Design-Your-Own Quick Bread

Wow, February was kind of unpleasant. In between bouts of illness, I managed to strain my Achilles tendon and break a toe. Those sorts of health issues are the kind that prevent a girl from cooking the way she would really like to, because hauling groceries and standing at the stove when both your feet are iffy isn’t very pleasant, and neither is eating much of anything when you’ve got a stomach bug or a terrible fever. But now it is March, and we need never speak of the previous month again.* Moving on.

This week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe was for a savory cheese and chive bread. She says that in France, it’s thought of as a cake more than a quick bread, which makes sense. Quick breads can generally be baked as muffins instead of a loaf, in which case they verge on cupcakes. But here’s the thing: I’m not wild about chives. I love garlic, onions, shallots, leeks, scallions, ramps (it’s almost ramp season!), but chives are somehow always wrong. 

Lucky for me, the header and marginalia on this recipe explain clearly that it is meant to be tweaked. Swap in other kinds of cheese, or some sundried tomatoes, different herbs, bacon, olives–whatever. My craving this week led me to figs. And then walnuts. And then blue cheese. Which led me to create this bread:

Start with some flour. I used a mix of all-purpose and whole wheat, because that’s how I roll. Whisk in the baking powder, salt, and pepper.

In another bowl, whisk together 3 eggs. Mix in some milk and olive oil. I found it easier to measure both in the same Pyrex together, with the added bonus that these gorgeous bubbles formed between the two layers.

Pour wet into dry and mix until just combined, then add in the add-ins. As Dorie says, you can use really whatever you like. The original recipe calls for both grated AND diced cheese, but I thought the volume and moisture of the fruit would compensate for ditching the grated, plus, even I don’t need THAT much blue cheese in one dish.

Mix it all up and then dump it in a buttered loaf pan. And then bake until it’s done, really. I wish I could say that I just ate this one slice and then ran out to share the rest with my neighbors or coworkers or the deshi at New York Aikikai or something, but that would be a blatant lie. I ate three slices and am not optimistic that the rest will survive until C. returns from her sojourn upstate. So I will just have to make it again.

*Truthfully, there were many good meals in February, including my latest turn hosting Cook Club (post tk), a dinner at Momofuku Noodle Bar with S., and, as previously mentioned, a wonderful Valentine’s Day dinner with my very own valentine. But I like to pick and choose my anecdotes in order to tell the story I’ve chosen.

Fig-Walnut Bread with Blue Cheese

adapted from Dorie Greenspan

Makes one loaf or probably 10-12 muffins

1 c all-purpose flour

3/4 c whole wheat flour

1 Tbsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp white pepper

3 eggs

1/3 c milk

1/3 c olive oil

1 c dried figs, chopped

2 oz blue cheese, crumbled or chopped

1/3 c toasted walnuts, chopped

Preheat the oven to 350F and butter a loaf pan. (8 x 4 1/2 or 9 x 5, either is fine. Or a muffin tin, greased or lined.)

Whisk together the flours, baking powder, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. In a medium bowl, whisk the three eggs for a full minute, until they are foamy. Pour in the milk and olive oil and mix to combine. Pour the wet ingredients into the bowl with the flour and stir together. Add in the figs, cheese, and nuts, and stir just until everything is about uniformly distributed in the batter. Careful not to overmix.

Pour the batter into the loaf pan, smooth out the top, and bake for about 40 minutes. (Start checking earlier if your loaf pan is bigger. And if you’re making muffins, give them 20-25 minutes.) The loaf is ready when a thin knife comes out clean. 

Remove from the oven, let cool briefly, and then turn out onto a cooling rack. When it’s come to room temperature, it can be stored wrapped in foil or plastic wrap. Eat it within a few days or else freeze it.

Sage advice (oh my god, I put a pun in the title of a post, shoot me now)

There’s a used bookstore around the corner from my office that has a very odd selection of cookbooks. They probably have just as odd a selection of other books, too, but mostly I peruse the food section. Because I like to pretend that I need more cookbooks in my life. Actually, that is something I can almost convince myself is true, now that I’ve relocated them from a shelf above my stove to a proper bookshelf, an important development for two reasons: first, the spines of the books won’t get all sticky with cooking anymore, and second, I can now put a wall-mounted pot rack behind the stove and then the world will be a better place. (It’s the little things that bring me the most joy.)

In any event, at this bookstore, I was flipping through a book the other day called The Good Herb: Recipes and Remedies from Nature, looking for some new uses for things like the sage, oregano, and summer savory currently taking up residence in my fridge.

I couldn’t sell myself on the book just yet, but I surreptitiously snapped a photo of this recipe for whole wheat sage bread

and crossed my fingers that the resolution on my dinky camera phone would be enough to let me read it properly later… Luckily, after bluetooth-ing the file to my computer and enlarging it enough, I could just about squint out the distinctions between teaspoons and tablespoons of everything on the ingredient list. So I set to work.

First, into a bowl go a mix of whole wheat and all purpose flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda.

Then it’s time to chop the leaves from a few sprigs of sage.

The recipe called for dried sage, but the only herb that is better dried than fresh is oregano, and the whole purpose of making this recipe is to use things while they are fresh. So I just minced it up as finely as possible, and that goes into the bowl, too. General rule of thumb, by the way: 1 part dried herb = 3 parts fresh.

Then the wet ingredients, in this case a mix of plain yogurt (as always, my substitute for buttermilk), egg whites, and a bit of olive oil. 

Mix it together and then knead it into a round loaf. I’m not sure I’d encountered a recipe before that calls for kneading a dough that’s leavened with baking powder and soda, rather than yeast. But it still suggests slashing the top to let the air out as it cooks. I opted for the traditional cross in this case.

It was really delicious straight out of the oven, with a little butter spread on a slice. 

Although there is some evidence that I need to work either on my kneading technique or the slashes on top of the loaf.

Weekend Brunch

Mmm… Pumpkin bread pudding…

Yes, there is more to it than just me drooling over the memory of this dish.

One of the things I received in the January delivery was a pouch of pureed butternut squash. I cook with winter squash a lot, but it’s usually in chunks, and I actually had to think a bit to decide what I could do with the puree. And then, while I was hungrily browsing some other food blogs last Friday, I suddenly remembered something that was sitting in the freezer along with the squash: a loaf of cinnamon swirl bread from Great Harvest. And suddenly I knew what A., A., M., and I were going to have for brunch on Sunday.

Bread pudding is one of those dishes that is really impossibly easy and also incredibly satisfying. In this case, you just mix in some of the squash puree with the milk & egg, and basically call it a day.

And you might want to add in some spices: cinnamon, ginger, allspice, and cloves. I doubled the spices, per the recommendation from nearly every reader comment on Epicurious, except for the cinnamon, since there was a lot in the bread already. And I cut the sugar in half, which will make sense to anyone who has had the aforementioned cinnamon swirl bread.

Then, because I am sometimes incredibly lazy, I dotted the butter (again, less than called for) over the bread instead of melting it and mixing it in.

Pour over the egg/milk/squash mess:

And bake for a half hour at 350F. Or a bit longer if you think it needs it.

I was so excited to eat this that I forgot to take a picture at first. So this is A.’s half-finished plate.

Normally these days I am not such a fan of sweet breakfasts. But damn, this was good.

Ideas to Try

From the New York Times:

Sweet and Sour Cabbage With Tofu and Grains
Zucchini ‘Pasta’
Quinoa With Corn and Zucchini

From Smitten Kitchen:

Zucchini Bread

From 101 Cookbooks:

Lemony Chickpea Stir-fry Recipe (with spinach instead of kale)

Let there be bread

Over the years, I have gotten pretty good at judging recipes, I think. It does not happen very often these days that I’ll find a recipe online or in a cookbook, try it myself, and either (a) hate it (like this vegetable curry I made from a Nigella Lawson book once) or (b) totally screw it up (like the first time I tried to make mole poblano–remember that one, Linds?). I’m even confident enough now that I can adjust a recipe to my taste or my pantry before trying it out the first time, which is a big step for me. Nevertheless, I was really nervous about this bread:

Oregano Pain de Campagne (which for some reason is called “de champagne” on the blog where I found it)
adapted from Once Upon a Cakestand

See, I had all this oregano in the fridge, and that’s just not an herb I cook with a lot. Plus everybody who DOES use it often seems to agree that it’s actually better dried. But I love baking with fresh herbs, so I figured I could find a bread recipe somewhere. And so I did.

The first problem was that the author of this blog is Swiss, so things are in grams and mililiters. But I’ve got a really great kitchen scale now so that’s ok. Then there’s the fact that it calls for FRESH yeast instead of dry active. But I do, in theory, know how to handle a packet of yeast. So we gave it a shot this morning.

Halfway through, I was sure it was going to be a hot mess. It was WAY too wet–the bread I’ve made before gets a certain silky feeling after it’s been kneaded and even adding quite a bit of extra flour, this one never got there. Even after rising, the texture just seemed off somehow. Plus I don’t have a kitchenaid, just my cuisinart with the handy dough blade, which I LOVE but is not designed for bread making. But I figured I’d give it a shot. And presto! Bread!

Really, really delicious bread, it turns out. My dinner guests later this week are going to be lucky if I don’t eat it all before they arrive.

Oregano Pain de Campagne Focaccia [upon further consideration, I have revised the name of this bread. It is buttery and rather flat, not what I think of as a French country bread at all]

2 c. + 2 Tbsp. all purpose flour
2/3 c. rye flour
1 Tbsp. salt
big handful of fresh oregano leaves, chopped
1 packet dry active yeast (1/4 oz.)
pinch of sugar
1 stick butter, room temperature, cut into chunks
~1 c. water

In a 1-cup pyrex, mix the yeast with the sugar and some warm water. Let it do its thing while you mix all the dry ingredients in your Cuisinart with dough blade (or if you’re lucky, your Kitchenaid with dough hook).

Toss the butter into the machine and pulse it up until it’s nicely mixed and sort of halfway between wet sand and pebbles.

Top off the pyrex cup of yeast with water up to the 1 cup mark, and tip it into the bowl of the machine. Pulse until it’s mostly mixed, then dump it out onto a floured surface and knead until smooth. Add more flour as needed.

Form the dough into a ball and place it in a lightly oiled bowl. Cover and let rise in a warm spot (thank goodness for stoves with pilot lights!) for 1 1/2 hours.

Squish the dough into a ball again and put it on a baking sheet lined with parchment and sprinkled with a little flour. Cover and let rise another hour.

Slash an X onto the top of the loaf. Bake at 425F for 30 minutes, until it’s lightly golden and crusty, and (if you want to check) the temperature inside is about 200F.