Thanksgiving bread

Happy Thanksgiving!  And look at that!  It's almost one month after my last post!  How time does fly...

Really, it's been crazy, crazy busy.  This past weekend Ryan and I performed in the school's fall opera production, which means the previous week was filled with daily rehearsals.  We had one day "off" on Sunday to recover and prepare for coming week.  Monday was a busy day of classes (and a happy meeting with a friend from college, in town to look at schools).  Tuesday was class and the New Music Ensemble concert at the Canadian Opera Company, also filmed for a TV broadcast, which thankfully went very well!  Yesterday was a meeting with the man coming in to asses the school for the Canadian Heritage Fund, who then also observed my lesson.  And then finally I had the afternoon off!  Holy mackerel!  It feels like it has been ages since that happened (and let's not even think about the rest of the week...).  So Ryan and I made vegetarian stuffing for dinner (homemade sourdough with mushrooms, celery, leeks, chestnuts, and apples--recipe below) along with a salad with pomegranate seeds (the pomegranate was given to me by Rubana at Economy Fruit).  I also put together another batch of bread to retard in the fridge overnight and to bake today.  Per the request of one of my classmates, I measured the ingredients in volume in addition to weight so that I could make a version of the recipe for people who don't have a scale (though investing in a kitchen scale is probably a good idea if you're going to be doing a lot of bread baking because it makes measuring really easy and largely reduces the large margin of error found in volume measurements).

One loaf made last week.

So here is Susan's recipe for Norwich Sourdough from her blog Wild Yeast, adapted for volume measurements and with my little addenda.

Yield:
Two big loaves, or 10 mini loaves (which is what I made today), or one loaf plus a pizza, or... you get the picture.  It's a lot.

Time:
Mixing -- 5 minutes
Autolyse -- 30 minutes
First fermentation -- 2.5 hours

If you're baking that day, then you divide/rest/shape
And then you proof -- 2.5 hours
And then you bake -- 30 minutes max

If you're not baking that day, I've been (in a probably incredibly unorthodox move) just transferring the dough directly to a container, usually a big tupperware, to retard for up to two days.  Then I form the loaves as quickly as possible before throwing them in the oven.  I've found that the sour flavor really improves after the two days in the fridge.

Ingredients:
900 g white flour  -- or 6 cups

120 g whole wheat flour -- or 1 cup

600 g water at about 74F -- or 3 cups

360 g mature starter -- or 1 3/4 cups (which in my case is about half white and half wheat)

--later--

23 g salt -- or 2 tbsp

cornmeal for dusting

Method (for a completely handmade, no mixer 'cause I don't have one, bread):
Mix the flours, water, and starter until just combined, which usually I'm not quite strong enough to do with a big wooden spoon, so usually I just use my hands.
Let the dough rest (autolyse) for 30 minutes.
Add the salt and mix until the dough reaches a medium level of gluten development.  (Her pictures are really nice, so check them out.)  I usually wind up sort of pulling the dough between my hands until it actually stretches.  In the beginning it sort of breaks and won't stretch very well, but then as the gluten develops you can stretch it farther apart.
Transfer the dough to an oiled container (I usually just oil the bowl I mixed it in).
Ferment at room temperature (72F – 76F) for 2.5 hours, with folds (again nice instructions here, but basically you just stretch and then fold up) at approximately 50 and 100 minutes.

At this point I sort of deviate from Susan's instructions.  If I'm baking that day, I might shape one half of the bread into a ball, which I'll place on a piece of parchment paper dusted with cornmeal.  Otherwise I'll take my nicely oiled ball, find a big tupperware container, and dump the whole thing inside.  Make sure there's some room for it to expand because it will keep growing.  And then I put it in the fridge and wait a day or two.  I've found that 48 hours in the fridge results in a really nice and sour bread.

When I'm about ready to bake, I preheat the oven to 475 and put in the vessel I'm using for a cloche along with a baking tray (I don't own a bread stone, but I hear those are great).  Thanks to Susan's website, I recently started using this technique instead of trying to make steam in the whole oven.  First of all it's a lot safer.  Second of all it basically doesn't require any equipment (except the cloche).  Third of all it actually works. 

So what is this cloche thing?  Basically it's a heat-proof vessel like a big ceramic casserole or something that you can turn upside down and create a seal with a baking sheet.  You can also purchase a real one, or apparently make one out of a flower pot (instructions on her website), but really a deep ceramic baking dish seems to work perfectly.  The cloche traps the moisture that's already inside of the bread, allowing the dough to rise much more and ultimately creating a better crust.  You bake for 12 minutes or so with the cloche over the bread and then remove it for the last part of the baking.  Easy peasy.  No trays of boiling hot water or squirt guns or whatever.  No giant steam cloud threatening to cook you to death like a squishy lobster.  

So, you set the oven to 475, put in your big ceramic pot and your tray for baking the bread.  When the oven reaches the proper temperature, take a piece of parchment paper and dust it with your cornmeal.  Take your dough out of the fridge and quickly and gently shape (pat, coax) it into a size that will fit underneath your cloche.  Using a sharp knife, cut two long slashes into the dough.  It sometimes helps me to oil the knife blade a little first.  Then, I usually take the baking tray out of the oven and put it on the stove; transfer my dough to the baking tray using the parchment paper; and then take the cloche out of the oven and invert it over my piece of dough.  Then the whole thing goes back in the oven and you set the timer for 12 minutes and turn down the oven to 450.  After 12 minutes, carefully remove the cloche.  Mine's a little hard to grip, so yours might be too.  Just don't burn yourself.  And then keep baking until the bread is brown and done looking.  Depending on the size of the loaf and the temperature of the oven, this might be another 10-20 minutes.  And it's as easy as that!

And what will I be doing with my 10 mini loaves of bread?  I'm bringing them to a few of the people I'm really thankful for here in Toronto, including Rubana at Economy Fruit and my teachers and administrators at school.  It is sad not to be able to take the day to celebrate with my friends and family the way I have growing up, and I would especially like to be able to personally contribute to the storm clean up effort in New York, but I figure that I can at least do this small thing to give thanks for my innumerable blessings and the bounty that is in my life.

Garret Girl's Kitchen Spooktacular: Bones, bones, bones!

Just in time for halloween, I bring you this blog post about eating bones!  So, please be forewarned if you think this is a subject that might make you upset (there are pictures).

I was under the weather for two weeks just recently, felled by this nasty bug everyone in Toronto seems to have gotten (some virus I've dubbed "the plague"). It wasn't anywhere near as terrible as influenza or mono, but it was a quite nasty cold that ended with laryngitis and left me struggling to get up the stairs. Plus, I'm not usually sick for that long!

Probably related to this, on Sunday I suddenly had a craving for roasted marrow bones. I had them for the first time back in May, I think, at Prune, a restaurant in New York City where I dined with my Aunt KS. They were served with a parsley and caper salad and a small dish of sel gris as well as little bits of toast. They were also really, really delicious.

Now, I imagine that this might be a turn-off to some of you, vegetarians and omnivores alike. Given the way we generally consume meat in America/Canada/the West, the concept of bones is a little different (though I'd think much more "familiar" than some organs).  Ryan says it makes him think I'm going to cut off his leg and eat it.  Ya never know, I guess...  Still, there are a few reasons why I think they might be an interesting foray for those of you who do eat meat.

I constantly think about, and second-guess, my own desire (and perceived need) to eat meat. It's not something I feel morally justified in doing, though I also notice myself feeling more energized and "healthier" after I eat a moderate amount of meat--particularly red meat. I also feel satiated for longer periods of time and do not crave simple carbohydrates. However, I eat meat, especially red meat, very infrequently. Aside from the obvious ethical problems with raising inhumanely and then killing sentient beings for food, cattle--particularly industrially-raised cattle--are enormously bad for the environment and contribute to the failure of antibiotics and the rise of drug-resistant bacterial strains.

So, part of what I try to do when I eat meat is to be conscious of the choices I'm making as a consumer (i.e. eating meat infrequently but trying to purchase more ethically-raised animals when I do) and to use the meat I purchase in a respectful and thoughtful manner. This is somewhat easier when it's chicken (after eating the meat I can use the bones for stock) and a little more difficult when I'm purchasing a part of an animal (such as a cow) and know I'm not prepared to deal with all of it. Perhaps this just makes me a self-deluding hypocrite, but I do hope that eating the bones is one way of trying to be a bit more "nose-to-tail" even if I'm not brave enough for stomach, feet, noses, or the other sobering items available in many shops in our neighborhood.

Another plus is that bones aren't very expensive. I guess most people give them to dogs rather than eating them, though they're also great for soup stock (both straight from the freezer and also post-roasting and marrow-eating, which is why I put my "empty" bones back in there). All in all, though, it means that you can purchase better quality bones without setting yourself back too far. I got mine from the local Italian butcher, Gasparro's Meat Market (or, as their website says, "Vince Gasparro's Qaulity Meats"). One of the sons pulled two big bones from the freezer in the back and the father cut them into small, 2-3 inch segments using his giant saw. [I meanwhile tried to surreptitiously inspect their hands for small warts (I heard in my microbiology class at Yale that butchers are usually infected with papilloma virus; you can read more about it here), all to no avail.] A big bag of them cost me ten dollars. I slung it into my bike basket and then stopped by Economy Fruit for a cornucopia of delights, all for the tune of six buckaroos.

Paulie is the "No Groceries Left Behind" inspector. 

Yum!

At home, I preheated the oven to 450 degrees and set a few bone segments standing upright in a pie dish. When the oven was hot, I put them inside and roasted them for about 30 minutes until the marrow was bubbling and the bones were light brown. Most of the recipes I've seen call for about 20 minutes of roasting and some recommend 350 degrees. I don't know if this is because some bones are frozen and some are not, but I have to say that my method seemed to work just fine. It seems like it might be a little messier if the bones were warmer, plus I'm storing my extra bones in the freezer and it's just easier not to have to thaw them first.

Pre-roasting

Meanwhile I cooked up some onions and mushrooms, adding a little lemon and a lot of parsley for some extra flavor. It seems that a parsley salad is a traditional pairing with marrow bones, but I thought my method was pretty tasty too. Because marrow is so rich (i.e. it is mostly fat), it helps to have something lighter and a little acidic to help cut through and lighten the flavor. I also toasted some of my homemade whole-wheat-and-spent-grain bread and sliced up some cucumber... et voilà!  You spread the marrow on the toast and you're set to go.  I found a knife and a spoon worked just fine for extracting the marrow, though of course you can use a marrow spoon if you're so accoutered (are you allowed to use that word with cutlery?).  And what does it taste like?  The coordinator for the pre-college program at school said it tastes like "meaty butter."  I guess that makes sense.  It's a little bit gelatinous, it's a little bit meaty.  It's not really like butter, though.  It's just different.  And tasty.

A somewhat unappetizing photo, I'm afraid--but I promise it was scrumptious!

Now, the nutritional benefits (and dangers) of marrow are somewhat disputed. What seems abundantly clear is that the bones are full of fat. Marrow was a food of choice for our scavenging paleolithic ancestors, namely because it is... full of fat! And when you're a scavenging cave person, something like marrow is a ticket to survival. However, I am not a cave person. (Sort of, anyway; I do live in a basement.) Proper nutritional analysis of marrow does seem to be lacking. I read that the fat isn't saturated, so that's a plus. Some places on the internet say that it's a wonderful source of all these things you need, like vitamin K and iron, and will solve all your problems; some places say it's a source of fat, which makes you fat. I say this:

Bone marrow is delicious.

Bone marrow makes me feel really good after I eat it: satiated but not over-full or greasy, and with lots of energy for hours. I ate the bones yesterday for a good-sized late lunch and didn't eat dinner or any dessert because I was full and energized all evening. And I didn't just sit around! I speed-walked to the post office and back, rode my bike to school (second trip of the day), had opera rehearsal in which I was running around, waltzing, and generally working up a sweat for a few hours, and then I rode my bike home and did homework.

It's surely not a good choice for every day eating, but then I don't think any kind of meat ever should be.

Giving Thanks

Sometimes it feels hard to believe that I've already been in Toronto for more than a year, yet here I am passing milestones for the second time: labour day, the first day of school, Nuit Blanche, and now Canadian Thanksgiving.  I still find that this latter event (celebrated this weekend, with the official holiday falling today) comes at an odd time in the calendar year, being used to American Thanksgiving, but after the past week it seemed like the stars had aligned to remind me to be grateful for my many blessings.

It's not that the past few days have really been horrible; in fact, many wonderful things happened to counterbalance the bad.  And even the negatives, when viewed contextually, have a bright side.  Two family members took ill, but thankfully--though the mishaps or diseases are serious--they seem like they will recover fully.  Some of the other misadventures seem perplexing, but even these frustrations have been assuaged by opportunities which may turn out to be more beneficial in the end, both in terms of career and also in terms of my personal growth, than what I had originally hoped might transpire.  Funny how our desires may indeed be less salubrious than our response when we feel they are thwarted...  Finally, it's just good to remember how blessed I am to have such friends and family and music in my life, and that even when some of these things seem to have gone awry, the reason I notice is because I am lucky to have them there in the first place.  It's hard to complain about that.

The festive dining room.

Comrade M cooked and baked an excellent Thanksgiving dinner, per usual.  The turkey was divine, the stuffing scrumptious, the kale salad refreshing, the sweet potatoes creamy, the vegetarian option ironically to-die-for, and the mashed potatoes fluffed to a T.  And the desserts... all I can say is that the pumpkin pie should become a standard.  It's amazing!  And the apple and cherry rustic tart, baked in a cast iron pan and with a ginger cookie topping, was as delicious as it was beautiful.

Boiling potatoes

Kale for the salad 

Pumpkin pie

Apple and cherry tart

With fewer people this year (i.e. just one extra) there was less to prepare and thus less for me to do--except, of course, borrow Comrade M's nice work camera and take pictures of everything!  Comrade M used some of my homemade bread for the stuffing, something I baked last weekend with spent grain from Ryan's brewing, but I hadn't even been planning to cook anything myself until I found an email from Smitten Kitchen in my inbox with a recipe for pumpkin cinnamon rolls.  Now with something like a recipe for pumpkin cinnamon rolls, you'd think there would be little to improve upon--and of course since I only made the recipe once, it's hard to tell if I improved anything.  So instead we will say that I did some characteristic fiddling and made the following adjustments:

• Rather than using active dry yeast, I substituted my very own wild yeast sourdough starter.  (I've been growing it for the past week and this was my first experiment.)  I wound up using 1/2 cup of sourdough starter to replace the yeast called for in the recipe.  Consequently (and also due to the oven being occupied by the bird) I also allowed the buns to rise for several hours rather than the time she calls for.  I can't really tell if the sourdough starter influenced the flavor, especially due to the following point...
• ... which is that rather than using brown sugar (since I had run out) I replaced the 1/4 c brown sugar in the dough with 1/4 c molasses.  This yields a strong molasses flavor, which I like but which perhaps overpowers the pumpkin and other flavors.  Ryan likes it, though.  I might stick to brown sugar next time to see how it compares.
• Rather than just brushing the rolled-out dough with the butter (these are by no means healthy), I also added a layer of pumpkin puree.  Ryan and I roasted our own pumpkin (he had an extra one lying around after making a pumpkin beer a few weeks ago) and we had/have a lot left over.
• I also added a few tablespoons of pumpkin puree to the cream cheese frosting rather than adding milk to change the consistency (and ultimately used two times the amount of cream cheese because I found it too sweet with two cups of powdered sugar).  In retrospect I would have just halved the amount of sugar since the recipe yields a ton of frosting no matter how much cream cheese you include.  I guess I'll have to freeze the leftovers for the next several time I make these cinnamon buns...
• I also sprinkled the buns with pepitas before baking, though if/when I make these again I'd also include the seeds inside of the rolls.  I just didn't think of it until I had finished.

Rising rolls

Finished rolls with some glaze

And some without

Now it's Monday and Comrade M and I are embarking on a painting project.  First up?  The dining room, in "semolina" yellow.  It already looks beautifully bright and sunny!  I'm so excited.  

In the works...

Meanwhile, Ryan was concentrating on his latest batch of beer (this time with a holiday twist).

A tart by request

I was having fun coming up with slightly off-color titles for this post about the rosewater tart pictured in my last blog entry, but then I felt terrible about reinforcing the subjugation of women... so, my apologies, and here is a link to a New York Times discussion about legalizing prostitution which you should all read.

And now back to fruit pastries!

Way back in July, some girls from school came over and we had a big feast of... well... fried chicken... and other things.  (See, there's this new fried chicken place in my neighborhood.  One day Comrade MM saw a famous rapper going there with his family, so we figured if it was good enough for a famous person and his family, it would be good enough for us.  And it was pretty tasty, though fried chicken is really a once-every-few-years kind of thing.)  Anyway, I decided to make this tart I'd seen in the New York Times for dessert since it sounded delicious and there were lots of berries on sale at the supermarket.

Here's a link to Melissa Clark's description of her recipe; you can find a link to the recipe itself on the left: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/27/dining/a-fresh-fruit-tart-perfumed-with-roses.html?hp (her photo is also really beautiful)

In her introduction she says though berry tarts are traditional and delicious, she never makes them because they are so clichée.  Well, I never make them because I think that pastry cream is weird and usually doesn't taste very good.  I like pie, but tart is just usually too sweet and squishy for me.  However, the rose flavor just sounded too good to pass up.  If we grew roses here I would have just steeped my own rose petals, as Ms. Clark suggests, but we don't.  I found some rosewater at the local organic food store, though, and it was quite inexpensive.

Since I made only a few changes to the original recipe, I've copied it here in her own format and then added my little tweaks.  Most of my changes were to make the cream a little less sweet and a little more rosey.  I'll put my comments about the success of the recipe at the end.

MELISSA CLARK'S ROSEWATER TART, PLUS OR MINUS A FEW THINGS

COOK TIME

1 hour 30 minutes, plus chilling and cooling.  Tart shell must chill for 4 hours, plus time after baking, and the pastry cream for an hour, so beware that this recipe takes some time to put together.

For the tart shell

• 1.5 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup raw almonds (or almonds of another form if you so prefer)
• 1/3 cup confectioners’ sugar
• Grated zest of 1 lime (or lemon)
• Pinch salt
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cold and cubed
• 1 large egg, lightly beaten

For the pastry cream

• 2-3 tablespoons of rosewater, to taste (M. Clark calls for 1/2 tsp, so I'd recommend beginning with a small amount in case mine--though very fragrant--is somehow lacking and then adding generously after you discover it doesn't taste like roses)
• 2 cups whole milk
• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 5 large egg yolks
• 1 to 2 pints berries (strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, you name it.)
• Lime juice to taste (or lemon)

Preparation

1. For the crust, place 1/4 cup flour and the almonds in a food processor. Run until the almonds are finely ground, about 1 minute. Pulse in remaining one and a quarter cups flour, sugar, lime zest and salt.

2. Add the butter and pulse until a coarse meal forms. Add the egg and pulse until the dough comes together. Press dough into a disk, wrap in plastic, and chill for 4 hours or up to a week.

3. To make the cream, pour milk into a heavy saucepan and bring to a simmer. Remove from heat and stir in the rosewater.

4. In a medium bowl, whisk flour and sugar. Slowly whisk in the hot milk. Return mixture to the saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture just starts to boil, 1 to 2 minutes.

5. In a large bowl, whisk yolks until pale and thick. Whisking constantly, pour the hot milk mixture into the yolks. Return the mixture to the saucepan. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until custard is thick and smooth (170 degrees on an instant-read thermometer). Add lime juice to taste (I found it to be too sweet).  Do not let the mixture boil. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve if it looks chunky.  It may not; I don't think I strained mine in the end because it seemed smooth, plus straining custards/curds is somewhat irritating. Chill 1 hour before using or up to 5 days.

6. To bake the tart crust, first preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Roll the dough out between two sheets of plastic/waxed paper to a 3/8-inch thickness (it's very fragile).  Do not roll too thin!  Remove plastic/waxed paper and line a 9-inch tart pan with the dough; chill for 30 minutes.

7. Line the tart shell with foil and fill with baking weights/a slightly smaller pie tin. Bake for 20 minutes, then remove the foil and weights. Continue baking, uncovered, for 5 to 10 more minutes, until pale golden. Allow tart shell to cool completely before filling.

8. Spoon chilled pastry cream into cooled tart shell. Arrange berries over the top of the tart. Ms. Clark says to serve within 2 hours for the best texture; I found it to be just fine a day later.

So.  I thought that this was generally delicious, especially after I tweaked the recipe to suit my tastes.  Aside from adding a lot more rosewater than Ms. Clark indicates (about six times as much) I also decided to use lime instead of lemon.  I like fruit salads with lime, and I thought it might make for a more complex flavor than the more expected lemon.  Unfortunately I think I made my crust too thin, and it was ultimately too crispy for the consistency of the filling; next time I'd make sure to both roll it out thicker and bake it for a shorter period of time.  All these issues are really quite easy to overcome, so my one serious reservation is the number of egg yolks required.  It's not so much from a health standpoint, since one only eats so much dessert at a time anyway, as a practicality/what-will-I-do-with-five-egg-whites standpoint.  A whopper batch of macarons?  I like those, but recipes usually call for three egg whites and that already makes a large number of delicate, time-consuming cookies.  Meringue?  I hate that, so not for me.  Maybe an egg white omelet, for those who like such things?  At any rate, it's a recipe that requires both a fair amount of time to prepare and also a modicum of planning to use up the egg whites.  On the plus side, it's not a difficult recipe and the results are really beautiful and different, and would be well suited both to an afternoon tea and maybe even a dinner of Indian food (or, in my experience, fried chicken).  It's also light enough to work well in the summer but complex and creamy enough to lend itself to heavier food later in the season.  So perhaps I will give it a whirl later on this year--we shall see!

Encounters with the Pantheon in Downtown Toronto

So. It has been a really long time. I think a lot of things have happened, but I've been busy so I haven't noticed. Really, the most eventful moments have probably been in the kitchen. Oh, and the CD I released with Etherea that has been selling rather well. The digital release was on November 1st and it is available in hard-copy starting on Tuesday, the 15th. Currently we're 14 in the nation-wide "Billboard" charts and still number two (after falling from number one, which we held for a week) in the "traditional" new releases on iTunes. Ahead of Lang Lang and behind Hélene Grimaud.

Otherwise life is chugging along at its usual pace: lots of singing mixed in with some learning and then the boring "life" stuff. Halloween came and went; Ryan and I didn't do anything eventful (other than make dinner and help to hand out a little candy) because it fell on a Monday. November entered the picture and with it came the end of daylight savings. Now it is pitch dark by 5:30, which is a little sad. On the plus side we didn't get any of that pre-Halloween storm that blanketed the East Coast and the weather has been perhaps unseasonably warm. It might snow later in the week, but if it does it will probably just be a dusting. Otherwise I've been chipping away at learning La Calisto, thinking about technique, and working on some shorter assignments for school.

We have another ADP master class this Friday with the baritone Timothy Noble but luckily for me there is slightly less pressure as I'm not singing in the class itself, just in my coaching with him (we alternate, so all of us sing publicly in three classes but in private lessons for all six visiting master class artists, plus there are two extra classes this year, with Susan Graham and Ian Bostridge). I'm not sure what I'll be working on for Mr. Noble, but I've had Schubert on the brain of late so it may be some of that. My teacher recommended two songs of his to me: a short but beautiful one called "Florios Lied" (the only drawback being that about 45% of it sits on an F-natural, right in the passaggio...) and a 13-or-so minute long Blumenballade (or flower ballad) called "Viola." "Viola" is pretty awesome. It is somewhat like a giant version of the Goethe poem/Mozart Lied "Das Veilchen," but grafted onto a piano sonata or something like that. The poem (and song) alternates stanzas of storytelling with a refrain that, as one eventually realizes, rings with funeral knells for the dead violet. Per usual, the song is not so much about the different flowers of spring as it is about unrequited love. Poor Viola just gets too excited, stops paying any attention to anything but the coming of Spring, and then freezes to death. The music that falls between the refrain stanzas (there are a few strophes between each refrain) changes from strophe to strophe, with different textures and figurations in the piano reflecting the changing sentiments. It is rather nice. Highly recommend a listen.

So. I'm sure there are more things to talk about and think about, but for now I will segue to a photo essay, which will surely prompt memories...

Aha!

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far away, we made butternut squash ravioli for dinner. Ryan and Comrade J are working the assembly line:

I went to see Mlle P. in a ceremony at her school a few weeks ago because she was nominated for an award and her parents couldn't make it. Her school is French immersion, so it was interesting for me to witness both Canadian public education and also hear a little Ontario French. Here she is proudly displaying her certificate!

That Friday, after attending the ceremony, I went to the Royal Ontario Museum (we had the week off for a fall break/extra rehearsals). It is the subject of some controversy, as a prominent architect was hired to update the building and he wound up designing this "crystal" that juts out from the original facade. The museum is next door to the school and I happen to think that it looks very pretty from the outside, but I have to agree with some of the critics when I say that I'm not sure it does much for the interior. The museum is somewhat confusingly organized, with a collection that is very strong in some aspects but lacking in others. The crystal is made of big windows, as the name might suggest, but these are also blocked to prevent harmful light from damaging the collections. So, one winds up wandering amongst dinosaur skeletons in a sort of strangely white atmosphere. Not my favorite. There were some smaller collections of art of all sorts, including a few beautiful early pieces and some interesting folk art, as well as a large collection of Asian pottery. Some of the most interesting pieces of Asian work were the early "native" pottery examples, actually, not the beautifully-formed pots with jade-colored glaze. Perhaps unsurprisingly, early Chinese pottery looks a lot like Anasazi/pueblo work from the American Southwest.

One of my favorite pieces, however, was a wooden sculpture of the Virgin Mary standing with the infant Christ in a crescent moon. It struck me as oddly similar to the Artemis/Diana-Selene conflation that occurred in the post-Classical era...

The trees are less golden now than they appear here, but there are still leaves left on the branches:

Since then, I've clearly been busy with some interesting food.

On Halloween, I baked "Pane Francese," following a recipe from Mr. Hitz's book, to have with roasted vegetables and buckwheat groats:

One loaf is topped with poppy seeds and the other with sesame seeds.

I also must have made stir-fry of some sort involving zucchini, and then noticed how beautiful they are in cross-section!

Last Sunday I made a pie crust with a little whole wheat flour because apples were on sale at Economy Fruit. So, I made an apple pie augmented with some leftover Thanksgiving cranberry sauce and some almonds and oats.

Not pictured is the quiche I made later in the day with the remaining half of the pie crust. Talk about a fancy dinner! Quiche and pie! It was a good quiche. To make it less eggy, since Ryan doesn't really like eggs, I spiced it up with some garam masala. Yum!

The next night I decided I wanted to have some aioli, so I made it and lightly cooked some vegetables for dipping. It was reminiscent of some very good meals I had this summer at a friend's house! However, I was at a loss as to what I should do with the remaining egg whites. Until I decided to make French macarons: almond cookies, of course, with a raspberry-dark chocolate ganache. And they were pretty much divine. I highly recommend them. They are also apparently notoriously difficult to make but really behaved quite well. Not too tricky! I followed a recipe from Gourmet.com but made a few changes to their ganache.

Another picture, just for good measure:

A few days later I made my usual sojourn to Economy Fruit and picked up the following cornucopia-worthy items for only $6.50. The woman who works at the checkout might just actually be Demeter/Ceres. Seriously. Cere-ously.

The one drawback is that I have had to get very, very creative with the cabbage. Cabbage salad. Cabbage in couscous. Home-made falafel with cabbage. Andddd... that brings us to last night's dinner: minestrone soup.
I made vegetable stock by roasting vegetables and then made soup and bread in the evening. Here's the soup, bubbling away (before I added the cabbage):

And the bread, which was made following another recipe from Gourmet magazine involving bulgur wheat (and let me tell you... it is delicious!! I literally pulled one of the rolls out of the oven and ate it. The recipe made 12 medium-sized rolls and one medium-sized loaf):

And that, folks, is all for now. I need to spend some more time thinking about cabbage-filled recipes.

Food: Mr. Hitz's recipe for bread and psychological battery

To begin, a butterfly from the Toronto Islands (visited today and perhaps the source of a later post):

And now to the subject of the post:
I do love to cook/bake/make things in the kitchen, so perhaps one facet of this blog will be the odd--as in infrequent, though perhaps also strange--recipe. Those of you who have witnessed me in action (or know my dad's cooking) understand that recipes do not form the core of the Fitz Gibbon repertoire. My specialty, random things in a pot, generally turns out pretty well and doesn't require trips to the grocery store for extra ingredients.

Side note on random things in a pot: Dinner two nights ago. Ryan requested peanut sauce and noodles for dinner, I countered with peanut sauce and noodles on whatever cheap vegetables I could find. Enter: "Economy Fruit" and the $0.49/lb eggplant, plus the "No Frills" $1/head cauliflower. Exit: Stir fried eggplant with cauliflower, ginger, cilantro, garlic, onions, and peanut sauce/peanuts.

Anyway, there are some items for which recipes are useful, like saag paneer and cookies and bread. My mom gave me this neat bread cookbook a while ago and I made bread for myself last year. I don't eat much of it, so the whole wheat recipe I followed was perfect because it made three easily-freezable loaves and one batch lasted me each semester. Ryan, on the other hand, likes it a lot. That's good because I still like to make bread and making it more often means more experimentation. I was slightly dissatisfied with the results last year, mostly because the bread was always a bit bitter--and I don't even particularly like sweet things!--but I was rather pleased with this iteration and thought I might post it for those interested.

The recipe is adapted from Baking Artisan Bread by Ciril Hitz. The nice and also frightening thing about the book is that Mr. Hitz includes advanced techniques and explains everything very well, but he also INSISTS THAT EVERYTHING YOU DO WILL FAIL BECAUSE YOU DON'T HAVE THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS AND YOU DON'T WEIGH THEM AND YOU DON'T HAVE A SPECIAL STEAMING RACK but if you want you can do these other less-good things and maybe your bread will be okay. BUT NOT AS GOOD AS IF YOU DID IT THE RIGHT WAY! But then you make the bread, fearing the entire time that your efforts will be in vain, and in the end it's pretty tasty despite the dire warnings. Anyway, hence the psychological battery.

Once I conquer the most debilitating of my breadmaking fears, I do the following:
the night before, mix together the following ingredients in a big bowl to make the biga:
1 1/3 c. + 1 tbsp white flour
1/2 c 70ºF water
1.5*+ tsp instant dry yeast

*I say 1.5+ because Mr. Hitz wants you to use some special yeast that I don't have, and he says it will fail if you don't use it... but it won't. The only problem is the conversion isn't exact (it should be 1.56 tsp) so I fudge a little. And it still works out.

Anyway, mix it in a dough stand or get a strong spoon and combine all the ingredients. They will be sad and not want to mix together. You may need to add a little extra hot water if the flour or air is very dry. Put it in a bowl, or keep it in the bowl, coated with a little olive oil or something so that it can expand without drying out or sticking to the sides. Cover it with a dishtowel and let it sit out for 1 or 2 hours before going to bed. Press down on it to degas the dough before putting it in the fridge, loosely covered with some plastic, and wait until morning. Or tomorrow night, or whenever you have time to bake the bread itself.

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Now that it is some other time after you have made the biga, you can make the rest of the bread, which goes like this:

Take your biga
and the following ingredients, which can be altered to suit your fancy provided that the general proportion of flour to other ingredients stays the same, but which at this moment reflects the bread I made on 9/6/2011:
3.5 c whole wheat flour (at the moment I'm using white wheat, a sweeter wheat)
1 c buckwheat flour
2/3 c spelt
1/3 c flax
1/4 c honey
1 tsp instant dry yeast
3 tsp salt
2 c+ 95ºF water (I often have to add a little more than 2 c)

Mix these ingredients for a while. Mr. Hitz says to use your bread stand and mix on low speed for four minutes and medium for two minutes. I generally mix until it is combined, which will probably take a little while longer if you're doing it by hand.

At this point, add the following nuts and seeds and things (unless you don't like them, in which case you can skip this step)
1/3 c sesame seeds
1/3 c chopped walnuts
1/3 c rolled oats
and mix some more until everything is combined.

Now, make sure that your bowl has a little olive oil or something coating it and roll your ball of dough around a bit to make sure it's sufficiently moist and happy. Cover it with maybe a slightly moistened towel or something and let it sit. Mr. Hitz wants you to check that the temperature is between 75º and 78ºF using your digital thermometer. I have no digital thermometer. It will be fine. Anyway, let it sit for 45 minutes.

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Come back! Check on your bread, which by now should have risen some. Stretch it out a bit, fold it up a bit, and let it rest again for another 45 minutes. Mr. Hitz suggests preheating your oven to 450ºF at this point. That's probably not necessary.
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Now that another 45 minutes have passed, you are ready to divide your dough into two or into sizes that are sufficient for filling the bread pans that you have. Make sure they're coated with some olive oil or something, or the bread will stick. Shape the pieces of dough into loaves. Generally I tug them out until they're flatish and then roll them up a bit. Don't handle them too much, of course. If you want, you can coat them with more rolled oats. Or you can just put them in the pans. Cover those loaves again with your slightly moistened dishtowel or plastic wrap or whatever you're using and let them proof for 1-1.5 hours. (When they're ready, apparently they should recover almost--but not entirely--from being pressed gently with your fingers. This never makes any sense to me, but if you wait an hour or so, I think it will be ready.)

While the loaves are proofing, you can start figuring out the oven stuff. Mr. Hitz suggests injecting your oven with steam, which can be achieved by putting a funky cookie sheet or something in there while you're preheating the oven and placing a wet dishtowel on it when you put the loaves in the oven. This will release a lot of steam and so you should definitely be careful that you don't hurt yourself, or fall in the oven because you can't see when your glasses are fogged up. Mr. Hitz thinks you will boil your arms off. I haven't done that yet, but you never know. I'd hate to create an army of armless breadmakers by suggesting this technique, so do be careful. Truthfully I have no idea if it actually helps, but I haven't tried not including it because I worry that it is the last step saving my bread from DISASTROUS FAILURE (Mr. Hitz really gets to you). In theory, the steam should allow the bread to rise more because the crust will not form as quickly. In reality, this is a dense bread that doesn't rise much to begin with. (Maybe it's because I'm not using the special yeast? I like dense bread, though, so I don't mind.)

Anyway, put your loaves in the oven and either do or don't include the wet towel. Bake for 20 minutes at 450ºF. After 20 minutes, remove the pan with the towel and reduce the temperature to 380ºF. Bake for another 20 or 30 minutes. If they start browning too soon, try covering them with aluminum foil. If, after this last baking time, you remove the loaves from the pans and they seem like they could use an additional firming-up, you can put them back in the oven--pan-less--and bake for another five minutes. Or you can just leave them for done! And let them cool.

This bread, as mentioned, freezes quite well when wrapped in plastic. And I hope you like it! And emerge unscathed from the process.

Here are some pictures of the finished bread from the 9/6/11 batch: