Caprial's Desserts

I'd like to offer a quick endorsement for this book;

Caprial's recipes have butter and sugar and take the long way to make... but they are well written and never lead me astray. Just look at this cobbler;

It's like magic.

Bread Magic

The art of bread is a matter of alchemy. It is possible to use the exact same ingredients in exact proportions and have it turn out differently every time.  It could be because the batter was too dry, the weather too humid, or the dough was not kneaded enough or possibly too much, baking with a little consistency is a skill that takes a good deal of practice.  I'm so pleased when my baking goes well you must indulge me.

I made a new type of bread; Hungarian Split Farmhouse bread. It's from a recipe book I bought at Barnes & Noble for about $5 and despite the directions having been written poorly it has been a pretty useful book.

The ingredients called for a ton of yeast so the dough wound up being an unruly beast.  I added a significant amount of water to the dough (it's supposed to be very sticky to start, I added a whole extra cup of water). I beat it back three times before I was happy with the texture. The book only suggested one good kneading before baking but I imagine the whole thing would have been full of air bubbles.

I've got to say this is possibly the prettiest bread I've baked in a good long while.  It's covered with Fennel and Poppy seeds (perhaps too much Fennel, I'm going to knock off a few).  I am sitting here enjoying a fresh slice slathered in butter along with a licorice tea and I am in heaven!  If you love licorice you need to experience this! 

... And Papa, just to make you proud I took a photo of the inside... nearly perfect texture! 

We won't go until we get some...

What exactly is Figgy pudding? It is prominently featured in the Christmas carol "We Wish you a Merry Christmas" and yet, it is a mystery. Until today I can't say I've ever seen one or heard anyone talk of eating one. I decided to do some investigation on the topic. First via Google search and then by Dad's cookbook collection I compiled a variety of Fig pudding recipes. As per my father's teachings I wound up taking the recipe I liked the most and altering it anyway. What follows is what I distorted from the 1951 edition of The Joy of Cooking...

Step 1; chop up about 2 cups of dried figs and let them soak in about 3/4 c Rum and 1 1/4 c. hot water (I left it for about an hour)

 2. Beat together until "fluffy" (didn't look that fluffy to me)

1/2 c. butter

2 eggs

3/4c Molasses

1/4 c. brown sugar

3. Add, then mix

Chopped walnuts (I put in a fistfull, so I guess that's about 1/4c)

Figs with all the rum and water

1/2 c. milk

4. In a seperate bowl sift together;

2.5c flour

2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp nutmeg

5. mix it all together

6. preheat oven to 325°F and grease your pan

7. bake for about 1 hour or until a skewer comes out clean

It was hard to find this pan in our cupbords... we're not much of a bunt cake family, apparently this one was my great grandmothers.

The dough tasted like molassas and rum...

Finally I made a frosting of butter, orange juice and confectioner's sugar.  There are fancier/prettier pudding frostings, but this one was tasty.

Some recipes called for boiling the pudding or steaming it for four hours, some instruct to set it aflame before serving... so who knows how authentic this particular pudding is. It tasted like Fig Newtons and rum soaked gingerbread to me, but my friends Josh and Rosie claim that it does not taste like Fig Newtons at all (I did grow up on the organic hippie version of the Newton so perhaps I am biased). Either way, this stuff was fantastic and I intend to repeat it in the future.

Eating like a hippie

When I embarked on this no-dairy experiment I did so with a great internal sigh. Picky eaters are so terrible. When I worked at a restaurant I was always irritated by the people who would order something like penne primavera; "but could you take out the zucchini, and use manicotti instead of penne?". Even worse are the people who go to some place like McDonalds and ask for "a hamburger happy meal, but make one of the hamburgers a cheeseburger,only three pickle slices, and give me extra fries with no salt and an extra toy". I'm not exaggerating, I've met these people, they are the ones who hold up the line in the grocery store telling the baggers how to bag their milk "in plastic and then in paper but not with the ice cream!". That is a little how I imagined a diet with a major restriction to turn out. Not eating dairy for a month (and still going) has reinforced the fact that Those People are just difficult and disagreeable and it has nothing to do with any kind of dietary restriction. It's pretty easy to just say "hold the cheese" and not make it into a theatrical production.
What is hard, but will probably get easier, is grocery shopping. Shopping is slowed significantly because of the necessity of reading through ingredients trying to spot "whey" "casiene" "vanilin" and other code words for "Milk". Today I finally just went to the Berkeley Bowl (a mega-hippie supermarket with the most amazing produce section ever). I bought soy milk, soy butter, soy creamer, a few products labeled "vegan" and a ton of veggies.

The new diet has forced me to think harder about my food choices. Just look at how many veggies I ate tonight;

I also bought a book called "The Joy of Vegan Baking" which I love. The recipes are fairly simple and explain how to "veganize" any baking recipe. I tried using these recipes with eggs instead of egg substitutes but they weren't as good. The most surprising egg substitute that I loved was in the muffins I made today. Instead of two eggs you whip together 2 tablespoons of ground flax seed with 6 tablespoons of water, e voila!

For a dozen muffins I used a half cup of sugar and a third cup oil. Those were the only not-so-good-for-you ingredients, everything else was flour, flax, seasoning, fruit and nuts... actually they're really tasty. You'd never know that they're made with twigs and dirt.

So I'm accepting that I'm not becoming a terrible picky eater, I'm just being a more conscientious eater. Thank God I don't have to do this in Ohio.