recipes

Everyday sandwich bread

/ Christine Pennylegion

I’ve been baking bread from scratch for the past two years or so, ever since my breadmaker vibrated itself off the counter in a gory suicide during a kneading cycle one day. After many different recipe tweaks, I’ve finally nailed my perfect everyday sandwich bread. Have at ‘er.

Ingredients (makes two 40% whole wheat loaves):

  • 2 cups lukewarm water
  • 2.5 tsp active dry yeast
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 heaping Tbsp bread booster (I use Fleishmann’s)
  • heaping 1/4 cup wheat germ
  • 1/4 cup canola or vegetable oil
  • 2 cups whole wheat flour
  • 3 cups all-purpose flour

Method:

1. Add lukewarm water to a medium mixing bowl. Add yeast; allow to sit for a few minutes. Add salt, bread booster, wheat germ, and oil.

2. Add flours directly on top of wet ingredients. Mix by hand until dough starts to form a ball.

3. Knead for 5-10 minutes until dough is smooth and springy. I don’t usually need to flour my surface.

4. Return dough to bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and allow to rise for 40-60 minutes or until doubled in size.

5. Punch dough down. Grease two loaf pans. Briefly knead the dough and shape into two loaves. Let rise, covered, in the pans another 40-60 minutes.

6. Bake at 350F for 40 minutes or until the crust reaches your desired colour.

Happy Thanksgiving

/ Christine Pennylegion

It’s Thanksgiving! And, thankful for fall desserts, I bequeath to you my favourite pie recipe:

PUMPKIN PIE (makes 2)

Ingredients:

  • 3.5 cups pumpkin purée
  • 4 large eggs
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1 cup white sugar
  • 1 Tbsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp ground ginger
  • heaping 1/2 tsp ground cloves
  • 3/4 tsp salt
  • 2 cups table cream (18%)
  • 2 unbaked pie crusts

1. In a large mixing bowl, combine puree with eggs; sugars; spices and salt; and cream, stirring well between each addition.

2. Carefully pour into pie shells (pumpkin mixture will be extremely wet; I use a ladle).

3. Bake at 425F for 15 minutes.

4. Lower oven temperature to 350F, and bake for an additional 40 minutes, or until done. Serve warm or cold. Pies are suitable for freezing.

Small spring updates

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

Garden

The tulips are out.

Kitchen

I made lasagna today for the first time, and so the kids and I also made homemade ricotta following this recipe from America’s Test Kitchen. Dead easy, delicious, and about half the price of a tub from the store. We’ll be doing this again.

Gelatine adventures continue. I’ve been doing teas! Vanilla Rooibos is delicious in jelly form, Jasmine Green Tea a little pretty so-so. I’m thinking my next experiment will be cubed jellied Earl Grey with a sweetened condensed milk pour-over. Also I’m saving bones in the freezer to try my hand at p’tcha. More foods should have names that fun to say. P’tcha!

Words

My poem “Seclusion (A Checklist)” has been published by Jet Fuel Review (issue 21) and can be read online here. It’s part of this issue’s special section featuring golden shovel poems — a relatively new poetic form that is technically challenging and used to pay tribute to another poem or poet. The poet chooses a line by another writer, and each word of the origi line becomes the last word of each line in the new poem — such that the original line may be read down the right-hand side. Confused? I always find it a bit difficult to explain but seeing an example will make it fairly obvious.

In my case, I used a line by Christabel LaMotte, a poet who does not, technically speaking, exist; she’s a character in A. S. Byatt’s remarkable novel Possession (about which I have written here, and which also makes my list of desert island books). I was struck by the line “to drag a long life out in a dark room” in one of LaMotte’s/Byatt’s poems, and — well, click the link above if you would like to see where that took me!

Anniversary bake and jelly cake

/ Christine Pennylegion / 3 Comments

No, not our wedding anniversary, although we did have one relatively recently. I mean this little lady’s anniversary:

My good girl Sheryl has been hanging out for a year now. She lives in the cold and the dark and puts up with gross neglect for weeks on end. Yet for all that, she still makes some lovely loaves! My kitchen is cold and so they never end up as lofty as other peoples’ seem to, but they’re chewy and tangy nonetheless. Way to go, Sheryl.

Just look at that blistered crust. I have to say, I think that sourdough starters are a lot more flexible and resilient than a lot of people seem to think. The internet is awash with all sorts of finicky methods (usually named after somebody) that involve very precise times and temperatures and adjusting the amount of water in relation to the humidity of the air, as well as (I assume) performing certain obscure incantations and using flour that was ground in the light of the full moon.

I do pay attention to my measurements — a kitchen scale is a handy tool for this sort of thing — but other than that? I figure that people have been making sourdough for thousands of years. This is something you would carry around in a crock while you followed your goat herd and then baked over hot rocks. It’s a yeast colony. It will survive.

In other culinary news, I’ve been (somewhat inexplicably) really getting into gelatine lately. Why? It’s hard to say. I’ve always loved jell-o (especially with a little dab of fake whipped cream on top, like we always had at summer camp). And when I made panna cotta in the kids’ breakfast milk cups for April Fools, I realised how easy it actually is and a whole world opened up.

Anyway, here’s a jelly cake:

The top layer is orange jell-o with shredded carrot inside (something I remember having at potlucks long, long ago) and the bottom layer is a milk gelatin made with sweetened condensed milk. I don’t actually have any proper molds so this was made in a lightly greased bread pan, which worked well except for being slightly too long for the plate once decanted.

As you can see from that “bloom” of milk jelly in the middle, the orange layer wasn’t quite set enough when I poured in the second, and there was a little intermingling. No matter; I count this very successful as a first attempt and look forward to more experimentation. Nobody here likes jellies as much as I do, so I’ll probably be eating most of those experiments alone.

I am 100% ok with this.

Sweet Oatmeal Bread

/ Christine Pennylegion / 3 Comments

There is a recipe for oatmeal bread that I got from my mother, who got it from… some cookbook, I suppose. I used to make it relatively often many years ago, because it tastes delicious — but the trouble is, I could never get it to rise and it ended up incredibly dense. Now that I know more about making bread, this is because the original recipe’s process might as well have included “Step 3: kill your yeast”!

Instead of sharing that version, here is my revision, with a few tweaked ingredient ratios and a better process.

Ingredients for 2 loaves:

  • 2.5 cups lukewarm water
  • 2.5 tsp active dry yeast
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1/4 cup canola oil
  • 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
  • 1 cup quick oats
  • 5 cups all-purpose flour

Method:

  1. In a large mixing bowl, add yeast to water. Let bloom for a few minutes.
  2. Add remaining ingredients all at once.
  3. Mix by hand until dough comes together.
  4. Turn out onto your work surface and knead 8-10 minutes until smooth and elastic.
  5. Put dough ball back in bowl, cover, and let rise 30-60 minutes until doubled in size.
  6. Knead for 1 minute. Divide dough in half, and shape into loaves. Place in two greased loaf pans and allow to rise a further ~30 minutes.
  7. Bake at 350F for 30-40 minutes.

Don’t forget to cool it completely before slicing. This makes a lovely bread that’s a bit on the sweeter side and perfect for toasting. Enjoy!

Overnight Blueberry French Toast Bake

/ Christine Pennylegion / 1 Comment

We had this for breakfast on Christmas morning and it was delish. Enjoy!

Ingredients:

  • 1 loaf french bread, stale
  • 8 eggs
  • 2 cups milk
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 2 Tbsp vanilla extract
  • 1 lb fresh blueberries
  • 1/3 cup pecan pieces

Directions:

  1. Cut french bread into cubes and place in large bowl; set aside.
  2. In a second bowl, combine eggs, milk, cream, sugars, and vanilla. Whisk until well combined.
  3. Add blueberries, pecans, and liquid ingredients to bread cubes. Stir/fold with spatula until bread is soaked and nuts/berries are well distributed.
  4. Grease a 9×13″ casserole dish. Pour bread mixture into dish; cover and refrigerate overnight.
  5. In the morning, remove dish from fridge. Bake, uncovered, for 45 minutes at 375 degrees F. Serve warm.