All the Ingredients

Cookin' With Coolio

Okay, I confess. Although I spend my share of time on the internet, I do not watch a lot of YouTube. That is obviously how I missed the numerous episodes of "Cookin' with Coolio: The Ghetto Gourmet." Which is a good thing, because I find videos of Coolio overwhelming. His loud & colorful personality, his "sous-chef" Jarez, and the ladies who provide the background eye-candy, completely overshadow whatever he is cooking.

Spend time looking through his new book Cookin' with Coolio,and you get an entirely different view of this rap star. An appealing view. Coolio cooks because what you make at home is better than what you get at a drive-through window. It is also better for you. And you can do it on a budget and still eat well. There are a whole lot of fancy cookbooks out there waiting to end up under your Christmas tree this year that will charge way more than $16 to tell you that.

And this book is funny.

Maybe all the folks who have spent their summers trying to wade through the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, need to try lightening up with Coolio's recipes where the spices are measured in the quantities of "dime bag," and "nickel bag." (A dime bag of salt = 1 T salt, a nickel bag = 1/2 T.) 

Coolio's sous-chef Jarez adds his comments in bold blue ribbons across each recipe. Some are technical comments about how to preheat the oven or drain the fried shrimp. Some are more audience-specific: "To check and see if your [Sweet Chocolate Potato] pie is done, simply shank it with your shiv. If it comes out clean, it's done." My son found this book highly entertaining, although I am not sure any cookbook would push him to prepare any food beyond his comfort zone of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Coolio is not afraid of vegetables, and includes recommendations for lightening up recipes, such as using chicken or turkey sausages in place of ground beef in "Bro-ghetti" sauce. And the food styling and photography in this book would make Emeril or Paula jealous.

I tried the "Dom Chicken Alfredo." Coolio says that Fettuccine Alfredo is just mac and cheese for adults, and that if you make his recipe, your kids will never want the stuff out of the blue box again. My daughter already likes Fettuccine Alfredo (and still likes the stuff in the blue box). However, on this evening, she declared that she was not hungry and didn't want any. But by the time I had sauteed the onions, garlic, and mushrooms, and mixed together the sauce with its two types of cheeses, she was sniffing  around the kitchen.

The last ingredients added to the sauce before you pour the "Dom Chicken Alfredo" over the cooked fettuccine, is the chicken you have grilled and cut into strips, some sour cream, and fresh diced tomatoes. Even though I drained the tomatoes after I diced them, they were just watery enough so that they broke the cream sauce. My gorgeous alfredo sauce turned stringy. But it was delicious. My daughter was halfway through her plateful before she noticed the tomatoes and exclaimed, "What are these pink things!" I think the next time I will either cook the tomatoes with the rest of the vegetables, or serve them sliced on the side drizzled with balsamic vinegar (one of Coolio's favorite ingredients along with hot peppers).

I think a lot of the new cookbooks out this holiday season are retreads. (I swear that the photo of Nigella Lawson on the cover of Nigella's Christmas was taken when she was eighteen!) I guarantee that you will get your money's worth with Cookin' with Coolio, and it will be a unique present under anyone's Christmas tree.

Cooking with Julia Child

  It's Sunday. I didn't work today so I cooked breakfast: cinnamon rolls (not from scratch, sorry), and bacon. On the end of my kitchen counter is a TV with a DVD player, and on Sunday mornings, I treat myself and cook with Julia Child. Christmas before last, my husband gave me the two DVD sets that are available with episodes from her series, The French Chef. I love these DVDs because I enjoy watching Julia make recipes I would never try (terrines) and some I would try, like today's crepes. I also hate the DVDs because they are divided up by type of recipe--Starters, Main Courses, Desserts--and not arranged chronologically. You can go from watching a black and white early episode, to a later episode in color, and then back to balck and white. There were originally 134 episodes of this show, the first 13 of which were lost. So I only have 36 out of the remaining 121 on these two DVD sets. I would quickly fork out bundles of money for a complete, chronological set of The French Chef, but for now I make due with what there is. I love the fact that Julia is messy, drops things, and doesn't always worry about the final presentation of a dish.

Because I work in a bookstore, it's easy for me to see how media exposure drives book sales. As soon as the movie Julie & Julia came out, sales of Julia Child's books increased dramatically. We couldn't keep copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in stock because everyone wanted. Julie Powell made cooking from it seem so attractive. I sold it to one woman who bought it simply so she could learn to make a bechemal sauce. There are cheaper and quicker ways to get your hands on the recipe and technique of making bechemal sauce, but I certainly understand the attraction of having Julia teach you how. When I was a child  back in the 1960s, I learn to cook from my mother--and from watching Julia Child.

I own both hardcover volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (I paid $2.50 for each at a sidewalk sale outside a cooking store a long time ago), but I confess I never use them to cook with. They certainly are the foundation of the way Julia Child built her approach to cooking, but I prefer the more Americanized versions of her recipes: Julia in later life.

When my daughter Emily, was a toddler, she loved watching cooking shows. She was fascinating with what the hands were stirring and making. She loved to watch Julia and Jacques Pepin when their show, Cooking at Home, was on the air: "Mommy! The people who talk funny are on!" She thought Julia Child was from France too. Two of our favorite recipes for Sunday dinner come from that book: Roast Chicken (Jacques's version) and Scalloped Potatoes (Julia's Pommes des Terre Dauphinoise). I have never made scalloped potatoes as good as my mother-in-law's, but Julia's recipe fixed the mistakes I was making, and produced a recipe my husband found to be different than his mother's but "Very good!" The book is laid out with Julia and Jacques's recipes for the same basic dish side-by-side, and I often end up somewhere in the middle. But I have never made a bad recipe from this book.

The other book I use is Baking with Julia, based on a TV series Julia did baking with famous chefs such as Lora Brody, Martha Stewart, Marion Cunningham, and Nancy Silverton. Some of the recipes in this collection are completely over the top such as Martha Stewart's for a three-tiered almond wedding cake with meringue and apricot glaze between the layers, frosted with rum buttercream, and decorated with marzipan fruit. Other recipes are fabulous such as the Danish Braid (I made it with the apricot filling), or the White Loaves. This latter recipe produces two magnificent loaves of bread that toast  beautifully. That probably has  something to do with the half a stick of softened butter that is beaten in as the last step of making the dough. The recipe says that the "mountainous loaves" are four and half inches high. The two I made this week topped out at six inches!

And when I want an older, basic recipe, I tend to go back to The French Chef Cookbook, that has the recipes, chronologically, from the original series. My mother and I watched Julia make Beef Bourguignon with its Onion and Mushroom Garniture (Episode 96), and we bought the ingredients and made it soon afterwards. For years it was my requested birthday dinner. These recipes teach basic techniques and are aimed more towards how America cooked (at least in the 1960s) than the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

So if you are inspired to cook with Julia, take a look at all the different books she has on the shelf in the bookstore, and don't automatically head for the bright blue cover of her original gem. Take time to find the one that's right for you. And if you want a good look at how cooking television used to be before being FoodNetworkicized, I highly recommend the DVD sets.

The Conscious Carnivore

Last spring and summer, there were a lot of new books about the 100-mile diet and eating locally--still popular topics. But this summer, I noticed a lot of new books about meat. I consider myself an omnivore. I love a nice fresh carrot or an orange, but when you are putting the hamburgers on the grill, I am there holding the barbecue sauce. So I decided to take a look at some of these books and see what they had to say about being a conscious carnivore.

The first one I read was Meat: A Love Story: My Year in Search of the Perfect Meal, by Susan Bourette. The author starts by talking about how she worked, undercover, in a meat packing plant for a week, and how that made her give up eating meat--for exactly five weeks and thirty-seven hours. Obviously, Bourette wasn't cut out to be a vegetarian.

This book lost me in the long chapter when Bourette goes to Alaska for a village's whale hunt. I understand that meat is the flesh of animals that can be consumed, including birds and fish and even snails. But on a day-to-day basis, when I think about where my meat comes from and if and how I want to consume it, I never am in a quandary over whale meat. It just doesn't come up. Probably because there is nowhere in the Midwest to buy whale meat. This chapter didn't seem to be relevant to any carnivores in the continental United States. And in a culture that does eat whale meat because it's a main source of protein, relevance isn't a question. You eat whale meat because that's what there is to eat. Just like bushmen in Namibia eat warthog. You hunt it, you kill it, you clean it. It's what's for dinner.

I continued on through Meat, wondering why this was subtitled "A Love Story." Obviously Bourette "likes" meat since she couldn't give it up after experiencing first-hand the horrors of a meat packing plant. But she spends a lot of time NOT loving what she's eating, like when she spends an evening dining with followers of the Primal Diet, who only eat raw meat. Again, I don't find any relevance in this chapter. I am not going to eat my nice Iowa Chop raw. Bourette travels to the best steakhouse in Texas where the T-bone is bad enough to "put me off meat." She likes moose meat after attempting to hunt it with a bow and arrow a la Ted Nugent, and boudin sausage after learning to make it in Louisiana. The book is obviously quilted together from newspaper stories Bourette researched and wrote for her Canadian newspaper. There is no sense or plot line of the "year spent searching for the perfect meal." The meats here are often treated as novelty foods, and Bourette doesn't convince me that it's important to eat or not to eat any of them, even though in her epilogue she discusses meat consumption and its effects on global warming.

The Shameless Carnivore: A Manifesto for Meat Lovers, by Scott Gold, grabs the bull (and numerous other animals) by the horns and dines. After an introduction that thoroughly details what "carnivorism" is and what it is in America, Gold develops a list of meats he wants to acquire and eat over several months. The list includes staple meats we are all familiar with, as well as other meats not common on most American dinner tables such as yak, elk, rattlesnake, ostrich, and kangaroo.

Not only does Gold research each animal, he gives direction on how to most easily acquire it (often via the Internet, although he does, however, hunt his own squirrels), and he gives details about how each meat was cooked, and how it tasted. I might never make "Squirrel and Dumplings," but now I have a recipe just in case. Gold spends one section of the book dealing with just beef, certainly a meat common to his readers. He helps butcher fresh beef ("Ernie") and discusses relevant topics such as grain-fed versus grass-fed and dry-aging (which Bourette continually refers to as "controlled rotting"--yum!). Gold also includes a chapter on offal which is detailed and unbiased, and that might make a reader decide offal is not so awful. He also goes into detail about the pros and cons of eating meat in terms of how good and bad it is for you.

I enjoyed The Shameless Carnivore. It taught me a lot about types of meat I will probably never come across in my local market. However, it also made me more receptive to varietal meats when I did come across them. At our local farmer's market, we have a family that sells elk meat from their nearby ranch. Thanks to Gold, I tried it and discovered that I really like elk meat. It is milder than venison, and works well in a variety of recipes. (Elk tacos were a hit in my house.) I am not sure that I will ever have a chance to eat caribou, but thanks to Scott Gold's enthusiastic endorsement, I would happily pick up a fork and give it a try.

And finally I read The Compassionate Carnivore, or How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald's Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat, by Catherine Friend. By her own description, Friend is an Elvis-loving lesbian shepherd. She and her partner of 24-years raise sheep for meat in Minnesota. This is a personal look at what it's like to have a small animal farm and what goes in to raising healthy meat that people want to eat.

Friend also looks at the way Americans consume meat, and why meat that is raised in a careful, happy way, and that is killed quickly with the least amount of stress tastes better and is better for us. This is not storybook lamb-raising. Friend addresses all the issues of what it takes to be a small farmer of meat in today's factory economy, and why people do it anyway. She and her partner become attached to their animals as they raise them as food, NOT pets, and don't enjoy the days when the lambs and sheep are "processed." She is honest about how easy it is to eat factory-produced fast food, and how much harder it is to know where your food comes from and take the time to prepare it.

But what makes The Compassionate Carnivore more than just another farm memoir, is the last section of the book where Friend gives readers a plan for how to become involved with their local meat producers, and how to become a compassionate carnivore:

• Pay attention.
• Waste less meat.
• Replace factory meat with meat from animals raised humanely.
• Choose meatless meals over meat from animals raised in factories. (Such as when you are dining out.)

Friend suggests that doing these things one step at time, slowly changing our patterns of eating meat, will make us more compassionate carnivores. She gives tips about how to find local meat farmers, and how to approach learning about their farms and the products they offer. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to become a more conscious carnivore.

Retro Food--Banana Cream Pie

We eat a lot of pie in our house. Mostly we bake fresh or frozen-fruit pies with half the usual amount of sugar, some tapioca for thickener, and a nice double-crust. Recently I had cause to make a banana cream pie for a friend, and I realized how long it had been since I had thrown caloric considerations to the wind, and made a custard-based pie.

The first cookbook I ever bought of my own was the 1980 edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.  Fannie was a great teacher of cooking techniques I needed to learn. The second cookbook I bought was the first paperback version of The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook, the "newly revised" version of 1971, edited by Ruth Berolzheimer. This book was originally printed in the 1940s, and includes basic recipes for many foods that are now retro such as "Bologna Cups with Peas" (broiled bologna slices filled with cooked peas and served with rice and tomato wedges) and meats that no one in my neighborhood cooks such as moose, reindeer, and opossum. But as fascinating as the roasted squirrel recipe is, I love looking through the old dessert recipes. This is the cookbook that taught me how to make a killer banana cream pie when I had my first apartment in the early 1980s, and had yet to acquire a middle-aged waist.

I found the page in the encyclopedia's section on pies with my pencil notations that showed what recipes I had used, and started in. First, I followed the recipe for a basic graham cracker crust. While that was cooling, I prepared the "Cream Pie" filling. First I scalded 1 1/2 cups cold milk, and added it to 1/2 cup of cold milk, 1/3 cup of sugar, a dash of salt, and 3 tablespoons of cornstarch. Once I had simmered this mixture, stirring until it thickened, I added 3 egg yolks (tempered with some of the hot custard), and a dash of vanilla. Then I cooled the custard, added four sliced bananas, and spooned it into the graham cracker crust.

The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook has five different meringue recipes. I have always topped my banana cream pie with meringue instead of cream, and like the "Brown Sugar Meringue." This consists of 2 egg whites beaten until stiff with 4 tablespoons brown sugar and a dash of vanilla. Once I had made the meringue, I topped the pie with it, being sure to connect with the crust all the way around so the meringue wouldn't shrink, and then baked it at 350 degrees for 10 minutes until the meringue was a nice golden brown.

Rather than make a second pie just for myself, I  made four, small graham cracker crusts so that I could experiment with a batch of the custard filling. The first pie I made plain banana cream, to the second one I added coconut to the custard, and for the last two I mixed banana and coconu in the filling.

My husband and I split one of the banana-coconut pies. We both liked it, but agreed that it was too sweet to eat very often. And it certainly took longer to prepare, assemble, and clean up after than a fresh or frozen-fruit pie. Retro pie was fun, but for now is done!

Pizza on the Grill

A few weeks ago my husband and I had the pleasure of dining again with friends at Simone's Plain and Simple in Wellman, Iowa. We have dined there several times before (see http://alltheingredients.typepad.com/weblog/2007/06/plain_and_simpl.html ), but have never had the wonderful pizza Simone bakes in her brick oven in the yard. This time we had the pizza.

My daughter accuses me of being a "coffee snob" because I know exactly how I like my cafe au lait, and will only drink it one way when I order it in a coffee shop. However, I have definitely become a pizza snob. I want specific things out of my pizza: I prefer my crust thin; I want the tomato sauce (if there is one) not to have sugar in it--I want to taste the actual tomatoes; I want good quality cheese, whatever type; and I want fresh toppings--meat, vegetable, or both. This is not the kind of pizza my children like.

The last time we had take-out pizza from someplace they picked, the dough was soft and chewy, the sauce sweet, and the cheese an amalgamated melted mess on the surface. The pepperoni pizza had neat rounds sealed under the cheese topping, and tasted no differently from the plain cheese pizza. Both were greasy and awful. I would rather not eat pizza than eat what passes for pizza in the middle America town where we live. I am now a card-carrying pizza snob. So I was more than a little excited to have Simone's pizza cooked in her brick, European-style oven.

The pizza was sublime. The simple crust was rolled extremely thin and topped conservatively. As Simone said, "There is no pizza supreme here." The up side of this was with only three or four items on top of each type of pizza, you could taste the freshness of each. Not a single pizza she served even had any tomato sauce, and only the Pizza Margherita had any tomatoes at all.

Simone's brick oven was heated with wood burnt into fiery red coals, and was approximately 700 degrees, so the thin crust cooked quickly and was almost cracker crisp. Toppings included onions, escargot, creme freche thinned with a little Greek yogurt, walnuts, Gorgonzola, Parmesan cheese, and wilted greens, all in various combinations. Only the Pizza Margherita bore any resemblance to pizzas I have eaten before. Walnuts on pizza was a completely new and unexpected taste sensation. By the time the pizza roasted in the oven, the walnuts (coupled with the wilted greens and Gorgonzola) were also roasted and sizzling. The combination of tastes and textures was addictive. I came home wanting my own brick pizza oven.

Then I found a new book in the grilling section at the bookstore where I work, Pizza on the Grill, by Elizabeth Karmel and Bob Blumer. Whenever I have grilled pizza before, I have ended up with a burnt crust and underdone toppings. With it's "1-2-3" method, Pizza on the Grill solves that problem. First you cook your pizza on one side over indirect heat, coals on one side, pizza on the other. (The illustrations and directions in the book are for both gas and charcoal grills.) Then you remove it, flip the pizza over, put on your toppings, and slide the pizza back on the grill, lid down, to cook the rest of the way. A pizza takes roughly 7-12 minutes, start to finish, with any meat toppings pre-cooked. I made cheese pizza with a rough tomato sauce from organic canned, fire-roasted tomatoes, and the sweet sausage and pepper pizza from the book. I also made a roasted veggie pizza using leftover vegetables that I had grilled two days earlier. And, inspired by Simone, I made a tomato sauce, hazelnut, and gorgonzola pizza which was fabulous.

The recipe in the book produces a crust that is thin and crispy, and if you pull the pizza directly over the coals for a minute or so at the end, you get a nicely browned bottom crust. The pizzas end up being oblong instead of round to fit half of the grill--something everyone commented on.

My husband said it was the best pizza I had ever made--he especially liked the sweet sausage topping. The kids didn't like it, I think, because of the slightly smokey taste in the crust. But it is now my new favorite way to make pizza.

Although I still have my eye on the $2,000 terra-cotta beehive pizza oven that Williams Sonoma sells...

Hello, Cupcake!

Last week in our house, we had two birthday celebrations and Mother's Day in the span of two days. May rivals December in terms of making treats for celebrations, and it can be quite a challenge to always come up with something new. One year I baked a cake for my son (Birthday #1), bought an ice cream cake for my husband (Birthday #2), and pushed the two remaining halves together for my visiting father-in-law (Birthday #3). My father-in-law thought he got the best end of this deal since he got two flavors of cake and ice cream all in one.

This year I had one day off from work to bake and prepare treats for my husband and son's birthdays and the dinner party we were having for Mother's Day. I decided to go with chocolate cupcakes. I could bake a huge batch and decorate them differently for each person/celebration. I had recently bought the most creative cupcake book ever: Hello, Cupcake! Irresistibly Playful Creations Anyone Can Make. This new cookbook illustrates techniques for making imaginative cupcakes using simple techniques and candies that you can find at your local grocery or convenience store, and in the gas station candy aisle. There are cupcakes for holidays and special occasions, plus a zooful of animal creations: http://www.hellocupcakebook.com/ .

My son Zach hates peas. He hates peas so much that when he was a child, I gave him  certificate one year for Christmas that stated that he never has to eat peas. In fact, he hates peas so much that people have given him canned peas as a present. Twice friends have come back from England with cans of "mushy possessed peas" for his collection. Featured in Hello, Cupcake! is a TV dinner where one of the cupcakes is decorated with peas and carrots. That was what I made Zach for his birthday.

The first part of making these cupcakes was finding the candy. Supposedly, green Nerds make great, round peas. Only Nerds has new flavors and none of them are green. There's a store in town that carries everything from farm implements to obscure fuses and fishing lures. They had bags of fruit candies that featured small, round green "peas" of fruit flavor. The carrots were quartered Starbursts--all on top of chocolate cupcakes frosted green. I served them in a saucepan.

For Mother's Day, my daughter Emily and I made the spring garden--chocolate cupcakes covered with "dirt" and topped with candy vegetables. First the cupcakes were frosted with chocolate and then dipped in Oreo cookie crumbs. Then they were topped with the "vegetables." The lettuces were Frosted Flakes dipped in white chocolate, colored green. The carrots and radishes were cut and shaped Starbursts (Hint: 10 seconds in the microwave makes them much more malleable). The seeds were chocolate-covered sunflower seeds that I found in a gas station candy aisle. The outer shell of the pea pods were flat sticks of chewing gum wrapped around green M&Ms. The garden cupcakes took longer to decorate than the peas and carrots, but were the hit of our Mother's Day dinner.

My husband got a platter of the chocolate cupcakes decorated by Emily in different patterns with "dirt," chocolate sprinkles, and M&Ms for his birthday part of Mother's Day.

The directions for the styles we made from Hello, Cupcake! were clear and easy to follow once we had assembled our candy ingredients. The book has designs for holidays and special occasions such as weddings and baby showers, plus cats and dogs of all breeds. My daughter Emily has already picked out the horse cupcakes she wants me to make next month for her birthday at the stable where she rides. This book would make a great present for the bakers in your life!

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day--Part 2

It's been two months now since I mixed up my first batch of bread dough from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I have experimented with a number of the recipes in the book and am now branching out and making up recipes on my own.

Ten days ago I made a double batch of the Oat Flour Bread (pages 104-105), and I have been experimenting with it since. Last Sunday I made a batch of Monkey (or Pull Apart) Bread. One common recipe for this breakfast bread is made using frozen roll dough, brown sugar, instant butterscotch pudding mix, sugar, cinnamon, and a whole stick of melted butter. (My mother always added chopped pecans.) Other recipes use tubes of biscuit dough (the Paula Deen method of death by breakfast).

I made my Monkey Bread by pulling balls of dough off my batch in the refrigerator, handling it as little as possible to keep as air in the partially risen dough. I melted two tablespoons of butter and rolled each ball in that, and then in a mixture of half cinnamon and half sugar. I layered 18 balls of dough in a Bundt pan, and let them rise on my warm kitchen for about an hour. Then I baked them 20 minutes until the bread was golden brown on the top. I turned it out onto a plate, and the Monkey Bread was devoured with bacon for breakfast.

If you like sticky slimy breakfast breads, this recipe isn't for you. I like the fact that even though each ball of dough is coated in cinnamon-sugar, you can still taste the basic bread underneath. I think that in many other Monkey Bread recipes that use premade roll doughs or biscuits, the bread is just the vehicle for the sticky mass of sugar and butter. No one in my household needs that much sugar or butter with breakfast.

The next recipe I made up with the Oat Flour Bread was a variation on Pigs in a Blanket. I rolled some dough out about a half an inch thick, cut it into one-inch strips, and wrapped them around some apple Gouda sausages my husband had brought home from the store. I wrapped the sausages, mummy-style, overlapping the dough strips just a bit, and leaving the tips open. I sprinkled some spices on top and baked them about twenty minutes without any pre-rising of the dough. The dough puffed up, and the sausages sizzled juices out the ends while baking. They were wonderful dunked in a little mustard. I don't care for Pigs in a Blanket made with commercial hot dogs and crescent roll dough, but these allowed the flavor of the sausage to come through, complimented by the oat bread.

I still have a problem with a fact that there really is no "Five Minutes" to this bread-making technique. The dough takes me longer than five minutes to prepare and get into the tub, even using a stand mixer. But I love having the bread dough waiting for me in the refrigerator. It has made great bread--boules and standard loaves--as well as wonderful sticky and hamburger buns. I recommend the technique. Experiment and see what you can come up with: http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/ .

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day

Several people I know have recently experimented with the bread-baking recipes outlined in Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois's new book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking. This book promotes a system of preparing a wetter-than-average bread dough that lives in your refrigerator for up to two weeks, waiting for you to shape it, let it rise, and bake it. I like the idea of coming home from work and quickly baking fresh bread for dinner, so I bought the book.

The basic recipe is simple: mix 3 cups lukewarm water, 1 1/2 teaspoons yeast, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, and 6 1/2 cups of flour in a container large enough to allow it to at least double in bulk. The dough sits out for two hours to start percolating, and then goes into the refrigerator where it lives for up to two weeks. This basic recipe makes four, one pound batches--four small loaves of bread. The book is full of other great looking recipes for you to try, using this basic dough and other variations.

The first loaf of bread the authors teach you, a French boule, is easy and quick. Sixty seconds to shape, 40 minutes to rise, 30 minutes to bake. The authors also recommend only preheating the pizza stone used for baking for 20 minutes. For my first loaf, that wasn't long enough. I had to bake my loaf 45 minutes to get a browned bottom and a hallow thump that told me the loaf was done. I used the other three-fourths of the first batch to make three pizzas. The rest of the family loved them, but I found it very difficult to get enough cornmeal on the peel to get the dough rounds on the baking stone in roughly the same shape as they started. The solution (according to discussion threads on the Artisan Bread webpage) is to prepare the pizzas on baking parchment and slide the pizza onto the stone along with the parchment. I will have to try that. I thought the thick-crust dough was very tasty, but it's hard to easily divide a pizza shaped like Texas.

The second batch of dough I made, I blended one part whole-wheat flour to five parts all purpose flour. It rose happily and waited quietly in the refrigerator until I had time to bake this afternoon. The first loaf I prepped didn't seem to have risen at all on the peel at the end of 40 minutes. I waited another ten before sliding the boule into the oven. After all, the book says, "Depending on the age of the dough, you may not see much rise during this period." Well, not only did I not see much rise on the peel, there wasn't much rise afterward  in the oven. The bread browned nicely and cooked quicker (I heated the pizza stone the entire time the dough rested on the pizza peel), but it was very heavy. I knew this was not quite how the loaf was supposed to turn out. I shaped another loaf and left it to rest on the peel.

In the meantime, I explored the authors' webpage for the book: http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/. They continue to post new recipes developed with this technique, and also have question and answer threads from readers. The most interesting part of the webpage to me was the section on "errors" in the book. The very first issue addressed here is the rising time of the bread which they change to 40 minutes to 1 1/2 hours due to variations in peoples' kitchens and the way they handle the dough. Other "errors" correct details of the master and other recipes.

I find this fascinating. Here is a forum for Hertzberg and Francois to communicate with their readers and actually tweak what's in the fixed text of the book. How many times have you made a recipe out of a book and wondered what was wrong when it didn't turn out quite right? Part of that I am sure comes from someone who is an intuitive cook trying to transcribe a recipe that might be more changeable than they think. Whenever I buy a new cookbook now, I search for the author's online presence. Sometimes it consists of a brief list of appearances or a bio. Other times it has introduced me to new arenas for reading and writing about food. (Thank you Mr. Ruhlman.)

For dinner tonight, my husband and daughter gladly agreed to have toast--our family's method of testing any bread. They both liked the bread, but preferred the original version without the addition of the whole wheat flour. To my mouth, it was so little whole wheat, I almost didn't know it was there (but then, I actually like whole wheat bread). The second loaf had risen more on the peel after an hour and a half, and had finished about a third larger than the first loaf. The first loaf had a small and tight grain, but tasted every bit as good as the second, lighter, more-textured loaf. The second loaf also made crisper toast. Although the first loaf was smaller and denser, it was by no means a failure. So longer rising and preheating times are definitely good ideas.

My only complaint about Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is that the "quick" component is misleading. Yes, mixing the dough is quick. Shaping the initial boule and many of the other loves is too. But rising and baking is not. I calculated this morning, that for me to make the Sticky Pecan Caramel Rolls would take two hours from start to finish. Not something I could make in the morning to take to work. But I really like the fact that this is a system that for the most part adapts to my baking lifestyle. I have a job where my schedule changes every week. That makes it difficult to commit to a long-term relationship with a sourdough starter. When I want to bake on my days off, this dough is ready to go. I can't wait to try some of the other recipes.

Give a Gift: Bacon Of the Month

In my household, bacon is one of the most popular foods. Of the nine creatures under our roof (cats count), only my daughter doesn't really care for bacon. The rest of us love bacon. Bacon plain. Bacon in dishes. One of my favorite cookbook purchases of the last year has been Seduced by Bacon: Recipes and Lore About America's Favorite Indulgence by Joanna Pruess. This volume is a collection of bacon facts and lore as well as great recipes that take bacon from the breakfast table through lunch and dinner to dessert.

One recipe that has become a favorite in our house is "Bacon-Wrapped Breadsticks." You take the hard breadsticks that you can find in the bread aisle of almost any grocery store, wrap bacon around them, and cook for half an hour in a 350 degree oven. Seduced by Bacon recommends coating the inside of each bacon slice, before wrapping, with mustard and sprinkling it with Parmesan cheese. That sounds good, but I just sprinkle the inside of my slices with my favorite barbecue dry rub--I don't want to interfere with the taste of the bacon. Since the fat of the bacon softens up the bread sticks as they cook, I bake mine on a cookie rack on top of a baking sheet in the oven. That way the breadsticks don't sit in the bacon fat. Cook them until they are nice and crisp, and let cool just a bit before you serve them.

I caused a traffic jam at the hors d'oeuvre tray on Thanksgiving by following the same technique to cook bacon-wrapped dates (one friend who was fifteen minutes late didn't get any). The sugar in the dates caramelizes and adds extra crunch to the bacon. These are also fantastic cooked over low heat on a barbecue grill. However you cook the bacon-wrapped dates, you must watch them carefully because they will burn easily.

We have done a lot of experimenting with bacon recipes in our house over the last year because last February for Valentine's Day, I gave my husband the Bacon of the Month Club: http://www.gratefulpalate.com/?p=Category_11 . For $150 you get a different artisanal bacon delivered, cold-packed, to your door. Over the last twelve months, we have had some truly fabulous bacons such as Nodine's Apple Smoke Flavored Bacon, Edwards Brown Sugar Cured Virginia Bacon, Hempler's Pepper Bacon, and Burger's Smokehouse Sliced Country Pork Jowl. One of our favorites was Vande Rose Farms Applewood Smoked Artisan Dry Cured Bacon from Oskaloosa, here in Iowa. A fight almost broke out over the breakfast table over who would get the last piece. The pork used for this bacon is fed all natural grains, and the meat was hand-rubbed with spices before being smoked over applewood.  

The problem is that once you've eaten your way through a year of the Bacon of the Month Club, you can never go back to grocery-store bacon again. These are not highly-processed bacons filled with water and phosphates, and for most, there is minimal shrinkage when you cook them. One of the biggest surprises is that these artisanal bacons actually taste like pork--you know that they come from a pig. Most supermarket bacon does not taste like its animal of origin. My family at first was resistant to bacon that resembled a good Iowa pork chop in flavor, but now they prefer it. That flavor is the sign of bacon that was made in a traditional manner, preserving and respecting the flavor of the original pig.

If you really want to give a great present to the bacon-lover in your life, I highly recommend the Bacon of the Month Club. You can also visit their web page for other great bacon-themed presents such as bacon salt, bacon popcorn, and bacon brittle: http: //www.gratefulpalate.com/?p=Page_24. Give the gift of bacon this Valentine's Day!

The Art of Simple Food

For quite a while now, I have featured on my sidebar Alice Water's new book, The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Recipes, and Lessons from a Delicious Revolution without really talking about it. I am an Alice Waters fan. I used to study typography, and have set type for books by hand. From my study of classic page design, Water's cookbooks are some of the most beautiful and aesthetically pleasing on the market. The Art of Simple Food  follows in that tradition: the type is crisp and clear, the paper heavy and nice to touch, and the detailed black and white drawings sprinkled liberally throughout are works of art.

The thing I like most about The Art of Simple Food is that it's organized in an entirely different manner than her other cookbooks. This is Alice Waters as teacher. Instead of discussing her love for an ingredient like carrots and giving you five example of recipes to use the rooty tuber, in the first half of Simple Food, "Starting From Scratch," Waters picks a technique you should learn, explains the ingredients involved with her master recipe, and then gives you three variations.

For example in the chapter on omelets and souffles, Waters describes the basic techniques for making an omelet, a frittata, and a souffle, giving a recipe to illustrate each one. The only souffle I ever made was a disaster. It fell and it tasted awful. After reading the two pages here that describe the mystery of a souffle and how to create both savory and sweet versions, I feel confident that I could now make a good one. I especially like Water's parenthetical asides that help you avoid mistakes or fix them if they happen anyway: "(If the sauce does get lumpy, push it through a strainer to smooth it.)"

In the second half of the book, "At the Table," Waters gives her favorite recipes for everyday cooking. Here the recipes are divided along traditional cookbook lines: sauces, salads, pasta, poultry and so on. Each recipe lists the ingredient and instructions and ends with 2-4 variations you can try to alter the recipe to ingredient preferences. I get the feeling that these are not the recipes I would find on the table in front of me at Water's restaurant Chez Panisse, but would instead be served by Alice if she invited me to her house for supper. Her Marinated Beet Salad (the variation with added orange zest and juice) has become my favorite way to eat beets.

This book is the perfect partner to Michael Ruhlman's The Elements of Cooking. That book gives you all the definitions and grounding you need while Waters provides a basic cooking course to get there. These two books together would be the perfect wedding present for foodies. And the orange covers compliment each other nicely.