As I’ve been working on the chapter on bread in my planned forthcoming cookbook (when it will come forth is very much an open question), I got inspired to make a bread-machine loaf, something I don’t usually do. My breadmaking usually falls into much more controllable territory–rolls, pizza dough, breadsticks, and overnight bread baked as a round. I don’t have to worry about whether or not rolls are going to cave in, as they are baked outside of the machine. I can eyeball how far they’ve risen and adjust accordingly. But a big loaf is inherently much more unstable, and you can’t tweak the machine’s cycle after it has started. Here it is, though. I was reminded of a passage from Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins, in which the orphan Rose is raised by her Uncle Alec. She takes housekeeping lessons from one of her aunts as a part of her education, and here’s how her baking lessons come out:
Debi Simons
It’s the Stingy Person Who Spends the Most
Take a look at the two pictures above. They have a tenuous connection to the subject of this blog, as both beds are supposed to yield food. The picture on the left is of an asparagus bed and the one on the right is of a (putative) strawberry bed. You can see that there aren’t very many asparagus plants that are actually growing (it’s about 50%) and that there are absolutely no signs of life on the right.
This Type of Diet Is a Total Fad
Ho-kay. I haven’t written about fad dieting for a while; to be honest, I thought I’d pretty well covered the bases with the keto, Whole30, vegan, food-sensitivity and paleo diets, with a brief foray into what Tom Brady eats, and figured that every other weird eating plan out there was just a variant on these. But I realize that I’ve never actually discussed the whole gluten-free craze, which I plan to do, plus some other somewhat more fringe-y ideas (since, sigh, going gluten free has become pretty mainstream). But I’m going to start this new round of anti-faddism with something I heard about only recently, and that is the “blood-type diet.” While it became popular with the publication of Eat Right 4 Your Type (no link provided, as I don’t want anyone wasting money on it) in 1996, it’s still alive and kicking. A revised and updated version of the book was published in 2016, and I found out about (or was reminded of) the diet because I heard about someone I know who is following it.
Sometimes It’s Better to Abandon a Project
I made valances for our patio door and office window back a year ago, with the window valance still needing to be installed. These added (or will add) a nice finished look to the space. But I had way overbought the material for the valances and had several yards left over. (I don’t think it was very expensive.) So I planned to make throw pillows from the remaining fabric and bought some coordinating stuff to use for trim. I’d come up with a complicated method for making the pillow covers, with mitered, contrasting flanges. One pillow hadn’t come out very well, which was discouraging, but then I decided that
Use Food to Promote Conviviality without Promoting Indulgence
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about party food, even more than usual, because I’m working on a cookbook about such stuff (working title: Tiny Bites). Lately I’ve been testing my take on Swiss buttercream frosting. (Yesterday’s version was root beer. The batch is now in the freezer awaiting its use as a topping for root-beer brownies at the wedding reception I’m helping with in August. It was pretty good, but I’m still tweaking the basic recipe.)
So, as I’ve often said, food can be a tool that promotes conviviality. People aren’t eating because they’re hungry
I Attain Pizza Nirvana–and Eat Only One Slice
We are mildly obsessed with homemade pizza at our house. (But not as obsessed as Kenji Lopez-Alt, who carried out a monster experiment in his monster cookbook The Food Lab about whether or not the mineral content in the water has anything to do with crust quality. You can read all about it in the Kindle sample available on the Amazon page linked to above.) My son regularly makes the complicated recipe for deep-dish Chicago-style pizza from Cook’s Illustrated, and I’ve been on a kick
Resist the Call of the “Purchase Justification Machine”
I’ve mentioned this blog before, having stumbled upon it by accident several years ago. While MMM has gone through some upheaval in his personal life, and while he also isn’t writing very frequent posts these days, I check in periodically to see what he’s up to. His most recent article concerns his back-and-forth inner debate about whether or not to buy a Tesla, about which I could not possibly care less, but he’s actually onto a bigger principle:
Make the Effort to Serve Real Food
I have a number of posts in mind—a great new muffin recipe, some more anti-fad-diet rants—but for today here are some ideas for you to ponder as you head into the rest of the summer with all of its get-togethers. I’m sure there are cookouts and weddings yet to come, family visits and maybe even block parties. (Jim and I are pondering that last one.) There’s always the temptation to simply check off boxes for the menu. We have potato salad from Costco—check. We have fried chicken from King Soopers—check. We have a cake from King Soopers or Costco
Eat a Small Serving of the Real Thing
I follow the cooking blog Smitten Kitchen (as you know if you follow this blog), and her latest post is about a recipe for a super-rich chocolate Italian custard dessert called “chocolate budino.” She has some interesting details about how she tweaked the original recipe, but such is not my point here. Instead, I’d like to focus on this one idea:
A few spoonfuls is all you need, and I encourage you to do the same (rather than weakening its perfection with the goal of eating more).
Develop a Taste for Strong, Sharp Flavors
When we were in Kansas City recently we visited the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, a truly splendiferous place that we had missed out on the last time we came through town because we got delayed at Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue. (Also because we got going rather late that morning.) Anyway, if you’re ever in the area you really should go. It’s free, and one of its major draws is that it has one of only two castings of Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise.” There’s even a video that shows how they installed the thing. (We knew nothing about this ahead of time, of course, in our time-honored tradition of bumbling and stumbling upon things of wonder. We walked in and got to the bottom of the ramp that leads up to it, and I said, “Those are Ghiberti’s doors!” So I guess I get full props for recognizing them.)