Make challah bread!
I got a call from my girlfriend, Beth, last night asking if I wanted to hang out and make bread. I, of course, said that I would love to and we decided that today would be perfect; we'd walk over to my flat after violin studio. And then, last night, I realized that I would be spending hours of the first day of the Fast making, kneading, and baking the most amazing smelling bread. Ah! It almost drove me crazy with desire to eat. So, in between getting some work done, Beth and I mixed and heated and let the bread rise. We did some dishes, talked about fasting, tried to braid long, sticky snakes of dough. We got flour all over her nice black pants. And all over the kitchen floor (but it looks better there). In the end, we had 3 lovely loaves. One of them is going to the Oxford Bible Fellowship's women's luncheon this Saturday. Another is staying here. Beth and I split the third. :) So good.
Here's a link to Grandma Rosie's Recipe. I highly recommend it; both fun and easy. Oh, and as a warning: the recipe is for a full 3 loaves. So, do yourself a favor, and don't blindly double it.
Also warm and fuzzy: I'm having some tea right now that Rachael sent to Mendon and me for Ayyam-i-Ha. It is mint green tea, and it makes me think of my mommy. I think that mint tea is her favorite.
Now, understand that this is only the beginning of my gourmet breaking of the Fast. The following is from the house chef:
I felt it in my bones. I bought yeast about two weeks ago with a hankering for making bread. I'm glad that Kristen was the one to finally go ahead and make it.
Dinner tonight was a very interesting invention of food. It was pretty good though. I only had a vague image of what I wanted to prepare, I wanted a light pasta, with some lightly grilled checken, and what? I didn't know. Kristen had suggested making a lemon caper sauce for the chicken but couldn't find the recipe that her grandmother gave her and when I googled it the best recipe I could find called for extra dry Vermouth. As good as it sounded, Kristen and I are plum out of Vermouth and, oh right, don't drink or use it to cook with anyway! So, I cheated, I figured I'd improvise a lemon caper sauce for the chicken (improvisation is something that I have gotten pretty good at lately) by stealing a white sauce recipe and converting it.
It turned out wonderfully. I sauteed some onions and minced garlic in the frying pan and set up the white sauce (substituting milk for fish base) with a little butter and a clove of minced garlic for good measure. Then I realized that I had a box of garden rotini on hand to go with everything. It should be noted, I did not sautee the minced garlic (which was minced by hand with a wonderful knife from Locarno) in the butter. Rather, I added some flour and then the milk. After sauteeing the onions and garlic in the frying pan until I was satisfied that they had been lightly cooked, I transferred about 2/3 of them into the white sauce with some salt, pepper, mozzarella cheese, and some ricotta cheese, oh yeah, and some frozen spinach.
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Frozen spinach tastes terrible, if you attempt to use it as a primary ingredient in anything, such as a side of spinach. My mother likes to make it with a little bit of balsamic vinegar and salt. As far as I can tell, the only thing that makes that spinach edible is my nearly undilutable affection for balsamic vinegar. However, frozen spinach makes a fabulous ingredient in such things as Lasagna, spinach and cheese dip, and spinach and cheese gourmet white sauce.
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After grilling, to near perfection, the chicken, I transferred most of the remaining and severely carmelized onions in the frying pan to the white sauce. The chicken had managed to pick up a fabulous onion-garlic glaze while luckily having attained almost perfectly the quality of meat balanced between medium and rare such that it melted like butter in our mouths. The only possible shortcoming of the meal, after adding a small quantity of extra virgin olive oil to the garden rotini, was that the white sauce was just slightly on the bland side. I think that, if I make such a sauce again to accompany my pasta and chicken, it will require another clove of minced garlic.
That said, I served the white sauce on the chicken and pasta and we ate a meal that was fit for, well, a lesser monarch, like Victor Emanuel. The dessert was what really topped off our meal. You're thinking that we had fresh challah with butter and cinnamon and clove honey more pot de creme (which I was thinking of preparing but decided agains at the last moment). Well, you're wrong. We had Peeps instead. It was terrific.
"Frozen spinach tastes terrible, if you attempt to use it as a primary ingredient in anything, such as a side of spinach."
Haha! This is exactly what my dad likes to do with frozen spinach. I had no idea that spinach could actually taste good until, oh, about a couple years ago. Don't fret, though; I may not be a gourmet chef but I won't make a side of frozen spinach when I cook for you guys on Saturday :)
Actually, frozen spinach can be lovely if it is not precooked- i.e. frozen RAW spinach.
You know! If you eat the peeps while preparing the meal, then the challah makes a nice dessert too! Then again so does pie! Peeps after fasting smacks of something I think. What? I cannot tell, but it isn't good......
The cadbury eggs are good this time of year too....sshhh, don't tell mommy......ssssshhhh.
What happened to the lemon and the capers in the sauce? What happened to 'light'? And I will stand by and defend my frozen spinach any day of the week. Y'all are just a bunch of wusses! No guts, no glory!
Kristen, dear, your Challah looks lovely.
Well, we didn't have any extra dry vermouth, that's what happened to the lemon chicken and capers. As for light, the sauce was the heaviest thing, it was mostly comprised of milk and flour. There was a about 1 1/2 TBSP of butter and an ounce and a half of mozz. The ricotta was not statistically significant. The chicken was grilled in very little oil, and I used olive oil on the pasta. it was fairly light.
Capers. I love capers.
Piccata limone is best when there are capers in the sauce.
I'm not a fresh spinach is much nicer than frozen spinach, but there are times that I throw frozen spinach and hot dogs onto the steaming tray of my rice cooker, where I'm cooking rice. Less than a minute of prep, meal in twenty minutes, suck it down in five, back out the door. Better for me than a frozen dinner.
I had capers last night. :)
Formal Hall, which was kind of unusual as far as traditions go, was serving them with their LEMON CHICKEN dish! Ha! I'm so glad that Mendon and I didn't make them just a few days back. The capers were great on it. They had this perfect pop and zing that kept the food from being the usual chicken-and-potatoes dull that you can get with food that is too much of the same color... Speaking of dullness in the food, there was a lovely alum which sat next to me last night who, beneath his acadmeic robe, had hidden a stash of ground red pepper and a bottle of tobasco. :) He was great.
You mean you can't use capers unless you have the vermouth? Surely, you are more creative than that.