Shere Delight

More Rhubarb

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I love to eat rhubarb now, but when I was little I didn't, especially stewed into a gluey pink mess and served for breakfast.   Disguised as pie, however, with strawberries added  and mother's melt-in–your mouth pie crust, it was not the same vegetable at all.  It  seemed miraculous to me that such a sour stalk could turn into the magic of mother's pie.

Last summer an old friend brought me several cookbooks, among them  THE SLOW MEDITERRANEAN KITCHEN (Recipes for the Passionate Cook) . She brought them all the way from California, no less, but I was in an anti-cooking mode.   From spending a lot of time in my kitchen baking bread and cookies and experimenting with complex flavors and textures, to simply  grilled meat, steamed vegetables, and potatoes in some form for Mister, or micro-waved frozen prepared meals. There are some very good ones now, galaxies away from the tasteless  chicken pies and cardboard pizza's of the fifties, but still.  Not home made. No heart-warming aroma in the house, no piles of fruit and vegetables, nobody in the kitchen. A home needs somebody in the kitchen. My waist-line improved though. 

A few weeks ago, for reasons no doubt deeply buried in my sub-conscious, I was drawn back to my cook books, and the kitchen. I started browsing the books she had brought me. As she is a brilliant cook, I knew they must contain some unusual and delicious recipes, and they do. That's where I discovered rhubarb salad, which in this recipe you put on salmon poached in olive oil, but you could easily eat as a side dish with pork as well.

To serve 4, you slice 2 young rhubarb stalks and a medium cucumber; slice the rhubarb into thin diagonal slices, and cut the cucumber into very thin rounds. Add 2 tablespoons of coarse salt and let stand for 10 minutes. Rinse and drain. Toss with a couple of handfuls of arugula, add some lemon juices, garnish with fresh mint leaves, and voila. It is a refreshingly tangy condiment or salad.

I put some in with some cranberries and it made a delicious sauce, which is now molding in the frig because Bernard uses Branston Pickle instead. He uses it for all cold meat, and if we run out he goes into withdrawal.  Although he politely tried my concoction, he damned it with faint praise and reached for the Branston. Oh, well. I made too much of it anyway. It was good, though, and makes a nice alternative to regular cranberry sauce, if you haven't already tried it.

Rye Bread

Furious baking is going on in my kitchen since I returned from France. It's my way of putting down roots. When I've cleaned the kitchen and baked some bread, I am home again. I made two loaves of rye bread a week ago which were heavy enough to break skulls, yet chewy in the middle. I had used part rye flour and part spelt, using the recipe below. The flavor was wonderful. It made very nice toast. Once it was sliced up.

Here's the thing, though. Once you start reading about sourdough bread baking, or any bread baking, in fact, things can get complicate. Temperatures, measurements , the capacity of different types of flour to absorb moisture, varying strengths of gluten, etcetera all make a difference. It seems to become chemistry. But each book has a slightly different take on it. So it isn't really chemistry.

Dan Lepard, in his book, The Handmade Loaf, departs from the classic kneading for 10 minutes, and instead, suggests flopping the dough around for 10 or 12 seconds and then letting it rest for 15 minute. Repeat this a couple of times, then extend the rest to l/2 hour, then longer. Consequently, you are pretty much tied to your kitchen until the final proofing. This technique means you can have a wetter, softer dough, and so the crust is crustier and the holes are bigger than with the simpler method. There seems to be some agreement that "the wetter the better" applies to the dough, and this technique permits handling it.

• I bought flour when I was in France, spelt and whole wheat, so then I made a loaf with half of each, using a sourdough recipe I've often used, as it is so simple: l cup of starter, 3 cups of flour, and 1 cup of water, plus 2 teaspoons of salt. I also roasted some pine nuts and added them. I now understand why weighing the flour is better than using volume measures – the French flour is much lighter, so the dough was very soft. It flattened during proofing because I haven't yet found a good way to keep a baguette shaped, short of buying a baguette shaped tin, that is. So the dough spread into a long, flat, bent loaf, but the flavor and consistency was superb.
• I tackled the rye bread again, this time using the JOY of COOKING recipe, which seemed simpler and less time consuming . It calls for l cup of rye starter, 3.5 cups of rye flour, 3.5 cups of white flour, 2.5 cups of water, and 4 teaspoons of sea salt. The dough was really sticky, so I added a little more flour. Then it was stiffer, but still sticky, and required all my biceps to manipulate it. I let it rise an hour and a half, as recommended, then shaped it into round loaves by folding it, as I do with wheat flours, and let it rise another hour and a half. They went into an oven pre-heated to 450 degrees F, after a squirt of water on the oven walls to create humidity. Forty five minutes later I took them out looking gorgeous. But they not only split along the major slash I made on top, they split along the bottom edges as well. The loaves also break along my folding lines.

So I went to the big UK bread book, BREAD MATTERS, by Andrew Whitley to find out why loaves split where they shouldn't. This, apparently, is due to insufficient proofing – I should have let them rise longer. Or it could be the top dried out too much and the skin toughened. Or there was too much moisture. And you can't shape rye dough the way you can wheat, because it doesn't spread out. So simpler is NOT necessarily better. Oh well.

Olive-Onion Boule

Our 17th century kitchen doesn't have an open hearth with a spit for roasting venison, but still, it feels like it could have.  There is a cubby hole in one wall that clearly used to be an oven with a fire underneath.  Now, it hides recycling containers and a rubbish bin.  Next to it is a black working stove with wood stored beside it, but when I'm working in the kitchen it is rarely necessary to light the fire; heat from cooking is enough.  The floor is stone, and some of the walls.  This kitchen is the reason I've taken up baking sourdough bread, pies, and cakes.

My kitchen opens itself to me, invites me to fill it with the comforting aromas of baking .  I've never liked baking before.  It smacked of the victim/housewife I feared to be in the 70's, the one I threw out of my active life, and the one I've longed to reunite with ever since.  Not as a victim, of course.  I don't want her back.  That's what was confusing, back then.  How to take charge of our lives, make choices for ourselves, stand up and be counted.

I didn't know then how to separate the two, the traditional dependent housewife and the positive nurturing woman.   So I threw them both out.  I have been faltering without that nurturing self ever since. Slowly, piece by piece, I've been recovering her.  Now, I allow my kitchen to envelop me in a circle of wholeness.

I'm still experimenting, of course.  Some of my bread is too hard, or too dense, or too brown.  I write down what I have done and try to do better next time.  That's what I do in my life, too. 

This one is the second most successful bread I've made.  The crust is just thick enough and crunchy, the crumb tender, the loaf full of large holes.  Delicious.   I used some home-made leaven* and a little fresh yeast for an extra boost, because I'm afraid I added too much water to the starter which I began in November and slowed it down too much.   Its aroma is still sour and yeasty, but the  consistency is thin.
I then chopped pungent white onions into small dice, threw a handful into a pan of milk, heated it to boiling, then let it cool. 

Meantime, I pitted (!) -  yes, I couldn't find pre-pitted olives that were tasty - and chopped some herbed black olives, mixed 3 flours -  white bread, whole wheat, and spelt with some sea salt. 

When the milk was cool, I added it to the yeast and leaven and poured it onto the flour, then added the drained onions and chopped olives.   I'm experimenting with a kneading technique from a book called The Handmade Loaf by Dan Lepard  which seems to produce a more rustic bread, but it is pretty sticky and messy.  Anything goes in the pursuit of the perfect loaf, though, from a motley collection of starter containers in the frig to batter-laden fingers and hard-to-clean containers.

The result was a big crusty loaf bristling with chunks of olive.  It was far more than we two could eat before it became stale, so I cut it in half and gave some to our next door neighbors, neighbors who brought us soup when we were both sick. 

*I made the starter with a recipe in The JOY OF COOKING.  It worked perfectly.  Just white flour and water and time.