Dining Al Fresco

It's pretty much summer in Pueblo, which for us means eating outside on our patio that we made ourselves just a few months ago. The furniture was added for Ryan's birthday; a Craigslist find, and now pots of basil adorn the corners as the warm months promise an abundant harvest.

I have been continuing my bread-baking adventures, this time with the very time-consuming sourdough bread. As I finally reached the baking stage of the 8 day process, I decided I needed to prepare an Italian feast to accompany this accomplishment. And so I turned to that most basic of dinners, the one we all remember from childhood on busy nights when there was no time for our parents to cook; spaghetti.

Growing up, we ate a lot of Ragu and Prego spaghetti sauce, so I think I always assumed that tomato sauce must be very difficult to make. Not so, my friends. I guess if you wanted to make it just like your Italian grandmother, it might be an all day process; I don't know, as far as I know I am 0% Italian. However, it is extremely easy to make a far better than that canned preservative-filled spaghetti sauce of your youth with just a few simple ingredients. As my sourdough bread baked, filling the kitchen with warmth and nostalgic smells, I whipped up a batch of sauce, pasta, and a salad and prepared for a dinner on the patio.

As we sat outside eating, Ryan commented that he thought that food tasted better outdoors. I had to agree. Somehow with sunshine warming your face and plate, breathing in fresh air and the smell of flowers, you take the time to enjoy your food and your environment. I have flash backs to eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in my childhood treehouse; somehow that incredibly familiar lunch tasted better because I was outside and because the thrill of summertime was all around me. I might not have a treehouse anymore, but my patio reminds me that you don't have to be up in a tree to experience the magic of eating homemade food outside.

Homemade Pasta Sauce

2 tbsp olive oil

4-5 cloves garlic minced

2 tbsp basil

2 tbsp oregano

1 tsp salt

1 tbsp sugar

1 24-ounce can tomatoes (or equivalent fresh if you have them)

Some mushrooms, onions, peppers, or any other veggies you like in small handfulls

Put the olive oil in the pan with the garlic and cook on medium for 1 minute. Add the basil, oregano, and the veggies. Cook another 5 minutes. Add the tomatoes, salt, and sugar. Bring to a boil, and then simmer on low for between 20 minutes and 2 hours depending on your time restraints. It'll taste great either way.  

What if bread didn't take all day?

You're not a bad cook because you don't bake bread. I have been telling that to myself for years, with the very simple reason that homemade bread, while delicious, takes too damn long to make! To make a good loaf of sourdough takes six days. To make a good whole wheat, at least most of a day. Risings take multiple hours, so you have to be home all day or at least in and out at the correct intervals, a tough thing to do for anyone with, well, a job, school, family, or life outside the kitchen.

Dum duh duh duhhhhh!!! (triumphant music) I have found the perfect bread recipe for busy people!! That's right my friends; I, Rita Kerr-Vanderslice, the many-time failed bread baker, made bread yesterday and it was lovely, AND it took only 2 hours total. 2 hours!

How is this possible? Not really sure, actually, but I do know that everyone should own this cookbook: The Forgotten Skills of Cooking. Darina Allen is the author, and in this book she tells you how to do everything from making your own yogurt, to raising chickens, to foraging for mushrooms, and, of course, baking bread. Her simple Ballymaloe bread recipe is a simple whole wheat bread that reminds me of my dad making bread on Sunday mornings. Some timing may be slightly different depending on your altitude (writing to you know from 5,000 above sea level) and your oven.

Either way, congratulations to anyone who reads this; you are now capable of being a homemade bread baker; no more excuses. The only changes I made to this recipe are a) converting the yeast measurement from ounces of compressed yeast to teaspoons of active dry.

Ballymaloe Wheat Bread
1 2/3 c lukewarm water
1 tsp molasses
4 1/2 tsp active dry yeast
3 1/2 c whole wheat flour (or replace 1/2 c flour with bread flour if you have it)
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp sesame seeds
Butter or oil for greasing your 5X8 inch bread pan

Preheat the oven to 450. Combine 1/2 cup of the water, the molasses, and the yeast in a small bowl and set aside. Combine the flour and salt in a larger bowl and grease your bread pan. In about 5 minutes, your water and yeast should take on a creamy texture and be foamy at the top. That means it's ready to add to the flour along with the remaining water. Mix it all together in the bowl with a spoon (it will be too wet to knead) and then place the mixture into the bread pan, sprinkle the top with the sesame seeds and cover with a kitchen towel. Allow the bread to rise for approximately 20 minutes or until the dough has risen to just below the top of the pan. Place it in the oven and cook at 450 for 20 minutes, then lower the temperature to 400 and cook for another 40 minutes, or until the bread sounds hollow when you tap it. For a good, hard crust, remove the bread from the pan 10 minutes before it is done and place it directly on the oven rack.
Enjoy your newfound bakerdom!

Colorado Style Sushi

Like many people these days, I love sushi. LOVE it. However, living in a landlocked state makes trusting sushi restaurants a bit strange. My friend Sammy and I always made sushi back home in Rhode Island using fresh fish from her dad's seafood store, making it even more difficult for me to reconcile the fish I see in markets here with the magical ingredients I know do exist.

However, I persevere for the things I love. Last night, for the second time since moving ot Colorado, I made sushi. Delicious, but very vegetarian sushi. In the end, it's really not terribly difficult to make very good, very satisfying sushi using whatever ingredients you have around. I used fried tofu, egg, cucumber, baby carrots, scallions, and sesame seeds in place of the usual tuna or salmon, eel, lobster, and avocado.

In addition to having a special dinner, yesterday was a particularly startling first day of May for me; it snowed! I realized that cold sushi rolls needed their standard warm, satsifying companion on a snowy May Day; miso soup. I set aside half the tofu, some scallions, seaweed, and took my miso I bought from the Asian market out of the fridge.

To be realistic, landlocked sushi dinners aren't as good as eating big slices of raw tuna and salmon, it's true. However, it does give you that little bit of satisfaction that you get when you prepare that dinner you've been craving forever. It does give you that feeling of home, of comfort, and of accomplishment for making sushi happen without an ocean anywhere in sight.

Vegetarian Sushi
4 cups dry sushi rice
5 cups water
1 tbsp rice vinegar
1/2 tbsp sugar
Nori (seaweed)
fried tofu, cut in strips
4 whipped eggs, cooked omelet style and sliced into carrot-stick like strips
sliced cucumber, carrot, scallions, avocado, etc. (substitute anything you'd like)
toasted sesame seeds
wasabi and/or wasabi mayonnaise
soy sauce
a small dish of water for cleaning hands

Cook the sushi rice like normal rice (let it come to a boil, then simmer until all water is absorbed. The rice will have a sticky consistency. Line a bowl with plastic wrap and put the rice in there. Stir the rice vinegar and sugar together and then add them to the rice and stir it in. Allow the rice to cool to room temperature. While rice is cooling, prepare the tofu and egg by frying in a pan with oil and a teaspoon or two of soy sauce. Slice the vegetables so they will be ready and toast the sesame seeds on a pan or in the oven, just until slightly browned and fragrant.
For detailed directions on how to rolls sushi, click here. You do not need a sushi mat, though if you have one they can be helpful. I just use my fingers and make very successful rolls that way. Essentially you want to spread the rice evenly across the nori in a thin layer, place your ingredients in a thin line, much like wrapping a burrito, and then roll carefully so as not to rip the nori

Miso Soup
4 cups water
4 tbsp miso
1/2 cup chopped soft tofu
3 tbsp chopped scallions
1/2 cup dried seaweed

Boil the water, then add the miso until dissolved. Turn the pot down to low. Add the seaweed and tofu. Once the seaweed is soft, add the scallions. Serve immediately.

Avoiding Supermarkets

Ryan and I were talking about supermarkets the other day in the car as we did our usual trip out to the King Soopers grocery store. I was telling him about Wegmans, the supermarket chain I experienced in Ithaca, New York with its enormous fresh foods section, 3 aisles of international selections, and an olive bar. However, even better than Wegmans was living in Providence, Rhode Island with its mini-markets of every ethnic background you could imagine. When Ryan told me that Pueblo actually has both Latin American and Asian mini-markets, we decided to try mixing up our grocery shopping a bit.

First was the Mexican market where we acquired Maseca for our tortillas, chipotle and jalapeno peppers, and some dirt cheap pasta. Then to King Soopers for our staples: bread, yogurt, cheese, coffee, etc., and then to the Asian Market on the other side of town, oddly placed next to a Planned Parenthood.

There we wandered slowly down the couple of aisles, wondering what all of the unfamiliar small jars and packets really contained. I decided to get the ingredients for Miso Soup, and Ryan went to the store clerk to ask if they had any fresh fish. Did they ever. The woman who was running the store went into the back room and returned with two bins, one containing still lethargically crawling blue crabs, the other with shrimp and whole sea bass. She encouraged us to buy the bass, explained how to scale the fish and remove the innards and then proposed a variety of methods for cooking it.

We returned home excited for a food adventure for dinner. Ryan scaled the fish while I prepared a garlic butter sauce as a marinade. We decided on garlic and scallion mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus to accompany our meal, and so the water was put on to boil while I diced the vegetables in preparation.

I'm not about to say that we'll be running back to get another sea bass tomorrow. What I want to communicate with this story is that it's important to try new things. It's easy to get stuck in a food pattern, making the same things over and over, and a lot of that is because we insist on going to the same boring mega-grocery stores over and over. You forget that there are other foods that you like that you don't make, other combinations of ingredients you could prepare that you don't try out. In the end, our mashed potatoes were superb, our asparagus enchanting, but we decided that the more standard tuna and salmon are probably more popular than sea bass for a reason.

However, no regrets. Avoiding buying everything at the supermarket means taking chances on ingredients with labels you can't read, unmarked bizarre looking vegetables, and fish with their heads and scales still attached, and then enjoying the cooking adventure while it's happening.

I'll give you that mashed potato recipe though. : )

Garlic and Scallion Mashed Potatoes
(Makes enough for 4-5 servings)

4 medium sized baking potatoes, quartered, skins on

water for boiling

2 tbsps butter, and more to taste
1/2 cup warm milk
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 scallions minced

Place potatoes in enough water so that they are fully submerged. Boil until a fork stuck in them will go through easily. In a frying pan, melt the butter and fry the garlic for 2 minutes. When potatoes are done, drain the water, add the milk, butter and garlic, and mash until the consistency you desire. Add the scallions and enjoy!