Baking Apprentices

     

So....baking (and cooking in general) are beginning to be the responsibility of the next generation of Barnharts here in Houghton.  Over the past several months, my goal has been to have each of the children make breakfast on "their day" (each child is assigned a day of the week...they get special privileges and responsibilities on that day, one of which is now to choose and prepare breakfast).  They've been pretty excited about this possibility because they get to do something in the kitchen, and also because then they're not having oatmeal on a very regular basis (I had gotten into a bit of a breakfast rut).  I'm excited about it because our breakfast menu has been greatly varied and I am not responsible every morning to get food on the table! (that's somewhat selfish - but they ARE learning to make food and have good kitchen skills)  Everyone has their favorite style of food (their go-to food) but they're venturing out into new areas.  And we've all been enjoying delicious morning food.

Here's a sampling of what they've made...

Elisabeth's day is Tuesday.  She pretty much always makes muffins.  Actually, I think that is all she's made.  But she has been trying out new recipes every week (I think she's made two of her varieties twice - and some of the other children have re-made one that they especially liked). Her favorite recipes are all from the King Arthur Flour website....and they've been very successful.

Fresh out of the oven.

Last week's variety was the Simply Sinful Cinnamon Muffins.

Frosting the muffins (there are also some cupcakes that Elisabeth and Andrew made in two of the 9x13 pans, and the leftovers from a batch of buttermilk granola muffins that I had made the day before)

Ready to eat

The cinnamon-filled center was amazingly delicious!

Two weeks ago, Elisabeth did a repeat of her first muffin recipe.  Lemon poppy seed.  Steve said they were the best lemon poppy seed muffins he had ever had.

Lemon poppy seed muffins with a lemon-y glaze on them.

Peter's day is Friday.  His favorite breakfast foods usually consist of eggs and meat.  Something hearty and substantial.  Muffins usually rank pretty low on his list.  But the Chocolate Breakfast Muffins that Elisabeth had made a while back he really enjoyed.  So....

A proud baker and his batch of breakfast muffins.

Chocolate Breakfast Muffins

Andrew's day is Monday.  He's chosen to make the widest range of foods for his day.  This week he chose to make biscuits and gravy (Peter's favorite morning meal).  I didn't have time to work with him on this one, so Peter stepped up and walked Andrew through the process.  My apprentice teaching the next one!

Andrew and Peter with their biscuits and gravy

Measuring ingredients

One evening, Elisabeth was a bit bored and we didn't have any sweets in the house, so she decided to make cookies and Philip wanted to help. They made my new favorite oatmeal raisin cookies. 

The finished product

(L to R) Regular whole wheat bread, trail mix bread (to turn into overnight French toast), and whole wheat sourdough tortillas

 
And even though I have lots of good kitchen help, I still do make some of our food myself.  This was one Saturday's worth of baking for me (I have found the top of our radiator to be the best place for my dough to rise, at least during the cooler months when the radiator is warm). Three separate doughs.  Lots of yumminess awaits. 

The sourdough tortilla stack

Adventures in Bread Baking

The beginning

I've been wanting to figure out how to make sourdough bread for some time now, and have actually started a couple of starters (and eventually failed to keep them alive). I've had very mixed results with sourdough breads in the past, but I'm intrigued by the possibility of using wild yeasts and bacteria (instead of store-bought yeast) to make bread. It's ancient and modern, delicious and nutritious. And in this new stay-at-home time, I figured this was a good time to finally figure it out.

Guided by Tartine Bread (which was recommended by a friend of mine), I built a sourdough starter a couple weeks ago, and was finally ready to put it to the test.

First bread

Here's the starter (a few weeks back). Nice and bubbly, slightly sour, but not too sour.

Mixing the starter into some warm water. One test of an active starter is that it floats on the water. This stuff is barely floating, so I'm not sure it's really ready.

Here's the bread dough a couple hours into its first rise. You can see some bubbles along the side, which is a good sign.

But then something went wrong. I think the problem might be that I forgot about the dough for several hours, then it got late so I put it in the refrigerator overnight. Here it is, the next morning, looking like a delicious pancake that didn't quite make it into the skillet.

I was pretty certain it wasn't going to turn into a beautiful loaf of bread, but I figured I'd bake it anyway. This frisbee was the result.

Dense, tough, and ready to chip a tooth. Almost as good as Grandma Barnhart's famous biscuits.

Second bread

This one turned out a little better. I was able to start it earlier in the day and give it more time to rise. I'm liking the look of it in this basket.

And the final loaf turned out pretty well, though not quite as tall as I hoped. I was thinking it would rise a little higher in the oven, but it was not to be. This loaf had a good, strong sour flavor, which wasn't quite what I was hoping for. So, on to...

Third bread!

I think I've finally arrived, and I'm ready to open a bakery. I think I let this one rise longer than the 2nd loaf, and then I refrigerated it overnight for the final, long rise. Or maybe the starter is finally ready to make good bread. I'm not really sure, and only time will tell if I'll be able to duplicate (or even improve on) this loaf.

The adventure continues...

coffee joy in a time of quarantine

On an ordinary day, I drink two to three cups of strong, black coffee every day. Sometimes I like it and sometimes I don't, but what I'm really going for is the bracing strength of black coffee to slap me into being a functional human. However, since nothing seems to be ordinary at the moment, I decided to try an intriguing coffee recipe that popped into my inbox the other day, called dalgona coffee.

  (It's apparently very popular over social media at the moment, but this was the first I'd heard of it.) 

If you, like me, find yourself lolling about the house around 3:21 pm and wish for a caffeinated pick me up, I recommend giving this one a try. I don't typically prefer sweetened coffee beverages, but I found this one to be a perfect mix of intense frothy coffee with creamy milk to balance it out. 

Recipe

makes 1 serving

1 TBSP instant coffee

 (apparently Cafe Bustelo is the best 

but I used an old jar languishing

 in my cabinet with good results)

1 TBSP sugar

1 TBSP boiling water

Your milk of choice

 (I used vanilla oat milk, but whatever you like normally will obviously work because...you like it)

If you have a frother, use that to mix the instant coffee, sugar and boiling water together until creamy and whipped. If not, never fear! You can apparently put them in a mason jar and shake until frothy, though I haven't tried this. You can also whisk them by hand (this is tiring, I tried it once) or using a hand mixer. Whichever method you choose, once it's lightened in color to a rich caramel and looks very creamy, spoon it over a cup about 3/4 full with milk and ice, then stir gently before drinking.

I didn't do a great job of taking process photos last time I made this, but if you need further inspiration just google "dalgona coffee" and you'll be in endless supply of them. 

A Charcuterie Board

Adding a brief contribution to this blog, witness this delicious charcuterie board that Carson and I made a few nights ago! By way of explanation, she and I are essentially self-quarantining and considering each other as "family" for the shelter in place order, so we will occasionally travel back and forth to each other's dwellings and nowhere else (other than essential visits to the grocery store). It was delicious! For the curious, those are Miso-Glazed Roasted Brussel Sprouts that I am still attempting to perfect the texture of, although the flavor is amazing.

Another week of (confined) deliciousness

So, we’re about two weeks in to our “stay home, stay safe” mandate, and the children haven’t been bothered by a lack of extra activities. We have been eating well, and they’ve been burning their energy in creative ways. Here’s a sampling of what we’ve enjoyed this week...

  Elisabeth made church window cookies, a recipe that I remember my Grandma making when I was growing up. She always had a batch of these ready for when the grandchildren stopped by. Our kiddos enjoyed their first taste of them!

 Every Saturday is pizza night...last week's pizza options were pepperoni, cheeseburger and our "waffle ball" of the week...barbacoa and Mexican style beans.

"Pigs in Blankets" are always a treat.  Peter and Timothy are ready to eat their portion.



Our family really enjoys hummus for snacking and meals.  Steve usually makes our hummus (which is amazingly delicious!) from a tried and true recipe that we've had for years.  However, I recently found the Classic Hummus recipe in the Feed Zone Table Cookbook, and here's my take on it.  We also really like this one (this one has no garlic, but gets topped with toasted chickpeas and paprika).

This is our family's upgrade of a recipe that I grew up calling "sick rice," because my dad always made it when we were sick (colds, flu, whatever).  Steve has made us change the name, so in the Barnhart household it's now known as "comfy rice" and it's been slightly improved.  A double boiler is the required cooking implement (and Steve just got me a huge one, so I can make a large enough batch for our family), 1 cup of brown rice and 1 quart of milk, cooked gently for about 2.5 hours, stirred occasionally.  We top it with the standard toppings: honey, butter and cinnamon.  But we've now added nuts, raisins, coconut oil.  Anything that could make it extra delicious. (Note: our family requires 3 cups of rice and 3 quarts of milk....we eat a lot)  If you decide to make this with white rice (how I knew it as a child) it would cook completely in about 1 hour.

We make bread almost every day (sometimes it's every other day, and very occasionally every three days).  This is our standard batch.  If it's fresh for lunch time and sandwiches, we'll devour two loaves then.  Then a loaf with dinner, and a loaf for snacking or to supplement breakfast the next day.  Then we bake another batch.  We eat a lot of bread.  No gluten-free diets in this household!

And yesterday's batch of pizza.  We made the Chicago Style Deep Dish Pizza from Cook's Illustrated (I think David originally got us a subscription to this magazine, and we've made lots of delicious foods from it...we've made this one a number of times over the years).  We made a double batch, for a total of 4 pizzas, as the recipe indicated a single batch would serve 4 to 6 people.  Definitely didn't want to run out!  Two of these were plain cheese and two had added pepperoni (we could tell them apart by their pans). 

 

Steve decided we'd just cut into two of them to start with....and that's actually all we needed for all of us! (with 2 pieces left over)  Here he is wielding our pizza knife; it's long enough to cut through the pizzas we bake on our half-sheet pans in one go.

We'll be eating deep dish pizza again for another meal this week....very happily and without all of the work!

Happy Eating from the Houghton Barnharts! (And that food on the table really did feed all 8 of us!)