Rolling in Dough

Bazaar Season

We live in the part of town that used to be Italian. Most of the Italians have long since moved to the suburbs, but come July, NW Denver celebrates its Italian heritage by hosting a series of Bazaars, fund raisers for the different Catholic Churches. It's an opportunity to put on the dog and visit old friends. Ninety year old ladies with perfectly round orange coifs, dark men sporting Italian horn necklaces, middle aged people who attended Catholic school together and young girls hoping to be noticed all gather on a hot parking lot and gossip about the old days - against the backdrop of a big band offering Frank Sinatra serenades. It's a great way to spend a Saturday night. The food is nothing to write home about, but is traditional to the event - Pizza Fritas, a deep fried pizza dough covered in sugar, draft beer, occasionally red wine, and always the Sausage Sandwich. A line will form and snake around the lot with people willing to wait 45 minutes to trade five dollars for a grilled sausage patty dipped in red sauce and served on a bun, sometimes with grilled peppers. Food and Frank Sinatra aside, I attend for another reason. Like all upstanding organizations, the churchs' primary fund raising activity centers around gambling. There are Italian cheeses, salamis and the occasional pasta bowl to be won. Each week, I feverishly trade my hard earned dollars for tickets and jostle for position among the coiffed ladies, hoping that Lady Luck will smile upon me and I will return home, proudly carrying a cheese of my own. Actually, the whole thing is crazy, I could go to Costco and buy my own cheese for a fraction of what I spend at the Bazaars trying to win a cheese. Maybe it's the thrill of the game, but there is nothing like the feeling of watching the wheel slow down and stop on your number. The winner cheers like they won a car, and everybody else throws their tickets down in disgust. When the next round starts, they are there, waving their money and asking for "some good numbers this time". 

I'm telling you all of this because after nearly two years of not winning a cheese, last week I did. With the first dollar I spent. Hooray! After perusing the selection of Cotto Salami, Cappacolla, ham and jugs of Olive oil, I decided on a huge Mozzarella, like six pounds of it. So, in addition to all of the goat cheese in my fridge, I am now well stocked with Mozzarella. Cheese, anyone?

Now that I am enjoying cheese with nearly every meal, I'm trying to find some different things to do with it. Last night I made Calzones. I filled Mike's with Italian Sausage, grilled green peppers and mozzarella (of course). As the tomatoes are finally ripe in my garden, I tried something different for my own. After I roIled out the dough, I added some Mozzarella, Ricotta, Roma tomato slices, and Feta with sun-dried tomatoes to mine. I baked them for 10 minutes and they were wonderful. I decided to bake them seam side up, and the presentation beats the folded over variety hands down. A fabulous use of Mozzarella - only 4 1/2 lbs to go. There is another Bazaar tonight. I'll be there gambling with the ladies. Keep your fingers crossed - I could still find room in the fridge for a big Provolone! 

Haystack Peak Goat Cheese

"Goats are nice, they're not in a rush. Goats make cheese for everyone."

Lovie sings this on the way to Haystack Farms to meet the goats. After we arrive, it occurs to me that her song has perfectly captured the essence of the goats. Goats get a bad rap - people think they are stinky, indiscriminate eaters. But we found them to be friendly, content and truly, not in a rush. I have a whole new goat respect for them.

While we were there, I asked the lady running the place what their most unique cheese was and without a moment's hesitation, she pointed to the Haystack Peak, a small pyramid shaped cheese. She told me that it was the first cheese they had made on the farm, a fresh ripened cheese with a bloomy-rind surface that was still their favorite. I added it to my collection, brought it home and have been storing it since we visited a couple of weeks ago. Today I opened it. The scent caught me as soon as I undid the first corner of the wrapper, a whiff of pungent cheese mold. As I unwrapped it, I uncovered a beautiful soft but firm white tower of cheese with an off-white bloomy rind. I was amazed at the wonder I had been hiding in the fridge. Actually, I was surprised at everything about this cheese. As I cut into it, the knife revealed an almost fluffy interior that is snowy white. The inside smells clean and nothing like the blue moldy scent of the rind. As the creamy middle melted in my mouth, I began thinking how great this cheese would taste with fresh fruit, maybe a pear. It really does taste a little bit like a Brie, but it has a rounder and smoother flavor, reminiscent of summer fields. A piece cut a bit closer to the rind took on a sharper flavor - it was almost a little bitter, which was surprising, too. The rind is mild and tastes like soft blue cheese. To have three distinct tastes in one fabulous cheese is a marvel. Apparently, other people think so too, as this cheese has won several awards, including The American Cheese Society 2004 award and was named one of America's best artisanal cheeses by Saveur Magazine in April of 2005. This is one of the more unique cheeses I have had and simply tasting it makes a great case for seeking out fresh artisanal cheeses. What a change from the hoardes of plastic wrapped, artificially colored packages that generally pass for cheese in this country. This is in a league of it's own!   

A Taste of the Southwest - A Few Of My Favourite Things - Blogging By Mail

In our global economy, there are very few things that aren't available everywhere. So when I signed up for Blogging By Mail, I wanted to send something that was special to me, was unique to my area and not readily available in all corners of the globe. Colorado has wineries, but lots of countries do too, and when was the last time anyone went out of their way to find a bottle of Colorado wine? The ubiquitous Coors beer is made here, but it's not a unique, unusual or even a good beer. Finally, I decided on a taste of the Desert Southwest. Green Chile and all of it's chile inspired friends are the basis of so much regional cooking here. You can find it on every corner. It always seems strange when people tell me that in most other states, and virtually all other countries, Green Chile is practically unheard of. I know that there are Mexican restaurants everywhere serving tacos, enchiladas and burritos, but truly authentic Green Chile is only available in Mexico and the Southwestern United States. I set off to visit my favorite place, The Savory Spice Shop, where I found a culinary bounty of flavors to warm my blogging buddy's heart. I came home with a Southwestern bonanza: Mild Green Chile Powder, with a recipe to make your very own sauce, Lodo Fresh Adobo - a spicy, delicious smelling mix of Chimayo Chiles, paprika, salt, pepper, oregano and cumin to use on vegetables or meat as a seasoning or sauce, La Plata Peak Latino Spice, an onion and garlic based mixture for tacos or burritos, Mexican Mole - Dutch cocoa, sesame, ancho, pastilla, negro and guajillo chiles and cinnamon, Red Cloud Peak Seasoning, great on venison, wild boar, or ostrich and also on steak, full of paprika, garlic, and pepper, and Mexican Cocoa powder with Dutch Cocoa, Ceylon Cinnamon and vanilla powder. I am complementing this spicy bounty with Simply Simpatico, a cookbook from the Albuquerque Junior League, chock full of Southwestern recipes. For dessert, I'm enclosing a package of chocolate covered orange sticks, for a perfectly sweet finish after all that spicy food.

I'm kind of a picky eater, so I was a little worried about sending all of these zingy tastes off to someone who may not like spicy food. But everything I'm sending is mild and delicious, and since my Taste of the Southwest is "some assembly required", my buddy can choose how daring she is feeling. Enjoy it!

For the roundup, and to see all of the Blogging By Mail packages, please visit Dispensing Happiness hosted by the lovely Happy Sorceress! Thanks!

Cinnamon Apple Pecan Bumpy Bread

  In honor of Bread Baking Day #2, I pulled out the United Presbyterian Women's Cookbook from Algona, Iowa. My Grammie belonged to this church for about 40 years and I would attend with her when I visited during the summer. Thinking back now, I have images of Midwestern ladies all done up with white gloves and a fancy handbag, the service being followed by some sort of luncheon in the basement where Jello was always served, and communion consisting of grape juice and small squares of Wonder bread, reflections of Midwestern civility. I hope that the congregation in my memory still attends church there - as I like the idea that people still think that church is an occasion worth dressing up for. People in Colorado attend church dressed as though they stopped by on the way to a monster truck rally. But I digress... Anyway, with years of feeding farmers under their belts, the ladies of the United Presbyterian Church in Algona, Iowa can cook! They don't cook fancy stuff but it's fresh, wholesome and always delicious (except their scary and unusual love of scalloped corn, which I never understood). My Grammie gave me a copy of the church cookbook as a housewarming gift when I moved into my first apartment. I don't have any idea when it was published - there is no date, but my mom has had a cookbook just like it for as long as I can remember. It's full of homey recipes designed for simple cooking, and my mom is full of stories about the ladies who contributed to it, including the church organist Mrs. Mawdsley (who's recipe I used here), my mom's 6th grade music teacher.

My mom is truly the master of these rolls and I have tried my best to duplicate her efforts. This is a fantastic recipe that always gets rave reviews when I make them, and everyone that attends the Christmas Eve fish dinner at my house goes home with a pan of them to enjoy on Christmas morning. This is a great all-purpose sweet roll recipe to make cinnamon rolls, coffee rounds or doughnuts with, depending on how you decide to form, fill and cook them. For Bread Baking Day #2, I chopped up two apples and 1/2 cup of pecans and added them to the brown sugar, butter and cinnamon I filled the dough with, cut the dough into small pieces and dropped them into a loaf pan to make Bumpy Bread. It still tastes like sweet rolls but can be sliced and even toasted if you want. Try it and let me know what you think!

This is my entry into Bread Baking Day #2, generously hosted by Columbus Foodie. Check the link after August 4th to see all of the fruity bread entries!    

Green Chile & Goat Cheese Souffle

Since I began the Cheese Course, my fridge is stocked to the gills with great cheeses. I generally like to just enjoy them by themselves with a glass of wine during Happy Hour, but I've been looking for some other ways to show off their wonderful attributes. Cooking with cheese can be a risky proposition. Too often, the flavors get jumbled up with everything else, and what really makes each cheese special becomes completely lost. Too many things are simply Cheese and _____ (Insert food item here). In Sandwiches, Wraps, Enchiladas, Burritos, Salads and Omelets, cheese is just a bit of extra creamy goodness and flavor, an enhancement to be sure, but not the star of the show. Which is why I love fondues and souffles - cheese is the whole deal, maybe some other flavors spice things up, but they are a great vehicle to really let their wonderful cheesiness (Is this a word?) shine through.

I had seen a recipe for Goat Cheese and Walnut Souffles in the Gourmet Cookbook, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. With all of the recent Goat Cheese abundance, I kept imagining a souffle of my own, with a few twists, of course. I pulled out what was left of the Truf, Goat Cheese Extraordinaire, and added a few shavings of Romano. Using the Gourmet recipe as inspiration, I added my cheeses and some diced green chiles to the herby souffle mix. The result was fabulous! The unusual thing was that none of the flavors overpowered the others. It wasn't too herby, too spicy, or too goaty, all of the flavors worked well together, creating a delicious, elegant tasting main course. We had it with salad picked from the garden, and crusty pieces of still-warm-from-the-oven bread. I had cut the recipe in half because there are only three of us, but I'll make the whole thing next time, using one large souffle dish. I ate the last one for breakfast the next day. It was just as good reheated, and left me wishing that I had more leftovers.    

1917 Old-Fashioned Pound Cake

Finding myself with some unexpected and treasured time alone in the kitchen this week, waiting for my bread to rise (see Pane Francese post), I thought it might be a good time to bake something sweet.  I began the cookbook search and settled on a recipe for Old-Fashioned Pound Cake, published in 1917 in my Ryzon Baking Book. I wondered how old the recipe had to be for it to be considered "old-fashioned" in 1917. As part of the Vintage Kitchen Challenge, I'm determined to cook pretty much as they would have when these cookbooks are published, and after two recipes, all I'm really sure of is that I am a complete wuss. This recipe calls for 5 eggs to be beaten until they are "very light". It did ask me to use an egg beater, which I don't own, so I got to work with a wire whisk, thinking that my Kitchen-Aid stand mixer probably was not part of a typical kitchen in 1917. I whisked away until my arm had a knot in it, maybe 2 minutes in, switched hands, switched hands again and again and again. I decided that I would whisk for 10 minutes, all the time wondering if I was going to start resembling Popeye after a few weeks of vintage baking. All I would need is an anchor tattooed on my forearm and I'd be all set. Ten painful minutes later, my eggs were lighter, I'm not sure I would call them "very light", but they were going to have to do.

This is an unusual recipe in that the first step is to cream the butter with the flour. I have creamed lots of butter with sugar and sometimes eggs, but I had never seen a recipe where butter and flour were used together like this and it was kind of difficult to get the lumps out once the eggs were added. The recipe also called for Orange Flower Water, which I actually had in the cupboard, but had never used. I liked what it added though, more of a fragrance than a flavor. Light and elegant, like something you might be served at a formal tea party.

This is a terrific recipe. Lightly sweet, with a tight crumb, it is a great summertime snack. It was wonderful with ice cream and tonight I'm going to  grill some slices to eat with fresh peaches for dessert.
I'm liking the Vintage Cooking, maybe I'm on to something here.....

Old Fashioned Pound Cake

from the Ryzon Baking Book, published 1917

2/3 cupful (51/4 ounces) butter

2 level cupfuls (1/2 pound) flour

1 level teaspoonful Baking Powder

Pinch salt

1 cupful (1/2 pint) eggs - 5 eggs usually fill a cup, measure before beating

11/2 level cupfuls (12 ounces) sugar

2 tablespoonfuls orange flower water

Cream butter with flour. Add baking powder and salt to eggs and beat them until very light with an egg beater. Add sugar gradually, and beat well. Add egg mixture to creamed flour, using a wooden spoon, until all is mixed. Add orange flower water, and beat thoroughly with long, light strokes. Turn into a greased and floured shallow cake tin, and bake in a moderate oven for one hour.

Sufficient for one cake ( for ten to twelve people)

Haystack Mountain Red Cloud Cheese

In honor of The Saturday Cheese Course, Lovie and I took a field trip to Haystack Mountain Farm, where they produce phenomenal handcrafted goat cheeses. Although the farm is located just outside Boulder, less than 45 minutes away from my house, the trip there reminded me of searching the European countryside to visit some out of the way artisanal farm. The directions to Haystack included unmarked dirt roads and that I was to turn when I saw "three mailboxes by an apple tree". As we pulled up the long, dirt driveway, I was struck by how small the whole operation was. One small building and 136 goats are churning out thousands of pounds of drool-inducing cheese each year. We parked by the "teenager" pen and were met by a throng of tiny white goats rushing up to be petted. The self-guided tour included stops at the baby goat nursery, the maternity ward, the bucks' house and the milking herd, all filled with beautiful, clean, happy goats, full of personality and fun.

Inside the milking house, we saw how they milk goats, eight at a time and looked into the cheese room, where trays of Haystack Peak sat aging on the counter. Our guide opened the door to the walk-in and the aroma of cheese filled the air. The fridge was filled with small rounds of Red Cloud and Sunlight cheese, raw-milk cheeses aged for 60 days. During the aging process, each round is scrubbed every week to remove mold blooms, produced by larger rounds of green cheese left to induce spore growth and flavor, leaving behind a beautiful reddish washed-rind finish.

In the tasting room, most of the varieties were available for snacking, YUM! We tasted the deliciously smooth and creamy Chevre, Buttercup - a mixed milk semi-hard cheese that reminded me of a Gouda, the Queso de Mano - a mild and nutty raw-milk cheese and the Red Cloud, which is what, after much deliberation, came home with me.  The Red Cloud is an amazing cheese, firm with a nice bite. The rind is a gorgeous color, light reddish-gold with tiny moldy holes. Inside the creamy white cheese is a revelation of complex, nutty and woody flavors that melt in your mouth. This is a fabulous cheese simply to enjoy with a glass of wine and chunks of crispy baguette. I also think it would be a wonderful and unusual way to finish a spicy dish, crumbled on top of guacamole, enchiladas or tostadas. I always love the way tangy goat cheeses give Mexican food a new twist, and this would be a great choice.

Haystack Mountain Cheese is sold in gourmet grocery stores across the country and is served in many fine restaurants. You can find a location or order online at Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy. I'm thrilled to have found them in my own backyard!            

Pane Francese - Lessons from the oven

I am a bread lover. Bread is the one thing that simply must be in the house, or it seems like there is absolutely nothing here to eat (even if the fridge is full). That whole low-carb thing where all bread is eschewed could never be a diet for me. I especially love to bake bread - the whole process of the kneading and the rising and the smell in the house - to me is one of the most essential parts of living and eating well. But having said that, I am not a patient baker. I love bread recipes that I can start around 4:30pm and still enjoy with dinner that evening. I hate to admit it, but apparently I need instant gratification. This lack of patience has long prevented me from fulfilling my bread baking potential. The starters, sponges and bigas necessary for so many wonderful breads simply take longer to develop than I am willing to wait. But as part of my Crust & Crumb initiative, I'm going to try and bake with a little patience.

So, this week I started a couple of days ahead to make Pane Francese, or Italian French Bread. According to The Italian Baker, this was formerly known as Como bread, where it was served as a snack midway through the Sunday afternoon bicycle ride between Milan and Como. Guess you would be ready for a snack after 25 miles on the bike, especially if you were only halfway there.

I began on Wednesday with a biga, that I left on the counter for about 18 hours. Thursday, I made the dough before I went to work, and left it to rise in the fridge, thinking that I was enhancing flavor with the slow rise time. When I got home around 2:30, I took it out, noted the extremely slow rise, again congratulated myself for being patient enough to make flavor enhanced bread through slow rising and left it under a light to warm up in the 90 degree temperature of my kitchen. At 5:00pm, I began to worry about my Pane Francese, which was still cold. The recipe said it should have lots of little bubbles under the surface. I had no bubbles. I began losing my patience, and started hurrying the bread along. I dumped it out, left it to rest and made it into loaves to begin the second rise. It did, some. But not a lot. I decided to go ahead and bake it anyway, and started the oven. This is a bread I wanted to eat with dinner tonight, not tomorrow. But now that my patience had left the building, I forgot to slash the top, I didn't use a wash to get the nice golden brown color I love, I forgot to add some water to the oven to create a crisp crust and I didn't bake it long enough. Nice work on that patience thing. But I learned a couple of nice things about bread. It's forgiving - even with everything I could have done right and didn't, my bread turned out ok. It has nice holes, an interesting sweetness that you just don't get from a really yeasty bread, and a nice dense texture. Even when it's not great, it's pretty good. Almost any bread that you take the time to knead by hand and create in your own kitchen is going to taste better than Wonder Bread. And I can try again any day, hopefully adding more patience to the recipe next time.

La Vis Dipinti Pinot Grigio

I am not a wine expert. I love it and enjoy a glass almost every day, but I don't really know much about it. A year or so ago, I got a book and read about how to taste, learned about varietals versus the wines named for their regions and what "terrior" is. But the finer points of tasting are still a mystery to me, so I'll mostly drink anything and enjoy it (actually that doesn't sound like such a bad thing, now that I'm reading it). So in an effort to apply my limited knowledge, I'm trying something new. In the past, I would go the the wine store and come home with 4 or 5 different bottles, drink them one at a time, enjoy them all, really like one or two and vow to buy them again someday. But as soon as the bottle was empty, I couldn't tell you a thing about the wine inside and I was on to the next. So in honor of Nickel and Dime Wine Day, we purchased TWO bottles (hey, big spender!), read the tasting notes and have taken the time to really try and taste them. It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it.   

I have mixed emotions about whites. They can either be terrific or really insipid beginners' wine (and I said that I didn't have strong opinions about wine!). And I don't like Chardonnay. It always seems like it's what people buy when they don't know what to buy. A safe and boring choice. But I have discovered and come to love some wonderful Rieslings (not the syrupy stuff in the blue bottle), Gruner Veltliners, Vouvrays and Semillons. Complex, fruity and crisp, nothing tastes better or more refreshing on a hot summer evening. So when Mike brought home a couple of bottles of La Vis Dipinti Pinot Grigio, I couldn't wait to try them. I would have bought them, too, simply based on the wonderful label art painted by Paola de Manincor, depicting a scene from the Storie di Vite, about life amongst the vines. (Doesn't a "life amongst the vines" sound lovely?)

Well, the La Vis is pretty lovely, too. La Vis Dipinti Pinot Grigio, from the Dolomiti region of Italy, near the Austrian border, vintage 2006, is rated 87 points and came in under our $10 benchmark at $9.49. The scent reminds me of orange flowers. On first tasting, it bites a little and is bit sharp, but it smoothes out nicely and had an unusual depth for a Pinot Grigio. It is a nice wine, elegant and spicy with a hint of almonds and tangerines. The little card on the store shelf says that there is nothing not to like about it and I agree. It was terrific with Romano cheese, salad, pretzels and I even enjoyed it to next to a pesto and goat cheese pizza. A great summer wine!   

   

Coffee Crumb Cake

When I set out to bake something out of a vintage cookbook, I expected to find a few differences, mostly in flavor and methods of preparation. I was wrong. My ancient cookbooks are filled with head scratching directions like "add 1 gill of milk", "add the weight of 4 eggs of flour", and simply "bake in a moderate oven". Ok, I don't know what a gill is or how much 4 eggs weigh, and while I can guess what a moderate oven might be, I have no clue as to how long it might take to bake this item. I also encountered the puzzling statement that "After a very little experience the heat of the oven can easily be judged by simply feeling it with the hand". I clearly did not have enough respect for the talented cooks who came before me.

I decided that a coffee cake might be a nice place to start, but finding a recipe proved to be a bit of a challenge. Finally I located one in the Ryzon Baking Book, a cookbook complied by the Ryzon Perfect Baking Powder Company in 1917. The introduction states that "every one of the prize selections was carefully tested by actual baking", which is a good way to test recipes, much better than simply guessing whether or not it works. So, fortified by the knowledge that I was using a recipe that had actually been tested, I began. I creamed butter with a wooden spoon - vintage style - no stand mixer for me, added sugar, sifted flour, figured out what a gill of milk was and popped my lovely vintage coffee cake into the oven. I set a antique egg timer for 20 minutes and waited.

The coffee cake smelled heavenly and tasted just as good. This isn't a very sweet coffee cake, and it has the weight and density of a corn bread with a nice sweet bite provided by the crumbly topping. The recipe calls for a much smaller ratio of butter and sugar to the flour used than in most of the other recipes in my contemporary cookbooks - 2 Tablespoons of butter and 3 tablespoons of sugar compared to at least a whole stick of butter and a cup of sugar in other recipes. This tastes very much like a cake you might find in Europe, compared to the almost sticky sweet pastries we have become accustomed to in America. I wonder if the limited use of the more expensive ingredients was due to price at the time, or if people really just ate differently and through time our palates have changed (not necessarily for the better). I'm intrigued by the differences and can't wait to investigate further. Meanwhile, enjoy this - it's fantastic!