Fall is here!

So it's been a little while since I've posted. I should share a little background of what has kept me busy and away from the computer (yet more immersed in the kitchen!). At the end of August (almost a month ago!), I moved to an intentional monastic community. I am living with five other adults, two 18mth old twins and my beloved cat Shalom. I have been involved in mission projects in the area including cooking for homeless and street involved people, hymn sing at a nursing home and showing hospitality. Each member of the house has a selected evening when they prepare dinner for the house. My day is Friday, a day that I have set aside as a Sabbath - of rest, reflection and re-creation. Since cooking is my favourite thing to do, it is a joy to set aside a good chunk of the day to meal prep.

I have to say that I was pretty excited the other day to realize that fall is here. I love fall with all it's colours, the cool breeze, and all the wonderful flavours of fall stews and soups and the harvest. I almost literally jumped for joy in the realization that I can use a new section of my cookbook Simply in Season - a book that sections recipes according to the seasonal fruits and vegetables (an awesome cookbook!). I had so much fun picking out recipes for the house.

Yesterday, I made a couple of salads and a kale potato soup (pictured below). The sweet potato salad had a tangy homemade honey mustard dressing while the autumn green salad with pears had a dijon dressing. The kale soup was so flavourful. I steamed it for just a few minutes making it soft, but not too much that it becomes bitter. The soup had only chicken stock and salt to flavour it, but the natural flavours were something else!

Sweet potato salad

Kale and Potato Soup

I also made a granola using up some of the dried fruits and grains in the house. I love homemade granola and it is the perfect topping for yoghurt!

Granola with raisins, cranberries, currants and pumpkin seeds

Last but not least, I made a caraway rye bread. Sadly, I forgot to take a picture so you will have to take my word that it both looked and tasted delicious. I could barely wait for it to cool off from the baking (do you know how hard it is to subject yourself to the smell of baking bread and then have to let it cool? patience has never been my virtue).

The Joy of Bread Baking

Orange Cinnamon Swirl Bread

There is something really special and therapeutic and almost prayerful about baking bread. There is a process of creating, of waiting, of anticipating, and rejoicing when a loaf is made. Yesterday, my friend J. and I set out to bake bread. She worked on an orange cinnamon swirl recipe that comes from The Bread Bible: 300 Favorite Recipes. This sweet bread had the hint and smell of orange that was faint, yet made this bread distinct.

Orange Cinnamon Swirl Bread (Side View)

I worked on a yeast pizza crust from the Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition - 2006, and added my own flair to it with a few herbs.

Basic Pizza Dough (Improvised version with herbs)

Together we chatted and shared about our life stories, our journeys and what we are struggling with as we kneaded and prepared bread that we would share. As we waited for it to rise, the stories continued.

There is something special about creating food with a friend. The giving, the receiving, the making, the sharing, the enjoying. The finished bread and finished pizza was a prize for our hard labour as well as a joy added to our friendship, making yesterday a special day.

Best tasting pizza ever!

I love the simplicity of baking bread. I used to think that bread was complicated and yeast was finicky. But there is something to making one of the basic foods in life from scratch and something wholesome about not eating one of the main staples from a store.

Bread making, as I referred to in a different post, has a special meaning to me now. As I knead the bread, I remember my grandma. I remember her influence. I remember the joy that she brought into my life. I remember her praying with my grandpa each morning for all the people in their life. I remember the stories she told me of growing up and here adventures in the war. The kneading is healing to the pain and sorrow of losing someone I love dearly, but also extends beyond to the future of knowing that her legacy lives on. Her life was a blessing while she was here on earth. But will also continue to be a blessing. Today I was reminded of this as I enjoyed a piece of the orange cinnamon bread and the fruits of yesterday.

Forming the Dough

Cruising in the Caribbean

First and foremost, I have to congratulate blogger for making changes to their post editor - from now on pictures will be added and sized to hopefully be aligned properly. Kudos for them figuring out that it was quite the challenge before, especially with me being rather rusty in HTML codes.

Second, I would like to share my deep excitement that my blog is getting some worldwide attention! How fun is that? I think should start posting some of the original recipes and from now on I will create a link to the actual cookbook that I use. I will warn you that I have a growing collection - currently it is at about 30 books. I ran out of space for them - but - problem was recently solved when I designated a whole bookshelf to the cookbooks. Not only are they neatly displayed, but there is also an empty shelf (that needs to be filled).

A few friends and I gathered for one of my known cooking parties. A time when each person brings a few ingredients and we sit, chat, chop and cook together. Dinner is always served at least an hour after the planned time. But it is always a good night of sharing, laughter and friendship. There is something very intimate about a kitchen. As I am interested in phenomenology, I am interested in looking at what makes the experience of the kitchen different from, say, the living room. The kitchen is a special place to me and I daresay others, though, maybe their interest in cooking is not nearly close to mine or perhaps because I love cooking so much I am too biased to look at it neutrally. In any event, this was the first dinner party I've had in a long time.

Each dinner party has a theme. This night was the Caribbean. Trying to stick to fall vegetables in keeping with the season was probably the biggest challenge I faced in picking recipes. Every recipe looked amazing. But with my recent conviction to eat in season, I just could not justify picking out recipes that required the main ingredient to be imported from who knows where just because I have the luxury of being able to buy whatever I want. I made a mistake with okra (though while it is not "in season" according to my book, it has been on sale a lot lately, so I do not feel so guilty).

Peanut Chicken

Main course was peanut chicken - a very rich sauce with thyme, garlic, curry powder, lemon juice and various other ingredients to make it spicy to taste  (I think I toned down the spice since the last Caribbean meal that I made challenged my tolerance of spicy foods). And of course, it had peanut butter. 

The meal was complimented by a red and green pepper corn bread (using up the peppers that were required for the rest of the recipes!). It was so good and made the perfect bread addition to the meal.

Bean Salad

As a side dish we had a very good peppery bean salad with quite the dressing - cumin, ketchup, white wine vinegar. It had 3 different types of beans (kidney, chickpeas and black beans). The black beans gave it a different texture and then the vegetables were crunchy. This is definitely a keep recipe and I will try to post it as it would be good to make for lunch or anything.

Okra Fried Rice

The Okra Fried Rice was something that I had never tasted anything like it before. I have had okra once but never cooked it myself. I really enjoyed the different flavours and the colourfulness of this dish.

Creamed Sweet Potato/Yam

Then we had creamed sweet potato with a bit of yam in it. Or perhaps a bit of sweet potato in the yam. or perhaps all yam. or perhaps all sweet potato. We discovered the impossibility of us being able to determine which is which without knowing what plant they actually grew from. The stores use yam and sweet potatoes differently. They both come in oodles of varieties so they are easily confused. Sweet potatoes can be cream or orange fleshed. Yams can also be cream or orange fleshed. Mind you, the white fleshed (what i considered sweet potato) definitely had a very distinct flavour. But who knew you had to be an expert in botany to be able to pick out the right ingredient for recipes?

Barbadian Sweet Coconut Bread

The dessert was actually made for the next day. We were too stuffed to try to eat dessert. This is a Barbadian Sweet Coconut Bread. In Barbados, it is often served at Christmas time. It had a whole pile of flour, lots of coconut, hardly any sugar and very little liquid. It barely rose and was quite dense to hold. But the bread, while heavy, was moist inside and incredibly sweet. Definitely another keeper.

Recipes can be found in this great book! I love the pictures, the recipes so far are easy and delicious. The book also explains the beliefs, culture and types of food for the various countries.

C'Mon, Let's Roll!

Squash Cloverleaf Buns

I am enjoying my new project of bread baking in honour and memory of my grandmother. There is something satisfying, relaxing and wholesome about kneading some dough, letting it rise and having it baked in the oven. Fresh bread smells and tastes better as the steam rises above a freshly cut piece. With my book of 300 recipes, I am quite pleased with a project that will carry me all my days. I'm trying not to buy bread at all. I made an amazing wild rice and molasses bread. The rice added a nutty flavour to the bread as well as a heartiness that plain old white and whole wheat breads lack. I have been enjoying breadbaking so much that I have started to pun at every opportunity (much to A's dismay who has gotten quite the rise out of my jokes). Alas, in a world gone a-rye, is a pun every now and then so bad? Sometimes life is just down and out crumb-y and a little pun now and then makes one laugh (or groan). Come now - it's all about the flour power!

Wild Rice Molasses Bread

Then this week for Bible study snack, I made a special snack :) Last week L. brought a homebaked and decorated cake with a Hallowe'en theme (L. has been dubbed the Queen of Desserts in our Bible study group) and the week before J. brought amazing cheesecake. To say the least, if I continued the trend of sweet snacks, I had a tough act to follow. So alas, I decided to do something completely different and I baked Squash Cloverleaf Buns (recipe from The Bread Bible: 300 Favorite Recipes)

These are actually made with squash. Yes, a yeast bread made with squash! The design is called "cloverleaf" which is made of 3 round balls of dough, stuck into a muffin tin. the three pieces remain distinct, yet one (I feel a theological reflection coming on....)

Right now I kneed in my need to grieve and remember. But perhaps out of this kneading, a bread baker will arise in me.

Flour and Seeds

There are times in life when you face hard, maybe unexpected or maybe long coming, things. And there are times when nothing can be said, or done to make it better. There are times when things are lost and cannot be replaced. And there are times, within those moments, where silence seems not enough, inaction is inadequate, and the need to do something is strong. I know people who have planted seeds in symbolism of hope of the days to come or in memory of something or someone that was lost. I know others who write, and others still who paint or draw.

My thing is cooking. So I was thinking about my need to do something - anything - and the limits that the details of my life put on such action. I feel helpless. So I have decided to turn my pain and sadness into something beautiful and wonderful and new. Just like I did with the Moroccan food 4 years ago. I am going to master the art of baking bread - in memory, in grief, in anticipation, in hoping for the days to come. Bread will become my symbol of how God works through this particular chapter of my life. It will be my reminder.

Yesterday I cooked my very first loaf of bread from scratch! My new recipe book says that one should start with a white loaf as it is pretty simple for a first loaf. I don't like to do things the easy way though and plain white bread is not the most nutritious. So I decided to attempt a whole grain loaf - with bran, molasses and sunflowers. I enjoyed the process of kneading, and then punching down the risen dough and shaping the bread. The reward of the smell of baking bread was quite wonderful. But the prize - a perfectly shaped bread that tasted amazing. I don't think I've ever tasted bread that good before!

So my new adventure is off to a great start!