Rebuilding My Cookbook Shelf

One of the great losses in the fire was my cookbooks. Nowhere near as bad as things that could never be replaced, such as my writing, my babyhood teddybear, photos and many other personal things, but saddening nonetheless.

I read cookbooks the way most folks read novels. I had about 10 to 20 boxes of them. And well...they cooked alright!

I can't remember the vast majority of them or their titles, but here are a few of the ones I miss the most.

The Joy of Cooking

A classic on how to cook just about anything, I've used this one for everything from the Country Captain Chicken recipe that was my mom's go-to dish any time she was invited to a potluck, to how to dress a pheasant. Yes, I really had to learn that - some poor bird jumped in front of my car once, and died in my lap (I was going to try to heal it). Sad but delicious. The other big loss on this one is that I'd used it to stash family recipes in.

Local Breads

Written by the owner of Bread Alone, a bakery near where used to live in upstate NY, I was only beginning to explore this book. I recall making the Riccota Bread - soft, crumbly and delicious and one of the French breads. We were in the process of building a wood-fired oven so that I could make more use of these recipes, when we lost everything. Most of the recipes were also based on sourdough starters, and that posed a challenge for me at a time, since I didn't havhere a working refrigerator (and still don't). If you love homemade artisanal bread, I highly recommend this one.

The Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest


When I was first learning to cook, my ex challenged me to buy a "useful" book, a cookbook, instead of the novels I usually read. These two were part of the first four cookbooks to grace my shelf. While some of the recipes were a bit overly vegetarian for me, and some just didn't seem to work at all (the Enchanted Broccoli Forest is just broccoli in a bed of brown rice and swiss cheese from what I recall) these books instilled a sense of playfulness and experimentation. I especially appreciated the section (I can't remember which of the two it was in) that listed herbs and spices particular to different cuisines, so you could create a stir-fry with the flavors you wanted.

The New Basics Cookbook

Written by the folks who wrote the Silver Palate Cookbook, this was one of my favorites. I especially remember the Red and Black Bean Dips and a luscious recipe for date and green olive-stuffed chicken livers. I'd never been much of a chicken-liver lover UNTIL I got this cookbook. Their recipe for cobbler crust (I think their original was a berry cobbler, but I experimented with the fillings depending on what was fresh) was absolutely die-for. Light and flakey and oh so satisfying--and this from someone who isn't even much of a desert person. And there was a pineapple salsa that was truly amazing.

I'll share my memory of the stuffed chicken liver recipe:

Green olives, pitted
Dates, pitted
Chicken livers, cleaned
Bacon strips, cut in half width-wise
Toothpicks

Stuff a green olive into a date. Wrap the chicken liver around the date. Wrap a slice of bacon around the chicken liver. Skewer the bacon closed with a toothpick. Put on a sheet tray and keep making more till you run out of ingredients. Bake at 425 degrees until the bacon is crisp.
Remove the toothpicks. Serve as hors-de-ouvres, and don't expect them to last long. Sweet, savory, salty deliciousness!

Chinese Cookery

I hesitate to even mention this one, as it's now out of print, and I don't want you to go out and get the last copy before I have an opportunity to replace mine. This was one of the four original cookbooks that I learned from. One of the things I loved about this book were the gorgeous and instructional illustrations. Other than the family recipes I'd learned at home, I was a raw newbie at cooking. In no time, this cookbook had me doing everything from steamed rolls to dumplings, shao-mai and even de-boning an entire duck.
Some of my favorite recipes from this book were snow peas with shitakes, cold chicken and noodles with hot tahini sauce, pork with green onions and an amazing sweet and sour spicy cabbage.

More lost cookbooks to come soon.

Eggless Chicken Cabbage Bread Pudding

There's nothing like not having the ingredients you want to get you creative in the kitchen. Once again being stymied by my small pantry and a nearly nonexistant fridge has led to a genius dinner. This savory autumn dish is almost exclusively made of leftovers and is simple to make. The apples add just a touch of sweetness.

Eggless Chicken Cabbage Bread Pudding

1 lb leftover chicken meat, cooked then chopped or shredded
1/2 large cabbage, about 6 cups, roughly chopped
2 apples, cored and roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 teaspoon whole cumin seed
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups buttermilk
1 raisin pumpernickle cinnamon bagle, cubed
1/2 loaf stale Italian, French or other peasant bread (about 1/2 lb), chopped
2 cups chicken stock
1 tablespoon cornstarch
2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
Salt & pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

If your bread is extremely hard, cut it in larger chunks and soak it in the buttermilk until it becomes easier to chop, approximately an hour.

Heat a large frying pan over low heat and add in the olive oil and cumin. When the seeds just become fragrant, add in the cabbage and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Saute, stirring lightly until the cabbage is wilted. If it toasts a little that's fine - I love the crisp texture and smoky taste of slightly toasted cabbage. Add in the garlic and saute for a few moments longer, until fragrant. Add 1/2 cup of the chicken stock and let cook for two more minutes.

Pour the cabbage mix into a large mixing bowl. Add all other ingredients except for the butter and cornstarch. Stir lightly until everything is well distributed. Add in the cornstarch. By this time the other ingredients will have cooled slightly, so the cornstarch won't congeal immediately.

Butter a large baking casserole with the butter, reserving any excess butter.

Pour the cabbage/apple/bread mix into the baking dish. Dot with the excess butter. Bake this for approximately 30-40 minutes until the top is crispy and lightly browned.

Serves 4-6

More Yak Pics Today

Well we finally figured out how to get our camera working. So here are some photos for you to enjoy.

First of all here's our Pit Bull puppy Zen, intrigued by the weird noises that the camera is making.

 Zen was absolutely fascinated with the camera. I'm hoping he won't eat it. The girls were less thrilled about having their photos taken. But we managed to get some anyway. Squeaks on the other hand, hid under the bed.

 

One of our Yaks in the pasture. I think this might be Yazoo but it's hard to tell from this angle.

This one is definitely Yazoo, you can tell by the heart-shaped star on her face.

Yazoo at the fence and curious.

And our girly-girl Yazoo back in the pasture.

Here's baby Yeti-Starr munching on some hay and getting herself covered with it in the process.

Yonkers isn't thrilled when we come near. Notice the broken fence in the foreground. That's because she wanted to get at the hay.

Yonkers glowering at me from the corral.

Yonkers and Yeti off to the pasture for some grass.

In other news, Quantum has been working on making us a stone oven. The idea is that we'll use it for baking and also run a pipe from the heated area into the trailer, and maybe get some warmth! I've always wanted a brick oven for bread and pizza, so I'm completely thrilled.

My stone oven in progress.

Closer up, looking at the stone oven.

And here's a really cool stump that Quantum found while he was wandering around in our woods. We've got no idea what we'll do with it yet. Probably some kind of sculpture.

A nifty stump.

The Scent of Baking Bread

I've always loved to bake bread.  There's something wonderfully satisfying and homey about the process.  You pour mix the yeast into water, add a tiny bit of sugar or honey and the yeast comes ALIVE!  It wakes up, foams in the bowl and immediately begins dispersing delicious scents around the kitchen.  The process of kneading dough is satisfying too.  Great exercise for the arms and hands (probably just as good as any fancy exercise program at firming arms, armpits and bust) and you can get out your aggressions by thumping the dough around.  I usually find myself so much calmer after I've spent a good session kneading dough.  And of course the best part comes when the house fills up with the perfume of baking and you pull the warm crusty bread out of the oven.  I can barely wait for it to cool before I rip a hunk off and slather it with butter.

The cotton that they sell in the local stores just doesn't compare with real homemade bread.  Especially down here in Florida, where the bakery section of the local supermarket produces something with a soft, boring crust, dough with the consistency of a marshmallow and virtually no flavor.  Is it the water down here? The air? Or just a really lousy baking process at commercial bakeries? 

I remember when I was a kid growing up in New York, you could walk into the local bakery and find something a lot closer to what I can produce at home.  How I miss the wonderful hard rolls from the bakery on Richmond Terrace.  I used to pocket my bus money and walk to school instead.  I'd stop at the bakery and get a poppy-seed hard roll with a fried egg, and eat it while I walked the couple more miles to school.  Crusty, dripping with butter and soft yolk, the nutty flavor of the poppy seeds.  It was glorious.  It almost made going to school worthwhile.

So if I adore baking bread so much, why the heck, in my fifteen years of living down here in Florida, and in my six years in this condo, have I baked bread all of perhaps four or five times until recently?  Well, baking is--or at least used to be--an all day affair.  In the tiny kitchen I have here, just setting up places to knead the dough is nearly impossible.  First, we have storage problems.  Our roommate has a penchant for buying as much food as he can stuff into the kitchen whether or not we need it.  So the tiny counters are cluttered with cans and jars and boxes.  No matter how fast I try stuffing them into the pantry, it's a growing pile.  Which means that any cooking project must first be a clearing project.  Then there's the fact that I rarely have a full day to devote to kneading bread and watching it rise.  And maybe it's the humid air, but getting dough to the right consistency is nigh impossible.  You set up the yeast and wait for it to rise, then you mix in the flour and spend an hour or two kneading and pounding the dough into the right consistency.  It should feel like an earlobe when you're done.  I could swear that in the past it's only taken 15 or 20 minutes of kneading.  Maybe it's the humid Florida air, but I can never get the dough correct with less than an hour's work.

But this last Christmas my wonderful husband, Quantum gave me a miracle gift.  A KitchenAid Professional 600 Series 6-Quart Stand Mixer

I've been drooling over the ones they have on Iron Chef and all the other Food Network programs.  Now I actually OWN one!  Okay, I don't get to knead the bread by hand.  (But at an hour or more per loaf of bread, I'm NOT complaining!)  Even though I desperately wanted one, I'd been putting off the purchase, telling myself that other purchases were more important.  I'd been content to think that SOMEDAY once we moved, we'd get one.  Quantum, however, thought "someday" wasn't soon enough.  Mine is onyx black.  It comes in other colors--the Iron Chefs have a red one--but I've always been partial to black appliances, silly goth chick that I am.

Here's what's so cool - this baby does all the work!  I put the yeast and water in the bowl, let it rise, go check my email.  Fifteen minutes later I go back and add in the flour, attatch the dough hook (ah! the wonder that is a dough hook!) turn the speed on 2 (funny, I've never really needed any other speed except for whipping eggs or cream) and let the divine machine do its work.  While I pack boxes for my move, or read my favorite forum, the mixer kneads the dough to perfect consistency.  Ten or fifteen minutes later, I turn the dough into an oiled bowl, let it rise for an hour or so (while I again go back to other work) then shape the dough on a flat cookie tin, pop it into my preheated oven and voila! the house fills with the scent of baking dough and soon thereafter we have warm crusty goodness to spread butter or honey butter on, or top with roasted peppers and chopped pine nuts or something equally decadent.

Since my mixer has its own place on the counter, I no longer have to clear a space for my work.  Although I am no longer getting the exercise benefit of kneading dough in this miserable damp climate, the fact that we have yummy bread any time we want, certainly makes up for that.  And I'm probably saving money too.  After all, a 5lb bag of flour costs about the same as a loaf of bread, and makes about 4-6 more times as much bread.  Good bread, not that nasty cotton I can buy at the store.  Meanwhile, cleanup is a dream.  It takes about two minutes tops to wash the stainless bowl and the dough hook.  The mixer does most of the work by scraping the bowl clean in the kneading process.  That, contrasted to my previous 20 minutes to clear a space, then another half hour or more to clean up the flour dust left from kneading.  In the four months since Quantum got me the mixer, I've made bread more times than I have during the rest of my entire life! 

Its fabulous for other baking stuff too.  The other day I made some delicious Zucchini Bread, and as soon as I've got my garden started, I'll be making Zucchini Bread all during growing season, no doubt.  We also bought an Ice Cream Maker Attachment (yum!) and a Food Grinder Attachment and Sausage Stuffer Kit and I'll tell you about our experiments with those in another post sometime soon.

Honey Sage Butter:

1/2 lb (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1 bunch fresh sage leaves
several tablespoons honey, to taste
a pinch of salt

Leave the butter out of the fridge to soften slightly.  Mince the sage and very lightly sautee with a tiny bit of the butter, until slightly toasted and fragrant.  Put all the items into your mixer, use the whisk attatchment and run on Speed 2 for a minute or two.  Pack the butter into a bowl, or wrap it in plastic wrap like a sausage.  Return it to the fridge and let it harden (it will be a bit softer than normal butter) and use as desired.  Use it to slather across your fresh, warm homemade bread, on toast, or dot it onto a chicken and roast.

Check out the KitchenAid Professional 600 Series 6-Quart Stand Mixers
Coffee Press