It was the first cool cloudy day in a while and I decided to do a number of things in the kitchen.
In the morning I took a small bag of frozen strawberries that I had vacuum-packed maybe a year ago. I have some things in the freezer that are probably still good due to the vacuum packing and I should really start going through it. I cooked the strawberries with a few tablespoons of sugar over low heat until it became a nice strawberry sauce to pour over my pancakes. I could have used more sugar I guess because the sauce was still pretty tart.
Too late did I realize I was out of cornstarch and thus didn’t know what to thicken the sauce with, and then I found some large pearl tapioca in the cupboard. I wasn’t sure if it was cool to just throw tapioca in with the strawberries so what I did instead was to put the tapioca in a glass measuring jar and added a cup of water and microwaved it for a minute. Then I strained out the pearls and poured the thickened goo into the strawberry sauce, hoping that the proteins and polysaccharides or whatever the hell causes the thickening action in tapioca would be present in the liquid at that point, independently of the pearls. It seemed to work.
Two days ago we bought a rotisserie chicken for dinner and we ate most of it, except the legs — we’re not really dark meat people. (For Thanksgiving/Christmas, if I’m cooking I’ll buy a turkey breast rather than a whole one). I saved the rest because I figured I should make stock and not waste it. I wanted to make it pretty simple since my goal was to try to approximate the chicken soup my grandmother used to make. I haven’t tasted it in well over 25 years so it’s unlikely that even if I got it right I’d be able to recognize it as such, but I figured I could get close to it.
I cooked down a whole chopped onion in some butter and a bit of olive oil, then tore up the remains of the chicken and put that in there. Then I sprinkled some salt and added a bunch of water, and brought it to a boil, and then let it simmer for about 5 hours or so. While that happened I defrosted some chicken cutlets (continuing the task of using up things from the freezer).
I chopped up the cutlets and browned them in another big pot with a wee bit more olive oil, then threw in some chopped up baby potatoes and about four handfuls of rice. Then I ladled in the stock through a sieve and added an equal amount of water. Brought to a boil, then simmered for about an hour. I sprinkled a tiny amount (about half a teaspoon) of a commercial herbes de provence mix because it seemed appropriate.
The soup was thick and starchy, the potatoes were perfectly soft, the rice had that exploded look that rice gets when left in soup too long.
This is the part of this entry where I note that I failed to photograph any of this, and therefore as a food blog post it will be severely lacking.
Then I decided to make bread from scratch. I’ve been thinking about buying a breadmaker but before I add another gadget to my tiny kitchen, I figured I should see if it’s really that onerous to just try to do it the old-school way. It’s possible my oven is just not amenable to baking bread, we’ll find out. As I write this the loaves are undergoing the second rise. I didn’t have bread flour so I used half whole wheat and half all-purpose. I was a little confused about the yeast instructions, because the packet said to add the active dry yeast to some warm water and then add that to the flour, but most recipes for basic bread that I’ve come across say to mix the dry ingredients (including the yeast) together first and only then add liquid.
I should add that I used to be really into cooking, many years ago. I joined a book-of-the-month club for cookbooks and bought quite a few thick texts. My goal was to make things from scratch as much as possible.
Tasty.
But over the years I lost track of things, stopped cooking at home for a while, or at least stopped doing it with the gusto and dedication I used to have. So I’ve forgotten more than I ever knew of the basic tips and tricks that one picks up after being in a kitchen regularly.
This is all essentially saying, if I sound like a total idiot, it’s because I may be.
So: bread is rising, I may edit this later to let you know how it went. Here’s the basic recipe I followed (I was looking for something very basic). There’s something very satisfying about working food with your hands. I kneaded the dough for ~ 10 minutes like the recipe (and the back of the yeast packet) asked to.
*then* I decided to make yogurt. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while but I always end up eating the yogurt I buy for the starter. A while back I bought some pretty mason jars because I didn’t have any appropriate containers for yogurt storage, and I wanted to avoid plastics as I tend to do these days with anything in my kitchen. Here’s a link, here’s another one.
I boiled water and poured it into two of my mason jars and the lids for sterilization purposes. I heated some milk to ~ 190 – 200 degrees F, and then let it cool down to ~ 110 deg F. Then I whisked two spoons of yogurt into the milk and poured it into my mason jars and wrapped a hot wet cloth around them and put them in the microwave to keep the warmth in. I’ll let you know how that goes too.
But now I’m also thinking about using the rest of that tapioca to make pudding.
