Tuesday Things

1. When I got home from the gym last night, I had an unshakable desire to bake some bread. So I did, and miracle of miracles, it actually rose! Not like my previous attempt during the winter. I’m thinking that putting the starter in the sunshine to prove may have had something to do with it.

2. Then I ate Nutella straight out of the jar. True story: I only discovered the existence of the glory that is Nutella when I went backpacking in Europe when I was 20. Why was this beautiful thing not a part of my life before then?! Mom, I’m looking at you!

3. Speaking of Mom, I found myself dancing around the kitchen, snapping and singing along to Michael Buble just like she does. I actually thought I was my mother for a moment, like an out-of-body experience, it was weird. I kept on cooking anyway.

4. For dinner I made a recipe out of Dish magazine that looked and sounded amazing in theory, but in practice it was little more than aromatic yogurt-covered chicken with cashews thrown in for fun. And I totally followed the recipe this time, so it’s not my fault that it wasn’t great. But it really makes me wonder about recipes in magazines – how many are actually trialled? Is that the way the chicken is supposed to taste? Who decides that a recipe is actually good?

5. I need a Dutch Oven. Not that kind of Dutch Oven – ew, get your mind out of the gutter! – but the cast-iron enamel-coated kind. I need a Dutch Oven like I need my coffee in the morning. Desperate need. I keep seeing mouth-watering recipes that use Dutch Ovens over on the Pioneer Woman Cooks, like this one for Pork Roast, and I’m just dying to make them. But the Le Creuset Fairy hasn’t yet seen fit to visit my house.

6. We watched a show called ‘Wild Mongolia’ on the Discovery Channel on Sunday night and our cat Spice loved it. She watched every minute of it. Her favourite scenes were the ones with the little meerkat-like rodents running around and popping out of their burrows, she went batsh!t crazy for them – jumped right up on the TV stand and tried to catch them, and even tried looking behind the TV for them. I don’t know who the show was more entertaining for – us or the cat.

Look - sheep!!

What are those funny sheep doing?

They have camels too?!

7. Behold the Ugli Fruit of New Zealand. It’s kind of a cross between a grapefruit and a very juice orange.  I was absolutely astounded by it and had to buy one just to see what it tasted like.

It's seriously ugli, but not really all that ugly.  Confusion abounds!

8. I have eaten asparagus pizza four times in the past two weeks. I may start sprouting asparagus shoots soon.  Have I mentioned that Jonno makes some killer pizza crust??

9. As part of Apple-Gate 2011, I made applesauce like Mom used to make after a trip to the orchard and cooked up some filling for a future apple crumble. However there is still a bowl full of apples occupying my counter, and I’ve already made two apple cakes, so I need a new vehicle through which to dispose of my extraneous apples. HALP!!!

10. When making the aforementioned applesauce, I did not skin my apples. Big. Mistake. I spent probably an hour trying to fish the skins out of the cooked-down applesauce and used at least three different utensils in my efforts. There is no best way to fish out the skins, the only way to eliminate them before they become part of the applesauce. Like, seriously guys, why did no one tell me this? Mom?

11. I’ve been appealing to Mommy lots recently, and in a little over a month, I get to see her for the first time since I got married!! And Daddy and Seester too! Jonno and I are skiving off to spend four weeks in the States, including Christmas. Christmas in the cold again, woo hoo!!!! It’s been three years of warm Christmases so far, and I really can’t get into it. My body won’t let me feel like it’s Christmas unless it’s frickin freezing outside and you have to bake copious amounts of diet-unfriendly foods in order to keep warm.

12.  I wish my kitchen wasn't so freakin yellow.  It causes all of my photos that are taken at night to turn out with a yellowish tinge, and I'm not fancy enough to own a lightbox setup, or even a DSLR camera for that matter.  It's just me and my iPhone, making yellow pictures!

If you've made it to the end of this post, thank you for your patience!  Sometimes I just like to ramble and show off my kitties and asparagus pizza. 

Bread and Recreation

If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.  -Edward Bellamy

Well last night we certainly turned bread-making into some serious recreation!  It started off well enough, with Jonno mixing up the dough like a good husband should.  I was busy making dinner so wasn't able to supervise directly and I'm wondering if that had any effect or if he actually got it all right.  To be fair, we make Wholemeal Bread from the Edmond's Cookbook, and all the recipes are written in paragraph form, with no breaks or delineations between steps, making it super-easy to inadvertently skip something.  Not that I've ever done that, noooo not me!  

The Baker is baking!

Poor husband, he's a little kitchenly-challenged.  He started off well, mixing the dry ingredients with a whisk, aerating as directed.  Then after he incorporated the wet ones, he continued mixing with the whisk, unbeknownst to me.  All of a sudden I hear, "Ugh, shite ya bahstahd!"  (He likes to pull out the Scottish accent every now and then, especially when he's swearing.  It makes life more fun!)  I look over and see him trying to mix everything together with the whisk, and half the batter is stick up in the middle of the wires.  "How are you supposed to mix this stuff?!"  Oh poor boy, he had such a forlorn puppy-dog look on his face, how could I not take pity on him?  It was his first loaf of bread, after all.  

We fixed up the mixing situation, and I used my innate Ukrainian sense of all things wheat-related to knead the dough into a beautifully elastic ball.  Seriously, I'm pretty sure that all Ukrainian women come out of the womb with the ability to make bread.  I wouldn't be surprised if some over-achievers were busy baking inside their mum's tum instead of kicking!  You feel a consistent pushing in there - oh yeah, that's just little Katya, refining her kneading technique!  

So, bread kneaded and needs to rise.  "Cover and leave to rise in a warm place" the recipe says.  The only warm place in our house - warm being not frostbite territory - is on or near the oil heater.  Therefore my brain says to put it in a bowl on top of the heater, coz you know, heat rises.  And oh baby, rise that sucker did.

Rising to infinity, and beyond!

It rose to completely encompass our flimsy silicon loaf pan.  It rose like the Stau-Puft Marshmallow Man.  It rose like it was going to take over the world.  That's when I thought it might be time to bake this blobtastic thing.  Well wouldn't you know it, as soon as I walked out of the lounge, permanent home of the heater, into the icy cold kitchen the whole thing deflated like whoopie cushion!  I stuck it in the oven anyway, hoping it might rise back to its former glory, but no dice.  We ended up with a wide, flat loaf, and who knows how it turned out on the inside.  I'm afraid to cut it open, I think it might eat me!

I went back and had a wee squizz at the recipe and realized I skipped one very important step - splitting the one big dough ball into two smaller dough balls to make, you know, TWO loaves of bread.  Like the recipe says.  Huh.  Two loaves.  ......Ooops! 

Then a bit later I was perusing one of my favorite magazines, Cook's Illustrated, and they had an article where they tested different rising temperatures.  Turns out that either putting your dough in the fridge for 24 hours or leaving it out in a cool area (read: my kitchen between June and October) over night.  So the lazy method works!  No need to rush the rising for only an hour, let it sit, they say!  Well in that case, I should make the best darn bread in New Zealand, because I am the queen of leaving things out over night, intentionally and not.  I'm pretty sure that's where the cats got their taste for certain human foods - snacking off last night's dinner left on the bench top!  Oh well, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger, and I've shared my milk with Spice before.  She's a very clean kitteh!  She wasn't too impressed with our monster bread though.

Pumpkin Bread

Humility alert: My work colleagues love me.  Not because I work hard or because I'm the smartest cookie on the plate (both of which I do/am, of course!), but because I bake.  I bake lots.  I bake at least once a week.  If I don't bake, they start to wonder what's wrong with me.  And their blood sugar levels start to collectively drop and they get the shakes, so I run home and whip up something to restore them. 

This week there was a big hunk of pumpkin sitting in my fridge, leftover from making Pumpkin Soup, and crying out to be used before it turned into a science experiment, which things are known to do in Fortress Moxham's fridge.  I'm pretty sure it's the fridge's fault, it aims its cosmic rays at some poou, unsuspecting piece of produce and makes it grow a nice woolly coat of white fuzzies.  Totally the fridge.  So I made some pumpkin bread out of said earlier-mentioned pumpkin for the work mates, just to make them love me a little more.  What can I say, I am a glutton for baking love.

Anyway, this is my pumpkin, of the crown pumpkin variety.  *Photography disclaimer: I'm using Instagram and Hipstamatic on my iPhone because (a) it's winter here in Wellington, and being so far south we lose any daylight before I get home from work, and (b) I haven't learned how to optimize my dinky point-and-shoot camera yet, and so I still take pretty average photos.  Back to my pumpkin - I only used that piece you see in front, that was plenty of pumpkin meat (pumpkin meat, really?! is that the term?) for this concoction.  I weighed it up, just for good measure, and it came out to 600 grams.  True story: before I moved to New Zealand, I had never measured by weight!  Must be my innate fear of scales.

So then I had to use all of the strenth that I possess, my sharpest knife, and whatever wits I had at the end of the workday in order to carve the skin off the pumpkin and not my own fingers.  And then again with the cutting the pumpkin into chunks - this thing did not want to cut up.  It acted like I was carving up its soul.  Poor little pumpkin soul.  I hope it rests in peace. 

So once you have de-souled the pumpkin, throw it in a pot of hot water and boil it up into a mash, much like you would for mashed potatoes.  When it's nice and soft, strain it, and mash up in a big bowl.  Add sugar, oil, water, eggs and shake what yo momma gave ya.  Or just mix it, if you're not feeling very enthusiastic.  Then mix up some dry ingredients - flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and ground cloves.  You can sift them together, or just aerate them with a wisk in the bowl.  Either way, it's all about aeration.  On a completely different note, please don't judge me for my 80's bench tops and shoddy-looking drawers, we're renting! 

Ok now that that's out of the way and I don't have to worry about being harshly judged for my cracked-out kitchen, I can finish this bread.  Introduce the dry ingredients to the wet ones, preferably in an actual mixer if you don't fancy having to clean up stray flour, and beat until smooth.  Divide between two loaf pans and bake at 180 C for 55-60 minutes, or until a toothpick come out clean. 

This pumpkin bread does two things for me as an American.  First, it gives me a reason to cut up a pumpkin.  I may or may not have carved some eyes into this one before I mutilated it for the pumpkin soup.  And I may or may not have given him a crooked smile too.  Look, New Zealanders don't really do Halloween, and they definitely don't do jack-o-lanterns at Halloween, so I had to take the chance when I got it, k?  You can take the girl out of American, but you can't take all of the America out of the girl. 

The second thing this bread does is mostly fulfill my fix for Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.  Although I am determined to do Thanksgiving this year!  But this will suffice for now, especially if I serve it warm with some real whipped cream.  *Homer drool*  Yes, this is a multi-tasking bread, and really when it's as cold outside as it has been, you need food that does many things for you at once!

Here's the recipe, straight up:

Pumpkin Bread

- 600 grams of pumpkin, about 1/3 of a Crown Pumpkin

- 1 1/2 cups sugar

- 1 cup water

- 1 cup canola oil

- 4 eggs

- 3 1/2 plain flour

- 2 tsp baking soda

- 1 tsp salt

- 1 tsp baking power

- 2 tsp ground cinnamon

- 1 tsp ground nutmeg

- 3/4 tsp group cloves

1. Preheat your oven to 180C.  Grease or oil and flour two loaf pans.

2. Peel the pumpkin and chop into large chunks.  Boil in water for 15-18 minutes, until it's soft enough to be pierced by a fork.  Strain the water out as much as possible, squeezing the pulp. 

3. In a large mixing bowl, mash the pumpkin.  Add the sugar, water, canola oil and eggs, and beat until mixed.

4. In another bowl, combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and ground cloves.  Sift or whisk together to aerate and combine.  Slowly add them to the pumpkin mash in the mixing bowl and continue beathing until the mixture is smooth. 

5. Divide the mix evenly between your two loaf pans.  Bake for 55-60 (ish) minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. 

6. Feed to your family/work mates/bestest friends, because you now have a lot of bread to get rid of!