Here’s my first sewing project for 2009- from the Friday Night Apron pattern from Vanilla House Designs.  This was quick to make, and used less than 1.5 yards of fabric, total.  I might make the apron skirt a little wider the next time, and skip the gathering of the bib sections.

Who says a cook must look frumpy?

The fabrics are from Rowan’s line for Westminster Fibers, which I had leftover from making baby quilts last year.

As someone looking for “real” food, i.e. not processed food, but yet someone with a life outside my kitchen, I’m always looking for recipes and techniques I can fit into my life.   The No-Knead Bread craze, altered by Cook’s Illustrated in the last post to Knead Only 10 times Bread is one of those techniques that now fit nicely in my life.

Artisan-In-Five loaf ready for baking

While trolling Amazon to decide how to spend a gift certificate, I happened across Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes A Day, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois.  The authors are from Minneapolis, so they’re almost locals.   I found a copy at my local library, and checked it out.

It is important to remember that the “5 minutes a day” refers to the active time you are working with the dough, but that the elapsed time of the process is longer.  Again, the idea is to make it workable with your life.

The techniques are simple. The basic idea is that mixing a lot of dough in a few minutes and keeping it in the fridge allows you to bake off a loaf when you want it. As someone said (I wish I knew whom),  “If you’re going to be lazy, you need to be efficient”. How can you not like a way to have fresh bread for dinner every night for a week that requires very small amounts of work each day?

So far I have only mixed one recipe- a 100% whole wheat bread.  The results have been tasty, though I think I need more practice before I will have the technique perfected.  One of the things I like about this book is that the authors don’t just make the basic white bread.  There are recipes for brioche, for rye breads, for multigrain breads, and recipes for sandwiches, salads, etc. to have with the breads. The book also explains how to partially bake loaves, so you can freeze them.  More nifty ways to fit good homemade bread into modern life.

Bread After Baking

If you click on the link above, Zoe shows how to use the basic doughs in other ways, too.  The Bacon and Eggs In Toast from January 6th looks like a real winner.  From reading the blog, it looks like they have a second book in the works, so their technique IS taking off.

The fact that we have a second fridge allows me to keep a big dough bucket cold without any problem, so I think this book will be one I’ll try many recipes from.   I’ll try and get pictures of some results to post next time, too.

From Cook’s Illustrated Magazine, January 2008

Since the dough can be left alone for 8 to 18 hours, it’s easy to mix this up in the morning (or the night before) then bake it for dinner. The baking method (pre-heating the Dutch oven) assures a crusty country loaf. It’s amazingly easy. You’d never believe you baked such a good looking loaf with such great crust.

Equipment:

• Dutch oven with metal knob on lid
• Mixing bowl
• Spoon
• Measuring cups and spoons
• Liquid measuring cup
• Plastic wrap
• 10 inch Skillet (size not too crucial.)
• Parchment paper (wax paper won’t work)
• Non-stick cooking spray

Ingredients:

• 3 cups (15 oz) all purpose flour
• ¼ tsp instant (bread machine) or rapid-rise yeast
• 1 ½ tsp table salt
• ¾ cup plus 2 Tbs. water (7 oz), at room temperature
• ¼ cup plus 2 Tbs. (3 oz) mild-flavored lager (Miller Lite, etc) beer
• 1 Tbs. white vinegar

Process:

1. Whisk flour, yeast, and salt in large bowl. Add water, beer, and vinegar. Using rubber spatula, fold mixture, scraping up dry flour from bottom of bowl until shaggy ball forms. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for 8 to 18 hours.
2. Lay 12- by 18-inch sheet of parchment paper inside the skillet and spray with nonstick cooking spray. Transfer dough to lightly floured work surface and knead 10 to 15 times. Shape dough into ball by pulling edges into middle. Transfer dough, seam-side down, to parchment-lined skillet and spray surface of dough with nonstick cooking spray. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature until dough has doubled in size and does not readily spring back when poked with finger, about 2 hours.
3. About 30 minutes before baking, adjust oven rack to lowest position, place 6- to 8-quart heavy-bottomed Dutch oven (with lid) on rack, and heat oven to 500 degrees. Lightly flour top of dough and, using razor blade or sharp knife, make one 6-inch-long, 1/2-inch-deep slit along top of dough. Carefully remove pot from oven and remove lid. Pick up dough by lifting parchment overhang and lower into pot (let any excess parchment hang over pot edge). Cover pot and place in oven.
4. Reduce oven temperature to 425 degrees and bake covered for 30 minutes. Remove lid and continue to bake until loaf is deep brown and instant-read thermometer inserted into center registers 210 degrees, 20 to 30 minutes longer. Carefully remove bread from pot; transfer to wire rack and cool to room temperature, about 2 hours.

When I visit my in-laws for the holidays, I have an urge to make The Big Classics.  I think it is because we didn’t necessarily have the big classics at home growing up, and I want to know how to make them.  And since my in-laws like to eat, but don’t like to cook, and I like to cook, it gives us all an opportunity, and me a bit of a stage.  After all, if Christmas isn’t a special enough occasion, when will we have one?  Most of us are unlikely to host the Queen of England or the President of the United States, or any other foreign dignitaries, for that matter, in our homes.

We went to central Illinois for Christmas, and we brought a crown roast with us from Minnesota.  I ordered it from my local meat shop on the day I brought my favorite butcher a present.  DH picked up the roast the day before we left for Illinois, and we put it on ice.

On the day of the Big Dinner (actually the day after Christmas),  I got the meat out of the cooler, and started to prep.

I wish I had a before picture, to show what the roast looked like when I started in on it.  The first  thing to do, to make it a showpiece, was to clean the bones of any remaining tissue above the chop part of the crown, a.k.a Frenching the bones.  I think that there must not be many apprentice butchers to give this work to, or not enough demand for Frenching of bones these days for meat shops to do it, as it is a lot of work.  I learned after a bone or two that there is a method to it, but I still spent half an hour at it.  My audience might not have cared that I took the time to do this, but I wanted to prove I could.  And again, why not?

Frenched Bones, ready for the next step

The next step was making a rub for the meat. I don’t remember exact proportions now, as I was doing this on the fly, but the ingredient list included dried sage, fennel seeds, salt, pepper, and some juniper berries. I rubbed this on the meat inside the crown, and at the base of the crown, below the bones.

After that, DH and I spent the time to make little frilly paper hats for the bones, for when we served the roast. Again, why not? The beauty of this recipe, after the Frenching, is that the oven does all the work, leaving time to do such things as make frilly paper hats.

Here’s what it looked like when I served it.

The Crown Roast on the Dinner Table

It was well worth the effort. Delicious. Enough for more than two meals for six people. And we got a giggle out of the paper hats. I think I’ll take this picture to show the butcher. He’ll get a kick out of it.