Saturday Baking

Doesn't it seem like as soon as the weather turns cooler you just want to turn the oven on? Well, the weather started changing around here around the middle of October and sure enough I spent two Saturdays in a row baking lovely things for breakfast and sharing. The warm sweet aromas coming out of the oven and the occasional burst of bright sunshine through the orange and red leaves makes fall a not so bad time of year after all.

Making sweets or baked goods while following a traditional foods lifestyle can be challenging for a couple of reasons. Evidence is stacking up from all sides that sugar and simple carbohydrates in refined flour are just not good for you. Sally Fallon recommends the use of rapadura, an unrefined cane sugar, instead of refined white sugar or adapting a recipe to use honey or maple syrup. These sweetners, while still very high in sucrose and fructose that can wreck havoc on all but the very most stable blood sugar levels, do contain some of the trace nutrients of the original plant material. Traditional wisdom reminds us that tempering our sweets with adequate fats can help regulate our blood sugar so I always try to include nutritious ingredients and a full compliment of butter, eggs or coconut oil.

The other problem with baking is the problem of grains. Sally Fallon teaches us that though whole grains are more nutritious than refined grains, they need to be processed properly in order to neutralize anti-nutrients and release their full potential. The usual methods for neutralizing phytates are soaking in an acidic medium, sprouting or fermenting using sourdough methods. I won't even get into gluten free baking, oy! Sprouted flour can be used in any recipe that calls for wheat flour with minimal or no changes to the process. Soaking and fermenting require completely different processes and honestly, are a bit outside my range of motion on a typical Saturday morning. I take comfort in the knowledge that white flour, though not adding much nutrition, is not removing vital minerals through the action of phytic acid. My baked goods are treats, not staples in my diet, and so I don't worry too much.

This recipe, though, circumvents most of these problems by being grain free and refined sugar free. It is based on a recipe in the great cookbook White Trash Cooking by Ernest Matt Mickler, a lovely collection of authentic recipes reminiscent of the author's childhood in rural Mississippi. The original is called Sweet Potato Pone and is a mix of baked sweet potatoes, heavy cream, molasses and eggs baked into a sweet treat. I subsituted the sweet potato for canned pumpkin and the heavy cream for coconut milk to make a healthful, easy baked treat for any Saturday morning.

Pumpkin Molasses Custard (or Pone, if you prefer)

1 can canned pumpkin (or 2 cups mashed cooked pumpkin, winter sqash or sweet potato)
1/2 can coconut milk (or 1 cup heavy cream or evaporated milk)
3 eggs (or 2, if that's all you got)
1/2 cup molasses (give or take - a big hearty glugg out of the jar will do)
spices to taste - I used 2 tsp cinnamon. Nutmeg, ginger or cloves are not out of place here.
1/2 tsp salt

Combine everything in a mixing bowl and then pour into a greased 8x8 baking dish. Bake at 350 degrees for 40 to 50 minutes or until set and browned to your liking. It really can be eaten anywhere from still a little jiggly to brown and firm so take it out whenever you just can't stand it anymore.

Serve with whipped cream, cold heavy cream, chopped nuts or just a spoon. It's very rich but very tasty.

What do you like to bake up on these cool, rainy, autumn mornings?

Breakfasts of Champions

This last weekend I made two fantastic breakfasts for myself. I love a good cooked breakfast more than just about any other meal. Omlette with goodies tucked inside, hashbrowns or homefries, bacon, sausage, ham, hollandaise sauce! I lived with a boyfriend for a while who loved cooking breakfast as much as I love eating it and we got in the habit of eating bacon, fried eggs and toast even on weekdays. Now that I'm cooking for one again I rarely do that, but I do make a point to cook a good breakfast meal at least once on the weekends. Even better is going out for breakfast! I have heard that going out to breakfast is a real Portland thing and that means I'm a real Portland girl. I love breakfasts.

The first breakfast of the weekend was a puffy omlette with wild mushrooms. A friend from work gifted me some wild mushrooms that her friend had collected. Some were unquestionably morels and I happily sauteed them up but I wasn't sure what the other was. It might have been a king bolete but as I continued looking at it and googling like a mad woman I decided that I didn't really want to eat it. It was a little past it's prime, and mushrooms are just one of those things. Oh well, the morels were fantastic.

I read about puffy omlettes on this fantastic blog I found last week called Beyond Salmon. The author talks about her dilema in teaching a cooking class focused on eggs. She wanted to use authentic french methods to cook an omlette but it turns out no one likes flat, plain french omlettes. So she asked her mom how to make a fluffy omlette. Turns out the secret is a blender. I used her method, with some dill added to the eggs and the musrhooms and Irish cheddar inside. It was fantastic!


Mushroom and Dill Puflette



1/3 cup whole milk
2 1/2 tsp unbleached flour
2 large eggs
1/4 tsp salt
A few grinds of black pepper
A pinch of dried dill
Fat for the pan - a mix of butter and oil or butter and goose fat
2-3 Tbs of sauteed wild mushrooms and onions

• Combine the eggs, milk, flour, salt, pepper and dill in a blender and blend until well combined. The original recipe calls for blending for 2 minutes, I didn't blend for anywhere near that long.
• Preheat the broiler and set a a 6 inch cast iron skillet (recipe called for a 7-8 inch nonstick skillet). Add your cooking fat and let it heat until the butter has melted and the foam subsided. I used a goodly amount, at least a tablespoon total because I was worried about the eggs sticking but if you have a well seasoned pan you just need a thin coating.
• When the foam subsides in the butter add the egg mixture into the skillet, cover the pan and cook for 45 seconds (maybe a full minute for the 6 inch pan) or until the eggs look set around the edges but completely liquid in the center.
• Uncover and place the skillet 2-4 inches away from the broiler element until the mixture is puffy and golden on top, 60-90 seconds or until it is puffy and golden on top.
• Add the filling, slide the omlette onto a plate and fold in half. The original recipe calls to "Dot with a sliver of butter, spreading it over the top of the omelette as it melts." How wonderful!

The next day for breakfast I just had simple scrambled eggs but accompanied them with a red flannel hash. Red flannel hash is a New England special of pan fried potatoes and beets with or without salty meat like corned beef or bacon. Mine had no meat but did have onion and lots of black pepper. This was really out of control good. Way, way better than I was expecting.


Red Flannel Hash


1 baseball sized beet, peeled and diced to 1/8 inch dice
2 baseball sized yellow potatoes, washed and shredded on a box grater
1/2 onion, sliced thin
salt, pepper
goose fat, lard or coconut oil for the pan

• Melt the fat in a 12 inch cast iron skillet over medium heat and add the onions and beets. Lightly salt and pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until the beets are tender.
• Add the potatoes, more salt and generous amounts of pepper. Toss and stir until well incorporated with the beets and then smoosh the mass into the pan. Continue cooking over medium heat, stirring, scraping and turning occasionally, until the potatoes are cooked through and starting to get a bit crispy, about 20 minutes. Taste for salt and pepper and serve alongside scrambled eggs or topped with a poached egg.

Breakfast really is the most important meal of the day. Making sure that it is full of good fats and plenty of protein means you don't get hungry early in the day. A good breakfast keeps you productive and healthy AND happy. What do you like to eat for breakfast? .

This post is part of the Real Food Wednesday Blog Carnival. Check out what other folks are eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner over there!

Adventures in Roommates, and Ketchup

I've lived with a lot of roommates over the years. I counted it up once and the number was over two dozen different people I have shared an address with. Generally speaking I love living with other people and I've had some awesome friends share my homes over the years. Yes, you have to deal with their dirty dishes, and their human foibles and drama but usually it's worth it.

Some of my favorite roommate memories revolve around food (big suprise there, right?). I actually met my first good friends in college because of our love of food - I smelled baking tofu in the dorm kitchen and went to investigate. I remember pigging out on one roommate's meat pie when I was still a vegetarian and pulling a red wagon full of vegetables back from the store with another. Did you know that sweet potatoes go great with black beans, or that black pepper and seasoning salt are just as good on popcorn as butter? If it weren't for my roommates I wouldn't either. One set of roommates and I enjoyed White Trash Dinner nights and perfected our Tater Tot Hot Dish recipe and our tuna noodle casserole (the tuna noodle may show up on this blog someday, but the Tater Tot Hot Dish most likely never will.)

I lived for a couple months once with the most wonderful man in the whole wide world. Eric is one of those people that everyone loves. He is generous, kind and will keep you laughing from morning till night. And if you want an adventure, just make sure Eric is around and adventure will find you. Often Eric and our other roommates would come home in the early hours of the morning after a night of adventuring and meet me as I was waking up for my work day. It was always a fun, bright start to a morning and almost always involved breakfast sammies. Bacon, egg, cheese, english muffin and ketchup... the breakfast of champions.

Eric has moved up to NW Washington to follow his bliss and I am still making breakfast sammies at least once a week. I still like my eggs overhard (yolk broken and not gooey at all, please!) but these days I'm just as likely to use sour dough as english muffins.

I also recently made my first batch of homemade ketchup. It really bumps a sammy up to gourmet status, and is much easier than I expected. OK.. it's easier to MAKE the ketchup, getting the flavors just right is going to take some time. I started with googling "homemade ketchup" and reading every recipe I could find. They're mostly the same - some tomato product, spices of some variety, vinegar and sugar. Which spices and how much sugar are often the big variables and I finally decided to go with a recipe and just try it.

I chose this recipe from Brooklyn Farmhouse, a blog I intend to spend a whole lot more time at in the future. It calls for some pretty basic spices all simmered together with the tomato product. I used tomato puree instead of whole tomatoes partly because thats what I had avaliable and partly to cut down on simmering time. In the end I tweaked the spices a litle bit and am still not 100% happy with the end result. I'm eating it, and making some seriously good sammies, but next time it will be better.

One More Homemade Ketchup Recipe

makes about 1 pint

4 whole cloves

1/2 teaspoon celery seed

1/2 teaspoon chile flakes

1 cinnamon stick (1-inch long)

2 14-ounce cans of tomato puree

1/2 a large onion, chopped,

2 garlic clove, peeled and smashed

2 teaspoons kosher salt

1/2 cup cider vinegar

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 of an onion and 1 garlic clove

*Wrap the cloves, celery seed, chile flakes and cinnamon stick in a cheesecloth bundle. Combine everything except the second piece of onion and garlic in a heavy bottomed, 2 quart sauce pan and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer for at least an hour.

*Remove the spice bundle and puree the mixture in a blender along with the second addition of garlic and onion. Return the mixture to the pot and simmer again until it looses it's "raw" flavor. Feel free to adjust seasonings and simmer longer to reach your desired consistency.

Like I said, this recipe isn't perfect. It's a little cinnamonny for my liking (the original recipe called for a 3 inch piece, I used a 2 inch, I'm saying you should use 1 inch) and there's still something not quite right. It's also a little chunky but pushing it through a sieve would have helped that as would cooking it longer to reduce the water content.

Eric would like it though, especially combined with some Secret Aardvark Sauce. He was always up for an adventure, and making homemade ketchup is truly an adventure.