Modified from this Allrecipes version.

• 3/4 cup milk
• 3 Tbsp finely chopped fresh lavender, or 3 tsp dried lavender flowers
• 8 Tbsp butter, softened
• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• If, like me, you are a tool who has self-rising flour lying around, you can use that instead of the last three ingredients.

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Grease two smallish loaf pans thoroughly–this bread likes to stick.

Combine the milk and lavender in a small saucepan over medium heat. Raise to just barely a simmer–you are looking for tiny bubbles around the edges, but not a full boil–then remove from heat, and allow to cool some.

Cream together the butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in the eggs until the mixture is light and fluffy (I did this first with a spoon and did not achieve fluffiness, and it was sub-par. Use a mixer!)

Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt; alternate adding the dry ingredients and the lavender-milk to the creamed things until just blended. Pour/scrape into the prepared pans.

Bake for 35 minutes, or until a testing thing comes out clean. Cool pretty thoroughly in the pan before attempting to turn out onto a wire rack. When it’s cool, you can add a citrus glaze if you like. My last one was 1/4 cup powdered sugar / juice of about a third of a lemon / splash of vanilla, but this did not quite seem ideal.

You can find a pretty good transcript of the recipe here (but not quite complete, annoyingly), if you don’t have the cookbook. Note that you will also need her instructions on sauteing mushrooms (this one is a direct, complete copy) and brown-braising pearl onions (close enough), even if you think you know how to do these things.

Some notes:

• One of the best things about the original recipe is the detailed information on wine. It recommends pairing with “a fairly full-bodied, young red wine, such as Beaujolais, Côtes du Rhône, Bordeaux-St. Émilion, or Burgundy,” and using any of those or a Chianti to go into the stew.
• 3 cups of wine = 1 bottle. I doubled the recipe. Whoo!
• I bought pre-cut-up stew meat, some of which was cut a lot finer than the other, and on the whole big chunks worked a lot better for drying and browning.
• Conversely, I couldn’t find an unsliced chunk of bacon anywhere, and regular old thick-sliced seemed to work okay.
• I over-salted because I forgot, as always, to account for the massive amounts of salt in bouillon cubes. Use caution, or perhaps better beef stock.
• Blanching helps when you realize you have to peel 48 pearl onions.
• I couldn’t really get the sauce to thicken in the end, but it seemed to end up okay just letting it reduce a lot even if it never really reached light-spoon-coating consistency. =/

For extras, here is the rosemary bread recipe I have been fussing with of late. It’s sort of long but that’s because the procedure is the complicated part; sorry. Start this ~3 hrs before you want to eat it.

• 2 1/2 tsp yeast, which is~1 packet
• 2 c. warm water, ~110-115 F, which is warm but just shy of scalding
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• 2 tsp salt
• 4 c. flour. Bread flour is nice if you can get it, and if you do not consider extra gluten cheating.
• 2 tsp. minced fresh rosemary plus more for topping. Fresh is important! You can sub out some for fresh thyme.
• olive oil, corn meal, sea salt

Dissolve yeast in the warm water and sugar. If it’s NOT instant/fast-acting/bread-machine yeast, give it <5 min to froth up. Otherwise, immediately add flour, salt, and 2 tsp rosemary and stir until blended. Do not knead! Cover and let rise for 1 hour or until double in size; bonus points for putting it someplace slightly warm and moist.

Oil a baking sheet and sprinkle with corn meal. Perhaps try oiling your hands instead of flouring them, as the dough is super sticky, then divide it in half, shape each half quickly and loosely into a round by tucking the edges under, and place on the baking sheet. Cover and let rise another hour. The stickiness is again a problem; cooking-sprayed plastic wrap is the only thing I’ve managed to use that DIDN’T stick horribly and make the top of my loaves lumpy.

With bread, some last-minute rising happens in the oven and for that you want things hot and steamy (har). Start heating your oven early, maybe half an hour into the second rise, to 450 or “lots.” My oven here has no numbers on the dial between 350 and 500 so I use my imagination, but I don’t think getting it too hot is a possibility. If you have a pizza stone, put it in now. Also put a cast-iron skillet in the bottom of the oven (or something else which can be raised to high temps empty, then have cool water thrown in it without exploding).

When bread is again about doubled in size, brush with olive oil and top with more rosemary and plentiful crushed sea salt. Get yourself some water, maybe 1/4 cup, on hand near your oven as now you must act quickly! Put the bread in (just stick the pan on the pizza stone if using one, unless you want to get fancy and try to slide the bread onto the stone directly), dump the water on your previously-heated skillet or whatever where it will send up exciting clouds of steam, and close the oven door quickly. Bake 10 min, adding more water for steam if it runs out. Then turn the oven down to 375 and bake another 20 min or so until it’s golden-browny.

The Pioneer Woman’s pictures are much better than mine so you should go look at them, but here are some Things I Learned, or changed when I made it, or WOULD change were I to make it again (sadly, the rest of the apples are fated for apple butter so that cannot be just yet):

• It says 9-10″ cast-iron skillet. I used a 10″. It overflowed while baking, and the cake came out thicker, compared to the apple layer, than I would have liked. I should’ve used the 12″ skillet!
• Cut down the initial butter melting in the skillet to 10 Tbs (4 Tbs less) and this was PLENTY – although don’t get me wrong, the butter/caramelized sugar/apples slow-cooked in same are still the point of this thing.
• Also sliced the apples thinner, into twelfths not sixths. This was preferable, I think, as thin apples = fitting more in the pan = yes. Also, better distribution of apple-to-cake.
• The spices were a little blah even though I threw in more cinnamon. Could probably take some allspice, cloves, etc. – it’s super sweet and I think a little more of a kick would compliment that.
• My fatal error: put this on a baking sheet when you stick it in the oven! Slightly over-crowded 10″ skillet + bubbling-over caramelizing sugar and butter + floor of gas oven = smoke-filled kitchen.

In conclusion, you should probably be smarter than me when it comes to setting sugar on fire, but this cake is still delicious.

0. Take a cup of raisins, or a little less because they’ll expand. Soak them in some water. Dark spiced rum would be better. I used water spiked with vanilla but it wasn’t ultimately noticeable. Mine were sort of acceptable around 1 hour and deliciously gushy around 10 hours (I started baking in the morning but then there was Cream Fail and I couldn’t come back till much later – probably overkill though.) This is to prevent the raisins from soaking up lots of the scones’ moisture as they bake. Alternately, you could use golden raisins or special “baking raisins,” which are less dehydrated.

0b. No really, preheat the oven well in advance. I never remember but it is KEY, I’m increasingly sure, for baking.

1. Scone recipe, as per usual, but doubled, AND ALSO:

2. To the dry ingredients, add “some” cinnamon (maybe 1/2 tsp? I would try a full tsp though.)

3. After adding the cream , just as the dough is starting to come together, add the raisins, which you will have appropriately drained.

4. After scones are thoroughly cool, glaze lightly and let dry.

For the glaze: about 1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar, maybe half a teaspoon of lemon zest, a teaspoon or two of lemon juice. Whisk furiously! It’s better if you start up with less lemon juice and add more slowly so as not to make it too runny. Also be sure not to use too much glaze because the stuff is really sweet. Enjoy!

I used a recipe recommended by these fine people, Grandma Opel’s apple pie. It’s somewhat nontraditional in that you make fill the pie just with apples and add the latice crust, then pour a syrup over the whole thing. The recipe claims it’s for 1 9″ pie, which I doubled, and then made 3 pie shells (in slightly small pans but they claimed to be 9″), but, slicing the apples very thinly and mounding them as high as I could in the pie shells, I only used 10 (out of a prescribed 14-16) apples. Granny Smiths are the best of course. Peeling, coring, and slicing them takes way longer than I thought – add some lemon juice to the sliced apples to prevent them browning before you’re done cutting up all the rest.

Bonus: a pie crust recipe. This nominally makes two 11″ (um, I think?) crusts with a little left over (which you will naturally cut into strips, butter, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, roll up, bake, and consume with great rejoicing), but remember for each apple pie you need a double crust. I doubled the recipe and it worked just about perfectly for my three 9″ pies.

2 c flour
1/2 t salt
1/2 c chilled butter cut into 1/2″ bits
3 Tbs chilled vegetable shortening
5 Tbs cold water

At this point my ancestral recipe says, “Mix as for pie crust.” The point of the operation is to mix in the butter without melting it, so that when you bake it, delicious flakes result, which is why you want to avoid handling the dough and make it using ice water. Using a pastry blender or two knives, cut in half the butter till it has the texture of cornmeal. Cut in the other half of the butter and the shortening until the size of small peas. Then make 5 small wells in the dry ingredients. Pour 1 Tbs of cold water into a well and mix it into the surrounding dry ingredients; repeat for each well/Tbs of water. Stir or squash with hands till all is just incorporated, divide according to the number of pie crusts you wish to produce, then roll out, handling as little as possible, to about 1/8″ thick (but if you can get it this thin you have my eternal admiration). Fold into quarters to transfer to the pie pan.

rosemary bread yet again

First I baked rosemary bread yet again, for a dinner party, following this recipe for an unkneaded peasant bread. This time it came out much much lighter, fluffier, and more delicious. Basically I followed the directions more carefully and this worked (who knew!) although I also stuck my roommate’s pizza stone in the oven while it was preheating, then stuck the bread pan right on top of it to while baking, which may have helped.

I infused some olive oil with garlic and left-over fresh rosemary while it was baking, too, for dipping purposes. This was a good idea.

mm breakfast!

Hungry grad students ate all my bread at once, so the next day I made scones, using my current favorite recipe (via Smitten Kitchen, with modifications here), only lemon-zest-and-cranberry this time (I had no oranges). A nice thing I’d forgotten about this recipe is it involves no eggs, except for the glaze, so licking the spoon is completely acceptable.

Finally, I made tomatoes filled with rice again (for the third time!) and yet again, they were devoured before photographic evidence could be acquired. You’ll just have to trust me on them.

Here's the bread rising, looking bizarre

• The giant tomatoes I used the first time were a better balance of rice-to-tomato, but since they were hot-house grown, the little ones I used the second time actually tasted better. My advice: hold out for good tomatoes – preferably non-refrigerated.
• On roasting potatoes: the second time, I put them in their own dish, cut them a little thicker, salt-and-peppered them, and made sure to really really coat them with oil. I also cooked them at higher heat (~450F) for the last ten minutes after I took the tomatoes out. Some combination of these things helped a lot.
• Dried basil is an okay substitution here for once, since it gets cooked so much.
• I made fresh breadcrumbs the second time, whereas the first time I used “Italian” breadcrumbs in a box – texture was probably better the second time but if you don’t have a loaf of nice bread and a food processor sitting around it’s not a big deal.
• No really, do roast the tomatoes for that full time. They need it.
• And, as for a risotto, it really does need to be arborio rice.
• Correspondingly, if you’re making this for company, remember that you can’t skimp on the baking time and they may hate you forever if dinner is an hour late (I’m just saying. This is also why I didn’t pause to take pictures!)

For the dinner party last night, I made a green salad and topped it with sliced roast chicken breasts so we could pretend there was protein, and this was basically way too much food for everyone (in a good way). We had it with a cheap Montepulciano which was lovely – although it’s a veggie dish, warnings about pairing reds with heavy tomato sauces apply. I have leftover tomatoes so I’ll probably do it again in a week or so – the prep doesn’t take that long, and it’s warm and comforting and also looks deceptively fancy.

Take:

• some hardboiled eggs (2)
• some bacon (3 strips, but then I ate some while I was making it)
• fresh basil, chopped (or chiffonaded, if you are me and obsessed with chiffonading basil, also think that ‘to chiffonade’ is a real verb)
• a good-sized spoonful of light mayo
• more black pepper than you think you need
• also I put in a little garlic, because I am incapable of making things without it.

Mix! Consume! Rejoice!

For bonus points, I am currently enamored of le Pain Quotidien, which is like Panera for New York: fancier, more Belgian, costs 1.5x as much, once you go there all other variations lose their appeal. So New York is not particularly Belgian, but otherwise. Specifically I am a fan of the way they plate their pretentious sandwiches open-faced on three pieces of bread. Why would anyone do this?? But it’s so good.

Recipe from the back of the whole-wheat King Arthur Flour – I’d heard good reviews of it even though it does things I normally feel like are cheating, such as add oil and honey – with my comments in bold:

• 2 1/2 tsp instant yeast OR the equivalent in active dry yeast dissolved in 2 Tbs warm water
• 3 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 1/4 tsp salt
  
• 1/4 cup honey, molasses, or maple syrup * I used honey
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil * I used olive oil – olives are not unlike vegetables?
• 1 1/3 cups lukewarm water
• 1/4 cup nonfat dried milk * Having no dry milk, I used 1/4 cup (cold) nonfat milk, then filled it up to 1 1/3 cups with warm water.
• ~1/2 cup dried cranberries
  
• (~1/2 cup walnuts)
  

Combine all ingredients; stir till it starts to come together, then knead 6-8 minutes. Cover & let rise ~60 min or till nearly doubled.

Shape – I made two boules instead because I have no bread pan – into an 8-inch log and transfer to lightly greased 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 loaf pan. Cover again and let rise 30-60 min; preheat the oven during this time to 350F (or 400F, if you want to go for the oven spring, in which case turn oven down to 350 after ~10min.)

Bake about 40min, tenting lightly with aluminum foil (if you’re using the loaf pan) after 20min. Test for doneness by thumping the bottom of the loaf – it should sound hollow (<- pretty ingenious, no?) Remove from pan and cool before cutting.

I brushed some butter on top while it was still warm to add richness, since we were already cheating some (HONEY). Either I should’ve baked it a little longer, or should’ve tossed in some vinegar to make crust crunchier, I think. Otherwise I really wish it had walnuts in like those rolls, but it’s tasty nonetheless. The honey balances out the cranberries and, as proclaimed on the bag, the whole wheat does indeed have a “delightfully nutty flavour.” Thanks, flour!

cooling after the second bake

I’ve been craving cookies, but I don’t actually like them so much (too sweet); I just want something to go with coffee, and biscotti are generally not super rich, due to having no shortening usually. Melody recommended this recipe from joy of baking. I like my biscotti as plain as possible, so almond it was, but the link will also tell you how to make a chocolate glaze/frosting, and almond biscotti often have some anise in, too. For the nut-intolerant, cranberries or chocolate chips would probably substitute pretty well for the almonds (and though the original calls for almond extract, I didn’t have any so I just used extra vanilla and it worked fine. I thought about adding some Scotch because I was worried about blandness ["Vanilla extract is alcohol! Bailey's Irish Cream is made of whiskey and sweet and comes in an almond version!"] Then I didn’t. This was probably for the best.)

You need:

• 1 cup blanched, toasted, and coarsely chopped whole almonds
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/8-1/4 tsp salt (the original called for 1/8 and I don’t think it was quite enough.)
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• zest of most of a lemon, I guess, but not really grating the pith, just the pretty yellow bit, also a lot of it sticks to the grater anyway so it’s not as much as it sounds

Blanching the almonds: I guess you could buy pre-toasted, pre-chopped almonds, if you’re lame. So preheat the oven to 350F. Take your whole raw almonds and blanch them by boiling some water, adding the almonds and taking it off the heat, letting sit for 1 min (not more! gets mushy and bad!), then straining them out and running under cold water. Now the skins will come off really easily so do that and put your blanched, skinless almonds on a baking sheet. Toast them for ~10min (took me 12 min) till they’re turning a little bit golden and start to smell good. Maybe shake them around a little partway through. Now, have at them with knife. They don’t need to be evenly chopped at all – in fact a mixture of little nearly-powdered bits and halves or quarters makes for a nice texture.

You can turn the oven down to 300F now.

In a smallish bowl, beat the eggs with the vanilla extract – or 1 tsp vanilla and 1/2 tsp almond extract, if you have it, or whatever other fanciness you feel like. In another and larger bowl, mix your dry ingredients: flour, sugar, baking powder, salt. Pour the egg mixture in a bit at a time and mix it into a dough slowly. The original tells you to use an electric mixer; this was the opposite of helpful. I used spoon and hands after electric mixer disaster. When the wet ingredients are about half in, add the almonds.

You should have a thick, sugary dough. Divide into two equal lumps. Flour some countertop; roll each lump into a log about 10 in. long and 2 in. wide. Put them on a lightly greased baking sheet (flouring it might also have helped, in retrospect) with a bit of space between them. Depending on how flat you want your biscotti, you could squish them down a little. Bake for ~40 min or till no longer squishy to the touch.

Biscotti get their name because they’re baked twice (oh, Italy, you are so clever) so now you have to slice them and bake them again. But first, let them cool for at least 10 min! Then use a large serrated knife and caution. Mine crumbled a lot. Cut at an angle to make the right shape. I couldn’t get 1/2 inch slices to not break, but remember they will be hard and you will have to bite them so perhaps don’t go much thicker. Arrange them lying down on your baking sheet and stick them back in the oven, flipping halfway through, for about 15 min per side, or (again) until not squishy.

Let them cool and make coffee! I will be having mine with moka coffee for breakfast tomorrow.