Soup for breakfast? Absolutely!

I don't know what made me think of it - maybe it was the big butternut squash sitting on my counter right from my friend Reeny's garden - but it occurred to me that a thick creamy soup could be just the thing to start out a cold wintry day, in lieu of our usual fresh fruit.  With the early snowfall still on the ground, today seemed like a good day to test my theory on guests.  (Dominique was skeptical.)

I used my usual recipe from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, tossing in lots of dried sage and thyme.  I cooked it up the night before, then reheated it and mushed it with my immersion blender.  I served it in smallish bowls (I wasn't that confident, either) with a dollop of sour cream and a sprinkling of tiny homemade croutons.

I'm not a food photographer so I don't know if this picture looks good or gross, but it was absolutely delicious.  Everyone but the 12-year-old said so (chocolate chip pancakes and hot chocolate for him!) and the empty bowls said that they weren't just being polite.  Once breakfast was over we got to taste it, too, and I have to say, it was great.  Although it's creamy and rich-tasting, apart from the sour cream it's just vegetables, water, and herbs.

With Dominique's retirement really and truly in sight, we're looking forward to more experimentation and with luck they'll all turn out as well as this one.

Forgotten Skills with...Tomatoes!

Several years ago Dominique bought a book by an Irish cook and writer called Forgotten Skills.  As suggested by the title, it's about certain lost or at least wandering aimlessly cooking arts, like canning, bread making, and pickling.

We're a little bit intimidated by this book but a week or so ago I bought a bushel of tomatoes from the Amish farmer who supplies our herd share products.  Not knowing exactly what a bushel looked like, I almost left the farm with only one of these big boxes.  Fortunately (?), someone set me straight and I took them both home with me.

Now what?  Keep in mind, I don't even really like tomatoes that much, although a sliced heirloom with fresh mozzarella and basil is wonderfully cool, juicy and delicious for a summer lunch.  And we did serve up a few this way.

For the rest, I turned to Forgotten Skills and put them up in 2 ways.  First and easiest is halving or quartering them and slow-roasting them in the oven.  Her recipe calls for 100 degrees for 5-6 hours, but my oven felt only tepid at that temperature and I cranked it to 250.  We've been serving these roasted tomatoes as a side for breakfast and our guests seem to be loving them.

Another way to dispatch lots of tomatoes is to make tomato paste.  Tomato preparation is nearly identical to roasting:  clean, core, and quarter.  Before dumping them all into a big pot, you cut a few onions and give them a little warm up in some oil.  Then you let the whole thing cook for a very long time until it's as thick as you want it to be.  Forgotten Skills calls for a food mill to mush it up but we don't have one and I thought the immersion blender did a fine job.  Our paste isn't nearly as thick as that which you get in those tiny cans but it's so flavorful and has a wonderful texture.

I made a final batch of roasted tomatoes today and about halfway through the cooking I needed to bake a loaf of banana bread for an hour so I just turned up the heat and put it in with the tomatoes.  They look ever-so-slightly burnt around the edges and drier than the previous batch.  I have a feeling they're going to be even better and more flavorful.

Bread and Butter

After searching for a year or more, we finally subscribed to an Ohio "herd share" in order to be able to have raw milk (thank you, Paula and Kim!).  We now own a small portion of the cows on Log Cabin Farm run by the Yoders in Apple Creek from whom we get milk, cream, and yogourt.

We mainly wanted the milk so that we could make cultured butter after reading about it in a NY Times article.  We left our first gallon of milk out on the counter overnight to let the cream rise to the top, then realized that the cream had already been skimmed off.  Oops.  Milk turned a little sour,  not so good for drinking but just fine for making bread, and it led us to discover a fantastic and ridiculously fast and easy soda bread recipe in our "Forgotten Skills" cookbook.

The following week we ordered a pint of cream.  It was unbelievably thick and luscious, so much so that when we made butter, there was absolutely no buttermilk and no kneading required.  It was delicious.

We ordered another pint this week but this cream was a little more liquidy (is that a word?).  We put it in the food processor and "churned" it for maybe 3 minutes.  Voila! a big lump of butter in a puddle of buttermilk.  We kneaded the butter to get all the milk out, which took about 10 minutes.

It was fun to do by hand but it's easy to see why butter paddles might be useful.  Unfortunately, we forgot to add salt so we had to knead it a second time.

In the end, we had a crusty but light-crumbed soda bread, about a pound of the best-tasting butter ever, and a small glass of buttermilk.  What a breakfast!

Next stop:  an antique store to find butter molds!  But note the pretty butter dish that we recently inherited from Dominique's mother.

Improvements:  a tad less salt.

Mini Zucchini Quiche Recipe

I was on my own for breakfast this morning with six people to feed (including Jessie and me) and a load of zucchini.  I decided to make zucchini mini quiches and they turned out so well I thought I'd better get the recipe down before I forgot it.

6 Mini Zucchini Quiches
Make one batch of double pie crust from the Joy of Cooking.  Roll out 6 pieces and cut a circle to fit into each mini quiche plate.  Prick each crust 3-4 times with a fork.  Bake 17 min. at 370 degrees.  (That's Dom's timing and temp; I suspect 20 min. at 350 degrees would work just as well.)  Let the crusts cool.

Grate one zucchini.  Beat 3 eggs and 1 cup of milk together.  Cut up some basil leaves.  Add zucchini and a couple tablespoons of basil, plus salt and pepper.  Fill each crust.  Bake at 375 degrees for 15-20 min. (maybe longer).  Once the middle is set, add a couple tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese and put back in the oven until it melts.  Remove from oven and add a little paprika to look pretty.

I should have taken a picture but I was working pretty fast since my guests ate at two different times.  Anyway, they were great.  Obviously this recipe will work for a lot of other vegetables as well.

Our new (but temporary) 5-star chef

With Dominique in Harrisburg at his new job, it was a relief to have another cook to prepare breakfast for our guests this morning.  Mackenzie Bierman, chef non-pareil, whipped up a fantastic breakfast of huevos con chorizo, fried potatoes, and flour tortillas.
 
I contributed grapefruit with fresh home-grown mint and the usual sides of cereal, juice, and tea.  The guests ate almost every bite and sent their compliments to the chef!

Here he is, scrambling up the eggs:

And serving it up:

Looks good, doesn't it?  And the room looks so pretty; it's a beautiful spring day here in Oberlin.

Finally, the chef gets to enjoy the fruit of  his labors. Thanks, Kenzie!

Lesson learned: prepare the night before

We had a little bit of a breakdown yesterday and paid for it this morning.  For whatever reason - probably just an accumulation of too much non-stop work and the anxiety of doing something new - we were both exhausted last night:  didn't go to Illumination Night, didn't even have dinner.  And, most important, did not do one thing to prepare for this morning's breakfast.

Plus we somehow failed to take into account the fact that, duh!, today is graduation and parents need to be up and at 'em to get decent seats.  So we were really scrambling to get everything ready and on the table without looking too sweaty and harried.  I think we pulled it off...but if we did, it was mainly because everyone was focused on something else - like graduation.

Despite everything, Dom made these adorable quiches in our new ramekins and they were quite possibly the best quiches he's ever made.  And the table did indeed look beautiful with all our new things.

Anyway, the take-away from all this was this:  no matter how late it is, no matter how tired we are, we simply must get the room ready the night before and start the preparations (or at least have a game plan) for breakfast.

Culinary disasters

Commencement weekend is generally going great, helped in large measure by some very nice guests.  But both Dom and I have had some big failures in the kitchen.

For whatever reason, Dom's quiche yesterday morning simply did not want to come out of the pan.  He's made how many quiches?  But even though it wasn't picture perfect, it was presentable and tasted great.

Mine, on the other hand, was a true disaster.  One of our guests didn't tolerate gluten, so I decided to try my hand at a quick bread made from brown rice flour and potato flour.  As usual, I forgot to read the directions all the way through, so although I mixed up the wet and dry ingredients separately the night before to save time, I didn't take into account the 10 minutes it had to sit before being taken out of the pan, much less the 30 minutes it needed to cool before cutting.  Plus it needed to bake 45 minutes or more.  The "or more" was the key.

The cooling part ending up not mattering very much, because in turning it out of the pan the bread fell completely apart.  Part of the problem was that it probably didn't bake long enough; part of it was that I didn't realize how fragile a bread without gluten actually is.  The upshot was that it stayed in the kitchen, and my attempt at being a super-host failed spectacularly.  Sigh.

To be fair, it tasted pretty good and I think I know how to do it better next time, starting with making it the night before.  We bought some strawberries at the farmer's market this morning and I think it will make a great shortcake.