No Knead Bread

After buying a dutch oven, I finally had the cookware I needed to make no knead bread. It was so easy and came out great - golden brown and crispy on the outside, delightfully dense and chewy on the inside like real artisan bread that we had been carving and trying in vain to make. having now made this a few times, I have found that my favorite recipe so far is one I adapted from a couple of different recipes I found online. Here it is:

Ingredients:

0.5 cups warm water
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon yeast
1.5 teaspoons salt
4 Cups (20 oz.) bread flour (mix of white and whole wheat)
1.5 cups water

Directions:

1. Dissolve sugar in 0.5 cup warm water. Sprinkle with yeast to proof (let sit until foamy, about 10 minutes).
2. Mix 2 cups flour and salt in a large bowl. Stir in yeast mixture.
3. Add 2 cups flour and 1.5 cups water. Mix until well blended - making a stiff dough (I usually do the final mixing with hands).
4. Brush or spray dough with oil. Cover bowl with plastic wrap.
5. Refrigerate 3-10 hours.
6. Take out of fridge and let rise at cool room temperature 18-24 hours.
7. Using an oiled spatula, lift and fold dough toward center until mostly deflated. Do not stir. Brush or spray with oil. Cover with plastic wrap. 
8. Let rise in fridge 4-24 hours (or 1.5-2.5 hours at warm room temp) until doubled in size.
9. Put rack in lower third of oven. Preheat to 450 degrees F. Place heat dutch oven in preheated oven for about 5 minutes.
10. Loosen dough gently and invert it into pot. Spritz with water. Cover immediately. Give the pot a shake to center dough if necessary.
11. Bake for about 50 minutes. Remove lid.
12. Reduce heat to 425 F and bake another 15-20 minutes until browned and center is done. (Sometimes the bread is done for me at the end of the first 50 minutes).
13. Cool in pan for 10-15 minutes, then remove from pan and cool completely on wire rack.

Bay Cioppino

Tonight, I made Bay Cioppino from my favorite soup cookbook - Cuisine at Home: Splendid Soups & Spectaular Sides in my 8-quart dutch oven. Both the recipe and the cookware exceeded my expectations.

Being somewhat landlocked, fresh seafood is hard to come by. I found some small clams and wild caught prawns at Yoke's and used frozen Wild Alaskan Pacific Cod from Costco. Using roasted cherry tomatoes from last summer's garden and fresh herbs (thyme, basil, parsley) from my Aerogarden helped make this recipe a success.

The basic recipe follows:

1. Sweat the following veggies in 2 Tbs. olive oil: 1 C onion, 1/2 C each of carrot, celery, red bell pepper, fennel bulb, 1 Tbs. garlic.
2. Stir in: 2 Tbs. tomato paste, chopped fresh thyme, oregoano, basil, basil, and 1 tsp. red pepper flakes, salt, bay leaf. Deglaze with 1 C white wine. Simmer down 5 minutes or so.
3. Add: 1 qt. tomatoes, 2 C chicken broth, 1 Tbs. lemon juice, 1 tsp. sugar. Simmer 10 minutes.
4. Stir in 1 lb. clams or mussels, 3/4 lb. cubed cod. Simmer 5 minutes. Add 1/2 lb. shrimp. Simmer 5 more minutes.
5. Season with salt and pepper. Garnish with fresh parsley.

Bay Cioppino

Homemade No Knead Bread, Salad, and White Wine rounds out the meal.

Homemade Chocolate Mousse make a rich and delicious end to the meal.

Dutch Oven Chicken in Milk

The second recipe I made using my new enameled cast iron 8-quart dutch oven is Jamie Oliver's Chicken in Milk recipe via the Food Network. 

Here it is fresh from the oven.

I served it, as suggested in the recipe, with mashed potatoes and spinach. For the potatoes, I first baked two large russets for an hour, then mashed them with about 1.5 cups skim milk, 1/3 cup greek yogurt, 1 tsp garlic salt, 1/2 tsp white pepper, and a little of the leftover butter from frying the chicken. I put the mashed potatoes in a baking dish, topped with a couple of pats of butter and sprinkled with paprika. I put it in the oven with the chicken for the last 45-50 minutes. I simply steamed the spinach for a minute in water and a little fresh lemon juice (from the lemons I zested for the chicken).

The whole dinner was declared delicious by everyone in the family! And the dutch oven has served me well so far.

Enameled Cast Iron Cookware

My husband and I have had a cookware epiphany over the past couple of months. Tired of our "professional" quality hard anodized aluminum pots and pans with nonstick coatings, which inevitably peel and chip away even with the most careful attention to use of proper utensils and hand-washing, we opted to give enameled cast iron a try. In his extensive research, my husband declares this to be the best, most even-heating, durable, cleanable stovetop-to-oven cookware available. He is an expert at review-based product research and seldom steers us wrong with his results, so I trust him with this. I also consider myself flexible and somewhat easy to please, although I often lean toward liking more expensive products.

In a flourish of prompt response to our decision, my dear husband removed the whole set of cookware from the cupboards and return them to Costco, where we had purchased them several years ago. Good ole Costco took them back! In their place, he bought a Le Creuset 12-inch skillet and pulled from the recesses of our cupboards the stainless steel pots that we had bought from Costco in a previous anti-nonstick coating cookware revelation. In that case, he decided he didn't like how much everything stuck to the stainless set and reverted back to nonstick, but upgraded to the "professional" quality set previously mentioned.

We have been using the Le Creuset skillet for a month now and love it! Naturally, it is expensive. Needing a larger pot for stews and roasts, and desiring the Le Creuset dutch oven but knowing that Costco sold a similar, made-in-France one at a fraction of the cost ($80 compared to $385), we bought the one from Costco (knowing, of course, that we could return it if we ended up not liking it). If you are interested in this product, here is the link: 8-Quart Oval French-made Dutch Oven from Costco

The first dish I I made in this dutch oven was a Texas-style Chili and it came out just right. Tonight, I will test the pot with a roast chicken using the following recipe: Jamie Oliver's Chicken in Milk recipe, via the Food Network.

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Christmas Almost-Paleo Pumkin Spice Bundt Cake

My in-laws came to celebrate Christmas with us this year. My father-in-law has celiac disease, but I really wanted to make a nice dessert for Christmas Day dinner. I found a recipe for Paleo Pumpkin Bundt Cake with Coconut Cream Glaze at a blog I follow called Clean Eats in the Zoo. I have attempted other gluten-free dessert recipes in the past that have not turned out so well, so I was a little anxious about trying this one for a special meal. Luckily, my in-laws are very forgiving and are good subjects for experimenting with new recipes.

I did not have coconut cream on hand, so I made a simple (but decidedly non-paleo) powdered sugar icing made with leftover coconut milk. Aside from putting the icing on too soon, which caused it to melt more than it should have, I must say that it turned out beautifully. And it was oh so yummy! One secret ingredient that gave it that extra something was pureed pumpkin that I had in the freezer from the fall harvest. Every one of my very health conscious family members had seconds. I just love it when that happens.

Dinner Tonight: Fresh Homemade Thai Salad Rolls with Peanut Sauce

One of my family's favorite treats to get when we go hiking near Hood River, Oregon, is the fresh salad rolls from Lampoei's Thai food cart. So, when I was browsing the aisles at an Asian market a week ago and saw packages of rice paper with a pretty picture of salad rolls on the label, I thought, "I could make those." It is so easy to find good new recipes online. I often read through the first two or three I see that have positive reviews and loosely follow one or more, thus creating my own variation of a recipe. The approximate recipes I used follow the photos of my creation. I plan to stir fry some snow peas from the garden with some red bell pepper, mushrooms, garlic, and ginger to go with it. Maybe I'll also put in some chicken or tofu to make a complete meal. This meal would be great for a hot summer day. We are about 10 degrees cooler and 15mph windier than ideal, but we'll have to find a way to enjoy it anyway.

Fresh Thai Salad Rolls

carrots, cut into small matchsticks
cucumber, cut into small matchsticks

rice vermicelli (size XS; I found some from Jiangxi Province in China, where Ellie was born!), cook/soften in hot water, ten rinse, let cool, and chop
mixed salad greens, chopped (I used some from my garden, which has been loving our cool early summer)
cilantro, chopped
scallions (green onions), diced

I tossed the above four ingredients (vermicelli through scallions) with the following light dressing:
1 Tbs soy sauce
1 Tbs rice vinegar
a little less than 1 Tbs fish sauce
a pinch of brown sugar

rice paper (banh trang; I used medium size, 25cm)

Soak the rice paper in warm water. Put on some of the greens mixture. Layer on some carrots and cukes. Roll up carefully.

Salad Roll prep

Assembling salad roll

Peanut Sauce:
The amounts are approximate, as I wanted it a little thinner so kept adding a little more water, coconut milk, lime juice, and soy sauce to thin it out and get the taste I wanted.

1 C creamy peanut butter
1/2 C coconut milk
3 Tbs water
2 Tbs soy sauce
1 Tbs fish sauce
hot sauce (I used about 1 tsp chili garlic sauce, because that's what I had; use up to 1Tbs hot sauce of your choosing, depending on how spicy you like it)
1 Tbs fresh ginger, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped

Put it all in a food processor and puree until smooth.
Add some chopped cilantro just before serving, or as a garnish.

Enjoy!