On a Bread Roll

I recently picked up a copy of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, irrespective of my skepticism regarding its lofty promises. Bakery style batards, baguettes, and ciabattas with such little time and effort? Show me the money!

I must admit that the authors, Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois, really figured this one out. All you need are a few simple ingredients and tools: flour, yeast, salt, water, pizza stone and peel. This no knead method uses a yeast based wet dough, which is stored in the refrigerator for up to 14 days. The longer the dough sits, the more of a sourdough flavor it takes on. The only shortcoming to the method is that if you use the dough within the first couple days of mixing it, it has more of a yeasty taste rather than sourdough flavor. But in my opinion, this is a trivial drawback given the fact that the bread practically makes itself.

Once every week or so I mix up a double batch of the dough, which makes about 8 loaves. For the past few weeks, we've been enjoying fresh baked bread nearly every day. I'm practically considered a saint around here! Practically. Almost. Well... not quite. Okay, not really at all. But the heavenly scent of the bread baking has gotten me out of Dutch with the Disgruntled Farmhand more than once. I'm calling it "the miracle method".

Speaking of books on bread, look what I ran into while thumbing through the Farm Journal's 1969 tome on the subject:


Eww! Of all the ads to put in a book entitled "Homemade Bread", and right next to rye bread recipe! How 70s.

That's a Wrap!

The tomatoes on the front porch were starting to drive me nuts. Hand watering the 15 or so plants became too cumbersome of a task, not to mention the constant cleaning that became necessary as the plants began to dry up and drop their foliage. So I harvested all of the remaining fruit, green and red. The red went into the crock pot for an improved roasted garlic marinara sauce. The green became pickles.

I'd been pretty excited about a foray into preserving the green tomato as it wasn't something that I had grown up with. I learned the art of preserving from my mother who spent many a summer chained to the stove, overwhelmed with mountains of fresh produce and several scalding hot, burbling pots. I wasn't allowed in the kitchen during the process: boiling pots + rambunctious children = a trip to the emergency room waiting to happen. But I would hang about the dining room sneaking peeks of the happenings and catching strong whiffs of the overwhelming odors of tomatoes, peaches, pears, beans, pickles, etc. You name it, my mother probably canned it. However, the green tomato somehow eluded her Mason jar menagerie. I thought I would pick up where she left off.

I attempted two different types of green tomato pickles, spiced and dill. Both recipes came from my 1975 All About Pickling cookbook by Ortho Books. The dill recipe called for using the fresh pack method (pack jar with fresh fruit then pour boiling liquid over) and turned out perfect. The spiced, however, instructed to boil the toms for 15 minutes or until fruit is soft. I boiled for a very short time, yet the tomatoes turned mushy to the point of being unappealing. This also happened to me when I made my grandmother's watermelon rind pickle recipe last year. In the future, I think I will use the fresh pack method for all of my pickles and let them "rest" for a couple weeks to allow the flavors to meld. Anyone got any ideas as to what to do with a slurry of green tomato pickle slush?

Planting Trees and Harvesting Tomatoes

Yup, that's me, hard at it getting that Arbutus 'Marina', a.k.a. Strawberry tree, planted in front of our house. This past weekend Ute and I helped put in a bunch of new trees in our neighborhood with Friends of the Urban Forest. We'd been wanting a tree for some time and FUF gives great deals to residents in our neighborhood. They are a really wonderful organization and so incredibly organized. Along with fellow neighbors, we planted a total of 92 trees in the area, many of them going to Monroe Elementary School where Ute is a 1st grader. They had the whole operation running like a well oiled machine. Our little group of volunteers was the slowest by far, but we still finished somewhere around 1pm. What the above picture doesn't show is that right after it was snapped, I pulled that post pounder up too high, raising it up above the post, lost my balance (and if you've ever picked up a post pounder you know why), came careening off the ladder, hitting the noggin of that older gentleman in the train hat who was standing underneath me, all after our planting leader gave us a dismissive lecture about how tree planting is not a really dangerous activity, but if accidents were to occur, it would be when using the post pounder. I love being the example of why safety precautions are in place. I felt just like a toddler after being given that ubiquitous parental lecture "That's why I told you not to jump on the couch!"

Here's a pic of my big girl doing a much better, and safer, job than I.


Here I am, the joyful owner of a new tree.


If you have a program like this in your city, I highly recommend participating.

In other news, the tomatoes are ripening a plenty. In fact, I was able to make some delicious homemade tomato sauce to freeze with all the excess. The recipe came from Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (a really wonderful read btw). It called for quite a bit of basil, which I will probably moderate on my next attempt of this concoction. But all in all, the sauce tastes great.