The Artists' Hearth

With Covid-19 chasing people into their homes and self-isolation, I have read and heard from many sources that folks are taking up hobbies that they had long neglected or never before considered. I am one of these people. I got a new pet. Her name is Jane, and she is my wild yeast sourdough starter.

I have never much liked store-bought sourdough, usually finding it too strong and pungent for my palate, although Raven loves it. However, I was a batch of bread away from running out of yeast, so I knew I had to do something. Running off to the store every few days to grab a loaf of bread or a few more eggs or another gallon of milk as each one became needed was suddenly dangerous. So, with store runs to be limited to once every two weeks if at all possible and four people in the house to feed, I was likely to need to make my own bread before I could get back to the store. Lacking store-bought yeast, I decided that I would need to catch my own and care for it until it was needed. I suddenly understood the usefulness and importance of sourdough starter. As long as I take good care of Jane, I will have all of the yeast that I need.

Now, you might argue that I will also need flour, and of course I will. I had two bags of flour from a trip to Costco though, so I wasn’t terribly worried. On her last trip to the store my Mom managed to score a 25lb bag of flour as well (it was either that or a 2lb bag, which wouldn’t last me more than a batch or two of bread and with 4 people to feed it wouldn’t last long). So we are set. I have flour, and I have Jane.

Jane is two weeks old now, and I named her the day after I started her in the thinking that having a name would make me feel more responsible for keeping her fed and healthy. I have tried to make sourdough starters before, and they all died, but none of them had names. I named Jane for the author of the bread book whose instructions and proportions I followed to create her. Jane also has a nice literary history of both characters and authors, which appealed to my English Major sensibilities. I just realized this afternoon that she is Jane . . . Dough. Jane S. Dough. Jane Sour Dough. During her formative days I just kept adding to Jane, never discarding. Then I used her to make my first ever sourdough loaves. Not bad, although they both split badly around the base. Maybe more steam in the oven next time?

This bake depleted Jane down enough that I just started rebuilding her again. I have finally gotten to the point that her jar is full again and I was looking at other recipes to try, and most of them talk about using just some of the starter to set up the beginning of the bake, reserving a few ounces to keep the starter going, and discarding the rest.

Here is Jane (left) and Daughter of Jane (right). Daughter of Jane is approximately 4 hours old in this picture and already growing nicely. I did not trust the whole idea of using only a few ounces of what was a full jar of sourdough starter to add to a cup of flour and half a cup of water as a “feeding” and discarding or using the rest, so I just started a new jar to try it and see what happened. That way if Daughter of Jane didn’t work out, I wouldn’t lose two weeks of work and good growth from the starter I had made. If Daughter of Jane does work out – and it very much looks like she will – I will need to start baking tomorrow morning and do some research to find things beyond bread that I can make with “discarded” sourdough starter. I might even trust the “feeding” process and go back down to just one jar of starter.

Let’s talk for a moment about Pottage. It is a dish I hold near and dear to my heart. I call it pottage because that is the closest name I could find for what I make (thank you interwebs). You may have a different name for it. It may have trended at some point that I missed and there is some hip fancy name for it. I don’t know that name, so I call it pottage. My pottages generally do not start out with the intention of being pottages, but they begin as soups and just happen to continue and morph as things get added into the pot. For me, pottage is a pot that is on the stove, and just keeps getting added to day after day, and can continue as long as it lasts, which may be a while since it keeps getting new things thrown into the pot. My pottage usually begins life as a soup, but may end up from time to time – or stage to stage of its existence – more the consistency of a casserole. I usually blame rice for this alteration.

Being modern times and all, my pottage is not in fact on the stove ALL the time, but it gets brought out and warmed back up on the stove and new ingredients added to it every day (sometimes twice a day). It rarely lasts long enough for the original ingredients to disappear, but that would be possible, and maybe now I have a goal to strive toward.

Yesterday I made a soup which has now, unplannedly but not unexpectedly, become a pottage. This soup was not made from scratch, but was also not a canned soup. It was instead a soup made with ingredients that all came out of cans, liquid included: chicken, corn, carrots, green beans, three different kinds of white beans, diced tomatoes, sliced mushrooms, and a container of chicken broth. I seasoned all this with some Tomato Basil Garlic Mrs. Dash and a little Cajun seasoning, plus some salt and pepper. Served with a side of garlic bread (seasoning also out of a bottle. Yes, I am sometimes a lazy cook. Especially for lunch – although this became dinner as well.), this was a really tasty lunch, and later dinner.

Today for lunch (and maybe dinner too. Did I mention I am also not always a highly motivated cook if there is already something to eat?) I pulled the soup back out and put it on the stove. We had half a pot of leftover white rice from a different dish, so I added that into the soup to build it back up.

The rice did as rice does when given free rein in a liquid and tried to stage a takeover of the entire dish. This called for reinforcements from the canned foods, and another can of chicken, a can of peas (I’m out of corn), another can of diced tomatoes, and two more cans of mushrooms were brought in to restore balance to the forc. . . pot.

The pot is once again at high tide, so all additions have ceased until at least after lunch. With all that rice, the next addition may just be more water or chicken broth. We shall see how the battle goes.

Valah here. It has been far too long since I have posted anything, here or anywhere else. In my defense, I was finishing my dissertation and life got crazy. The stress had my head going all sorts of places that were not fit for sharing, so I abstained from writing. But that is now past, my dissertation has been accepted, and I can breathe again!

I have been enjoying cooking soups for the past month or so. My current go-to soup book is Twelve Months of Monastery Soups, which has wonderful recipes that Brother Victor-Antoine has pared down to just a few beautifully simple steps.

Today’s soup does not come from a recipe. Instead, it was inspired by the fact that there were no good leftovers in the fridge for lunch, so I made a soup.

The purplish color comes from using leftover black rice, which will taste great, but makes the broth a bit scary. I also had a bunch of grilled chicken breast strips left over, which I cubed up and put in. As well as the leftover rice and chicken, there are onions, carrots, celery, diced tomatoes (canned), and fresh mushrooms.

I sliced the onions, mushrooms, and celery, and sautéed them in 4 TBSP of butter for 3 minutes to soften them up and start to bring out their flavor. After 3 minutes, I added the sliced carrots and sautéed for another 3 minutes.

I put some chicken bullion into 8 cups of hot water and added that into the soup, along with the tomatoes, rice, and chicken. I brought this whole concoction to a boil, then reduced to a simmer and covered to let it cook for an hour.

I baked up a par-baked mini baguette to go along with it (I know, I should have made bread, but I am lazy. I will get around to baking again one of these days).

All in all, a nice, filling lunch.

Right, so maybe Pot Roast isn’t entirely a lazy day meal, but on the other hand, it really kinda is. I hadn’t gotten around to thinking about cooking dinner in time to make something in the slow cooker, so I needed to come up with something that would actually need to be cooked. I thought about soup, but it is actually pretty warm here still (weird for the latter half of October, but I’m not complaining yet). Mom suggested Pot Roast, and that sounded like a pretty good idea. We had carrots, onions, and celery already, so the only thing we needed to buy was the roast itself. A quick trip to the store on the way home from taking care of Stella in the evening and I was set to cook as soon as I got home.

Just some salt and pepper on the meat, and it was ready to go. I pulled out my trusty enameled Dutch Oven (one of my favorite cooking vessels) and browned the roast all over. I also sliced an onion and minced about half-a-dozen small cloves of garlic. Once the roast was browned I put in the onion and garlic, put the lid on the pot, and stuck it in the oven for about an hour.

While the meat was cooking I cut up the potatoes and put them in salted water to soak. I also cut up the celery and carrots, and some mushrooms since I had them in the fridge. When we were about 45 minutes out from dinner I tossed the veggies in olive oil, salt, and pepper and put them in with the roast.

When Raven got home I pulled the roast out and let it rest while the veggies cooked a little longer. With a bagged chopped salad on the side, it made for a really tasty low-fuss dinner. Hooray for adding another recipe to my go-to dinner arsenal.

My days have been odd lately and I don’t know why. Well, I do know why, I’m just not sure what reason my head decided to latch onto to then cause out of proportion stress without warning me or giving me a hint as to how to settle it back down. For those of you who know me, this comes as no surprise, but I get bouts of depression from time to time. I have since I was little. I was the youngest person my psychiatrist ever put on meds. Yay me.

As I said, my days have been interesting the past few weeks. I’m fine during the day, but most days I “crash” in the late afternoon or evening and no longer want to do anything at all except curl up in a ball or stare at the wall. I can’t even nap because my head throws nightmares at me before I can manage to fall asleep. If I do fall asleep, it just means the nightmares will probably be bad enough to wake me back up in a heart-pounding terror. So, no naps. But I still need to cook dinner Monday through Thursday. So, I decided that I should pull out our trusty slow cooker, since I can set up dinner early enough in the day that my brain hasn’t done a nose dive and started telling me all of my faults, flaws, and failures yet.

It has worked pretty good these past few weeks. I cooked a nice sort of Shepherd’s Pie with chicken, and a peach bread pudding for dessert: (This one wasn’t in the slow cooker, it just took a long time in the oven)

And a mushroom chicken recipe that is definitely a keeper. It was supposed to use white meat, but I found the dark meat to be fall-apart tender and almost buttery:

I also tried out a new seasoning mix that our housemate Kelly brought home a while back. It is “Middle Eastern Inspired ZA’ATAR Blend. I even made (cheater) Naan to go with it (I say cheater because I found a recipe that didn’t need yeast and a rise). It has a pleasant but not overpowering flavor. Next time I should do a curry or something to go on the rice and give the Naan something to sop up.

Not bad for a week where I’ve only been fully functional for 2/3 of each day. I am hopeful that I will be able to get my head around the stressful things going on for me right now (which shouldn’t be all that stressful, really) and get back to letting me be fully functional all day. Hopefully by the weekend one (or maybe even two!) of them should be dealt with, so that would be good. Fingers crossed.

So, that’s where I’ve been the past few weeks. Sorry I haven’t kept up on the blog. I hope to be back to it from now on.

It’s Autumn! Hooray!!

Today is Hobbit Day! It’s Bilbo’s birthday! It’s Frodo’s birthday! Hooray for Hobbit Day!

I have been meaning to make a seed cake in honor of Bilbo’s birthday for several years, and every year I have not gotten it made on the proper day. Somehow it seemed wrong to make it on a day other than Hobbit day, since in my head a seed cake is the cake Bilbo’s makes and so should be made on the proper day or not at all (at least the first time).

I had never had a seed cake before and had no idea what sort of cake it was when I read (or was read to) about Bilbo having just made a pair of lovely seed cakes at the beginning of The Hobbit. Turns out a seed cake is flavored with caraway, mace, and nutmeg.

I quite like this cake, as did Mom, Raven, and our friend Jim when we cut into it after dinner. It is not too sweet, and quite a nice way to welcome in Autumn when combined with a warm mug of tea.

The recipe I found (which was based on an older classic British recipe) made two cakes, although it said to put the batter into a greased and lined pan (singular), but when I tried a single pan it was full with no room to rise without climbing out of the pan, so I divided it into two pans. It is a British recipe, but unless British cake pans are taller than American cake pans, I think two cake pans are actually needed to make this recipe or else it might climb its way out of the pan and all over the oven while baking.

The recipe said to serve this cake with tea (I tried the sweetened milky tea it recommended, but on the second mug and slice I went back to my normal unsweetened and un-milky tea). I must say that it is indeed quite good with a nice black tea (yes, that is a Wind in the Willows mug). I do not think that coffee would go with this cake nearly as well. I think coffee and caraway might clash a bit, but that’s my own taste.

Happy Birthday Bilbo and Frodo!

Welcome Autumn!

Last weekend, quite unexpectedly, became a peach canning weekend. Our sweet neighbor Emily has peach trees in her back yard and they are starting to drop their ripe fruit. They are dropping far more fruit than she can use. So, she gave us three bags of peaches! Then, the same day, my cousin Theresa and her family came to visit and brought with them a flat of . . . . peaches! So, we had lots and lots of peaches.

I made peach bread pudding. Mom made peach cobbler. And we still had a ton of peaches.

All of the peaches were freestones, so they could be easily halved. Now, we have made peach jam, and spiced peach jam, and stone fruit jam, but I had never canned peaches. So, I decided we should can the peaches. I had no idea it would entirely take over the kitchen and use every single large bowl we owned.

Between the weighing, sorting, blanching, the ice bath, halving, peeling, and pitting, it was quite an undertaking. Raven did the blanching and ice bath while I sorted, cleaned, and weighed the peaches. Then we both did the peeling and pitting. Even Mom got in on that once we moved to the dining room table where there was space for three people.

Then it was just putting them in jars with their syrup and a hot water bath for half an hour. We ended up with 11 pints and 1 quart of canned peaches from the 12 pounds of peaches we started with.

We haven’t opened up a can of our peaches yet, but they look tasty (except for the quart jar. There were only blue quart jars at the store, and orange peaches in blue jars look green, so not as tasty and tempting as clear glass jars).

We’re going to take a few jars over to Emily, since they are her peaches after all. We also still have peaches, and are likely to get more, since Emily’s trees still have a lot of peaches on them and one of the neighbors we pass on our run has an extremely productive peach tree and she has given us several bags and boxes of peaches in previous years. Her peaches are cling though, so those would be for jam rather than canning. Oh darn, canned peaches and peach jam for the winter.

Today’s recipe finds its origins in my (actually, Raven’s) cookbook Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. I love this cookbook, by the way. The recipes are sensible, tasty, and not too fiddly. Raven got this cookbook and I got the 50th Anniversary edition of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking for Christmas a few years ago. I have not yet gotten up the guts to try my cookbook. Somehow Julia Child’s book seems intimidating and fancy, and Hazan’s seems more comfortable and less demanding and exacting. Maybe that’s just in my head.

This particular recipe calls for the chicken to be quartered and then pan-roasted, but I used my dutch oven instead. Mostly, because I love my dutch oven. The only seasonings are garlic and rosemary (and of course salt and pepper). I know the pot got crowded, and next time I think I would use one of our cast iron pans and its lid, since it has more room across the bottom.

It didn’t look too bad after it got browned, though. Once the browning was done the garlic, rosemary, and white wine got added (I put in A LOT more garlic, rosemary, and wine than the recipe called for. I have no regrets). As you can see from the picture, I used a good deal of garlic powder (which the recipe does not call for), as well as putting in a few more cloves of garlic than the recipe called for. I like garlic. I also added more wine instead of the water that the recipe called for when the liquid in the pot got low. This chicken ended up with about half a bottle of wine cooked into it.

It took a few hours for the chicken to get done, and it spent the whole time covered, so I put it on a sheet pan under the broiler for a few minutes to crisp up the skin a bit. I highly recommend this step if you like the skin, it made it really crispy and tasty. The recipe said to cook the chicken until it was falling apart, which I did. I am a bit divided over this, but Mom and Raven liked it, so it worked. Turns out the crispy bits that stuck to the bottom of the pan at the end were REALLY tasty! So yeah, a bigger pan to allow more crispy bits would be good.

Three we are, one quarter of a chicken with rosemary and garlic. The sauce from deglazing the pan tasted a bit burnt so I didn’t put it on the chicken, but on the whole this ended up as a simple, tasty chicken dinner. This one is worth trying again.

I ended up cooking again tonight. No rest for the newly-appointed primary cook I suppose. I had a pack of chicken breasts plus a single chicken breast in the freezer and a bag of mushrooms in the fridge, so I went online to see what I could make with what I had. I found this recipe on the Laughing Spatula blog: Easy Chicken Breasts with Mushroom Pan Sauce. It had chicken breasts, it had mushrooms, and it had the appealing fact of being a one-pan meal. The chicken breasts cook in the pan, then they come out to rest and you make the mushroom sauce (mine came out as a thick gravy, actually).

I like this recipe and it is worth playing with again, although the chicken breasts I was using were a goodly amount larger than the recipe was thinking of.  They were Costco sized chicken breasts, so they probably run rather large. The instructions say to cook the breasts at medium-high heat on one side for 4-5 minutes, then on the other side for 4-5 minutes, and they will be done. Not even close. Even though I cut each breast in half (across the horizontal, like butterflying but all the way through), 8-10 minutes was not enough time to cook the chicken breasts. It took almost double that.

Once the chicken was done I put it in the oven (which I had set to warm) to rest and made the pan sauce per instructions. Have I already mentioned that I love one-pot meals? The mushroom pan sauce started out looking like nothing much and not enough to make gravy for four servings. The Laughing Spatula did have a good tip for getting your mushrooms to brown. I’m not telling though, you’ll have to go to their blog post on this recipe to see what the secret is!

Fortunately, when I finished the recipe I actually did have a nice mushroom pan sauce/gravy that was plenty for both the chicken and the mashed potatoes I made as a side. It did taste a little overcooked since the chicken took longer and thus the pan leavings were almost burned. If your pan leavings from the chicken do burn I would recommend cleaning out the pan between the chicken and the mushrooms. You will lose a bit of the flavor from the chicken, but if that flavor is burnt you may be better off missing it.

The next time I try this recipe I think I will turn down the heat a bit after I get a nice browning on the chicken. Hopefully that will cook the chicken and keep the tasty pan leavings from getting overcooked when I make the gravy. I wonder if covering the pan after the initial browning on the chicken would help with the cooking time and moistness to preserve the drippings for the sauce? I may need to try that next time.

It probably would have been a thinner sauce if I had taken it off the heat as soon as I added the chicken stock. But the gravy was tasty, and I proceeded to smother both the chicken and the mashed potatoes with it.

It may not be the prettiest dinner, but it tasted good. Brown gravy just isn’t that photogenic. I guess I could have added a sprig of parsley or something. The picture probably would have looked more appealing if I hadn’t covered the chicken with the gravy before I took the photo, but gravy!

I did add a salad (from a bag) to make this dinner kinda-sorta healthy. The Laughing Spatula might become one of my favorite blogs if more of their recipes are as cook-friendly and tasty as this one!