Beauty from the Beast

About eighteen months ago, I got it into my head to try and make a sourdough starter.  We love sourdough bread at our house and what else did I have to do, right?  Yeah, right.  But when I get a bee in my bonnet about something, I have to do something about it.  That's just how I am.  I did a bit of research and figured out what to do to start a starter.  A sourdough culture is a mixture of wild yeast and lactobacillus bacteria living in a mixture of flour and water.  The microorganisms are usually living on the flour and just need some water to help them grow.  Some people think the microorganisms come out of the air, and some do, but mostly they are in the flour.  It actually takes quite a while to get a good sourdough starter really active and robust enough to use for baking.  I worked on mine for about a month before I attempted to use it.  A sourdough starter is a living organism and needs to be tended regularly.

I have named mine "the Beast."  The Beast lives in the refrigerator most of the time.  I take it out and feed it about once a week or whenever I'm ready to do some baking.  The Beast is a happy and healthy starter as you can see by the lovely bubbles. The longer it lives, the more sourdough-y it smells.  It has a great yeasty aroma at this point. 

Once I got the Beast going, I tried all kinds of sourdough recipes.  I made pancakes, waffles, biscuits, breads, and English muffins.  After all was said and done, though, the family decided that the bread and English muffins were the keepers.  We have other recipes we like better for pancakes, waffles, and biscuits.  But the bread and muffins are wonderful.  I have tweaked the bread so that it contains about a third organic hard white wheat flour (from Bob's Red Mill) and two thirds regular unbleached white flour.  I'm not sure why it's called white wheat flour but it is like a fine whole wheat.  We really like the combination and it makes nice firm, healthy loaves of bread.   These just came out of the oven and the whole house smells of freshly baked bread with just a tinge of that sourdough smell, too.  I think it's time to cut a slice and do a taste test.

January Cheer

It is bleak mid-winter.  Even though we are temporarily without snow and rain, it is still January.  The trees are leafless.  The grass is brownish.  There is not a green shoot poking up anywhere.  Sigh...

When one lives in this climate, one must expect the January blahs.  My antidote is to have blooms in the house.  At this moment there is a beautiful red amaryllis trumpeting cheer around the room.  

There are fragrant paperwhites brightly nodding and subtly scenting the house.  And there is a hyacinth bulb showing the promise of a stem of blossoms.  Each of these makes me smile.  They are reminders of the flowers to come. 

One does what one can to fight off the winter blues.

The Elusive Truffle

Paul has had a lifelong dream to eat fresh truffles in season, in Italy.  Not a bad dream.  But going to Italy in truffle season is a bit of a stretch for us.  We like going places but would really rather stay home most of the time.  Then we read about Oregon truffles.  It turns out that Oregon truffles are a unique culinary experience in their own right.  So we set out to try them.  Last February we went to Dayton, Oregon to the Joel Palmer House restaurant.  They are famous for foraging and preparing wild mushrooms.  Unfortunately for us, February is the end...or past the end...of truffle season and we didn't get to eat any.  We did have a wonderful meal, just no truffles.  Not being ones to give up easily, we did a little more research and found that the height of truffle season is right around Christmas time.  So, this year, when we went to visit the family in Oregon, we made a reservation to go back to the Joel Palmer House and try again.  We were not disappointed this time.  We had thinly shaved white truffles on nearly every dish we ordered.  They tasted amazing...as did the bottle of Aramenta Cellars Pinot Noir we had with dinner.  In fact we liked the wine so much, Paul went to the winery the next day and bought four more bottles!

Now we were hooked on Oregon truffles and decided to take things a step further by ordering four ounces of fresh white truffles from Oregon Wild Edibles in Eugene.  Once we made the commitment, we had to plan a truffle-centric dinner timed for when the ripe truffles would arrive.  We lined up a couple of mushroom loving friends and starting planning.  We ended up making a fairly simple risotto with sliced truffle infused chicken broth.  We also covered the risotto with more thinly sliced truffles.  We served it alongside a simple salad of baby greens and homemade sourdough and another bottle of Aramenta Cellars Pinot.  There was Chocolate Obsession for dessert. Needless to say, the dinner was a big hit and we all had our fill of truffles.  In fact, we were so anxious to taste them that we forgot to take a picture!

Four ounces of truffles is actually quite a bit so we minced most of the rest of the truffles and mixed them into softened butter.  This is supposed to be a good way to keep the truffle experience alive for more than the few days they are at their peak.  We created 6 "truffle butter bombs" and stuck them in the freezer.

However, being the food sluts that we are, Paul and I saved a couple of the truffles for the next night.  We fixed angel hair pasta and threw one of the truffle bombs into it, along with some olive oil and Parmesan cheese.  We sliced the remaining truffles and scattered them over the pasta.  Again, we were not disappointed.  

Oregon truffles have their own unique smell and flavor.  It is hard to describe...earthy, pungent, heady, intoxicating.  We are now dedicated fans of the delicacy and are planning on getting more next year.  I believe we have started another lovely food tradition in Tuscany on the Palouse.

Crab

I'll come right out and say it:  I love crab.  I always have, even as a child.  In fact, I have wonderful memories of my Grandpa Hank cleaning crabs and showing me how to use the little end of the claw as a pick to get the crab meat out of tight places.  Now I use a nutcracker and nutpick, but the method is just the same.  Every winter I look forward to crab season although now I get it from the grocery instead of Grandpa's house on the Oregon coast.  It still tastes great, though.  Yesterday there was Dungeness crab at the store.  I bought two of the prickly orange crustaceans and brought them home.  Paul and I stood at the sink and picked out all the luscious meat, laughing and talking and making a mess.  It's always more fun to clean crab with someone else to keep you company.  Last night we mixed it with some melted butter and finely chopped garlic and roasted it in the oven long enough to heat it up and cook the garlic a little.  We ate it with French bread and a salad of baby greens.  It was delicious.  Today I mixed the leftover crab with some mayonnaise, bread crumbs, chopped green onion, minced lemon peel, and a pinch of cayenne and formed it into crab cakes.  Oh, my!  Crab cakes might be my favorite way to eat crab.  However I fix it, crab always makes me think of my Grandpa Hank.  If he were still around, the one thing I would want to do with him is clean and eat some fresh crab.  They just go together in my mind. 

Out With the Old, In With the New

Well, the old year has passed and the new one is under way.  It seems to me that time flies faster and faster.  I haven't posted in nearly a month but I have an excuse, aside from the excitement and travel of the holiday season.  My old Mac laptop died....well, suffered a debilitating blow anyway.  It was going to cost nearly as much to fix it, with no guarantees of how long it would last, than it would to buy a new one.  So, with a bit of trepidation and excitement, I ordered a new laptop.  It arrived last Monday and I rushed it in to the repair shop where the old laptop sat waiting to transfer all my goodies, pictures, bookmarks, and such.  Luckily the damage was not enough that my files couldn't be retrieved.  Everything important to me now resides in the new computer, which is somehow comforting.  Getting a new laptop is  kind of a giddy experience, kind of like getting a new car or something.  It's familiar on one level and not on another.  It took some time to get things set up and downloaded and whatnot.  But I am starting to feel comfortable with it and I think we're going to do just fine together.  Passing from the old laptop to the new one is a bit like passing from the old year to the new.  It's a little sad to leave one behind yet exciting to start in on a new one.  May your new year be filled with love and laughter.