leftover mashed potatoes make for tasty potato pancakes Last Thursday we had Thanksgiving dinner at my house, which was a lot of fun (pictures are on the fedibblety blog. Afterwards, I was left with a lot of leftovers, including lots of mashed potatoes. We had made 10 pounds worth, which was probably too much. I was also left with some milk and 10 out of 12 eggs. I had bought milk and eggs just for thanksgiving. I don’t normally eat […] (Read more)

Sometime this past summer I made an interesting discovery in the international aisle of the local Food-Coop, Bloomingfoods — Seitan in a can. What is seitan you might ask? It is wheat gluten. And what is wheat gluten? It is the part of wheat that makes bread stick together. Glutinous means sticky, and that is exactly what gluten does in bread. Without gluten, all the carbon dioxide that yeast produces when it is eating the sugars would simply evaporate, but […] (Read more)

I have been baking bread for over 6 years now. I started in 2001, my last semester at Grinnell College, with the hopes of producing some bread like I fell in love with in Germany. I started off with fairly simple recipes from a Fleischmann’s baking book my mom gave me. That book got me going pretty well. There were some very obvious failures, but I enjoyed the pursuit, and usually, the results. In 2003, I started experimenting with sourdough […] (Read more)

As I write this I am enjoying some extremely tasty leftover soup that Clare made last Sunday. It kind of has everything in it, but I think that the swiss chard and the spelt are the most distinctive parts. She had bought some swiss chard at Trader Joe’s (on sale I think), and wanted to make something with it, but didn’t know what. I had seen several recipes in my new Italian cookbook calling for swiss chard, so I suggested […] (Read more)

So tonight for dinner we had some friends over, and I was trying to think of what to cook. Clare suggested some of the bread I made yesterday with some olive tapenade her parents had given us. That sounded like a great starter. So I started thinking of other dishes to go along with it. I thought of a risotto, but Clare was not too excited about that. I also considered pasta, but we had just had pasta. Then I […] (Read more)