All the Ingredients

Bacon Jam

A friend who knows how much bacon is revered in my household sent me the link for the Homesick Texan's recipe for Bacon Jam. Bacon in jam form? Hmm. The recipe seems pretty simple, although the preparation steps leave out how to add several ingredients. I wasn't bothered by the fact that the recipe didn't seem complete. I have reached a stage in my cooking life where I often read a recipe and drastically change it in my head before I even start to prepare it. This is one of those recipes.

The original recipe called for lots of garlic and a little onion. Since my husband is not a huge garlic fan, I flipped those quantities. I also like the way onion and bacon compliment each other in recipes, so I wanted about an equal amount of each. One of the liquid ingredients in the original recipe was coffee. I am the only person in our household who drinks coffee, so I substituted something else that I thought would work: root beer. I think you could use coffee or cola with success.

So the ingredients as I reshaped the recipe became:

• 1 medium sweet yellow onion
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 lb bacon, sliced

Now I am sure you can make bacon jam quite nicely with the bacon you can find in your local grocery store. However, if I was going to go to this much trouble, I was going to shell out $6 for a pound of meaty local bacon from the farmer's market, made from pigs who wore crowns of flowers and gamboled in green meadows. Okay, so these pigs were raised on Iowa farm in a barnyard. But they were antibiotic free, and actually saw the light of day until they became a jam ingredient.

• 2 chipotles en adobe (found in a can on the grocer's shelf) 
• 2 teaspoons adobo sauce (from the can)
• 1 tablespoon cocoa powder
• 1 cup root beer
• 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
• 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar

Dice the bacon into 1/2 inch pieces and cook in a heavy pot or skillet over a medium-high heat until the pieces start to crisp. Remove the bacon pieces and drain on a paper towel. Pour out all but 1 tablespoon of the bacon fat. Chop the onions into medium pieces, and mince the garlic. Add to the bacon fat and saute until the onions are clear and soft. Remove the chipotles from the can and chop as fine as you can (they are smooshy and slippery). Add them and the rest of the ingredients to the pot and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and stir periodically. You want the mixture to thicken to the consistency of a nice jam. Cool and put into a jar and refrigerate.

There are numerous on-line postings to tell you where to put your bacon jam: on egg breakfast biscuits, on BLTs, in baked beans and so on. So far, we haven't got past burgers. The jam was fabulous on bacon-cheeseburgers. It was also quite tasty on patty melts made with marble rye and swiss cheese. My husband thinks the jam is a little too spicy; my son, not an adventurous eater, thinks it is just right. You can certainly only use one chipotle or add more depending on your heat tolerance. I liked the bacon jam exactly as I made it. You taste the onion and the bacon, and then finish with a slight sear across the tongue that makes you want another bite. And another.

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.

Raising the Bar--Quaker Oats True Delights

I like a good bowl of crunchy granola with some milk and sliced banana. I also like to take a banana and dip it into the granola, eating the fruit bite by bite, dip by dip, sitting at the kitchen table watching the birds at the feeder outside.

Of course, although I try not to be, I am a typical America. If I can get it to go, eat it in the car, I like it. Granola bars are the perfect food for eating on the move. I have been thinking about them because as part of Foodbuzz, I signed up to be a "food taster." I sign up, they send me free food, and I taste it. This food blogging is rough, but someone has to do it.

So the first product sample arrived several weeks ago: Quaker Oats New True Delight granola bar line with three flavors: Dark Chocolate Raspberry Almond, Honey Roasted Cashew Mixed Berry, and Toasted Coconut Banana Cashew Macadamia Nut. Each has a 140 calories, 5 or fewer grams of fat, 2 grams of protein, 3 grams of fat, and at least 4 words in its name. All of the bars were shiny with corn syrup and had 8-10 grams of it.

Once the package of sample granola bars arrived--two of each flavor--I began to notice just how many granola bars surround me on a daily basis. They are like varieties of marmalade: I always have lots around. I have two kinds in my locker at work.  I have six kinds at home, another kind in my gym locker, several in my canvas lunch bag, and one in my car. I am always trying new ones. They are portable. Very portable. And they may have expiration dates, but they never seem to get stale. However if they travel around too long in my bag, they can get mushed flat to the wrapper or crumble in pieces when I open them.

Granola bars are everywhere. As I pushed my cart through my small town grocery store the other day, there were two separate large displays of them. Fudge-dipped bars have the most sugar and are the least resilient. They melt if left in a warm car, and gum to the wrappers if they are trampled in my bag. The kids like those best. I prefer bars that have chocolate chunks and dried fruit. They tend to have fewer grams of sugar and more grams of fiber.

I was excited to test the new granola bars. Treats! I started with the Toasted Coconut Banana Macadamia Nut. The name was almost as long as the granola bar. I have a number of food preferences. One of them is that I only like bananas and strawberries as actual bananas and strawberries. I don't like banana bread, and I don't like strawberry jam on my toast in the morning (although I will eat if if breakfast is brought by room service on a tray and there is no little jar of marmalade). I really liked the Toasted Coconut Banana Macadamia Nut. I love coconuts and macadamia nuts, and their flavors were the prominent ones with the hint of banana in the background.

Next I tried the Honey Roasted Cashew Mixed Berry. Cashews are okay, but they are not a nut I would have in the house if it weren't for the fact that my husband likes them. This wasn't a bad granola bar by any means, but it wasn't my favorite. One thing I noticed with this bar is that, unlike most processed food, these granola bars look like the picture on the wrapper when you slide them out.

Last I tried the Dark Chocolate Raspberry Almond. This granola bar has a lot going for it. I prefer dark chocolate to milk any day, and it blended well with the raspberries and almonds. This was my favorite of the three, and the one I went to the store and bought for myself. This is the granola bar I eat in the afternoon to keep me out of the vending machine at work. My favorite candy bar out of the machine has twice as many calories, more than twice the amount of fat, only 1/3 of the fiber, and 20 more grams of sugar than this True Delights bar.

Check them out at http://quakertruedelights.comand get your free sample. And check out Foodbuzz while you're there.

Pimento Cheese Sandwiches

Last weekend, I made food for a friend's baby shower. The party was in the middle of the afternoon and we wanted food that was easy to eat that didn't require silverware. I couldn't face another platter of cold-cuts and cheese, or sliced chicken wraps, so I made finger sandwiches.

My age is really showing here, because I don't think people make platters of finger sandwiches anymore. At least not here in the Midwest. When I was a sophomore in high school over thirty years ago, my school had a mother-daughter tea in the spring. My mother was in charge of the finger sandwiches for two hundred girls and mothers, and the two of us made hundreds of ham salad sandwiches. It was at least a decade before I could look a ham salad sandwich in the face. But as a hostess, I have always had a fondness for finger food for parties. Especially for showers where people are sprinkled throughout a living room to watch the bride-to-be or mother-to be-open presents.

For this shower, I decided to make ham salad, olive and cream cheese, and pimento cheese finger sandwiches. The nice thing about these were, I could mix up the spreads and make the sandwiches a day or two early, and they would keep beautifully. I also had my bases covered for the Muslim and vegetarian friends in the crowd who couldn't eat the ham salad.

The ham salad was easy. I had baked a ham and ground chilled slices of it in the food processor with sweet pickle relish and mayonnaise until it was the right consistency. You have to be careful not to over-process ham salad, or it becomes too pastey. You want to be able to see little pieces of ham and pickle.

For the olive and cream cream cheese spread, I started by putting a block of cream cheese in the food processor and adding a small can of sliced black olives. To perk this recipe up a bit, I also added a half a cup of a variety of olive--mostly green--that I had bought at the food co-op. The zesty green olives gave the spread more olive flavor.

Then I made the pimento cheese following my mother's recipe:

• 1 lb grated cheddar cheese (the recipe in her handwriting actually says "rat cheese"--I think this means mild cheddar, but I like sharp)
• 8 oz softened cream cheese
• 1 T melted butter
• 1 C mayonnaise
• 1 4 oz jar pimento cheese
• dash of Worcestershire sauce
• dash of Angostura bitters

I didn't add the bitters because I didn't have any, so I doubled the Worcestershire sauce and added an extra 2 oz jar of pimentos because I like a lot of them in my pimento cheese. My mother used to make this when there was only about a cup of mayonnaise left in the large mayonnaise jar, and would then pack the cheese spread into this handy container.

Finger sandwiches are made on bread that you have cut the crusts off of, and that are then cut into three "fingers" or four triangles. I like to use wheat and white bread so that the sandwiches can alternate colors on the platter. There are lots of nice breads available, but I always use Pepperidge Farm bread for finger sandwiches as my mother did. It holds up well to the trimming and tastes good. To keep the sandwiches from drying out, I packed them in plastic lidded containers between layers of damp paper towels (my mother, of course, used damp linen tea towels).

The sandwiches were a hit at the party. We served them with potato chips, small fruit kabobs, and a punch made of Sprite and limeade. Sometimes old-fashioned food is just what you need.

After the party I looked in several cookbooks to see what sorts of pimento cheese recipes exist. IBeing Dead is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral  by Gayden Metcalfe devotes an entire page to discuss this "Southern pate" debating the pros and cons of sweet versus savory, and creamy versus fluffy. The six pimento cheese recipes here run the gamut from simple to complex, but the sweet pimento cheese recipe sounds awful to me. I can't imagine putting sugar in a cheese spread.

The "Epilogue" to Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Souther Specialties: An Entertaining Life (with Recipes) by Julia Reed is entirely about pimento cheese, and gives an overview of the ways this spread changes throughout the South. I can see the merits of adding jalapenos or pecans, but I would never use either. And if I felt the urge to add onion, I would just grate in the tiniest bit.

I was fascinated by the section on pimento cheese in The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbookby Matt & Ted Lee. Their basic recipe uses a red pepper they have blackened, peeled and diced, themselves. That sounds wonderful. They also include a recipe for a pimento cheese that can be used for grilled pimento cheese sandwiches or to top hamburgers. This recipe uses only cream cheese and no mayonnaise so that the resulting mixture is thick enough to slice when it's chilled. I can see the attraction of this. One of the ways I prefer my pimento cheese sandwich is to toast the Pepperidge Farm Bread, spread the cheese, and eat the sandwich immediately while it is hot. The Lee Brothers explain that to grill the pimento cheese you have to take the mayonnaise out of the recipe or the spread breaks down when it is cooked. I will have to try this new twist on an old favorite.

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!

And now for something completely different...Lollyphile!

I have long had a special fondness for sweet and savory flavors together. I have often been made fun of because I like odd combinations of food. Pretzels are much better eaten with a square of dark chocolate (I don't prefer pretzels already dipped in chocolate because I want to be able to control the sweet to savory ratio myself.) I have to have a nice piece of sharp cheddar cheese with my apple pie. Or my pecan pie. Never ice cream or whipped cream. The sharpness of the cheddar balances the sweetness of the pie and keeps it from being too sweet. I love a nice Belgium waffle or stack of pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast, but only if the are accompanied by nice crispy, salty, strips of bacon. Sweet and savory is a delicate balance, and I beginning to experiment with adding spicy heat to the equation.

Recently I had a birthday, and a friend sent me a true "foodie" present: Maple-Bacon lollipops from Lollyphile, a new San Francisco candy company: http://www.lollyphile.com/ . Made with organic Vermont maple syrup and sustainable, organic cured bacon, these are lollipops all grown up. There are several candy companies I have read about over the last few months that make bacon candy--almost always paired with chocolate. That doesn't seem like the right sweet flavor to combine with the sharp, smokiness of bacon. But maple candy? That's perfect.

When you open the box, the Maple-Bacon lollipops smell faintly like my kitchen on Sunday morning after breakfast. The pungency of bacon is there, as well as the sweet smell of maple syrup. The lollipops are clear, smooth amber maple-flavored pops studded with tiny bits of diced bacon. The two flavors blend in your mouth just like a bite of breakfast. I also like the combinations of textures: smooth maple versus bumpy bacon. All Lollyphile needs is a coffee with cream sucker to complete the meal.

In these days when molecular gastronomy is becoming all the rage, and chefs can make "caviar" pearls that taste like green apples, it's wonderful to have a small sweet treat that encompasses an entire meal. Currently, Lollyphile only has one other flavor lolly for sale, Absinthe. I will have to try that next!

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.

"Coffee Snob"

No one in my household likes coffee or tea but me. My husband eschews all hot beverages except cocoa after sledding. My daughter likes cocoa; my son drinks no hot beverages--perhaps he would if Pepsi was offered that way. So I have free reign over the hot beverages in our house. I make coffee and tea and don't have to share.

When I became the manager of the cafe in the Big Bookstore ten years ago, I didn't drink coffee at all. I had been a dedicated tea drinker since I was young--hot, cold, and any temperature in between. I even have an automatic tea brewer (it looks like a Mr. Coffee but it really is a Miss Tea). My parents drank coffee, but mostly it was instant and I didn't like the odor or the taste. We lived in Phoenix and made sun tea probably seven or eight months of the year. In the winter, my mother brewed tea (orange pekoe loose leaf) in a china tea pot. It wasn't until I was in college that I learned about all the varieties of loose leaf tea that were out there. All my friends drank tea (when they weren't pursuing alcohol), and we shared our favorites. This was also in the dark ages before there was a Starbucks on every corner--there was no coffee house on my campus, as I am sure there must be by now.

But over the course of the five years I was a cafe manager, I was exposed to coffee day in and day out. I learned how coffee is grown, roasted, and brewed, and how espresso is extracted. I discovered that I like the way coffee ground from fresh beans smells and tastes. I also discovered I am a coffee wuss. I don't care for it straight. Good coffee is strong coffee, but I prefer to take it down a notch. I am not a fan of mochas or flavored coffee confections, although I will have one once in awhile when I need the caffeine and the sugar boost. In those drinks coffee takes a back seat and is almost not necessary to the drink at all. But I do like my strong coffee mixed with steamed milk, cafe au lait style. I take it plain or add a little hazelnut flavoring. When I order coffee, and I tell the barista exactly how I want it, my daughter accuses me of being  "coffee snob." I tell her no, I just know how I like it, and if I am going to pay for coffee in a coffee shop, I want it exactly the way I prefer it.

I don't, as a rule, drink preflavored coffees because in my mouth, all I can taste is the chemical flavoring of the hazelnut or vanilla, and not the fullness of the coffee itself. They leave a bad "finish" in my mouth. This could also be because as a cafe manager, I was indoctrinated into the world of plain coffee where the beans are blended to specific roasts, but if you want any other flavor, you have add it to the finished cup of coffee in the form of syrup. Flavored coffees taint the grinders and the pots you brew them in.

But a lot of people like flavored coffees and drink them. Recently I received a sample of a coffee that was preflavored, Joffrey's Coffee Jamaican Me Crazy, a blend of "caramel, vanilla, and coffee liqueur" flavors. This was a medium roast, very smooth. With steamed milk added, it was a nice cup of coffee. You can check out Joffrey's at http://joffreys.com/ and see their different blends, flavored and unflavored. Even though I was indoctrinated by a large coffee chain to prefer regular coffees that aren't preflavored, I think there's room for lots of choices. Personally, I think the idea of adding pumpkin and spice flavors to coffee for an autumnal blend is ghastly (and I tried it once at a major chain). But I think you can also be a coffee snob and drink it the way you like it, as long as I get my "venti non-fat au lait with two pumps hazelnut."

Lost Recipes

Now that the kids have gone back to school, and life is settling down at the Big Bookstore, I have time to start reading all the cookbooks I bought or was given over the holiday season. The first I have been noodling about in is America's Best Lost Recipes: 121 Kitchen-Tested Recipes Too Good to Forget, by the Editors Of Cook's Country Magazine. The magazine editors had a contest for readers to send in their best "lost" recipes--something appealing that captured a moment in American food history AND that was still good.

There are all sorts of recipes in here that I have heard of before--Cheese Crusted Olive Balls, butter Horn Rolls, and Wacky Cake, a dessert that was invented when war rationing made it necessary to find a way to make cake without eggs. Flipping through this lovely book is a pleasant way to spend an evening. I found myself arguing with some of the editor's choices (you can't look at a display in a bakery these days without tripping over Red Velvet Cake), and reminiscing with others. My mother made her own version of Tipsy Squire using Sarah Lee pound cake as the sponge base, with the tipsy provided by a nice cream sherry. Not a fan of alcohol in food as a child, I loved assembling the dessert, and made my own, small, non-tipsy version that I liked just fine.

One of the other things this book made me think about is my own "lost" recipes. You still see chicken and dumplings on comfort food menus, but my mother made fabulous blueberries and dumplings when I was a kid. This was probably a recipe born from her cold, Ohio childhood, and it was not one she made often in the warm Phoenix winter, but I remember her serving up bowlfuls of the deep purpley blueberries, cooked with sugar and lemon peel. I loved the way the syrup from the berries would turn the dumplings light purple on the outside, but they would stay white on the inside. My mother would finish by pouring Half-N-Half into each of our bowls, leaving us to mix it in as we ate. I don't have an official recipe for blueberries and dumplings, but I bet I could figure one out.

And that's one of the nice things about the Lost Recipes. Except for some of the ethnic recipes, the dishes here don't call for complicated ingredient lists or long, drawn-out preparations. Poor Boy Stroganov is made with canned and fresh ingredients you probably have on hand,and cut put together pretty quickly. And now I have a recipe for the fruit-filled Kolaches that I love to buy at the Farmer's Markets all summer.

So for my new year's gift, I give you a great recipe from my family's lost recipe files:

Ham Loaf

• 1 lb ham, ground
• 1 1/2 lean fresh ground pork
• 1/4 t pepper
• 1/4 t salt
• 2 eggs, well beaten
• 1 C milk
• 1 C Saltine crumbs

Thoroughly mix meats. Add remaining ingredients, and place in a loaf pan. Smooth top, and  with handle of wooden spoon, score top. Fill each row with sauce. Bake at 350 degrees for 2 hours, basting frequently.

Sauce:

• 1/3 C brown sugar
• 1 T yellow mustard
• 3/4 C apple cider vinegar
• 1/4 water

Not a wordy recipe. I always serve it with mashed potatoes and peas.

Happy New Year!