From Word To Word

I have this flour mill, have had it for several years now, ever since my Grandmother Hill decided that she was too old to be grinding her own flour anymore.  She told me that it was “a very good grinder, a very good grinder, do you hear?” and she made me promise that I would never sell it or give it away, so it has been sitting in my basement, unused, for more than half a decade.

That was, of course, until I went to visit Loonsong Garden a few weekends ago and had a chance to learn a little bit about how grain is grown and about how flour is ground.  So, when I got home, I went into the basement and dug out the mill to see whether it was a stone grinder, which it is, and which is good.  I spent a little time playing with it  and then sent an email to Loonsong about getting a little whole grain for experimentation.

Yesterday, the owner of Loonsong came by my house unexpectedly, dropping some flour off for a friend of mine.  He took a look at my mill, and it turns out that my Grandmother was quite right, as she has so often been.  Not only does it use stones to grind the flour, which is good for all sorts of reasons, but it is an older model, so it is built far more solidly than anything available to the public now and is geared more slowly, so the flour does not overheat as it is being ground.  In other words, it is far too good a machine to be rusting in my basement, so I may be compelled to add flour grinding to my weekly activities.  It also means that anyone who has grain that needs to be ground, and I know that there are countless of you out there, is very welcome to come and use it, so long as I can have a slice of any bread that you bake.

As my children have already posted, our family visited Loonsong Garden while we were on Manitoulin Island this past weekend.  Loonsong is a farm that grows organic cereal crops and grinds whole flours.  It also grows vegetables for a local Community Shared Agriculture program.  My mother first introduced us to Loonsong at Christmas, when she brought us four of their flours as a Christmas gift.  My wife, who has begun breadmaking much more seriously, has really enjoyed using them, particularly the Red Fife Wheat flour, which has a really beautiful flavour.

Red Fife, as the owners of Loonsong will tell you, has a story of its own that is well worth telling.  Myth has it that Red Fife began as a single hat full of grain sent on to Canada from Glasgow, and that the whole first crop was destroyed by rust except for a single plant that must have been an accidental hybrid of some sort, and that this single plant was the parent of all Red Fife grown today.  It was robust enough to thrive in the sometimes difficult Canadian climate, resistant to rust, and did not require nitrogen rich soil to grow, so it was used to breed many new variations.  These newer strains and other wheat varieties were often bred for higher yields, however, so the original Red Fife was gradually replaced, until there was little of its seed remaining.  Only in the last thirty years or so has it become used more widely again, especially by organic farmers for whom its resistance to rust and ability to grow without chemical fertilizers are highly desirable, despite its relatively low yields.

The flour that Loonsong makes from Red Fife is also distinct from commercial flours in that it is truly whole grain.  Most flours include only the endosperm, the carbohydrate heavy part of the wheat seed that provides nutrition for the growing wheat germ until it can grow leaves and photosynthesize for itself.  Commercial whole grain flours include the bran, the outer coating of the seed, which adds needed roughage but not much nutritive value to the flour.  Loonsong’s flours, however, include literally the whole wheat seed: the endosperm, the bran, and the germ.  The benfit of this is that the flour contains the many nutritious oils and proteins of the germ, but at the cost of a shorter shelf life, since these oils will make the flour go rancid more quickly, so whole flours do need to be refrigerated

Loonsong’s whole grain Red Fife flour is really beautiful.  It is far more nutritious than most flours, and it is delicious, with a flavour that is mildly suggestive of nuts.  It also makes great bread, though it is too heavy to be used in most bread machines.  It works best in old-fashioned recipes, since many of these recipes were made with hand ground whole flours in mind.  The following is one that we have been enjoying lately:

Jaya’s Bread

Mix 2 cups of stone ground whole wheat flour, 2 cups of rye flour, and 2 cups of unbleached white flour.

Warm 1 pint of buttermilk and 1 cup of water to about 30 degrees Celsius.  Stir in 2 tablespoons of brown sugar, 1 tablespoon of dark molasses, and a dash of salt.  Stir in 2 rounded tablespoons of dry yeast and let it proof.

Gradually add 4 cups of the  flour to the wet ingredients to form a stiff batter.  Add 3/4 cups of melted lard or shortening and knead until the dough is smooth.  Let the dough rise to about double its size.

Knead in the remainder of the flour.  Let the dough rise until roughly double its size.  If the dough is too sticky, add unbleached white flour until it reaches a good consistency, as much as 4 cups.

Beat the dough down and divide it into three parts.  Shape each part into a loaf and place in a loaf pan.  Let the loaves rise to about double their size.

Bake at 350 degrees Celsius for about an hour.  Remove the loaves from the pans and let them stand until cool.

The result is a heavy, nutty, whole wheat bead that is great for almost any purpose, but best, at least in my opinion, when sliced thickly, toasted lightly, and eaten with nothing but butter.

If you would like to know more about Loonsong and their products, you can phone them at <705-368-0460> or email them at <loonsong@vianet.ca>

I have just had another request for my Bev Stroganov recipe, so rather than keep writing it for people individually, I thought I might just post it here where I can direct people as I have need.  This is one of those recipes that I first made when I still lived in my parents’ home and have been experimenting ever since.  I very rarely make it exactly the same twice, but the following is the gist of the dish.

Bev Stroganov

Make a paste with three tablespoons of ground mustard, three or more teaspoons of ground pepper, two teaspoons of sugar, a pinch of salt, and a little water.  The paste should be wet enough that it is smooth but dry enough not to be runny.  You can experiment with different varieties of mustard here, but I would recommend that you use preground mustard or use an electric grinder rather than a mortar and pestle for your whole mustard, just to be sure the mustard is ground finely enough to make a good paste.  Let this paste rest at room temperature.

Thinly slice four or five cups of yellow onions into rings.  Thinly slice a pound or so of mushrooms.  I use brown mushrooms most often, but I have used shitake and oyster mushrooms also, so experiment as you like.

Take a two or three pound fillet of beef.  Cut it first across the fillet into rounds that are about a quarter inch thick.  Then cut each round into quarter inch strips, this time cutting with the grain.  This process will make strips of beef that will be tender and easy to chew.  If you cut the stripe so that they go with the grain with both cuts, you will just get long bits of whole muscle that will be much less tender.

Heat a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil in a heavy skillet over very high heat.  Wait until the oil begins to haze over the pan.  Add the mushrooms and onions, then immediately reduce the heat to low.  Cook for twenty or thirty minutes, stirring occasionally, until the vegetable have softened, then drain them through a sieve and set aside.

Heat two or three more tablespoons of oil in the skillet over high heat until the oil is hor but not smoking.  Add just enough meat to cover the bottom of the skillet and brown it, then transfer the meat to a bowl and set it aside.  Repeat this process until all the meat has been browned.  Stir in the mustard paste.  When it is well combined, stir in four cups of sour cream.  Cover the mixture and cook until the sauce is well heated.  Taste the mixture and add mustard, salt, and pepper as necessary.

Serve over egg noodles or, if you want to be a little more authentic, over thinly sliced and very crisp French fried potatoes.

My sister-in-law was over yesterday morning, and she commented on the dried orange zest that I was adding to a recipe, wanting to know where I had purchased it.  Now, it is certainly possible to buy dried orange peel at many bulk food stores, and I have done so myself, but this was zest that I had dried myself, something that shocked her a little.  She had always just tossed her orange peels, and the process of zesting and drying that much peel seemed onerous to her, which is fair.  Our conversation got me thinking, however, about the leavings of things that I used to throw away but now use regularly in my cooking, and I thought that I might list them here, first, to share something of my own kitchen practices, and second, to solicit ideas about any other leavings that I could be using in my cooking.

1.  I zest and dry the peels of any citrus that I will not be using immediately: orange, lemon, lime, even grapefruit when I have it in the house, which is infrequently.  I add these things to desserts and to curries and to stirfries, and I use them as toppings for things like puddings and custards and icecream, and I sometimes add them to some jams and preserves.

2.  I strip and dry the tops of carrots, which can be added to soups and stews to provide carrot flavour without actually using carrots.  They are also great in making soup stock.  You can even steam them with butter and lemon and eat them as a green vegetable, though my family does not exactly love this.

3.  I dry and grind stale bread into bread crumbs for breading meat and using as toppings on casseroles and whatnot.

4.  I save the leavings of certain vegetables for making soup stock: carrot and onion and celery, certainly, but also sweet peppers, garlic, broccoli, mushrooms, anything that is not too starchy.

What other leavings could I be using?

I was asked to bring a dessert to a potluck party tonight, a farewell gathering for friends  of ours who will soon be heading to Chile.  I decided to make one of childhood favourites, Oranje Cooke.  It is a recipe that our family learned in the Dutch church that we attended when I was a child, and the recipe in my book claims to be from the kitchen of Tina DeVries, a woman I vaguely remember, so I never questioned my family lore about the dish, though much of it now seems to me a little questionable.  We were always told that Oranje Cooke was Dutch for Orange Cake, which may well be true, but it raised the question of why the recipe does not actually have any oranges in it.  This was because, we were told, the name of the dish actually refers to the colour orange as a symbol of Holland’s royal family, which descends from Willem van Oranje, or William of Orange.  Again, this explanation seems plausible enough, only the icing that was put on this cake, every time I can remember eating it, whether it was made by my own family of one of the Dutch ladies from the church, was pink.  There was no explanation at all for this inconsistency.

So, today, as I got the recipe out of my book for perhaps the fiftieth time, and as I wondered about why there should be pink icing on an orange cake for the fiftieth time also, I decided to answer this question once and for all.  Unfortunately, the internet solved nothing.  I can find no results for Oranje Cooke recipes that look anything like mine, no results that are even without oranges.  A search for Dutch Spice Cake, which I think more accurately describes the dish, returns any number of recipes, some more or less like mine, but none very similar, and none that specify pink icing, or even orange icing for that matter.

All of this makes me feel much better about the fact that I have been alterring the recipe as long as I have been making it for myself.  Despite all the reasons that I was given as a child, I grate orange rind into it, and I make the icing orange as well.

Oranje Cooke

Mix together, in a very large bowl, a pound of shortening, four eggs, three cups of brown sugar, and a teasponn of vanilla.  Stir in a tablespoon of anise seed, two or three tablespoons of grated orange rind, and about two teaspoons each, more or less depending on your taste, of ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg, ground allspice, ground cloves, and baking powder.  Stir in four cups of flour, which should produce a heavy, sticky dough.  Press the dough about half an inch thick into an edged cookie pan.  Bake it for ten minutes or so in a 450 degree oven.  Let it cool, then spread it it with orange (or pink) butter icing.  Cut it into squares, and enjoy.

Yesterday was a milestone in the long running battle I have been waging to find a satisfactory system for organizing my spices.  The history of this battle will probably not interest you, but I will share it anyway.

It begins with my realization, quite early in my cooking career, that the little bags or bottles in which spices are usually sold have almost no value as storage containers.  The bags are unsealed, continually falling over, inconvenient to handle, and difficult to sort through.  The little jars are sealable and stable, but they are too small for spoons and fingers, unstackable, and not easy to refill.

So, I invested in a number of plastic containers made for the purpose of holding spices.  They had a lid on each side: one for shaking and one for spoons.  They came in sets of twelve, and I bought two sets, so I had enough for what I wanted at the time.  I quickly realized, however, that these were too small for things like cinnamon sticks and whole nutmeg and had too small an opening for me to use my fingers, which is my preferred way of measuring.  There were soon also too few of them for my growing collection and I could not find any more of them.  There were other similar containers available, but they were unmatched, and I will confess that this disturbed the obsessive compulsive part of my personality to a completely unreasonable degree.

My next attempt, one that worked well enough for many years, was simply to use the little plastic containers from the bulk food stores where I was buying many of my spices anyway.  They had tops wide enough for even the biggest spoons and fingers.  They came in one cup, two cup, and four cup sizes.  They were stackable.  They were cheap.  There were also virtually infinite quantities of them, which was important as my collection approached a hundred spices and teas and other sundries.  I still had some reservations about them, however.  The seals were not great, so the spices tended to age too quickly, and they were not very strong, so the lids were always splitting and needing to be replaced.  Still, I had methods for dealing with any spices that really needed a strong seal, and the arrangement was quite functional.

This Christmas, however, my mother gave me several boxes of glass cannisters in two cup and four cup sizes.  The seals were very good.  The tops were a little narrower than the bulk store containers but still very functional.  I decided to make the shift.  Unfortunately, though she gave me more than a dozen of the large containers and several dozen of the small, these quantities did not even approach the needs of my collection.  So, I had her tell me where they had been purchased, and I called every outlet in the area, eventually finding a place that had enough stock for me to buy an entire  case of the larger canisters and three cases of the smaller ones.  I then spent the better part of yesterday afternoon transferring and labeling everything.  The results were much to my satisfaction.

The upper shelf has the four cup canisters, two deep and fifteen wide, and they hold the beans and nuts and dried fruit and whatnot.  The lower shelf has the two cup cannisters, three deep and two high and fifteen wide, and they hold the spices proper, loosely organized, with ground spices behind their whole counterparts and the less frequently used items well at the back.  The shelf to the side has my twenty odd teas and infusions.  There is even, in reserve, a whole case of the two cup cannisters in the basement, to account for breakage and additions to the collection. Everything is in its place, and there is a place for everything.

I am well pleased.

So, as I mentioned last month, there will be no Dinner and a Doc this Saturday.  Instead, it had been my plan to send my children off with one relative or another so that I could have my traditional Christmas baking day with my wife.  I was also going to set up the projector this year, so that we could watch movies together as we worked.  I initially proposed an Alfred Hitchcock marathon.  My wife demurred.  She counter-proposed a foodie-movie marathon.  I accepted, and I was intending to post a request for people to recommend their favourite foodie-movies.  Everything was planned.

Unfortunately, life, or the Christmas season rather, has intervened.  It seems that we will be hosting an annual gathering of friends this year, and this Saturday is really the only day that will work for it, and there are no other open Saturdays between now and when the Christmas baking will be needed, so the annual Christmas baking day has become something like an extended Christmas baking week, where we are making this and that whenever we find a few minutes.  It is not exactly what I had planned, or not at all in fact, but it has been something good even so.  It has allowed us to enjoy the baking at a slower pace and over a longer time, and it has also opened opportunities for friends to do some of the baking with us.  I was not tradition perhaps, but it did what the tradition was intended nevertheless.

Of course, this does not mean that those foodie-movies will not get watched someday, so feel free to recommend them anyway.

Also, for those who are wondering, here is the upcoming schedule for Dinner and a Doc:

January 9th – The Price of Sugar by Bill Haney
February 13th – Lost in La Mancha by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe
Match 13th – Man or Aran by Robert Flaherty

Learning requires failure.

In order to learn, it is necessary that we come to a place where we fail, where are be confronted by our failure, so that we will be forced to learn, before anything else, how to learn, because it is precisely when we fail that we are forced to go beyond ourselves to our teachers and our mentors and our peers and our resources and our technologies, and it is then that we can begin to learn.  If we are never allowed to fail, we will never learn how to learn.  Failure drives learning.  Learning requires failure.

Let me give you an example.  Something like twelve years ago, I decided that I wanted to learn how to make pie pastry.  I had tried to make it more than once, and I had observed my mother making it any number of times, but none of my attempts had been terribly successful, and I wanted to learn to do it properly.  I found several recipes.  I compared them.  I tried them.  In every case, there was something not working quite right.  The results were edible, but the dough was never very workable.  The process was frustrating.  The product was unattractive.  I was failing.

So I decided to go to a master: my paternal grandmother, who made two pies every weekday for many years of her life.  She lives on Manitoulin Island, and the next time I was there I had her lead me through her process.  I did exactly what she did, side by side, every step of the way, and somehow hers worked and mine still failed.  The consistency of her dough was perfect.  She could flip it over, fold it into sixes, and cut designs in it, then unfold it onto the pie like a work of art.  The consistency of my dough was at first too dry and then, after a little water was added, too moist.  I could get it into the pans, and it tasted fine, but it was certainly nothing to take to the county fair.

I despaired, but I persisted, and I experimented with every recipe I could find: with shortening or with lard, with egg or without, a dash of vinegar or not, less water or more, one temperature or another.  I failed and I succeeded, to one degree or another, time after time, and I began to find something that worked for me, though it is not something that will likely work for you.  There was no single secret.  There was only trying one thing or another, watching one person or another, and practicing, much practicing, so that I can now fold my dough into sixes and cut designs in it, though I rarely bother.

This is not the end of things, however, because learning by failing never really ends.  The other day I saw a cherry pie with the thickest, most unbelievable double-crust, so I talked to the woman who had made it.  She explained how she cuts the top crust about an inch too wide, so that there is a healthy bit overhanging the whole of the pie.  Then she tucks the overhanging pastry under the edge of the bottom crust, so that the edge is now three layers thick, and she squeezes these layers together to form her crust.

Of course, I should hardly have to say by now that I needed to try this technique for myself.  I should also hardly have to say that I failed.  Tucking the top pastry under the bottom was a little more delicate than I thought, and my first attempt could only have been called, even with all possible sensitivity, misshapen.  The second was much better, and future attempts should only improve as I get practice.

This is how learning works.  It works through failure.

I have had a bunch of Spy apples sitting around for the last week or so.  They were meant to become pie filling, but the pumpkin pies went further than I thought they would, so the apples have remained, unneeded and unloved, on top of the refrigerator.  Something had to be done with them before they went bad, and that something, I decided this evening, was that I would make stewed apples, one of my favourite holiday recipes.  I know that it is not yet December and that I should still be resisting the onset of the commercially prolonged Christmas season, but it was an emergency, and this way you all get the benefit of a recipe that you can use when Christmas actually comes within reasonable celebrating proximity.

Stewed Apples

Melt half a pound or so of butter in a good sized stock pot.  Add the finely chopped peels of 8 or 10 clementines or the zest of 4 or 5 large oranges.  Add several sticks of cinnamon, several roughly cracked whole nutmegs, and two dozen or so each of whole cloves and whole allspice.  Saute this until the peel has had time to soften and the pot starts to smell amazing.

Add 8 or 10 pounds of cooking apples, peeled and sliced.  Cooking apples are those that resist falling apart when you cook them.  Northern Spys are a great choice because they have so much flavour.  Cortlands are good too because their flesh does not brown like most apples.  Ida Reds are another of my favourites.  Add enough brown sugar to sweeten the apples, but not enough to overwhelm them.  This will differ according to the tartness of the apples you are using.  Use your judgement, but err on the side of too little.  Simmer everything, stirring frequently, until the apples begin to soften.

Add two or three cups each of raisins and dried cranberries.  Keep simmering.  As the raisins and cranberries rehydrate, you will likely find that you need to add some fluid, again depending on the apples.  Apple cider is a safe choice, but rum works very well also.  You could also use orange juice, cranberry juice, or whiskey.  Feel free to experiment, but add the liquid gradually.  You want the mixture to be moist but not swimming.

When the apples have softened and the dried fruit has rehydrated, remove the pot from the heat.  Alternatively, you can also choose at this point to add a healthy dose of heavy cream and cook everything a little longer.  Either way is good.  You may eat it immediately after it is finished, but the flavours will only intensify if you leave it cooling on the stove overnight or let it rest even longer in the refrigerator.  It is great both cold and reheated, both as a breakfast or snack in itself and as a topping for cake or icecream.  I have never tried to can it properly, but it lasts quite a long time in jars in my refrigerator, and it tastes like Christmas whenever you happen to bring it out, even in November.

Tomatoes were not one of my garden’s successes this year, for the second year running.  I did manage to plant them away from the walnut trees this time around, and neither of my two remaining chimneys fell on them, which is a definite improvement over last year, but I started growing them from seed too late, and I had the seedlings in a place with too little light, so I had to plant them out before they were ready, and then everything was compounded by a summer of too little sun and and too little heat.  So, though I have a reasonable tomato harvest, almost a bushel, it is entirely green.

Now, I know that green tomatoes can be fried, and I have attempted this dish in the past, but it is only possible, for me at least, to eat so many fried green tomatoes.  I have also made green tomato chutney in past years, but not everyone seems to like this as much as I do.  So I have been doing some experimenting, and I thought I might share the results.

Green Tomato and Sour Cream Pasta Sauce
Slice a fair number of green tomatoes into slightly larger than bite sized chunks and dice two yellow onions.  Saute the tomatoes and the onions in olive oil.  Add a little sugar and keep cooking until the mixture begins to caramelize.  Add just enough white wine to deglaze the pan.  Add a handful of chopped fresh tarragon.  Add a healthy doze of freshly ground black pepper.

Reduce the pan to low and add enough sour cream to produce the consistency that you want.  I just used a tub of sour cream from the supermarket, but I would wager any money that homemade stuff would be far superior if you have the time to make it.  Add salt to taste.  Put over pasta.

The green tomatoes work really well in a recipe like this because they have the tomato flavour but do not melt like ripe tomatoes,  so they can be caramelized and still keep some structure to them.

Green Tomato Salsa
There are many recipes for green tomato salsa drifting about the internet, but none of them were what I wanted, so I combined and manipulated some of them to my own purposes.

Mince four cloves of garlic, two or three seeded jalapeno peppers, 2 yellow onions, six or eight green tomatoes, and a cup or so of fresh cilantro.  When I say mince, I mean mince.  It should not be chunky.  It should be just this side of puree.

Add a few tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, a dash of sugar, a dash of salt, and freshly ground pepper to taste.  Let it sit, at least for an hour or two, preferably overnight or even longer, so that the tomatoes can pickle.  If it seems a little dry as you are about to serve it, add a little more cider vinegar.

Between these two recipes I have used up a fair number of my green tomatoes, but if anyone wants to share a favourite recipe, I am sure that I will have the chance to try it eventually, if not this year, then the next time my garden cannot list tomatoes among its successes.