Category: Personal
baking
I’ve been clearing out my stock of to-be-baked things. I’ve canned four 16oz jars of pumpkin puree and one jar of sweet potato in preparation for fall event baking. Tonight I made four mini loaves of banana bread using the pan that mom gave me for my birthday. They turned out really good. The ceramic does a good job, I’m pleased.
I also have been learning about how to make apple pie. There are a few articles on serious eats about how to select the right apples and how to make a good filling out of them and all of that. I wanted to try the filling out on its own so tonight I filled my miniature enameled cast iron dishes with sous vided apple filling and made tiny apple crumble. I only baked one and put the other three in the freezer because this stuff is supposed to freeze pretty well.
http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/10/perfect-apple-pie-recipe-double-crusted-thanksgiving-dessert.html
http://sweets.seriouseats.com/2011/10/the-food-lab-what-are-the-best-apples-for-apple-pies-how-to-make-pie.html
http://sweets.seriouseats.com/2011/10/the-food-labs-apple-pie-part-2-how-to-make-perfect-apple-pie-filling.html
The plan is to make a real apple pie but I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t going to completely screw up the filling. I’m reasonably competent with the crust now.
Anyway, it came out and was delicious but I need to not leave the lid on while it’s baking or it doesn’t brown.
concern
My sourdough starter has not been doing very well for the last couple of days. It’s supposed to be all foamy and alive and the best it manages to do is a few bubbles on the underside. It stopped smelling of vinegar but now it just doesn’t smell strongly at all. I’m going to keep feeding it but I don’t have a lot of hope at this point.
I made some pumpkin puree last night and did my first canning ever. It seems to have worked out ok. As far as I can tell the lids are sealed well and I have two 16oz jars full which is enough for two pies. But I also want to make pumpkin bread and pumpkin ice cream so I may have to do another batch. I suppose we’ll see.
sourdough starter day 4
I forgot to feed the starter this morning so it went 36 hours or so between feedings. That’s not the end of the world so I’m just continuing on. I’ve decided that it was maybe a little too wet so this feeding was 25g rye, 20g white flour, 45g water (back to 100% hydration) plus 20g starter.
I failed to ride my bike today but I did my PT homework and some laundry so I’m not a total failure. Also I met mom in San Marcos and we had coffee and made hotel reservations for the January trip and did a little shopping at the outlet mall. That’s it. Busy week at work this week probably. People are here from London and I’m supposed to be teaching someone how to use the software I’ve made.
probs
I have a problem. I am very, very bad at throwing things away. I am also not good at dealing with mail and putting things away and all of that being-a-tidy-person stuff. The public part of the house I usually somewhat tolerable because there is a small, but non-zero chance that people might visit. My office, however, bears the cost of the rest of the house being more presentable. Just look at this pathetic display.
Today, rather that do something fun, like read or get coffee or go shopping for shit I don’t need and have no way to store I started tackling the mess in the office. I estimate I made a 10-20% dent in the stacks of crap. Mostly old mail, financials statements and the like, birthday and Christmas cards, and so on. The mail is at the same time both the most difficult in that there are hundreds of individual items that need to be reviewed and the easiest in that there is little to no emotional attachment to the items and so they can be kept or tossed due to criteria like, “Will I ever have to have this if I am audited?”
There are substantially more difficult items in the stacks and boxes. However, once in a while I run across something fun. Like, for example, my first ever paycheck as an employed adult for three whole hours of work as a co-op at Cypress before I graduated and went full-time on December 26th, 2000. I never cashed it. Because I am dumb.
breakfast
I’ve been busy stocking my kitchen with silly things. I bought a cream whipper from iSi (pron. “Easy”). I got one that I can use with hot and cold preparations which will allow me to do things like custard foam / whips and so on. It’s very well made. One of the recipes on their website is Belgian waffles. However their recipe calls for a pre-made waffle mix plus wet ingredients and I ain’t about that so I just made the basic waffle recipe in The Joy of Cooking. They came out tasty but I don’t know that it’s worth the trouble to run them though the whipper. I’m thinking that in the future, it would be better to just do the yeast leavened waffles and change the butter ratio to try to get them to be a little more crispy. The whipper could then be used to make sweetened whipped cream to put on top instead of syrup which is pretty much what you’re supposed to do anyway. Also, I need a funnel for it because I got batter everywhere trying to fill the thing and I suspect that will not be the last time that happens trying to put stuff into the cannister.
The sourdough starter is a weird thing. I didn’t feed it last night. I’d like to get on a once per day schedule so I thought I’d see how it did. When I checked it last night it was a little bubbly but not as much even as the first day. This morning when I checked it it was fairly liquid and not really visibly bubbly at all. Upon opening it was less sour smelling and when I scooped out my reserve it had clearly been bubbly. I think this is the result of the additional hydration. Anyway, I fed it again this morning and I’m going to check on it at the two hour mark to see if I can smell the “sweet” smell that Robertson describes in his book. After that I suppose I need to get on with the rest of my day.
The waffle making takes a long time if you’re not in practice.
sourdough starter day 3
I decided to make a couple of changes in the starter this morning based on what I’d been reading in the Tartine Bread book last night. I did find a brief mention of what the starter smells like and the sour vinegary smell is because the culture is leaning toward acetic acid production rather than lactic acid. He says that a warmer, wetter starter will move toward lactic acid production and smell more sweet and less sour.
Previously my process looked like this:
Every 12hrs:
30g reserved starter +
30g rye flour +
30g water =
90g (30% starter)
This morning I did this
20g reserved starter +
20g rye flour +
20g KA bread flour +
45g water =
105g (≈20% starter)
This is more like the 50/50 white/wheat mix he was talking about and is ≈110% hydration rather than 100%. It’s Friday so I’m probably getting home later than usual so we’ll see how the starter gets along with an extra three hours or so of fermentation time. If everything goes ok after a day or two of this I may just go ahead and switch to the default feeding schedule in the book.
Also, in the interests of science. The house, in A/C mode, is allowed to get to 80°F and probably has the last few days.
dinner
I’ve made three meals using my fancy-ass Nomiku now. Tonight’s was the second batch of Jerk chicken. I did it at 63°C for 70 min where last night I did 64°C for 45 minutes. I also did not dredge them in flour and fry them this time, opting to just put them in a lightly oiled skillet. I should have used the non-stick skillet because they did stick pretty badly. The longer time and slightly lower temperature made the chicken come out more like a piece of fish. It was very good. I mixed it with penne pasta, a Kalamata olive pesto I made and steamed broccoli.
Also my sourdough starter is going ok. I’m not entirely sure what it’s supposed to smell like but it’s kinda unpleasant and vinegary at feeding time so I think maybe it’s going to fast. I don’t really have a way to keep it at 65°F – 70°F though so I guess that’s just how it goes.
Cooking
A while back (*cough* a year ago *cough*) I participated in the Kickstarter for a home immersion circulator for cooking sous vide called “Nomiku”. It finally showed up this week so I’ve been playing with it. I cooked a steak, broccoli and rice on Monday night and I did Jerk chicken a roasted Brussels sprouts tonight. The meats come out perfectly done. The steak was on the medium side of medium-rare all the way through and the chicken was what I would call medium/medium-well and probably could have been done a two or three degrees cooler with an extra half hour on the clock and would have been even juicier. I’ve been pretty happy with it but I have a way to go. I have learned that it is worth seasoning your meat before you bag and cook it. The steak was lacking something which I attribute to it not being salted and peppered before sous vide where I usually season the meat and let it rest for an hour or so before I grill it. The chicken marinated all day in the fridge and tasted wonderful.
Also, I got the Tartine Bread book for my birthday and it is all about the sourdough starter so I started one of those and it’s going pretty good. The dude is super serious about his bread though and it basically takes more than an entire day to go from a piece of starter to a baked loaf you can eat so it’s the kind of thing where, at best, I’d get one loaf a week for seven days of twice daily feeding. It’s worth a try though and maybe the rhythm will stick with me.
I’ve been putting the pictures of the new cooking in here:
http://thwartedagain.com/zenphoto/cooking/
When I was on my recent diet where in I got down to 160 lbs (normal!) I actually spent a lot of time baking. I didn’t really take any pictures but I made a blueberry pie and a cherry pie from scratch, some banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, some bread and some ice cream. I plan to continue with the baking so I’ll have some pictures of that at some point.
I had a pretty good birthday as far as such things go. I had dinner with a small group of friends (including the charming young lady who I have been seeing :D ) at Hillside Farmacy. The food was good and I got an egg creme soda and an ice cream cookie. I got a bottle of interesting Northeastern Italian dessert wine and a package of books from the aforementioned lady. I’ve read the first one, “The Lake” by Banana Yoshimoto and I really enjoyed it. Her style reminds me of Murakami but it is less surreal and is more concise. I think it’s interesting that characters in the Japanese books I read always seem to have their whole mental state thought out and seem to kind of passively observe their own life in first person. It’s strange. She tells me that it’s part of the Ukiyo-e tradition where the world can only be observed imperfectly through this separate layer (which the Blanton exhibit dubbed “The floating world” in the print exhibit I liked from years back) and that it is extremely common in Japanese literature. The everyday occurrence and acceptance of the supernatural and surreal is another common theme and there is a little of that in the book but not as much of that as Murakami likes to use either. Next up is a thriller / horror book and then I got a couple of silly things when I exchanged After Dark which I’d already read. Plus I have the rest of my To Be Read stack on the coffee table.
I hurt my back while exercising on my diet and ended up re-injuring it several times through bad form, muscular imbalance, lack of flexibility and not enough healing time. As a result I ended up at the Orthopedist and he sent me to Physical Therapy which I finished last week. I have been given a laundry list of PT homework that I am to do from now on to maintain my core strength and posterior chain flexibility. I’m getting better at it but it’s slow. My goal now is to complete the entire set of homework three times per week for all of October. If I can stick to that I’ll allow myself the opportunity to resume lifting in a limited and cautious aspect. Also it’s time for the LiveStrong Challenge so I’ve been riding my bike again. Oddly enough I’ve been able to keep a decent pace even though I haven’t been riding much but the rides have been short so that’s not terribly surprising. I am quite a bit lighter than I was. I think this weekend I’m going to try to do 30 miles since it’s going to be nice out.
I suppose that’s it for now. There’s been more going on but I need to be better about just putting stuff in here as it happens instead of always waiting months and then trying to cram it all in at once. Anyway, so far, so good.
normal
I suspect I’ll be back up around 170 tomorrow. Today I get a taste of things to come.