread

Anadama Bread
This bread is described by Peter Reinhart as one of the great New England breads.  The story he relates to the name of the bread is the story of a man who’s wife has left him, leaving behind only a pot of cornmeal mush and some molasses.  He mixes that together along with some yeast and flour and mutters “Anna, damn ‘er!”  It later gets amended to the more genteel “anadama”

For this bread, I used agave syrup instead of the molasses (I had the agave syrup and not the molasses).  It made for very nice sandwich bread, I had roast beef and provolone sandwiches for my lunch for a couple days with this bread.  The next time I make this bread, I think I’ll replace the molasses with the barley syrup I bought for the next bread I’ll be posting about.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2010/01/anadama-bread/

Jan 22 2010

Mesquite Chocolate Chip Cookies

Mesquite Chocolate Chip Cookies
I’ve had the Super Natural Cooking cookbook by Heidi Swanson (of 101 Cookbooks) for a few years now.  One of the recipes that I marked right away was this cookie recipe.  The only thing holding up a batch of these cookies however was getting some Mesquite flour.  Mesquite flour is made from the pods of the Mesquite (not the wood) which is ground up into a flour or meal.  Of course in the book there are resources on where to order it online, but I never got around to doing that.

This year, as part of my Christmas present, my girlfriend gave me a half pound of Mesquite flour from the Arizona Mesquite Company.  So it was finally time to make the cookies.  Baking with the mesquite flour was fun.  The flour is very aromatic, and while its only a fraction of the flour in these cookies, you can definitely smell its there.  There was one casualty while baking these cookies though.  Breaking from my normal routine of only mixing by hand, I pulled out the electric hand mixer.  Just as I was about done mixing there was a spark and smoke from the inside of the mixer.  The mixer alas had mixed its last.  I guess that’s what I get for trying to use technology while baking.  In the end it was worth it though…these cookies were quite good.
Mesquite Chocolate Chip Cookies

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Jan 22 2010

So. Cal. Rain

Even the Pidgins don’t like the rain in So. Cal.  Its been raining all week in LA.  And not just the normal barely a shower type of rain, but close to a half of a years average rain fall in a week kind of rain.  Lots of streets have flooded and mud slides are happening all over the fire ravaged mountains on the east side of LA.  A little rain is good (at least in my opinion), but the rain we’ve had this week is a little more than the environment can handle down here.  Most of it is just going to run off down the river beds into the ocean and not help the drought conditions anyway.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2010/01/so-cal-rain/

Jan 20 2010

Why ya gotta be H8N?



Seen on the 101 in Thousand Oaks, originally uploaded by rhinoblues.

UCLA H8NUSC

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Jan 15 2010

No-Knead Bread

In the midst of starting to bake through the recipes of the Bread Baker’s Apprentice, I received my second KCRW Cookbook Club Selection, My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method by Jim Lahey.  As I was planning on getting my dutch oven out of storage in Oregon anyway, the bread that inspired this cookbook was very enticing.

I actually ended up making this bread twice before I was satisfied with it enough to post pictures of it.  The first time I made it, I used the same flour I mentioned in my focaccia post, a freshly ground hard red wheat.  I think there were a couple of factors contributing to that bread not turning out as well as I’d have liked.  First, I probably needed a little bit more water in the dough to let the yeast fully do its stuff.  The other problem, the temperature of my parents house.  My parents have one of those fancy programmable  thermostats, and as there isn’t normally anyone home during the day on weekdays, it was set somewhere in the 60s.  This also being a house I’ve never lived in, I didn’t know where the thermostat was to bump it up to a more normal temperature.  That loaf of bread ended up tasting ok, but it was a little dense and smaller than I expected.

Upon returning to LA, I had to try again, this time using actual bread flour instead of the fresh ground red wheat.  The dough definitely ended up doing a better job of fermenting this time and the size while still a little smaller than I expected was better as well.  I also didn’t get it quite shaped in a perfect round, so it looks a little like a waning moon.

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After cutting into the bread, I was quite pleased to find the nice gaseous holes that were supposed to be there (and weren’t really there in my first attempt with the hard red wheat).

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The bread wasn’t quite as tall as I expected it to be, but when I went back and looked at the pictures in the book, it was pretty comparable to the loaf there.  I was quite happy with the results (and it was wonderful dipped in the Roasted Garlic Rosemary Dipping Oil from the Olive Pit).

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2010/01/no-knead-bread/

Jan 07 2010

Intern intentionality

While looking for information on a different non-profit service org today, I came across the new site of the Episcopal Urban Intern Program (EUIP).  For those of you that don’t know, applying to the EUIP in 2007 led to me moving down to Los Angeles in August of 2007, though not as a participant in the EUIP.  One of the reasons I wasn’t selected was because of my age.  The EUIP is designed for folks approx 20-30 years old.  I was turning 31 in Auguest of 2007 (when it would have begun).  The program directors job was to choose good candidates who would have a good shot of forming a good community.  The interns that were selected were all between 21 and 24 that year (if I remember correctly).  I knew when I applied though, that I was pushing the age range, so I wasn’t too bummed out.  Plus I ended up getting offered a different opportunity to intern in Los Angeles through the Episcopal Church.  While that internship didn’t end up working out as well as I’d hoped it would, it was still a valuable experience for me.

This year, another one of my friends was accepted into a new intern program affiliated with the Campus Ministry at Cal State – Channel Islands…the Abundant Table Farm Project.  She luckily still fit under the 30 yr old ceiling most of the intern programs have.

Anyway, all this got me thinking about those of us in our 30s or 40s (or more) that are searching for ourselves, our spirituality, our intentionality.  Where can we participate in these kind of things?  I know my age group is more likely to be more settled into family life or a career (though maybe less so into careers in the current state of the economy), but there are many of us that are still searching for our vocation…or a vocational change.  Where do we go to find our community now that we are out of school?

I think this is something that I’ll add to my list to explore in the next year.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2010/01/intern-intentionality/

Jan 07 2010

Focaccia

Since I figured I’d have some spare time, I brought my copy of the Bread Baker’s Apprentice with me while visiting my parents over Christmas.  On the drive up to Oregon from LA, a stop in Corning at the Olive Pit inspired my third bread from BBA.  (That and the memory of Nicole’s focaccia.)  The Olive Pit’s Roasted Garlic Rosemary Dipping Oil was just perfect for the herbed oil called for in the recipe.

When I hit up the local grocery store (Market of Choice) to get some bread flour, I discovered something I’d never seen before.  In the bulk section, they had a machine full of wheat berries that would be freshly ground into flour.  Pretty much exactly like the more common fresh peanut butter machines, just for flour.  So I got a bag and set into filling it with around 4 pounds of freshly ground hard red wheat flour.

This was another two day bread, that started with making a poolish.  The poolish is a starter that you allow to ferment ahead of time to get nice start on long strands of gluten.  Because I was using whole wheat flour, without any of the normal bread flour additions, I gave my poolish a little more time than normal.  It also probably could have used a little more water for the yeast to work with.  Nonetheless, the bread ended up turning out pretty good.  It might have been a little denser then it would have been if I had used bread flour, but it was a big hit with the family.

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just out of the oven

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cut and ready to eat

Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2010/01/focaccia/