A Little Something

Applesauce

We bought lots of extra apples at the farmer's market so I could make applesauce. Homemade applesauce is a most simple, delicious, warm, homey, nutritious snack - perfect for fall. Being a lover of quality kitchen gadgets and also of tasty homemade food, my dear husband granted my wish for a food mill. I am now the very happy owner of the Oxo Good Grips Food Mill which makes applesauce super easy.

Wash the apples and chop them with a handy dandy apple slicer - you don't need to peel or core the apples - I love that. Put about an inch of water in the bottom of a large pot and throw in all the apple pieces. Bring to a boil then lower the heat and simmer, covered, until apples are cooked through. Mine took about 40 minutes.

 

Then run the apples through the food mill. The Oxo lives up to its reputation of comfortable, easy to use kitchen gadgets. It takes a lot of turning to process the apples, but it's very fast and easy and the comfortable spinning rubber knob makes it a breeze.

 

Stir in a spoonful of cinnamon if you like.

 

We enjoyed our applesauce warm for lunch with cheese and crackers. My big stock pot of apples cooked down to about five quarts of applesauce, and by the end of the day it was all gone. I would like to make more and maybe freeze some for the winter - we'll have to see if the next batch 'evaporates' as fast as this one did. 

Homemade Buttermilk

 

I use a lot of buttermilk in our daily baking as it gives my baked goods a nice bright flavor and a pleasant light texture. Just yesterday I made a batch of my corn muffins using regular milk as I had no buttermilk, and today I made a batch with buttermilk and they were noticeably better. My scone recipe also calls for buttermilk (recipes for corn muffins and scones are on my Cheat Sheet), and buttermilk is notoriously good for pancakes, waffles and biscuits. Cultured milk may also be more beneficial health wise than regular milk.

On a recent trip to the grocery store I realized that at $2 a quart, buttermilk costs twice the price of regular milk. But it is very easy to make at home, so I have been making my own. Basically, you use a small amount of purchased buttermilk as your starter culture, mix it into your regular milk, and let it sit until it's done. It's much simpler than making yogurt as it sets up nicely at room temperature so you don't need any special heating source or equipment.

Start by washing your chosen container in hot water to be sure it is clean. I use a glass pitcher, adding about a third of a cup of cultured buttermilk (I don't bother to measure) and filling the rest up with fresh milk. I've been using whole milk and it turns out very good. I give it a stir to mix it up and then cover the pitcher with plastic wrap. Then I just let it sit on my countertop. It takes about 12 - 36 hours to set up. When it looks nice and thick it's done and I move it to the refrigerator.

 

Then I just save a bit at the end to use to start a new batch. I do wash the pitcher out between batches. (Obviously if you end up with milk that looks or smells off you might have ended up with some sort of stray bacteria or contamination, but I've never had that happen.)

A Word About Flour

 

With the current economic climate everyone seems to be tightening their financial belts, ourselves included. Feeding a family of nine is no small business so I've been paying more attention to prices looking for ways to trim the food budget, trying to be a better steward of our family's resources. With food costs skyrocketing along with everything else, we had this conversation in our home some time ago:

me: Do you think we should try using store brand flour? It's cheaper.

him: Why would you do that? Don't you always get King Arthur flour? How much different can the price be - just get the good stuff.

me: Well, the store brand is $1.66 for five pounds and the King Arthur is $3.99.

him: Oh! Why don't you try the store brand?!

And so I did. I ran out of sacks of King Arthur and replaced them with the store brand of both unbleached white and whole wheat. At less than half the price it seemed like a reasonable switch. The whole wheat was very different, and I noticed I needed to add more liquid to most of my recipes to make up for the different consistency. (Note: All of my recipes here on my blog calling for whole wheat are based on 'King Arthur white whole wheat' and you may need more liquid if using another brand, particularly for yeasted breads.) I resisted (mostly) the temptation to call the new flour sawdust, despite its coarse, flaky appearance and tendency to slurp up so much liquid. I also determined that I would not complain about the new, um, heftiness of our daily bread but instead just think of it as hearty whole wheat. I chose to avoid mentioning all those adjectives that came to mind such as chewy, toothsome, heavy, dense, bitter... We were saving lots of money and that's what mattered.

And then I found it.

Hidden away in the back of a pantry shelf was a long lost and forgotten sack of my favorite King Arthur white whole wheat. As soon as the sawdust store brand wheat was gone I opened the beloved sack and made some scones. One bite of that delicious sweet and mellow flavor, the look of that beautiful golden goodness and I knew I could never turn back. Everything tasted brighter and lighter, my yeast bread was the right size again, my scones were back to the right consistency, our cookies no longer resembled hockey pucks...

We've since made other cuts in our grocery bill - we've switched to store brand orange juice and stopped buying yogurt in little cups and things like that. We figure we already save so much money by making all our bread, cookies, muffins and all that we can splurge on the good stuff to bake with as it tastes soooo much better. We're happily back to King Arthur in the flour jar and in my kitchen, the King is here to stay.

Recipe Cheat Sheet

One of my kitchen utensil drawers used to be chronically stuffed with recipes on little scraps of paper. These were the recipes I used all the time, so I wouldn't bother to ever file them away in my regular recipe holder. This mishmash of recipes sat in an untidy heap on top of the stuff that actually belonged in the drawer, and it always took a fair bit of rummaging to find either the right recipe or anything else in there.

I have finally gotten all the recipes cleared out of the drawer and replaced it with - drum roll please (or just bang a wooden spoon on your mixing bowl)...The Recipe Cheat Sheet.

This brilliant yet so very simple idea comes from Amy Karol, author of Bend-the-Rules Sewing: The Essential Guide to a Whole New Way to Sew and her blog angry chicken. The idea is to compile your most frequently used recipes all on one sheet for quick reference. Because they are all recipes you are familiar with you don't need lots of directions on mixing technique and so forth, so you can fit a lot on one sheet. Amy Karol's cheat sheet is here. She has some everyday things as well as some desserts.

I made up my own sheet of our regular daily fare and popped it in a page protector. It has things like pancakes, waffles, biscuits, breads, coffee cake and a couple of cookies. We use it every day - it's cute, convenient, and reduces clutter.

Here is mine: Download Recipe_Sheet.pdf 

A few notes: You can find details for my various scones, and muffins in other posts. I use King Arthur flour and do most of my baking with some combination of white whole wheat (ww) and unbleached white flour. The bread and other yeasted doughs are made in our bread machine; the rolls are shaped, set in a greased 11x15" pan and set to rise again before baking.

If you have any questions about any of my recipes just ask. And if you make up your own cheat sheet and would like to share leave a comment with a link to your blog - I would love to see it! And if you have already used a cheat sheet for years just smile and wink to yourself and feel free to share all of your other great ideas with organizationally challenged folks like me.   

Baking Center

We enjoy baking on an almost daily basis, mainly because we like eating fresh baked goods on a daily basis. Doing our own baking is also more healthful, economical, and delicious than purchasing store bought goods. When we get home from morning Mass every day we like to have a fresh baked snack, the sooner the better. I've found the ideas in Confessions of an Organized Homemaker: The Secrets of Uncluttering Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life to be very helpful in organizing my kitchen for speed and efficiency. The author stresses the importance of storing items at their point of use, and grouping items for storage that are used together rather than by the type of item it is.

To facilitate everyday baking it really helps to have a 'mixing center', as Mrs. Schofield calls it, set up in the kitchen. I store my two types of flour and sugar on the counter in glass jars. I keep a one cup plastic measuring scoop in each flour jar, and a smaller size in the sugar, so that we can just scoop and measure in one quick step. In the cupboard directly above I keep all of my extracts, honey, cocoa, corn meal, chocolate chips, more measuring cups and the like. I also keep the baking powder and soda here, and I try to keep a measuring teaspoon in the container for quick access. This saves time and also dishwashing, as we don't have to wash these measuring spoons and cups every time they are used. We also keep salt out in a 'salt pig' with a little spoon in it - again it's a lot faster than finding a measuring spoon and pouring salt from the carton each time we use it. (I found mine for a quarter of that price. You can also just use any little decorative crock.) 

Right under this counter spot I keep my large mixing bowls. We like these stainless steel bowls for mixing as they are nice and big and unbreakable, and they were very reasonably priced in the 'restaurant section' at Sam's. We use a bit of non-slip stuff under the bowl to keep it still while stirring, and I store that right there as well. Brown and confectioner's sugar, my nut chopper and other small frequently used appliances are also in here. My other cooking utensils are in the drawers so things like spatulas and whisks are close at hand too.

All of this careful storage makes the daily baking a breeze as there is no running back and forth across the kitchen to gather supplies. Mr. Gilbreth would certainly approve of all the motion saved, and my family certainly approves of all the scones, and cookies, and bread, and muffins...

In Real Loaf

Here's a 'keeping it real' post for ya! Check out this baby:

Someone thought this, er, unusual loaf made a nice little dolly crib. Jonathan has been baking our bread for years - wonderful, fluffy loaves of 100% whole wheat bread. But he has been so busy lately, and everyone else as well, that we thought a bread machine would help alleviate some of the KP duty. We bought one of these Zojirushi BBCCX20 Home Bakery Supreme Bread Machine as it is supposed to be the best for making whole grain bread. It makes wonderful regular loaves, but for 100% whole grain our results have been, shall we say, less than stellar.

When we sliced the baby loaf Jonathan said it was castle bread while Eliza called it a crown. I thought it seemed most like a new interlocking modular building block. 

Bread swans, anyone?

When Your Children Bake

Do they paint their noses brown with vanilla so they can smell its vanilla-y goodness all day?

Mine do.

Welcome to My Kitchen

Come in and have a seat. My teacup is always full and I'll put the kettle on for yours.