Ciabatta Bread
recipe from The Kitchn

You need:

for the biga:
1/2 cup barely warm water (4 ounces)
1/2 teaspoon of yeast (I used my usual instant yeast)
1 cup flour

Mix the yeast and water together then stir in the flour mixing until it forms a paste-like substance. Stir it briskly to build up gluten, then cover and let it sit at room temperature overnight (at least 8 hours). It’s going to turn itself into a liquidy substance, soup and full of bubbles the next day.

For the bread: 
2 cups and 2 Tablespoons of water
1 teaspoon yeast
all of the biga
about 4 cups of flour
2 teaspoons salt

Put the water and yeast together in a stand mixer bowl. Scrape in all of the biga. With a spatula, gently stir the biga, breaking it up into smaller clumps. Add in the flour and the salt and stir it together until it forms a thick, gloppy paste. Let it sit for 20 minutes.

Fit your dough hook in and start kneading. This is going to have to knead for about 15 minutes (possibly more) on speed 4-6. I started mine out on speed 4 and after 7 minutes or so put it on 6 to finish out the kneading time. Somewhere in the middle of the kneading, the dough should start to come together and slap the sides of the bowl. It will go from being liquidy and looking like loose batter to looking a little more cohesive. Mine wasn’t looking the way I thought it should so I added a tiny bit more flour a little at a time until it became cohesive. It should look like this after the 15-18 minutes are up:

It won’t be solid dough – it really will puddle into the bowl when you remove the dough hook. It’s supposed to be that way. Also, watch your mixer while it’s mixing on that high speed. It will “walk” on your counter. Mine turned itself all the way around completely.

Cover the bowl of dough and let it sit until the dough has tripled in size, about 2-3 hours (in a warm room, I guess I should mention. I usually sit mine on the stove or inside the oven if it’s not in use. You can also achieve a quicker rise by heating the oven – without the dough inside – to about 300, then shutting it off and then putting your dough inside the warm oven. I didn’t only because Sundays are my leisurely cooking days. I didn’t mind waiting the three hours for the dough to triple.)

Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside. After the dough has risen, flour your counter VERY WELL. Gently scrape the dough out onto the counter with a spatula. Try not to de-gas the dough too much while handling it. Sprinkle the top of the dough with flour. Gently shape the dough into a rectangle shape, then using a pizza cutter or a bench scraper, cut your dough either into two loaves, or into rolls. The recipe says you can get 16 rolls out of this dough, but they looked like they might be too small for what I wanted. I ended up with 12 different sized pieces of dough.

this is only 4 of the 12 and I meant for those bottom two pieces to be large, just FYI

Gently scoop your cut up dough pieces (or loaves) onto your baking sheets. Let the dough rise until very puffy, about 30-40 minutes. While it’s rising, preheat the oven to 475. After everything’s risen and preheated, slide the sheets into the oven and bake until the bread is golden on the outside (took me about 20 minutes). Let them cool completely and store in paper sacks to keep them crisp or in plastic bags if you don’t mind the crust getting a bit softer.

of course they’re delicious warm with butter

*I call it my semi diet because in the past (and weight has been a struggle for me my entire life) dieting does not work. All it does is remind me that I am denying myself food and despite whatever weight loss I happen to have, I get too comfortable and immediately return to eating whatever I want. I’m a firm believer in moderation and while I don’t think that my diet is terrible, I do think that I eat too much sugar and carbs and that I don’t exercise enough. So I’m retaining the good aspects of how I eat (hardly any prepackaged, processed food, home cooked meals almost all the time, plenty of vegetables) and I’m trying to cut out more of the sugar and add more fruit and less reliance on carbs to fill me up. A semi-diet will work for me, whereas a regular diet won’t.

Saturday
Breakfast: leftover blueberry waffles with scant butter (I’m cutting down my butter intake, ya’ll), drizzle of maple syrup. I’m beginning to eat breakfast on Saturdays now because if I eat before I go food shopping, I bypass the VERY BIG AND DELICIOUS donut case in the store entirely because I’m not famished while shopping.
Lunch: I usually don’t eat lunch on weekends
Dinner: panko crusted fish tacos on homemade corn tortillas, with lime/jalapeno/cabbage slaw, Mexican rice or black beans. I haven’t decided yet.

Sunday
Breakfast: French toast
Lunch: I usually don’t eat lunch on weekends
Dinner: Navajo tacos with homemade chili beans

Monday
Breakfast: Erik will be getting his standard eggs and bacon, I will be eating oatmeal with raspberries and blueberries, and possibly a hard boiled egg for the protein
Lunch: turkey sandwich on ciabatta bread (homemade) with pickled peppers that I canned myself & provolone, carrot sticks, cottage cheese (no chips!)
Dinner: shredded roast beef sandwiches on homemade kaiser bun, oven roasted potato wedges, broccoli or cauliflower (haven’t decided yet)

Tuesday
Breakfast: blackberry muffins, soft boiled eggs, breakfast sausage
Lunch: leftovers
Dinner: crockpot lechon with mojo sauce, black beans and rice

Wednesday
Breakfast: veggie egg scramble (mushrooms, onions, tomatoes), toast
Lunch: leftovers  (crockpot meals usually yield a lot of leftovers despite Erik’s sometimes voracious appetite)
Dinner: navy bean and spicy sausage soup served with crusty no knead bread

Thursday
Breakfast: breakfast sandwiches on leftover kaiser rolls
Lunch: leftover soup
Dinner: Italian roasted chicken with spaghetti aglio e olio

Friday
Breakfast: poached eggs and bacon, toast
Lunch: another turkey on ciabatta
Dinner: lasagna roll ups (with spinach and Italian sausage), garlic bread made from leftover no knead bread

I’ve got a lot of baking to do this weekend – ciabatta for lunch sandwiches, kaiser rolls (leftovers will be frozen of course), a small loaf of no knead bread. I know I mentioned lessening my carb intake but keep in mind I won’t be eating all of this at once. Much of my bread baking gets given away or put in the freezer and it lasts us a few weeks. Snacking is limited to fruit and greek yogurt, celery and carrot sticks (which I do like a lot). I’ve also decided i really love the Wheat Thins Fiber Select Garden Vegetable crackers. Those are quite tasty, especially with a piece of muenster cheese.

Enfrijoladas
recipe adapted from Mexico in My Kitchen

You Need:

about 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups of cooked pinto beans and their broth
some cooked ground beef (I made enough for the two of us,cooked it with diced onion and seasoned it with salt, pepper, cumin, coriander and chile powder). You can also use shredded chicken or pork if you want instead of ground beef.
a few Arbol chiles, soaked in hot water until softened up a bit
a tablespoon or two of oil
diced white onion
a teaspoon of cumin
shredded monterey jack cheese (or crumbled Mexican cheese would be just fine here too)
chopped cilantro, tomato and onion, for serving
corn tortillas (I used 8)
a bit more oil for cooking tortillas

To make the sauce, put your beans and broth, the softened Arbol chiles and cumin in a blender. Blend until everything is smooth. Heat your 1 to 2 tablespoons of oil in a pan on medium heat and saute some diced onion (a couple tablespoons worth) in the oil until the onion is translucent. Add in the bean mixture and just cook to warm through. Season with salt and pepper to taste. If it’s still too thick, I’d add more of the bean broth. Mine came out too thick to actually be called a sauce and what you want is pourable sauce, not thick like refried beans.

Heat some more oil in another pan. Cook one corn tortilla at a time, frying for just a few seconds on each side (don’t crisp them, just fry enough to get them soft. Set aside on paper towel lined plates to drain. (You can also just soften your tortillas on a comal like you normally would and not fry them. I’m just obsessed with fried corn tortillas right now.)

To assemble the enfrijoladas, dip the cooked corn tortillas in the bean sauce, spoon a bit of the ground beef inside (if you’re using it), fold in half and place them on your plate. Repeat with all the corn tortillas.  Alternatively, you can spoon some of the sauce inside a tortilla, fill it, fold it, then pour more sauce on top. Do whichever is easiest for you. Top everything with cheese, diced onion, tomatoes, cilantro, lime juice, and sour cream or Mexican crema if you want. When I make these again I’m definitely adding some crema to my toppings.

Foodwise, I think I got a little lazy in menu planning and execution due to my overburdened work schedule and there were a lot of repeated meals in a quicker succession than I would have liked. There were also many nights of “oh screw it, get a pizza,” far more of those than I would have liked. On the other hand, I feel kind of accomplished because we managed to really step up our canning with very fresh, just picked veggies and fruits from Utah (as local as I could get for large quantities). I also found a source for the most beautiful and delicious organic veggies from the Crazy Lady farm located just a couple of miles from where I live. So our grocery bills went down in that regard and that produce is the freshest and best tasting I’ve ever had. I ate kohlrabi for the first time thanks to those produce baskets and am in love with it. I’m trying to find more local food sources and am currently looking for honey that’s made locally.

Towards the end of 2011, I have been immersing myself in canning and DIY blogs and one of the goals I am setting for myself is to learn how to use my new pressure canner (not just have Erik learn the hard parts – I need to know how to do it too!) and can vegetables so that I never have to purchase any pre-canned veggies from the store in 2012. I’m also intrigued by the “October Unprocessed” blog project that made the rounds recently. That might be a tad bit more difficult for me to do, because I can’t make my own flour and sugar for baking, obviously. But I do feel that I balance that out by not eating as much processed and packaged foods as I did when I was a kid.

Another food goal for 2012 is to stop buying grocery store bread. I want to learn how to keep a sourdough starter fed for a long period of time and I want to make our sandwich breads each week. I already make our burger and hot dog buns, our dinner rolls, baguettes, and other yeasty delights that one might normally purchase at the grocery store so I’m halfway there.

I’d like to stop spending $100 each time I shop. There shouldn’t be any need for that – there’s only two of us! One of Erik’s goals is to purchase meat in bulk and butcher it himself. He’s already got a small collection of good knives started. He cut up some beautiful steaks for us a few weeks ago. I’d like to source local beef and pork. Now that we have a HUGE new freezer (thanks to my in law’s astonishing Christmas generosity) I think we have plenty of space to store that quantity of meat.

We’ve obviously always got gardening goals. We’re going to do raised beds this year and clean up an ugly patch of yard space with them. There are several old tires that we are going to repurpose and grow potatoes in. I’d like to try a stand up pallet garden (kind of a cross between this project and one of those garden pocket/wall garden things) of ornamentals. I’m expanding my herb garden and getting them out of their containers. We’d also like to build a small garden/storage shed.

Our outdoor plans ought to result in some good exercise in the sun this year. This is good for me because I have officially crossed over into the Not Healthy and Not Feeling Well at my current size zone. So that means a diet and more exercise. I need to approach dieting differently though, not as a total deprivation thing, but as a moderation and take things slowly sort of way. I spent a lot of last year trying out new baking projects and then eating the results of said projects and not getting enough exercise. So there’s a typical new year goal. Lose some weight and get rid of my back pain and my general huffy-puffiness when I do physical things. You shouldn’t feel like you’ve run a marathon just by climbing some stairs. :/

So there you have it. These are my goals for 2012. Apologies for there not being a recipe, but I felt like this goes on quite long enough. I’ve got some good things on deck for the next week and I promise I’ll have a tasty recipe for you next time.

• We spend New Year’s Eve with reservations to a fancy pants restaurant called Epazote located in Santa Fe. The restaurant host gave me free Spanish brut cava and we started our meal with an appetizer of chapulines served on mini corn tortillas with guacamole. Or rather, Erik started his meal that way. He convinced me to eat one of the grasshoppers. It was tasty, but I couldn’t get past the whole “I’m eating a bug” thing. Plus, I think a leg got caught in my teeth. Before ordering our entrees, they brought us a sample of each of the moles the chef had to offer for the evening. All of them were delicious but the best was the mole poblano. I ordered the grilled Angus  sirloin with grilled onions and jalapenos, rice, and a mixed greens salad with cilantro vinaigrette. It also came with corn tortillas. Erik ordered the night’s special, Muscovy duck breast with mole poblano, rice, and the mixed greens salad. Everything was tasty and the chef even came out and greeted everyone to see how their meal was.

• We had brunch at Tortilla Flats. I had a simple order of breakfast tacos (ham and egg) on homemade flour tortillas. Erik ate a combination plate (huge portion, I don’t know where he found room for it all).
• We took a day trip to Taos and ate at the Guadalajara Grill. This place had a massive menu and I just had to order barbacoa tacos. They were so good I did not ever want to leave this place.
• In Albuquerque, we found a (very) small restaurant that I also wanted to pack up and take home with me. The Taqueria Mexico is tiny but they make seriously awesome carne asada tacos and homemade horchata. I was most impressed by that as most of the horchata I get in restaurants around my area is the kind from the powder packets. Erik ate another combo plate with a chile relleno made with a green New Mexican chile, an enchilada, and a taco.
• We took a scenic route home that took us through the Four Corners monument which I really wanted to see anyway. There were Navajo vendors there and one truck that made fry bread to order. Erik got a Navajo taco and I ate a piece of fry bread smothered with honey. 
  I’m not going to lie and say that it wasn’t a huge treat and a big deal that I found a Whataburger in Albuquerque. I haven’t eaten Whataburger since the last time we were in Texas (forever ago) so when I see one, there’s no question we’re stopping and getting a Whataburger with bacon and cheese. Erik ate a green chile smothered Whataburger that also looked good. While passing through Farmington, NM, I got myself a quick lunch from the Church’s fried chicken, another fast food joint I love that I haven’t eaten at in about 6 years. It was very, very satisfying.
• We spent our last night before coming home in Moab, Utah and ate at Eddie McStiff’s. I had an awesome Philly cheesesteak on homemade ciabatta made with prime rib, onions, bell pepper and provolone cheese. They served really wonderful beer battered onion rings on the side. Erik ate a massive mushroom swiss burger made with a garlic infused beef patty. It was so awesomely garlicky that I don’t ever want to make hamburgers again without stuffing them full of garlic.

We obviously had an awesome time and not enough room in our bellies to eat at every place we saw. Now that I’m home, I have a bunch of ideas to try and recreate some of the meals we ate. And as delicious as everything was, you really can’t beat eating your own homemade food. That might be the best part about being home from vacation – it gives us a renewed appreciation for our own cooking. Except now I want everything to be “southwestern” so I made a “southwestern egg scramble” for yesterday’s breakfast.

Southwestern Egg Scramble

You need:
diced white onion
a couple tablespoons of diced green chiles
a couple strips of bacon, cooked crisp and diced up
a small roma tomato, diced
eggs, scrambled
corn tortillas and chopped cilantro for serving

Cook the bacon until crisp. Drain it then chop it up. In the leftover bacon grease, saute the onion until translucent. Add in the chiles and tomatoes. Let those cook for a minute. Add in the bacon. Pour in the eggs, cook until done. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with corn tortillas, a sprinkling of cilantro and a side of refried beans.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,600 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Grand Central Bakery Jammers
recipe from The Kitchn (this is a halved batch; visit the link for the full batch amounts)

You Need:

2 cups flour
1 1/2 Tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 stick butter, chilled in the freezer until very cold
3/4 cup cold buttermilk
6-7 Tablespoons of fruit jam – I used peach vanilla jam

Heat the oven to 350. Line a baking sheet with parchment. Mix all of the dry ingredients together in a food processor and whiz until things are combined. Cut your cold butter into 1/2 inch dice. Add the butter in the food processor and whiz until the butter is well cut into dry ingredients (stuff will look kind of shaggy). Add your buttermilk and pulse until a dough has formed (don’t buzz the tar out of this – you don’t want tough biscuits due to overprocessing). Dump the dough out onto a floured surface. Using your hands, gently pat the dough together into an oblong shape about 1 to 1 1/2 inches thick. Use a large biscuit cutter and cut out biscuits, laying them on the baking sheet close together. Pat your scraps back together into the original shape and cut biscuits until you have no more dough left. I got 7 biscuits total out of my dough. The full recipe is supposed to make 10-12. Using your thumb, make a slight indentation in the biscuit being careful not to smoosh the entire thing. You just want a nice little well in the middle for your jam. Place about a tablespoons worth of jam into the wells. Place the sheet in the oven and bake until the biscuits are golden and cooked through.

p.s.: this is a short entry because I GOT AN IPAD FOR CHRISTMAS. And I’m going to play with it. All day.

Christmas Swirl Cookies 
recipe from Our Italian Kitchen

You Need:

2 cups cake flour (the original recipe does say she used AP flour to great results)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup powdered sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
2 1/2 sticks butter, softened and cut into chunks
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon food coloring of your choice (I used 3-4 drops of Americolor green gel paste)
1 1/2 cups holiday sprinkles

In the bowl of your stand mixer, combine the flour, baking powder, salt, powdered sugar and white sugar. Give it a little mix on low to combine everything. Add in your butter, cover the machine so flour doesn’t fly out everywhere, and mix until the butter is incorporated with the flour. Add in the vanilla and mix that in. Dump the dough onto a lightly floured surface, divide evenly in half. Add half the dough back to the mixer and add your coloring to it. Mix it together until the color has mixed in evenly. If the dough becomes too wet, add in a little bit of flour at a time to dry it up a bit – I mean like a tablespoon or so, not a huge amount.

Roll out each dough half between two lightly floured sheets of wax paper into a large rectangle (recipe says 11×9 inch) until the dough is 1/4 inch thick. Store both dough sheets in the fridge until they’re firm (2 hours).

Remove the top wax paper from both the dough halves. Stack the colored half on top of the non colored half. Press down lightly to adhere the two and trim the ends to make them even. Start rolling the dough up into a cylinder.

Put your holiday sprinkles on a large platter. Roll the cookie log in the sprinkles, pressing lightly to adhere them to the dough. Cover the whole dough log with the sprinkles. Wrap the log in plastic wrap and place back in the fridge for about an hour.

When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350. Line baking sheets with parchment. Start slicing your cookies from the log (1/4 to 1/8 inch thick cookie slices) and lay them on the prepared baking sheets. I spaced mine a couple inches apart on the sheets. Bake about 15 minutes until the edges are lightly golden.

Butterhorns
recipe from Foodjimoto

You Need:

Dough:
2 cups flour
2 sticks butter (cold)
1 egg yolk
3/4 cup sour cream

Filling:
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 cup finely chopped nuts (I used walnuts and didn’t chop mine as small as I should have)

Put your flour in the food processor. Add the butter in small chunks and whiz it until the butter is evenly cut into the flour (the mixture will look shaggy). Add the egg yolk and sour cream to the processor. Process until everything is combined and the dough comes together (30 seconds or so). Dump the dough onto a lightly floured surface and separate into 4 evenly sized balls. Wrap the dough balls in plastic wrap or wax paper and stash them in the fridge for at least 2 hours (I did my dough the day before and let them chill all night).

Mix your filling ingredients together in a small bowl and set it aside.

it’s time to roll out the dough, working with one ball of dough at a time. You can do this the way the recipe suggests: tear off a large sheet of wax paper, scatter a bit of flour on its surface, set a ball of dough onto it, dust with a bit more flour, tear off another large sheet of wax paper to set on top of that, then begin rolling over the wax paper (preferably with a large, heavy pin. I used my huge marble pin). Roll the dough as evenly as you can into a large circle (recipe says an 11 inch circle).

My dough ended up sticking horribly to the paper so I floured my counter well, floured the top of the dough ball, and just started rolling them like that, stopping to scrape any dough that might stick to the counter and making sure there was enough flour on the surface to keep it from doing that. You do what’s easiest for you.

If you’re rolling between wax paper, remove the top sheet of paper. Spoon some filling onto the rolled out dough circle and spread it to about 1/2 inch – 1 inch of the ends. Using a bench scraper, or a sharp knife, or a pizza cutter, start cutting that circle into wedges. How many you get depends on how big your dough circle is and how big you cut your wedges. I started by cutting the entire thing in half lengthwise, then again crosswise, then I cut triangles from each cut section. There are pictures of the process here.

While you’re doing all that, heat the oven to 350 and line baking sheets with parchment paper. To form your cookies, starting from the wide end of the wedges you just cut, start rolling them up (towards the small end), then form them into crescents and place on the baking sheets. These don’t spread out at all, so you don’t have to space them very far apart. Bake them until they’re golden brown, about 20-25 minutes. Let them cool on cooling racks. Labor intensive, sure. But they’re worth it.

Old Fashioned Butter Crunch Candy 
recipe from Sweet Pea’s Kitchen

You Need:

1 3/4 sticks of butter
1/2 cup almonds (or whatever nuts you want)
1 1/3 cups sugar
3 Tablespoons water
1 Tablespoon light corn syrup
about 3/4 to a full cup of chocolate chips, whichever kind you like

If you’re going to toast your nuts, do it in a 350 degree oven, with the nuts on a baking sheet, stirring them occasionally and bake them for 5 or 6 minutes, just until they’re lightly toasted. Put them in your food processor and whiz them until they’re in small pieces.

Line a 9×13 baking pan with foil and butter that foil. Butter it well. In a large pot (I use a nonstick stock pot), melt the butter. Add in the sugar, water and corn syrup and bring it to a boil. Let it boil, stirring it constantly, until the whole thing turns a beautiful amber color and the temperature registers about 310 on a candy thermometer (you want hard crack stage). You’ll have to keep an eye on your temperature while it’s cooking; if it feels like it’s getting too dark too fast, turn that stove down and just keep stirring the mixture so nothing sticks or burns to the bottom of the pan. The secret to candy making, I’ve found, is constant hovering and attention to what you’re making. You can’t just start it then leave it because that spells candy DISASTER.

it will look like this eventually

Once it registers the right temperature, immediately pour the caramel into the baking dish. BE VERY CAREFUL DOING THIS BECAUSE HOT, MELTED SUGAR IS HELLA HOT. It can burn you bad, seriously. Be careful. Let the mixture cool for about 5 minutes, letting it firm up just a little bit. While it’s still warm, scatter your chocolate evenly all over the candy. Let it sit for another 5 minutes until the chips have visibly softened, then spread that melted chocolate out evenly over the candy (use a spatula or the back of a large spoon to do this). Sprinkle your nuts all over the chocolate layer and press lightly with the spoon or spatula so they’ll stick. Let the whole thing cool and solidify completely, then break the candy into pieces.