Off To The Fair

 The second fair of summer fair season around here and I missed the jellies and preserves drop off date. . . so I had to make a big splash on the baking and confections day. This morning I delivered a very floral rose geranium angel food cake with rose water glaze.

I had to get up at 3 this morning to make sure this whole wheat lot had time to rise but the crust was still crisp when I arrived at the fair. Not quite seasonal, the small boat of white chocolate peppermint fudge (my old reliable by Christmas dessert/ party treat) topped with broken Hammond's candy canes was this years foray into confections. Last year I did pretty well with macadamia nut brittle so I am hopeful.

I don't think this is the kind of gingerbread the judges are expecting. In the fair handbook gingerbread is classified with quick breads and muffins but mine is really a cake -- James' favorite Christmas cake as a matter of fact. Specially for the fair I topped the moist spicy cake with dark chocolate ginger glaze and candied ginger. That might be risky, but it is delicious.

And then my old stand by, Portuguese (or Hawaiian) sweet bread. A soft light bread perfect for breakfast with jam, french toast or sandwiches. I don't know why I decided to enter sweet bread. I haven't made it in years since I started make more rustic, crisp crust breads like the wheat one I made early this morning. But something felt right and I've already taken home a blue ribbon from the season's first fair for this delicately sweet, moist bread.

MH Bread and Butter

 When we first came up to Northern California I naively thought (me and a good collection of food magazines) Della Fattoria's meyer lemon rosemary bread was just about the best loaf of bread I'd ever eaten. It's good. The wood fired crust and tender crumb make it a pretty appealing loaf and I fairly regularly handed over $6 for one to take home.
Then one day, wandering through the local market about to reach for my now familiar lemon rosemary loaf, a plain brown bag wrapper caught my eye. Rubber stamped letters simply said MH. Just when I thought I was buying the most extravagant loaf of bread in existence I came face to face with an $8 loaf of country white. The chewy crust is burnished dark brown -- black in spots. I couldn't resist the giant rustic loaf and carried my precious to the check out. I later learned I had happened down the aisle on the first day of deliveries for this new ( in 2013) bakery.
Funded as a kickstarted project, MH Bread and Butter's chief baker/ founder Nathan Yanko spent 8 years as master baker at San Francisco's world famous Tartine. Along with his wife Devon (a former personal chef and specialist in gluten free baking) Yanko founded the all-day cafe on a quiet street in sleepy San Anselmo. They serve an assortment of salads, sandwiches, soups, entrees, and of course desserts and I've been wanting to stop in since that first grocery store aisle encounter.
I finally had my chance and settled in for roasted Romano beans with tomato sauce, a poached egg and country toast. It was good -- fine -- everything coming out of the kitchen looked good. But the toast. Glorious, springy white bread with a crust so crisp it actually hurts the roof of your mouth if you bite down too hard. Order what you will, MH is all about the bread.
MH Bread and Butter's country loaf has basically ruined me for other breads. I've had French baguettes, Poilane's miche, Sullivan Street's filone, and Nancy Silverton's work before La Brea Bakery became a household word -- but my heart belongs to my new love MH Bread and Butter.

Home Baked Baguettes

Checking in on my favorite sites I wandered over to Farmgirl Fare and found a page the blogger calls Four Hour Classic Parisian Daily Baguettes. With the success of my hand kneaded sour milk farmhouse white bread the other day I was ready to try a couple more loaves. This recipe comes from Daniel Leader's classic cookbook, Bread Alone. Leader was an early pioneer in American artisan breads and in the 20 years since his first book was published he has turned countless timid cooks into confident home artisan bakers. These are my first baguettes and I can't think of a better teacher -- especially with Farmgirl Fare's photos of each step along the way.
True to their name I started out and just around 4 hours later was taking these crusty golden brown loaves out of the oven. I'm told, with a bakery on every corner, no housewife bakes her own bread in Paris. If only she knew how easy (and fun) it really is.

Sour Milk White Bread

The last of that more than expired milk turned into tender, soft, white sandwich bread. The kind of bread that elevated the classic American sandwich before Wonder and others stepped in. Homey, sweet, smooth white bread.
I wish this were my recipe. I wish I had come up with some thing this terrific, but this perfect loaf, farmhouse white, is from Susan the farmer, cook, and blogger behind the delightful rural blog Farmgirl Fare.
Kneading the dough, by hand, for the full ten minutes the recipe requires I felt frugal and smart, and strong, and capable. Now that is a great recipe.
Don't wait until your milk is sour to whip up these easy loaves.

Don't Worry About Stale Bread

It doesn't happen often but every now and then part of a loaf of bread goes stale -- too stale for toast or crostini. Usually I put it into the blender or food processor and store away breadcrumbs for my next batch of meatballs or a crispy milanese. Today I just didn't feel like more crumbs. I wanted to try something new. I've had a recipe for panade, a French casserole of vegetables and milk and stale bread, for quite some time waiting for just the right moment. No time like the present -- especially when I have half a large loaf of very stale italian bread waiting to be rescued.
First I crunched the bread up into 1/2 - 1 inch pieces, crust and all. Then I peeled a butternut squash and cut it into 1/4 - 1/2 inch slices, chopped a good bunch of stemmed black kale, and sliced part of a head of cauliflower. Meanwhile I sautéed two finely chopped shallots in 2 TB of butter, added in a quart of milk, two cloves of garlic, 6 more TB butter, S&P, and a pinch of nutmeg and brought the mixture almost to a boil. I grated two big handfuls of mimoette and Gruyere cheese (cheddar would work just as well -- I used what we had) and started to layer my panade.
Into a large dutch oven I put down a thick base of my roughly torn bread crumbs. I topped that layer with the sliced squash and about half the cheese. After a splash of half the milk mixture in went another layer of bread topped with the kale, the cauliflower and another layer of cheese. The rest of the milk covers the layers, just to come to the rim of the pot. Add some more milk or cream or even a splash of water or broth if needed to reach the rim of the pot.
I could have had dinner ready faster, but to get a custardy texture I baked my panade (covered with a rimmed pan underneath -- it will bubble over) at 275º for almost 3 hours. The last 10 minutes uncovered at 375º made sure James had a crispy cheese crust to cover the creamy interior.
A peasant dish for a cozy winter's night.

Welcome Santa: Christmas Eve 2012

 Classic Americana. Mustard brown sugar glazed ham, scalloped potatoes, lemony green beans and parker house rolls. James favorites for a cozy Christmas for two.

We don't have many traditions, but as long as I've known James I've made this unbeatable gingerbread cake every year. Flavored with hearty guinness stout,  the recipe is a specialty of New York's Gramercy tavern's (former) elite pastry chef Claudia Fleming. Fleming may have moved on to her own restaurant on the North Fork but her recipe lives on.
Christmas for two -- warm hearts and lots of leftovers.

303 And Counting

The stakes are high. Four dollars in our electoral college pool still unclaimed waiting on Florida.

Yesterday was such a busy day around here. James was out on the tractor digging in a new water tank. I was trying to get the house and dinner ready (not so easy given our muddy yard and 3 cheerful dogs) for friends coming over to watch the election returns all while ordering materials for our current landscape extravaganza and checking in on the early reports form the poles. No time to blog, but we did -- exhausted -- manage to get dinner on the table for our friends.

Oddly enough I don't have any pictures in the middle but here's where it started and how it finished. It's been a good long while since I delved into Jim Lahey's bread recipes. We so love the rosemary meyer lemon bread from nearby Della Fattoria I knew I could never compete. But I had a beautiful bag of stone ground flour I bought from a family farm in Washington state and there's no time like the present. I whipped up (if you can say that about a recipe that takes 2 days) a nice crusty loaf of whole wheat bread and set it out with delicious McClelland butter and homemade tomato bacon jam. There in the distance are our mini-appetizers -- a bowl of cayenne spiced pecans and Southern style cheese straws. I figured those were a good companion for the fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and kale salad that came later -- along with a neighborly pot of homegrown beans.

For dessert, since I still have apples on the tree, a brown sugar sweetened old-fashioned 3 layer apple cake from a recipe on marthastewart.com with a brown sugar buttercream. The frosting used egg white so I took that as a perfect excuse to make a quick batch of vanilla ice cream. James said it might be his favorite cake I'd ever made -- must be the apples right off the tree.