Notes from my kitchen, in which I bake bread and raise a few other matters
I’m going to make this short and sweet. These are my flaxseed grissini:
Because flaxseeds are good for your brain, the recipe got to appear in this cookbook:
You can also find the recipe here.
You can enter to win a copy of the book, thereby getting all 50 brainy and beautiful recipes from 50 brainy and beautiful bloggers, by leaving a comment below.
I have a lemon tree in my front yard. At least I now know that it is a lemon; when I moved in, the fruit was nothing more than tiny green nubbins, and because all citrus foliage and baby fruit are indistinguishable from all other citrus foliage and baby fruit, it was anybody’s guess what I had. As they grew, I first thought they were limes because they were green and lime-shaped (see the logic there?), but then they rounded out and I was sure they were oranges.
But damned if they didn’t turn out to be lemons (very round lemons, but most definitely lemons), and this is a good thing, because it is hard to have too many lemons. I suspect that when the tangerines on my other front-yard tree ripen in a week or two, I will be thinking I have way too many tangerines. Even though I love tangerines, you can only use so many. But lemons are one thing you can never have enough of.
This is especially true this month, when 1) we have all that holiday baking that calls for candied peels, 2) the stores are probably sold out of it by now, and 3) the stuff you buy in the store is swimming in way too much syrup anyway. It’s much better, and almost as easy, to make your own.
I get a lot of emails asking me to spend my money, but rarely do I get one asking me to spend someone else’s money. So when BlogHer and HomeGoods offered a $50 card for me to spend on gifts, they didn’t have to ask twice. And letting me give away a second $50 gift card to one of you made the deal even better.
In my family, Thanksgiving is not the only important November celebration. My mom and my niece have birthdays one day apart, and this year the party called for cheesecake.
This is a creamy, melt-in-your-mouth kind of cake with a traditional graham cracker crust, adapted from the one we made at SFBI. The topping was inspired by this one at Epicurious.
I’m not a cheesecake expert, but here are a few tips I’ve learned that have helped mine be better:
This is the recipe I said I would not post. At least, it’s the recipe for the cranberry bread I’ll be serving for Thanksgiving this year.
Three years ago I wrote (and re-posted for the two years following that) about why I never changed Thanksgiving dinner, why it had been the same reliable cranberry bread for years (along with the same turkey, the same stuffing, and the same potatoes), and would be for years to come. It was the recipe from the back of the bag of Ocean Spray cranberries; you could get it there if you wanted it, and I wasn’t about to go messing with it.
So this year, I messed with it, a little. Added some whole wheat flour. Took away some sugar. Made the loaf a little bigger. Converted everything into grams because that just feels better to me. Call it fine tuning.
In the scheme of things, it’s not that big a deal. And by the scheme of things, I mean that for the past year — and for the first time ever in my life — my household has consisted of just me. Throw a new home, graduating from baking school, and becoming adept at toilet repairs into the scheme, and messing with a cranberry bread recipe is just not that big a deal.
It’s all good, because even really fine, reliable traditions can use a little fine tuning every once in a while, and even really fine lives can withstand some major turbulence. Because even when the bread changes, the house changes, the life changes, and the plumbing breaks, I still have so much to be thankful for. (And if it makes anyone feel any better, I didn’t change the stuffing recipe at all.)
Have a beautiful Thanksgiving, everyone!
This month it was my turn to lead the Bread Baking Babes into battle, and I wanted to do something to celebrate Thanksgiving, the holiday that many Americans consider our most important. I’ve also been wanting to experiment with dough sculpture, so I asked the Babes to make a cornucopia, a symbol of bountiful harvest and giving thanks, from slightly-yeasted decorative dough.
The light and dark dough recipes are adapted from Jeffrey Hamelman’s excellent book, Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes. Hamelman also gives instructions for creating a woven version of the cornucopia, but I opted for a simpler rope-winding method. Some of the other Babes chose to weave, and the results are spectacular.
