A sweet change of pace: Raisin bread

The little boy next door, Elliott, took care of our cats while we were on vacation. He did a great job, and I paid him what I figured was decent pocket change for a second grader. He seemed quite pleased. But I also figured I should send something over for his mom and dad, to thank them for helping him with this chore.

So today, instead of baking my garden-variety whole wheat bread the way I do almost every Saturday, I decided to make a couple loaves of cinnamon raisin bread so I could give one to Scott and Lisa (and keep one for us, of course.)

I used my recipe for bread dough, and after letting the dough rise the first time, I divided it into two balls. Following Joy of Cooking instructions, I rolled each into an 8-by-18-inch square. I brushed the dough with melted butter, then topped each square of dough with cinnamon sugar and an evenly distributed half cup of raisins. (I boiled the raisins first to soften them, then rinsed them in cold water.) Starting with the 8-inch side of my dough, I rolled it tight, pinched the seam and the ends and placed into a greased and floured 9-by-5-inch loaf pan, seam side down. I let the loaves rise for 45 minutes.

Then I brushed the loaves with a beaten whole egg mixed with just a pinch of salt. I sprinkled the top of each with two teaspoons cinnamon sugar, and baked them in a convection oven at 350 degrees for 35 minutes. While they were still hot, I brushed each loaf with melted butter, let them cool on a rack, and packaged one up to take to Scott and Lisa next door.

I'm hoping this'll convince them to help Elliott take charge of our cats again next time we go on vacation.

Friday night dinner party: Salsa chicken

I didn't start out thinking we'd be entertaining tonight. I started the day throwing eight chicken thighs into the slow cooker at 7 a.m., with a jar of salsa for just Dave and me-- about the easiest dinner on the planet. Then before lunchtime, a friend emailed me at the office to see if we wanted to get together for dinner at a nearby pizza joint, and I'm like, no way, you two come over to our place, dinner is already cooking. So my lunch hour was spent figuring out how to jazz up the menu a little to pull off a decent meal for guests after putting in a full shift at work.

I usually choose to entertain on the weekends, but a weeknight last-minute get-together can be fun and produces a different sense of accomplishment. (I bask in the "how-did-you-possibly-manage-this?!" kudos.)

During my 60-minute lunch break, I stopped off at the grocery store for a few items, and went home to mix up corn muffin batter, which I put into a muffin pan and stored in the fridge to bake at dinnertime.

(A tip: When making corn muffins, it is best not to use paper muffin cups. The muffins stick to the paper and turn out not nearly as crispy perfect as when you grease and flour your pans.)

By noon time, my chicken was cooked, so I transferred it to a big saucepan, put that into the fridge, cleared off the dining room table and dug out four matching placemats and cloth napkins. Then I headed back to the office.

At 6:45 p.m., I was on my way home, expecting my guests at around 7:30. After a quick stop at the wine store, I hit the kitchen, got the salsa chicken simmering on the stove top, removed the bones, added a teaspoon of cumin, juice from half a lime and a touch of chili powder I also threw in about a cup of frozen corn. (I adapted the recipe from "Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook," by Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufman. An excellent resource. Buy it.) I cooked some rice. Decorated some crackers with goat cheese, oil-soaked sun-dried tomato bits and chopped fresh basil leaves to serve as appetizers. I set the table. Opened some wine. Popped my muffins into the oven. Set my iPod playlist to provide several hours of excellent blues tunes.

Our friends didn't arrive 'til 8 or so, bringing a tossed salad, more wine and dessert. I felt quite relaxed by then. And voila. We had everything we needed for a fine supper.

The key to a successful after-work fete is friends you can absolutely relax with, so you can still have fun even if everything goes awry and you end up ordering takeout. You also need some simple main course recipe. And just a little time over the noon hour for a bit of prep work.

Salsa chicken

In a slow cooker, place eight chicken thighs. Pour a 16-ounce jar of medium picante sauce. Cook on high for four hours. Add 1 teaspoon cumin, juice from half a lime and a pinch of chili powder. I like to add a cup or so of frozen corn. Heat 'til corn is cooked. Remove chicken bones (they will probably have fallen off by now). Serve over rice. Garnish with grated cheese and green onions.

Strata, gee

Just got back from a big family gathering to celebrate daughter Jessie's wedding in the hills of western Virginia. We rented a house which Dave and I shared with many extended family members.

We didn't have to worry about preparing dinners on this trip, as we were invited to various supper events so we could get to know the new in-laws and many of Jessie and Jake's friends. But breakfast in our hideaway rental was a cozy and somewhat competitive undertaking for the Knadler clan. I made my scones one morning, a definite crowd pleaser. Dave's brother Ed made French toast another day, also a hit. The day before the wedding, I began musing aloud about the efficiencies of baking a hearty cheese strata to appeal to a houseful of folks who tended to get up at different hours throughout the morning.

So the next day, Dave's nephew Mike, a self-professed "near chef," took it upon himself to create a cheese/egg/bacon/peppers and bread crumb casserole that wowed everyone. Later he admitted he'd never heard of "strata" and didn't really know what he was doing as he put this together. He expressed frustration that he didn't have more herbs to work with-- it's always a challenge to cook in a kitchen away from home. But his creation was delicious. As near as I could tell, here's his recipe:

Breakfast strata for a crowd

18 eggs
1 cup milk
One pound bacon
1 and 1/2 cups grated Monterrey Jack
1 onion, finely chopped
1 red or orange pepper, chopped
A loaf of unsliced bread (he used whole wheat), or enough to cover bottom of a casserole dish, broken into bite-sized chunks.
Fresh parsley, chopped
A sprig of fresh basil

Cook half the bacon until crispy. Break into pieces. Cut remaining bacon into 1-inch chunks. Beat eggs with milk. Add uncooked bacon, half the cheese, onions and peppers to egg mixture. Butter a 15-by-10-by-2-inch casserole dish. Arrange bread chunks in casserole. Top with egg mixture. Top with cooked bacon and remaining cheese. Sprinkle with parsley. Nephew Mike topped the casserole with sliced orange pepper, a few paper-thin orange slices and fresh-cut basil leaves. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes to one hour, until knife inserted comes out clean.

Everyone loved it.

And then we headed off to Jessie's wedding.

It just gets easier: Lemon Cheesecake

When I watch Emeril or Rachel Ray or The Barefoot Contessa casually throwing cups of this and teaspoons of that into mixing bowls, chopping and whisking, all smiles and lively narrative in their beautiful sound stage kitchens, I marvel that cooking has become such spectator sport.

Of course, these chefs deserve their due-- they know how to do many things we mere mortals can only dream of. But basically, what they model that I like best is confidence; they demonstrate how much fun it can be to throw simple stuff together to create good food.

And it doesn't have to be complicated. In these days when lots of folks aren't that sure-footed in the kitchen, it takes just a little effort to win a pinch of culinary recognition within one's circle of friends. Just start cooking. Take a plate of homemade brownies to the office (really homemade, not from a box-- there is almost no difference in terms of workload between the two but you'll enjoy higher-volume kudos for homemade. In fact, here's a link to a brownie recipe that looks pretty impressive) Have a little dinner party and make everything yourself, even the pastry crust for flaky quiche tart appetizers. This is not such hard work. And because so many people you know probably do not cook at all these days, ever, except to heat up leftover take-out, it doesn't take a lot of chops to earn a neighborhood reputation as a foodie. It is easy for those of us who enjoy cooking to impress those who do not. Therein lies much of the fun.

Part of the reason I've come to enjoy cooking more is that it does get a lot easier with time. Take Aunt Katie's lemon cheesecake, for example, which I'm taking to a dinner party tonight. I remember baking this in high school and thinking it was kind of a drag to grate the lemon peel and get a graham cracker crust distributed evenly in a pie pan, and clean everything up afterwards. Now I love the process, the delicate scent of lemon juice and peel on my hands, the flavor of sweetened cream cheese on my wooden spoon, how beautiful such a dessert is, and for so little effort.

Nora Ephron is one of my heroes, partly because she comes across in her writing as a truly joyful cook. Nonetheless, she says in her new book, "I Feel Bad About My Neck," that one of the rules she lives by is to never make a pie crust. I so disagree. I wouldn't even buy a ready-made graham cracker crust, and you won't either once you've tried this dessert:

Aunt Katie's Lemon Cheesecake

Crust:
Mix 1-1/4 crushed graham cracker crumbs with 1/3 cup sugar and 1/3 cup melted butter. Reserve 1/4 cup for top of cheesecake. Press rest on bottom and side of 9-inch pie plate. Chill until set.

Filling:
8 ounces cream cheese
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
2 tablespoons flour
2/3 cup milk
1/4 cup fresh-squeezed lemon juice
2 tablespoon grated lemon peel
1 9-inch graham cracker crust

Cream cheese and butter. Add sugar and whole egg. Mix well. Add flour, then milk. Stir in lemon juice and peel. Pour into unbaked graham cracker pie shell. Sprinkle with reserved crumbs. Bake 35 minutes at 350 degrees (325 degrees if using convection). Cool 10 minutes. Top with sour cream topping.

Sour cream topping:
Mix 1 small carton sour cream with 3 tablespoons sugar. Spread over cheesecake. Bake 10 minutes longer at 350 degrees. Chill before serving.

A toast to B-plus wines

I like buying good wine, nice table wine, at a good price. I like to go into my neighborhood wine store and scout out wines marked 87 or better by I-don't-know-whom, based on I-don't-know-what. This is a good way to go for someone who likes good wines but doesn't quite know how to pick 'em. And often these wines are in my $9-$12 a bottle range. I can usually get a good selection of the varieties we like (Pinot Noir or Cabernet in winter, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio or Viognier in summer) that some wine expert has deemed B-plus or better, without breaking the bank.

Dave's all for buying Woodbridge 150 ml bottles for what I generally pay for smaller bottles of Smoking Loon or Twin Fin, but I don't know, once you open a big bottle like that, no telling where things might end up.

That's as much as we know about wine. And I'll admit, I have no shame this muggy time of year about plopping ice into a glass of vin blanc. Learned this from my Aunt Katie in Florida, a former food editor, the greatest cook I know of, with the highest standards when it comes to presentation and elegance. If she's cool enjoying her Chardonnay over a couple ice cubes, hey, I'll drink to that.

Making dinner at lunchtime: Chicken marinade

I do a lot of cooking over the noon hour when I'm home from the office. I'll throw something in the slow cooker, or get something soaking in marinade for easy grilling at the end of the day.

I love, love, love the 75th anniversary edition of The Joy of Cooking. Buy it. It's got page after page of recipes for sauces and marinades and anything you want. It's not the same dog-eared copy of "Joy of Cooking" I've owned since I was in college, though it does have a lot of the recipes I love the best from that book ("Fudge Pie," on page 686, has been a favorite of mine for decades. It is really a torte, almost flourless, exquisite, especially topped with homemade chocolate sauce and raspberries.)

But I digress. I enjoy a certain self-righteousness when I mix up my own marinade rather than using a bottle of store-bought. So for dinner tonight, we're having chicken breasts that are soaking now in my variation (I didn't have fresh herbs on hand) of the Joy of Cooking's "Becker Chicken Marinade," page 585:

Chicken Marinade

Whisk together 1/4 cup red wine vinegar, 1/4 cup red wine, 1/4 cup olive oil, 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar, 1 tablespoon dried thyme, 1/2 tablespoon dried rosemary, 2 teaspoons soy sauce, 2 teaspoons black pepper, 4 pressed garlic cloves, juice of 1/2 a lemon, a little bit of grated lemon zest and 3 dashes hot pepper sauce.

Put into a freezer bag, and throw in four skinless, boneless chicken breasts. Seal and refrigerate. Bake or grill when the workday is over.

Gee, but it's great to be back home

One thing I love about living in Wichita, Kansas, is my seven-minute commute to and from work. I think this city of nearly half a million has more roadway per capita than anyplace else I've lived (including Philadelphia, Kansas City and Seattle). I'm very appreciative that it takes no time to drive from one end of this city to the other.

Especially at lunchtime. Nearly every day, unless I have a meeting scheduled, I'm able to be home for lunch. This allows some blissful quiet time and I tend to eat better (lighter, that is) than I would if I were eating out (no fries on the menu here, for example.) On the days when I'm living right, I eat a high-protein breakfast (and when I'm really living right, this comes after a 6 a.m. treadmill session at the Y), a light lunch and then I can enjoy pretty much whatever I want for dinner.

Today's lunch was last night's leftover salmon on a bed of spinach, cherry tomatoes and carrots, and a thin slice of my homemade bread. Here's a tip: Wish Bone has new "salad spritzer" dressing in various flavors that (according to the label) cost you just one calorie per squirt. And it's pretty tasty, at least the 10 spritzes of teriyaki flavor I sprayed on my salad,

OK. That's it for now. Time to go back to work.

Salmon, foiled again

I love grilling on summer evenings. What a quick way to cook up a healthy dinner after a long day at work. But timing is everything, and with grilling, man, timing everything right can be a crap shoot.

Tonight we grilled salmon, sweet onion slices on skewers and sweet potatoes. A nice, healthy supper. And I steamed some broccoli.

Unfortunately, I overcooked the broccoli, and the skewered onion bites turned out black and charcoal-crunchy. But the sweet potatoes were great, and the salmon was excellent. We'll get everything right next time.

Grilled salmon in foil with sweet potatoes

Here's how I prepared two salmon fillets for easy grilling: I brushed two pretty big pieces of foil with olive oil, placed one salmon fillet on each piece of foil, brushed the salmon with olive oil and sprinkled dried dill on each piece. Then I sliced a sweet onion as thin as I could manage, nearly paper thin, and placed a few onion circles on each fillet. Then I sealed the salmon up, very loosely, in the foil. Dave put those on the grill and cooked the fish on medium heat for about 15 minutes.

With sweet potatoes, I stab each one a few times, wrap each in foil, stab the foil to let out some air and let those cook on the grill at medium heat for about 30-40 minutes.

Coffee shop scones you can make at home

My friend, Gretchen, (co-owner of Zeus, dog of dogs, who recently spent a couple days chez nous) asked me to share my recipe for scones. These scones will prompt the most gratifying of all feedback a home baker can hear: "You really made these yourself?!" They're irresistable, and very easy to make.

Gretchen's husband Mike (the other co-owner of Zeus, duh) is a poet, and I took a batch of these to them when he recently had a reading at Watermark Books. Watermark is a very cool, friendly bookstore, cafe and bake shop near my house, where I sometimes stop in the morning to buy coffee and one of their delicious scones du jour. I can honestly say these are as good as any they sell or any I've ever had anywhere.

The recipe is from the new Bon Appetit Cookbook, edited by Barbara Fairchild. Buy it. It's fantastic, and the purchase price includes a one-year subscription to the magazine, which is the best resource on the planet for a cook who loves serving elegant food but has no appetite for any hassle in the kitchen. The recipe calls for cutting out the scones with a heart-shaped cookie cutter. I don't bother with that, I prefer a more traditional wedge shape.

Orange chocolate chip scones:

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/3 cup plus 3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup chilled unsalted butter, diced
3 tablespoons grated orange peel, divided
1 cup miniature semisweet chocolate chips
2/3 cup chilled buttermilk
1 large egg yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Additional buttermilk (for glaze)

Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper. Whisk flour, 1/2 cup sugar, baking powder, salt and baking soda in large bowl. Add butter and 2 teaspoons orange peel; rub in with fingertips or pastry cutter until mixture resembles coarse meal. Mix in chocolate chips. Whisk 2/3 cup buttermilk, egg yolk, and vanilla extract in small bowl to blend. Add buttermilk mixture to dry ingredients; stir with fork until dough comes together in moist clumps. Gather dough into two balls. Press out each ball of dough on lightly floured surface to 3/4 inch thickness, shaping into a circle. Cut six scone wedges as if slicing a pie. Transfer to baking sheet, spacing 1 inch apart. (Can be prepared 1 day ahead. Cover; chill.)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees (375 if using convection). Mix remaining 3 tablespoons sugar with remaining 1 teaspoon orange peel in small bowl. Brush scones lightly with buttermilk. Sprinkle with orange sugar. Bake until scones are crusty on top and tester inserted in center comes out clean, about 15 minutes (check at 10 minutes if using convection oven) or up to 20 minutes if using chilled dough. Serve warm or at room temperature. Makes a dozen scones.

I'm making this up: German sausage and apples

Everybody has a handful of dishes they can whip up without so much as sneaking a peak at a recipe. I have a few of those, (meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, clam spaghetti) but not many, and it is indeed rare that I'll create a palatable new recipe out of whole cloth. Tonight quite uncharacteristically, I got adventurous and without cracking a cookbook, cooked up some sausage with apples and sour cream, and ended with a recipe worth writing down for posterity and perhaps even frequent future use.

I started with German sausage I bought at Wichita's weekly farmers' market out west of town. (It is my summer Saturday morning ritual to head out at 7 a.m. , usually before Dave gets up, to drive more than a dozen miles to buy as many groceries as I can find. It is a delight to see the farm pickup beds piled with produce. Later in the summer, we will enjoy the best canteloupe in the country for a few fleeting weeks, and the most sugary Kansas sweet corn.)But I digress. This early in the season, I've picked up big, beautiful tomatoes, sweet onions, lettuce, jars of delectible peach jam and excellent steaks, roasts and sausage.

Thought we'd grill the sausage, but Dave was otherwise occupied this evening (and I don't mess with the grill once I've pulled my creatively orchestrated bag-o-meat-and-marinade out of the fridge and handed it to him) so here's what I came up for dinner:

German sausage in apples and sour cream

In a Dutch oven or deep frying pan, brown two pounds German sausage in two tablespoons olive oil. Add one chopped sweet onion. Add one diced, peeled Braeburn apple. Pour a bottle of cheap beer and 1/2 a 10.5-ounce can beef broth. Add a bay leaf. Let simmer at medium-high heat for 30-40 minutes, 'til liquid boils down and thickens. Add three tablespoons light sour cream and a dash of white vinegar. Whisk well. Serve over rice.

Losing the dread of bread

When I had small children underfoot, I was a pretty devoted baker. But I never knew quite how anything I baked might turn out. I threw just about every first batch of cookies I ever made into the trash, bottoms blackened.
As a young stay-at-home mom, I made healthy and sometimes complicated snacks for school parties, birthdays, holidays, etc., with competitive zeal. By the time the kids were teenagers (and I was very much not a stay-at-home mom anymore), I was barely able to keep enough store-bought food on hand to get through a week, much less bake anything, ever from scratch.

Kids are both at college far away now, and for Christmas this year, Dave bought me a KitchenAid standing mixer. I wish I'd owned one decades ago. I've discovered that these days with nicer kitchen tools and no pressure to perform, no children to feed on deadline, I have come to actually enjoy baking, especially bread. In fact, I find it rewarding, relaxing, it's a Zen-like exercise for me. The KitchenAid kneads dough in about 10 minutes (yeah, kneading would be a great upper-body workout for me, but I'm all about cutting corners in the kitchen without cutting down on a certain purity of ingredients I've lately come to treasure. I go to the Y to exercise. I go to the kitchen to just zone out and have a good time.)

The other purchase that changed my life was the gas range and convection oven we bought just before many of our children came home for Thanksgiving last year. Everyone who's spent any money on an oven these days owns one, but among my friends in that category, hardly anyone knows what to do with one. It's easy. Hit the convection button, set the temperature about 25 degrees lower than you would for a standard recipe, and cook for slightly less time. Buy a good guidebook ("Cooking with Convection" by Beatrice Ojakangas is dandy) and get cracking. The deal with convection is that your crusts will become crusty without becoming burned. Your cookies will be flawless. A convection oven takes the risk out of baking, and who among us has time or courage to take risks in the kitchen? Now baking is just pure fun, and I end up with cookies that are the perfect blend of crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside. I sometimes mail them off to my children far away, and await grateful text messages in return.

I've made dozens of loaves of bread in the last seven months. In fact, I haven't bought a loaf of bread since the start of the year. I've adapted a recipe from "The Best Recipe"(published by Cook's Illustrated Magazine, a resource I highly recommend) to create my own whole wheat sandwich bread that's healthy but light and sweet, and pretty quick. I've taken a load of liberties here with the cookbook's recipe, I must tell you, to get just what I like as the result. Something fantastic I've discovered is King Arthur Brand white whole wheat flour. It is delicious, 100 percent whole wheat, but nearly white in color, more tasty I think than standard whole wheat flour.

Whole wheat sandwich bread (two loaves)

Set oven to 200 degrees. When temperature is reached, turn off the oven.

In the bowl of your KitchenAid mixer, use bread hook attachment to mix 7 cups of flour (four of white whole wheat flour and three of white all-purpose flour) with four teaspoons salt.In a four-cup Pyrex measure, mix two cups cold milk with 2/3 cups boiling water, 4 tablespoons melted butter, a half cup of honey and two packages rapid-rise yeast. Stir with a whisk.Slowly add liquid to flour mixture and knead at low speed for 10 minutes. (If kneading by hand, knead for 10 minutes, good for you.) Turn dough onto floured surface, knead in a bit more flour to create a easy-to-handle ball. Butter a mixing bowl and put the dough in, roll to coat on all sides. Put into the oven to rise for one hour, until about doubled in size.Grease two loaf pans with no-transfat Crisco and coat with flour. Be sure to grease the top rim of the pans to prevent sticking. When dough is risen, divide into two balls.

Flatten each to create a 9-inch-by-six-inch oblong shape. Roll dough to create a loaf, pinching seam to seal. Fill loaf pans with dough, seam side down, pushing dough to each side of pans. Cover, let rise 30 minutes more. Brush each loaf with mixture of one teaspoon water and a beaten egg white. Sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds or poppy seeds. Bake 35-40 minutes at 350 in a convection oven until a wooden skewer inserted in the loaf comes out clean. Cool on wire racks.When loaves are cool, put each into a freezer bag. Freeze one. Eat the other over the course of the next week-- it will stay good for several days.