This month was a real treat. First, I’m swearing off sugar for 2012. I’ve got pounds to lose, and sugar’s ability to drive me into a fervent hunt for food does not help. Second, the recipe was simple, extensible, and reproducible enough that I could try it 3 times over the course of the month…which Audax suggested and I did.

Audax Artifex was our January 2012 Daring Bakers’ host. Aud worked tirelessly to master light and fluffy scones (a/k/a biscuits) to help us create delicious and perfect batches in our own kitchens!

To be clear, these are what Americans call biscuits, and what are called scones in most of the British Commonwealth.

Here were my three variations.

The first used a blend of whole-wheat flour and all-purpose flour. I also went relatively easy on the salt, and used equal parts butter and (natural, palm oil-based) shortening. I didn’t have buttermilk on hand, so I curdled some whole milk with vinegar instead.

The biscuits turned out nice, although a tiny bit heavy (probably the whole-wheat thing going on) and a bit insipid-tasting (I really needed to add more salt). They were still flavorful and my DH and I gobbled all 6 of them fairly quickly. We ate them with poached eggs (here’s how to make them) and veggie bacon strips. A nice twist on a traditional Southern breakfast!

(more…)

Amusingly illustrated in this minute-long animation by The Oatmeal:

Niektorzy –
czyli nie wszyscy.
Nawet nie wiekszosc wszystkich ale mniejszosc. Nie liczac szkol, gdzie sie musi,
i samych poetow,
bedzie tych osob chyba dwie na tysiac.

Some –
Meaning, not everyone.
Not even a majority of people, rather a minority. Not counting schools, where you have to,
and poets themselves.
People like this are maybe 2 out of a thousand.

Lubia –
ale lubi sie takze rosol z makaronem,
lubi sie komplementy i kolor niebieski,
lubi sie stary szalik,
lubi sie stawiac na swoim,
lubi sie glaskach psa.

Like –
But chicken noodle soup is also liked.
So are compliments and the color blue,
As is an old scarf
As is standing one’s ground
And petting a dog.

Poezje –
tylko co to takiego poezja.
Niejedna chwiejna odpowiedz
na to pytanie juz padla.
A ja nie wiem i nie wiem i trzymam sie tego jak zbawiennej poreczy.

Poetry –
Only, what exactly is poetry.
No single, wobbly answer
has been given to that question.
And I don’t know and don’t know, and hang on to it like a grip handle.

I’m not a scientist of any kind (although I did kick ass in my high school and college science courses, because I love the topic), but I suspect the reason we’re collectively having difficulty with weight is because of one taste in particular: sweet. I don’t pretend to know the full biochemical mechanism behind it, but I think foods/drinks with a sweet taste impel us to eat more than any other taste, and, because of that, should probably be avoided by people trying to lose weight. Here’s a bulleted list of my observations that point to this.

• Everyone I know that is overweight has a sweet tooth. Friends I know who don’t have a sweet tooth are thinner.
• Sweet-tooth people I know (myself included) are much more likely to binge than people who don’t have a sweet tooth.
• Cultures (like Japanese and Chinese) that don’t eat a lot of sweet foods tend to be thinner than those that do (like tropical islands, Mexico, the United States).
• Pretty much the only dietary change in the American diet that has been consistent in the last half-century is the explosion of sweet foods, sweet drinks (even diet ones), chewing gum, etc. The percentage of fat in our diet, for example, has actually gone down, but sugar has lost its status as a dietary danger because it’s fat-free.
• It would seem that the only source of sweet food until very recently was fruit, which typically has a very discrete harvest period in the wild. So it would make sense to engorge on fruit and even fatten up a bit when it was available, because its availability came in spurts and, unlike grain, was almost impossible to store until refrigeration.
• Fructose, unlike starch’s sugar components (glucose), does not trigger a satiety signal. I think this very much evolutionarily related to my previous point; when mankind has traditionally consumed fructose, it’s been in the form of fruit, and it might not be around for much longer, so chow down!
• NOTHING makes me want to continue eating more than eating something sweet. I read recently in RuPaul’s autobiography that he avoids sweet food for the exact same reason, and RuPaul is thin.
• People who drink lots of diet sodas are actually heavier than those who don’t, even though sodas don’t have any calories.

I know, I know, I know there are lots of people who eat sugar all day long and they never gain weight. There’s an exception to every rule, so I’m focusing on generalizations based on my own personal experience and what I see at societies at large.

This month’s challenge brought me back to territory I’ve covered in the past, although I was certainly due for a refresher. Being a San Francisco resident, this should’ve been a piece of cake for me, but it was not without its challenges.

Our Daring Bakers Host for December 2011 was Jessica of My Recipe Project and she showed us how fun it is to create Sour Dough bread in our own kitchens! She provided us with Sour Dough recipes from Bread Matters by AndrewWhitley as well as delicious recipes to use our Sour Dough bread in from Tonia George’s Things on Toast and Canteen’s Great British Food!

First, I tried making a starter with 50% whole wheat flour (via Trader Joe’s) and 50% einkorn flour (via Jovial Foods). The starter started bubbling and foaming up nicely after the third day or so, until my DH accidentally turned on the oven where I was keeping my starter warm (using the oven light) without checking first. This first starter died. 🙁

After guilt-tripping my DH into submission, I started the process over again, with 2 simultaneous starters. One was rye, the other the same mixture of whole wheat and einkorn. The rye surprisingly never really took off, although the mixture one did, and I used it to make rye bread fairly successfully.

I used the Dutch oven method, which is supposed to yield a chewier, more sourdoughy crust, but did not do much except avoid a way-too-crunchy crust in my case. I suspect a little water added to the pot might have helped a bit more.

Nevertheless, the rye turned out nice. It didn’t turn out huge and fluffy, but rye almost never does. It did taste good, and of course I didn’t wait the requisite 30 minutes for it to cool before cutting into it (I waited more like 30 seconds). Even my DH, who’s the pickiest eater on the planet and hates everything except white bread, thought it tasted pretty good.

We were supposed to make an accompaniment, too. I made beet soup, going along with the Eastern European/Jewish theme. I don’t have a picture of them together, but dipping the bread in the soup was a winning combination.

A few more pics after the jump…

(more…)

This month we were tasked with making the French-inspired but thoroughly Filipino dessert: the sans rival cake. Flourless but rich with butter, eggs, and nuts, this cake was delicious and gluten-free, but not for those looking to slim down. But, hell, we’re approaching Thanksgiving anyway, right?

Catherine of Munchie Musings was our November Daring Bakers’ host and she challenged us to make a traditional Filipino dessert – the delicious Sans Rival cake! And for those of us who wanted to try an additional Filipino dessert, Catherine also gave us a bonus recipe for Bibingka which comes from her friend Jun of Jun-blog.

My time was on short supply this month, so I didn’t try the bibingka, which is a pity, since it looks intriguing and decidedly non-Western (not that there’s anything wrong with Western desserts, mind you). Besides, my experience with Filipino desserts is limited to Mitchell’s halo-halo ice cream, and buko/pandan shakes at Jollibee’s.

In terms of variations, these are the ones I made:

• 50/50 nut mixture of macadamia and cashews for the dacquoise (only macadamias for decoration)
• chocolate in the French buttercream only, none in the dacquoise

This wasn’t a terribly difficult recipe to make, although getting the g-ddamn dacquoises off the damn parchment paper was next to impossible. I really should have listened to the advice to grease and flour the parchment paper, although allowing them to cook much longer (like an hour, instead of 30 minutes) made them crisp enough to pull off more easily, too. I put the 2 fucked-up looking ones in the middle, and the 2 relatively nice-looking ones (although they were warped a bit because I struggled to shove them onto the same cookie sheet) on the top and bottom. So, in a manner that was typical for me, I made an ugly dessert that still tasted great.

One picture here. A few more after the jump.

(more…)

Picked up two almost identical bottles of shampoo and body wash at Trader Joe’s. The price was identical. The branding was identical. The color and viscosity of the liquid? Identical. Gosh, they even smell the same. Yet, they are distinctly different products: one is shampoo, the other, body wash.

Let’s turn the bottle around…

(more…)

Where do retailers get off charging exorbitant prices for “organic” food?!?!

Wait a minute…

This month’s challenge was a fun one, especially considering that I’ve eaten this before. What the challenge (and apparently lots of Croatians) call povitica is called by my (Croatian) mother orahnjaca, from the word orah, meaning walnut. It’s a yeasted twisted sweet roulade with a layer of crushed walnuts. The change with this recipe from the dessert I grew up eating, is that the layers of dough and walnut filling were very, very thin, so much so that the roll was doubled-up on itself and lined the loaf pan 4 times.

The Daring Baker’s October 2011 challenge was Povitica, hosted by Jenni of The Gingered Whisk. Povitica is a traditional Eastern European Dessert Bread that is as lovely to look at as it is to eat!

I made 3 changes to the Daring Baker recipe that Redfilly01 shared:

• I replaced the cocoa in the filling with rum
• I used whole-wheat flour instead of all-purpose flour
• I used an egg wash instead of sweetened, strong coffee on the top

The result? Surprisingly good. I loved seeing 4 mini swirls in the sliced cake instead of just one. The whole-wheat flour didn’t make the cake heavy, fortunately, although in an ideal world, I probably would have added a lot more butter or something like it to enrich the flavor. I would probably also cut back on the rum a bit and add more in the way of spices, like maybe cloves or nutmeg.

This wasn’t the cheapest challenge (I estimate I spent about $30 on ingredients) although I did end up with 4 good-sized loaves, and these things do sell for $27 apiece online. One went into the freezer for when our whole family gets together for the holiday (yep, they apparently freeze OK for 3-6 months), another was shared at the house for homeless young adults where I volunteer, another was taken to work, and the final one was partially eaten at home and partially frozen for a rainy day.

One snafu: I didn’t want the top to get too dark, so I put foil on the top for the first 30 minutes or so. The dough, very, very thin, stuck to the foil, so I had to tear it off. The effect was that the tops of the loaves looked like they were eviscerated by some beast living in my oven, the walnut filling layer exposed beneath. It ended up creating an intriguing, almost streusel-like effect, so I’m not regretting my mistake too much.

Cutting it in half, you can see the 4 swirls that fused together to make the loaf. A few more pics after the jump…

(more…)

Wyspa na której wszystko sie wyjasnia.
Tu mozna stanac na gruncie dowodów.
Nie ma dróg innych oprócz drogi dojscia.
Krzaki az uginaja sie od odpowiedzi.

The island where everything is explained.
You can stand here on the basis of the evidence.
There aren’t any roads except the path of entry.
Bushes bend on answers.

Rosnie tu drzewo Slusznego Domyslu
o rozwiklanych wiecznie galeziach.

The tree of Justifiable Conjecture grows here
with eternally unraveled branches.

Olsniewajaco proste drzewo Zrozumienia
przy zródle, co sie zwie Ach Wiec To Tak.

The blindingly simple tree of Understanding
by a spring called Oh, So That’s How It Is.

Im dalej w las, tym szerzej sie otwiera
Dolina Oczywistosci.

The further you go into the forest, the wider
the Valley of Obviousness opens up.

Jesli jakies zwatpienie, to wiatr je rozwiewa.

If there’s any doubt, then the wind disperses it.

Echo bez wywolania glos zabiera
i wyjasnia ochoczo tajemnice swiatów.

Without a call, an echo takes away the voice
and enthusiastically explains the secrets of these worlds.

W prawo jaskinia, w której lezy sens.

To the right, a cave, where Meaning lies.

W lewo jezioro Glebokiego Przekonania.
Z dna odrywa sie prawda i lekko na wierzch wyplywa.

To the left, the lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth tears away from the bottom, and gently pops up at the surface.

Góruje nad dolina Pewnosc Niewzruszona.
Ze szczytu jej roztacza sie Istota Rzeczy.

Unshakeable Certainty towers above the valley.
From the peak, the Heart of the Matter unfurls.

Mimo powabów wyspa jest bezludna,
a widoczne po brzegach drobne slady stóp
bez wyjatku zwrócone sa w kierunku morza.
Jak gdyby tylko odchodzono stad
i bezpowrotnie zanurzano sie w topieli.

Despite its allure, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints visible on its shores
are without exception turned towards the sea.
As if it’s only possible to leave here
and dive into the deep forever.

W zyciu nie do pojecia.

In an inconceivable life.