What Am I? Homemaker.

It is a very contemplative day, being Easter and all. I spent most of the week strangely ill, hoping the near full week I spent without cooking at all would completely heal the last of my wounded hands. When complete recovery finally hit yesterday, I felt aptly renewed, a fresh appreciation for good health. I felt a new determination to be thankful in my everyday life, even as things seem to crash and fall around me with strange and strategic frequency lately.

I feel floundering, unsure (as I've mentioned before) of my place in my world, what to do with myself that is most beneficial to others and also makes me happiest. As I munched this cookie last Sunday after a Chinese lunch with my Parents, I couldn't help but wonder when this statement might possibly come true.

It wasn't until I sat here at the computer, looking over the photos I've liked this week - which weren't many since I barely ate at all - that I realized that I have regularly written things into this space now since April 8th of 2009, three full years of near spontaneous foods that have sprouted, risen and baked off into what I have regarded as my profession. A profession that has yet to pay a single cent, but one that has made me a better baker, a better cook, a full-fledged preserver, and a decent communicator in an online environment that prior to CakeWalk, I could never have imagined.

I'm not sure if it's my age ticking away that makes me wonder about the past with such frequency, the tickle of retrospect that whispers near constantly in my ear if I would have just done one or two little things differently that my whole life would be different. If I had only known that I loved food so much at 20ish years old then maybe today I'd know how to make a Bearnaise sauce, indeed all of the French sauces, off the cuff, and maybe I would know what to actually do when presented with meat, other than to slow cook it or most likely overcook it in a cast iron pan. Maybe my early mornings would be met with vats of dough, shaped and baked in my own steaming deck oven, round lumps of world-flavored bread emerging, goldened from my work visas to Italy, France, and the Middle East.

Yesterday I cast my votes in the supremely fun Saveur Best Food Blog Awards, and I read all of the blog posts in the category for Best Piece of Culinary Writing. They were all wonderful. Distinct voices of people who were grounded in their lives, having come to a point of "where-they-are-ness" that I really have not. While my internal voice seems to shiver, shirk, or shout depending on the variance of foodstuff or music listened to while writing, I do maybe know a few more things about myself since starting a food blog and they are:

• If I were in a professional kitchen, and if my hands were miraculously healed and I could do it without tearing skin and fingerprints from my digits, I would be perfectly happy being a dishwasher or a line cook. More than inventing and being ever-amicable, I know now that I am most happy serving people, working hard, cleaning thoroughly and with an eagle-eye, and hopefully being well appreciated in the process.
  

• If I had endless money, I would buy cheese without ever glancing at the price. I would drink stellar wines, the ones that bring a tear to my eye when the unbelievable scent of it gets even the nearest proximity of my nose. I would finally find an olive oil that knocked my socks off and I would make mayonnaise with it. I would buy a truffle because few things in life could rival it. (And for the record, and since I kinda need a car, I'd get a Fiat Abarth, which my current car crush and is only *slightly* more affordable than the Audi R8.)

• I never want to write a cookbook, but I want to help you write one if you make food that I love. Call me a ghost, or call me your right hand man, it would make no difference because what little recipe testing I have done confirms that I absolutely love helping someone do something passionately important to them, spinning off ideas and hopefully adding to their inspiration.

• I would much rather eat simple food at home or at your home, than luscious, well prepared food out. I do love fine dining, but it intimidates me and I'm not sure why. It could be in part because my minuscule appetite can't ever live up to course meals, and I often feel full for days. I also own next to nothing decent to wear - that isn't really a stretch either.
  

• If I could really understand only one thing in my kitchen life, it would be the bread. I want to know what makes it really live, how to figure out baking percentages in split seconds and how to judge weather, time and flours accordingly. I want to know how to make it adapt to wherever I am, so I could bake while traveling without much fuss. I want to know why it seems like whenever I feel confident in my bread, my bread changes the rules and makes me feel sophomoric in my bread making once again.

• I write best on deadlines, and when a specific idea is involved. Not maybe on this personal food blog, but in general anyway.

• If you ask me to do something for you, I will do it. Sometimes even if I'm not sure at first if I want to.
  


• I have a hard time accepting money for things I love to do. Related: I have a hard time charging for things I love to make.
  

• If you push me to do something out of my comfort zone, I will do it. (I'm winking at you Deena.)

My years writing this blog seem like instrumental ones. As I sat uploading the last picture of nopal trimmings that I simmered for a salad tomorrow, my now 5 1/2 year old son sat across the table from me with a candy cane pen and paper writing notes that he cut out and folded in half. The one he walked over to me simply said MOM in big letters across the top, with two stick figures, one big and one little. The little one is missing any trace of hair, but the face was perfectly nuanced with just eyes, nose and smiling mouth is looking upwards, one thin stick arm holding hands with mine.

I blinked back tears actually, looking at it - thinking how obsessed I've been lately with figuring out what I should do with myself but realizing that I am doing a good job of doing what I have been called to do. Making peanuts into peanut butter, taking time to Lego, too many things to count actually, that knit closely together into a pattern of years that somehow feel both gone in an instant and stretching out for forever simultaneously.

Will I garner fame and fortune or just money for groceries and cookbooks as a result of this work of CakeWalk? Not sure. Fortunately, I am in good supply of Artistic reminders that I am where I should be, and I do what I should be doing. I make, I eat, I occasionally mend and repair. I cook, bake, ferment, wash, dry, fold, organize, shovel, hoe, mow, walk, hug, kiss, drive to school. I write.

For the upcoming 4th year of CakeWalk, I'll likely tackle more of the same traditional, real foods I've become so fond of, along with plenty of bakery to be sure. But I'll also try to make a better effort to be reminded that whatever job I'm doing is the right job at the right time. My profession right now isn't really food blogger or writer, it's homemaker. I'm just a homemaker who happens to love making or trying to make it all myself, and sometimes I need to remember that a little help or a shortcut isn't a bad thing.

Dutchie Crust: Daring Baker Challenge March 2012

Sara and Erica of Baking JDs were our March 2012 Daring Baker hostesses! Sara & Erica challenged us to make Dutch Crunch bread, a delicious sandwich bread with a unique, crunchy topping. Sara and Erica also challenged us to create a one of a kind sandwich with our bread!

Our San Franciscan hosts call this crispy, crunchy bread Dutch Crunch, but in Milwaukee we call it Dutchie Crust. I actually never had any rolls of this type until I met my Husband and his family, and was introduced to Canfora Bakery just down the road from our house. Canfora is a "European" style bakery, and I do confess that I feel no guilt in the occasional purchase of hard rolls from them. They are fluffy and soft inside with a thin, brittle crackling crust - and I couldn't help but want to compare this month's challenge to them.

I followed the provided recipes for both the rolls and the topping, although I'd like to experiment more with this topping, perhaps even on a sourdough roll. It is made primarily of rice flour, which I ground from white rice in my VitaMix. I haven't ever purchased any rice flour, but homemade rice flour never quite loses the trace of grit you would expect from a hard, brown or white rice kernel.

The rice flour is mixed with yeast and water, a little sugar, oil and salt and left to sit for about 15 minutes before "painting" the tops of the risen rolls. It is thick, and I used my hands to almost mold it to the tops of rising bread. The bread dough recipe itself was a pretty standard roll recipe, and the heavy rice topping seemed to make them flatten out a bit, even though they were rising fine. Not a bad thing, and they would probably make a good torta or sandwich roll (I dug through my frozen leftovers and found some pork and cabbage from December that I heated and thickened with a little flour. It wasn't picturesque, but it was tasty.)

The topping made the rolls a bit gritty to eat, though the interiors were soft and pleasant enough. (My Husband picked out the filling and ate it alongside his meal...) I found them ok, in part because I was comparing them to the Dutchie crust rolls from down the street, and in part because the topping literally left a bad taste in my mouth.

I consulted Fany Gerson's recipe for conchas, and noticed that the topping uses flour and baking powder - the same type of topping I believe my Rhode Islander father-in-law said they used on top of the Dutch Crust rolls he made when he worked in a Portuguese bakery when he was young. Gerson's recipe has quite a lot of sugar, presumably because conchas are really a pan dulce, or sweet bread. But I may be on to something if I begin to experiment with it.

I'll be sure to write an update when I try again to master the mysteries of the Dutchie Crust roll, Meanwhile, be sure to check out the Daring Baker blogroll to find other variations on the challenge this month.

Mango Jam with Cayenne and Black Pepper

It may be safe to say I'll never make another jam without adding some chile peppers to it. I'm addicted. I'll even go as far as to say that I like jam better when it has a hint of the other side of sweet, an afterthought of calm warmth in my mouth. This morning when I woke up earlier than normal (after going to bed much later than usual), instead of feeling groggy and somewhat fuzzy, I felt invigorated and inspired.

My hands are on the mend, and after cleaning up a few dishes from a small dinner party last night I turned to the mangoes that were meant both for mango lassis and frozen storage for future smoothies. All of a sudden, I found a pot of jam on the stove and an excellent breakfast in my belly comprised of mango pits gnawed as clean as cobs of corn.

Mangoes appear to be perfectly in season, and I say this purely based on flavor and not any previous knowledge of when exactly a mango tree is actually prolifically in season. Mangoes are also dirt cheap right now, and armed with the previously culled and stored knowledge that they are a fruit very sensitive to pesticides (and thus rarely sprayed), I usually enjoy the non-organic variety of this fruit. I commonly see the larger, human-heart sized blushing green variety I presume come from Hawaii, but when I find good prices on the smoother fleshed, slender yellow "champagne" mangoes, I get really excited and sometimes go overboard on purchasing them. They taste like exotic peaches, impossibly smooth and slippery in your mouth, and completely without the fibrous tendencies of the more common mangoes. They are mango sophisticates.

I had a couple of varieties of mango already in my possession, and the jam bug hit as I began cubing them up for the freezer. Last week, I moved a jar of cayenne peppers I had dried from my garden last Summer, and I figured mango jam would do well to include that deep, red friend. I also used a combination of orange and lime juices, predominately because I didn't have more than a single lime. I made the most of it by zesting it and including that zest towards the end of the jamming stage. Multiple spoonfuls of boiling jam pot goodness, and this image of Tigress's pepper spiked preserved kumquats, had me also reaching for the pepper grinder...

Mango Jam with Cayenne and Black Pepper (inspired by Linda Ziedrich, Hungry Tigress)

my yield was 3 half pints and 1 3/4 pint jars

• 2 lbs. mango, peeled and diced
• 2 cayenne peppers, stemmed and roughly chopped (I left the seeds in)
  
• 1 lime, zested and juiced
• enough juiced orange to equal 1/2 c. when added to the lime juice
• coarsely ground black pepper to taste,
  
• 3 c. (574 g.) sugar (I used raw sugar)

Combine the mangoes, cayenne peppers, lime and orange juices in a preserving pot and cook gently over medium low heat until the mangoes soften and are tender. After they have softened, mash lightly with a masher then add sugar. (Taste, and if it isn't hot enough for you, add more cayenne pepper or powdered cayenne pepper.)

Increase the heat to medium, stirring frequently to make sure all the sugar has dissolved. When sugar has dissolved, raise the heat to medium high, add several grinds of coarse black (tellicherry) pepper and boil until a spoonful of jam mounds up when placed on a chilled dish. Stir in the lime zest.

Ladle jam into sterilized and still hot jam jars (use pint, 3/4 pint, or half pint jars), and process for 10 minutes in a boiling water bath.

mixed app iPhone pic homage to Tigress...

This chile spiked mango jam has a nice soft heat balanced with peachy sweetness. I can't wait to eat it on grilled cheeses and with cheese (which is my new favorite way to eat jam, I think). It may make a nice seltzer drink, or when thinned, a terrific sauce for vanilla ice cream or a topping for some rich, creamy cheesecake. Half the fun of making a new jam is deciding what to lop spoons of it onto!

My idea of jam making has changed so much in the past few years. I used to think that I could only make jam with fruit that I'd grown myself and in huge batches - probably reminiscent of the way my family preserved jam when I was growing up. Thanks to so many small-batch preservers, I've made stellar little 4 jar experiments with supermarket fruit that have slyly surprised me with their deliciousness. I've grown bold, adding herbs and spices to things I'd never considered, thanks to so many of my favorite preservers - maybe I will make it my 2012 mission to add chiles to everything I pop into jars.

Ain't it Funny how Time Slips Away...

I was a little too young for thirtysomething, but think of that term, pop culture, and my current age all the time recently. At some point, I became more the "I'm in my thirties" type, rather than a specific age, and I'm not sure when that happened or came to be. I'm also unsure how by magic I turned from child to parent, and how and when exactly my parents went from being my parents to also being my friends. I wonder all the time if the reason blogs are so prolific and interesting is because people my age, people who know what Snorks are, are hungry for the past, and for the first time they are fully aware of how lightening fast a lifetime will go.

A picture of my Gram hangs in my kitchen. It's a colorized photo of her smiling, sometime in the early 40's when she was a young girl. I must stare at that picture every single day for several minutes, wondering how that young girl became a strong, single parent and wondering how she worked so much and still had the time to make daily loaves of bread for her 5 children.

As often as my hands make their rhythm in the kitchen I think of hers and what they produced, and I think of her even more lately because of my skin ailments. I have inherited a lot of traits from her, and my sensitivity to my environment is just one of them. As I've nursed my swollen, horrible hands this week, I've thought of how continually thankful she was for everything, and how no one ever heard her complain about physical pain. I unfortunately did not inherit that quiet demeanor, but in a way, I feel like the way she handled difficulties in life inspires me to want to be strong in the same way. To be gracious and appreciative of every moment rather than sour and downhearted when I can't do what I'd like due to physical constraints.

Working entirely encased in foodservice gloves, I kneaded my way around a loaf of sprouted wheat bread yesterday. I haven't really been doing too much in my kitchen, and it makes me feel lost and unneeded. I read through the rest of Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads book, and felt only enough gonzo to sprout some hard wheat berries to make a 100% sprouted bread. I knew when I only let the wheat berries soak for about 16 hours and not properly "sprout" that I may be setting myself up for a dense loaf, but I was impatient both for sprouted bread and the feeling of empowerment that making bread gives me. And, Peter did say that soaking the grain overnight, draining and then waiting just a few hours should afford the grain enough time to sport tiny tails - and if you ask me it does look like my grain had a hint of tails.

This is a straight-dough method, commercial yeast bread with no added flour. The dough is made by grinding newly sprouted grain into a paste - something that caused my first ever VitaMix overheating. This is some heavy duty dough! I don't have a meat grinder, but I can borrow one from my Mom, and I think I will when I decide to try this bread again. Not that I was entirely unhappy with my dense result.

My childhood was such an amazing time, and I'm lucky to have so many food memories that I wouldn't know where to start. When this loaf came out of the oven at 1 1/2 lbs. of dense, near-brick stature, I immediately thought of my Eastern-European roots and the near black Baltic Rye bread that my great aunt used to migrate up from Chicago on summertime visits. That bread seemed to keep forever, and I remember eating it sliced wafer thin at my Great-Grandma's, my Gram's and at our own house. Stored in plastic and in the refrigerator, this was a tangy, rich bread that you would eat with cheese or finely sliced, cured meat and that is exactly what texture my bread took on. It may be that I didn't let it rise enough, didn't provide the dough a thorough kneading, was too quick to grind my sprouted wheat, or didn't grind it smooth enough... but all of the mistakes coupled with painful hands made a loaf of bread I'll enjoy every slice of myself.

it's toothsome.

I'm keeping it in plastic and in the fridge, and I'm able to slice it at a mere 1/4 inch or thinner with a chef's knife, and it makes me long for Summer Sausage which seemed to be a rare treat we gobbled up when I was a kid. At the time, I thought we could only get Summer Sausage in the Summer, and maybe we only did when big city relatives were visiting and mosquitoes were biting, and we all spent so much time together that it makes for stellar memories as a certain someone is approaching the other side of 35.

When I was growing up, old people seemed different than the older people I know now - I'll bet they will seem really different than the people I'll likely know when I'm officially old myself. Maybe nobody I know, including me, will retire Cocoon-style to Florida. Maybe the senior housing of the 2050's will be rocking out to Pearl Jam and Pantera and nostalgia t.v. networks will be long running marathons of the A-Team, Airwolf, and Simon and Simon. I guess time will tell, and hopefully I'll be healthy enough to avoid both assisted living and the pitfalls of too much television...

Meanwhile, I'm storing up new memories and trying desperately to be happy with these flawed hands that prevent me from working in the dirt, kneading the dough as I'd like. I'm trying to be comfortable with my increasing age for the first time in my life, trying to embrace the multiplying numbers of long silver hair that seem so noticeable to me but strangely to no one else. And if I feel like singing out loud in the middle of the day, I have made the time and space in my kitchen comfortable enough to do so. I will love the things I love now as much no matter my age and ability, and I pray that I'll just be able to keep the time from running through my (hopefully healing) fingers too quickly.

Dinner's in the Fridge.

I don't know how to eat lately. Sudden and early Spring with near-Summer temperatures have me thoroughly confused. I feel as if I've channeled my inner European and have taken to eating larger than normal lunches; when the dinner hour approaches, I find I'm not really hungry at all. There is also this thing called March Madness that prohibits me from really scheduling anything that takes my Husband longer than about a half-time to eat, if he eats at all. But it's all fine with me. I like eating little meals, and I also like cooking a little something out of nothing - a good challenge to use up odds and ends in the refrigerator.

Lately I've also been concerned that something I eat is making my skin issues worse. I occasionally have eczema on my hands, usually a condition that only appears under stress and with too much water or overuse. During this particularly awful episode, I am re-examining every morsel that enters my mouth. That is no fun, but on the bright side I have a whole host of new ideas about using food as medicine, and renewed empathy for those who suffer with food allergies.

My worst fear is that wheat or gluten is the culprit of my discomfort. For the past few days I have been diligently avoiding my bread, who sits neglected on the counter, a prisoner under a glass dome. I don't think that gluten is my issue fortunately and, maybe a bit prematurely, have started a new loaf of whole wheat sourdough this morning. The combination of using up the contents of my fridge and my subtle, perhaps unfounded, fear of gluten did lead to this little casserole that I baked efficiently in my toaster oven last night:

When I don't have to worry about my Husband for supper, I feel like I have free reign to make whatever my heart desires. While I classify him as a picky eater, he does surprise me with his likes and dislikes. On the likes list: kale, intestines, and raw fish of all types. On the dislike list: fennel, carrots, and squash of all types. These are abbreviated lists of course, but as a person without any food aversions (except raw cuddlefish, I ate it badly prepared once and had to spit it out), I find it sometimes frustrating to say the least.

Take polenta for example. I really love it, but texturally it's something my Husband can do without. Generally I avoid making it altogether since I don't like eating leftovers for a week. Rummaging through my cupboards yesterday, and noting how they could do with some Spring cleaning, I couldn't get my mind off a quart jar of polenta stashed in the back of my pantry. When I saw a half gallon jar in the fridge filled with more bean pot liquid than beans, and a few tablespoons of sorry looking mango salsa from earlier in the week, I figured dinner was served.

I cooked a 1/4 c. of polenta in the traditional way and spread it into a buttered tiny casserole dish that usually holds my measuring spoons, corn on the cob picks, other kitchen odds and ends in the silverware drawer. I tossed the leftover pintos with cumin, Mexican oregano and chile powder (despite pangs of guilt I wasn't going all out and using whole chiles as I was reminded in this lovely article - but I was going for ease...), and spooned them over the polenta. I mixed my sorry looking mango salsa, complete with edible but totally browned avocados, with a few spoonfuls of canned tomato salsa, and then grated the last of a block of cheddar cheese which I figured would be the best bet for using up odds and ends. I meant to add candied jalapenos to the layer of polenta, and I meant to defrost a little frozen corn, but for about 5 minutes of actual work, this simple one-dish supper was pretty good!

For lunch today I'm planning to have another slice, rewarmed and topped with a poached egg, and maybe crowned with some super hot sauce that I keep forgetting I should use up (oh, and a scoop of cilantro raisin chutney). Then, I'll maybe clean out the fridge some more and see what other little meals may be birthed out of the leftover chaos that often exists there.

But I'll not give up my bread just yet, especially when working more with whole wheat flour, and a higher hydration dough... I haven't been this excited about wild yeast for quite a while. I've also been reading Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads book, which also makes me itchy (pun possibly intended) for new experiments. Real bread has become such a staple part of my life that living without it seems hollow. I don't realize how much I depend on it, long for it, transform it to my needs. I romanticize it to be sure, but it is beguiling and I know when the weather changes and I'm mentally calculating how that affects my rising times that I indeed have the soul of a baker. Any leftover, refrigerated project tastes better on a slice of bread!


Update:

(I think I liked it even better topped with an egg...)