Garden Pizza

After six months of just about bi-weekly late night stomach aches and next morning groans of "Ugh....damn you Pizza Night", I think I have made - and eaten - enough pizza dough to start the Italian grandmotherly process of muscle memory training. There are pizza muscles just as there are pasta ones, potato gnocchi muscles and pie crust ones, as many muscles as there are culinary traditions to carry on. And so after many failures (edible nonetheless), I am beginning to recognize a pizza dough when I feel one. But just beginning.

I was weeding the garden yesterday, sporadically and randomly and just trying to make a dent in the jungle that the garden has become, when I pulled up one after the other oblong beige tuber. I had forgotten that I had dropped off some sprouted spuds several months back, in a back corner of the un-scientific experiment of our vegetable garden, and, sure enough, they had taken hold and flourished. On my way back inside I snipped some broccoli that was getting pretty leggy, and thought that our house-marinated olives would round out the pizza toppings nicely. Still in possession of around 20 pounds of yellow onions left from last week's event, I caramelized a bowlful for good measure. Add to that some ricotta I had made earlier in the day for some cookies, and we were sitting on quite the pizza larder.

While the cooking was not ideal this first attempt on the Big Green Egg - I'd like more radiant heat to blister the top crust before the bottom crust gets too dark - it was plenty successful as a first attempt, tasted absolutely delicious, and didn't heat up the entire house as the kitchen oven used to. We dined al fresco, mere steps from the land that had given us the toppings. And, learning my lesson from abundances past, I only made three pizzas.

Local Love

I've been preparing for this Saturday's 120 person luncheon for the last month, brining meats and pickling veggies and contemplating with steadily growing anxiety. Now that the cooking is underway I'm less worried about the food and more concerned with the sheer logistics; 120 people, whoever they are, translates to a lot of food (turns out even with my recently acquired second refrigerator I am woefully short on space). But Saturday will happen (third refrigerator be damned!) and the food will be tasty.

What I really want to write about is the joy, deep down in every member of the human race, of cooking for loved ones. I got the chance to take a break from event-worrying for a few days when my family was in town, the first time we were all together for quite awhile. As it was their first time in Portland, I decided to give them a good thorough taste of the Pacific Northwest.

Celebrating the Do-it-yourself mentality out here we snacked on freshly un-crocked garlic-dill pickles and sauerkraut and sipped homemade root beer and ginger beer. We roasted local Chinook salmon, covered in dill and lemon wedges, on cedar planks, and tossed just-from-the-garden snap peas with local hazelnuts and sharp sheep's milk cheese. Willapa Bay clams steamed with morels and baby turnips and finished with a generous shaving of Oregon black truffle kept it close to home. And a sourdough pumpernickel bread to go with the array of NW cheeses and Netarts Bay salt really sealed the deal. Those famous Oregon berries found their way into a crostata made with leaf lard from local pigs and joined by homemade vanilla ice cream, and to wash it all down, of course, a Willamette Pinot (Chehalem) and some black currant liqueur from Clear Creek.

A celebration of the place and of the people sharing it. What else is cooking about?

How We Flew to Bavaria on Wings of Rye

I had been less than pleased with my attempts to bake bread using only my sourdough starter, rather than any commercial yeast. I have a jar full of Fleischmann's in the fridge, but what would I do if I suddenly found myself in a post-Apocalyptic farm house, no grocery stores left, only my trusty mason jar of bubbling sour-smelling goo to raise my breads? (The yeast is the first thing the zombies go for.) Clearly, another attempt was in order.

Rye bread has always been a favorite of mine, as well as the dense brown breads of Northern European tradition. If lightness was not a desirable attribute of these breads, then maybe leaving out the yeast would work just fine. I started my sponge the day before baking, mixing my starter with dark rye flour, warm water, and a little sugar, and mixing in browned onions and crushed caraway seeds. I put that on the counter and walked away.

After only a couple hours it was quite active, putting up the occasional bubble (polenta-style) and acquiring a rather ripe smell. By the next day (about 16 hours of fermentation time) it had developed a thoroughly adolescent personality - impatient, volatile, smelly, and just plain uncomfortable in its body. It was time to graduate it to the mixing bowl.

I folded in the remaining flour (100% rye, as opposed to most rye bread recipes which lighten the loaf with varying amounts of white wheat flour), and let the sticky dough rise and ferment some more.

Eight or so hours later, I gathered the sticky mass and clumped it into a loaf pan, for a final rise of about 90 minutes. Rye flour, unlike wheat flour, does not depend on gluten for its structural integrity and carbon dioxide trapping ability, and so does not require any kneading (read more here), which is fortunate, because rye dough is sticky. It's like kneading bubble gum mixed with Elmer's.

Finally, it went into the oven (350 degrees F) for right around two hours. It's hard to over-bake a bread like this, and you certainly don't want to under-bake it, so shoot for at least two hours, and give it a knock on the bottom to see if it sounds hollow.

A few squares of cold sweet butter and a pinch of crunchy salt would do just about perfectly, but we had the recently canned sauerkraut to debut. Some hot kraut and onions, melted cheese, a few slices of rye, last summer's bread and butter pickles, and a home brew. Prost!

Recipe

In response to several requests, here's the recipe for the shortcakes. Nothing fancy, just a prodigal amount of good cream and butter, and the ripest strawberries you can find.

Biscuits:

1.5 c AP flour
4 t sugar
2 t baking powder
6 T butter
.75 c cream
fat pinch of salt

Combine dry ingredients. Cut in cold butter, stir in about 10 T of the cream until dough forms. Chill. Roll out to 0.5" thick. Cut out biscuits, brush with remaining cream, and bake at 400 F for about 16 minutes.

Strawberries:

4 c fresh strawberries, hulled and washed
0.25 c sugar (give or take)

Slice the strawberries, sprinkle with sugar, puree half of the mixture and fold back in.

Cream:

1 c cream
0.5 c fresh lemon verbena leaves (mint works nicely, too)
1.5 T

Steep herb in cream for at least 24 hours. Strain out herb and whip cream with sugar.

Assemble the shortcakes any way you want. They won't stay assembled long.

The Main Event

This weekend, Home Skillet was launched, on wings of strawberry shortcake, past the reaches of word of mouth among friends and into the wide world beyond.

Along with several other local food businesses, we offered a menu item to be served at a wine tasting fundraiser for The International School here in Portland. I had spent the days leading up to the event making sure that this simple dish would really shine: finding the best possible local strawberries, infusing rich organic cream with fresh lemon verbena, baking over one hundred sweet cream biscuits. Everything came out beautifully, leaving us with an easy job once we got to the event.

We plated up our desserts, schmoozed (as I love to do) and mingled with the crowd, dispatched a handful of business cards, and called it a night. A great event for all involved. Look out Portland, there's tasty food coming your way, and it's called Home Skillet.

From Crock to Can: A Sauerkraut's Life Journey.

On February 9 I packed a one gallon crock full of salted cabbage. Over the next couple days I pressed it down, until finally it was submerged in its own salty liquid. I covered it and put it in a dark corner of the garage.

For the next couple of weeks I compulsively checked it, my first home fermentation project, impatient for a transformation. I knew that it would take several weeks, if not months, to become that tangy, funky, and thoroughly nourishing German staple we all know and love, but I couldn't stop looking. And doubting.

As I started more and more projects, my attention wandered from the cabbage, until, would you look at that, it's been a solid three months; I'd better check. I lifted the top, fully expecting to find moldy, fly-ridden rotten veg, but what wafted up to greet me was pleasantly sour, and somehow even smelled alive. It crunched like cabbage, but tasted like another being altogether. Pricklingly acidic, earthy, vegetal, robust, brimming with life.

Knowing I didn't want to lose the vivacity of our new friend in the garage, but also realizing that we would most likely not get around to eating it all before the temperature rose to summer heights and carried our sauerkraut over the fermentation Sour Cliff and into the Abyss of Off Flavors, I canned it.

I know, I know, I just killed a living being. I took all that natural health-giving bacteria and cooked it, rendering it just another can in the cupboard. But then again, I'd rather have four quarts of delicious preserve than a crock of what might have been.

Filone

Someday I will have a wood-burning oven, most likely made of brick, and probably in my backyard. I first need a house, a backyard, and either the skills to build or the money to pay someone to build, but it will happen. Someday.

For now I make do with a 500 degree electric oven, a baking stone, and a smoke-filled kitchen (and adjoining living room). One look at the crust and I know it's not "real" bread, but for the tools I'm working with, it'll do for now.