I’ve been doing a whole lot of a whole lot lately, and as much as it might feel like I’m a chicken running around with its head cut off… well, I make a pretty good headless chicken. That doesn’t exactly make sense – what I mean to say is I’m my best at everything, and I’m most excited about everything when I’m crazily busy. Among other things there’s been cooking, of course, because I have to keep eating and all. That pizza pictured above is a breakfast pizza, which is a brilliant idea I read about on Smitten Kitchen. You can also click through to my photo on flickr to see another shot of my pizza with the herby-oniony toppings.

In crafting news I’ve been working on a new design that is almost, ALMOST done. And no, despite the picture above it does not involve tweedy mitered squares. There will be orange involved, though, and I can’t wait to show you all what it is. In the meantime I’ve got about 9,000 other ideas and projects kicking around the apartment, and it’s killing me to not cast on for them all Right! Now!! The preview for the new issue of Crochet Today! went up today and there are some super cute projects in there. And I must be a total masochist because I can’t wait to start hooking up this necklace with some size 10 crochet thread. Just to put things in perspective, this is what size 10 thread looks like:

It looks like thread. BECAUSE IT IS. Surely I will go blind, but at least I’ll have a completely amazing necklace. Right? RIGHT?! I originally thought I’d use this thread for some potholders (to swap) but I was clearly delusional when I had that idea. I did manage to make one potholder (not with the thread, obvs), however, and then sent it away to live with a friend.

And amidst all this I’m walking all over creation taking pictures, many on film with my two toys, a Canon AE-1 –

(sniff, good bye, winter) and a holga (hello, summer) –

And just as a teaser before I check out for an afternoon at the library, I’ve got that forthcoming design to tell you about (as soon as I, you know, finish it…) and a really great meal to write up -

We eat a lot of English muffins in our household, and while in my opinion they make a great accompaniment to any meal, walking to the store to buy them every couple days was becoming a real hassle. I’ve baked a fair amount of bread in my day, so I set out in search of a relatively easy and effective method for making them at home.

The cookbooks I have around the house were, on the whole, not a big help. Most of them have a paragraph on English muffins that basically says, “make any bread dough you want, form into small rounds and cook for 5 minutes on each side on a heavy skillet.” This is fine if you want a hamburger bun. It’s great for a sandwich at lunch time, but it’s way too dense for my taste at the breakfast table. There are no nooks and crannies. I did find a helpful tip in Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, however. He says that for English muffins your dough must be extremely wet. This reminded me of another Bittman recipe, the much-blogged No-Knead Bread.

I have a real love-hate relationship with the no-knead bread recipe. I love the convenience, and it does make a fantastic crust and overall texture. But made as-is it’s just the blandest bland to ever bland a bland; it just doesn’t have that developed flavor you get from kneading. I find adding more salt and olive oil (and using some whole wheat flour) improves things considerably. But for our purposes it’s the moisture that’s important. This dough is very, very moist – to the point that it looks like a total disaster when you put it in the oven. And when you add olive oil, it’s a little moister and obviously a little oily and more prone to bubbles when it’s baked: perfect for English muffins. So here is my modified version of the No-Knead Bread, adapted for English muffins. (The recipe is included below with pictures, but I’ve also made a nice printer-friendly pdf for you.)

No-Knead English Muffins

Recipe by Lauren Osborne, adapted from Mark Bittman in the New York Times, who originally adapted the method from Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery

Makes about 12 English muffins

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, more for dusting
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour (you may adjust this flour ratio to suit your own taste)
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
cornmeal

1. In a large bowl combine flours, yeast, and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water and the olive oil and stir until blended. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest 18 hours at about 70 degrees. (The inside of my rarely-used microwave is the perfect place for this.)

2. After about 18 hours your dough will be bubbly and goopy looking and smell vaguely sour. This is what it will look like – not particularly pretty:

Lightly dust your work surface with all-purpose flour and pour/turn out the dough. It will be so sticky that you may want to dust the top of it with more flour, and also flour your hands. If you wear rings it’s best to take them off. Give the dough a couple of gentle turns and shape it into a relatively uniform round, cover it with a tea towel (NOT terry cloth) and let it rest for 2 more hours.

This is pre-rest dough:

And this is post-rest dough. It has swelled and moistened considerably:

3. Sprinkle a baking sheet generously with corn meal.* Divide your dough into small rounds about 3-4 inches in diameter. I make 12 English muffins out of this amount of dough by dividing it in half, then in half again (so you have quarters), and then dividing each of these pieces into thirds. Gently shape your rounds into little patties, without too much squishing and squashing, and arrange them on your baking sheet. Cover with the tea towel again and let them rest 15 more minutes.

4. While they are resting you may begin to prepare your cooking area. I prefer to use a seasoned cast-iron pan to cook my English muffins. Something very heavy like this is ideal. Whatever you do, do NOT use non-stick because keeping it hot and dry with burning corn meal stuck to it will probably ruin the coating. I let my cast-iron pan warm up for a few minutes over medium heat.* Cooking your muffins will produce a fair amount of smoke, so I usually run the kitchen fan and have the back door and a window open. Unless you want to set off your smoke alarm, you should ventilate as well as you can.

5. When your pan is warmed, slide a spatula under your English muffins and place them on the pan one at a time and then cover the pan with a lid. (I can fit three on my pan without crowding them. With regards to the lid, it doesn’t have to fit the pan exactly, since not many cast-iron pans actually come with lids. I use the lid of a stock pot. Set a timer so you’re not constantly taking the lid off the check on them.) After 4 minutes they will have puffed up considerably, and you will be able to see the edges beginning to harden.

This is what mine look like when they’re halfway done:

Flip them over and cook another 4 minutes on the other side. Set them to cool on a rack. I scrape the burnt corn meal off the bottom of the pan and into the sink after each round so things don’t get too terribly smoky and burny.

Happy muff-ing! And as always, if I appear to have screwed something up please let me know.

* I tend to go really heavy on the corn meal and then re-use what is left on the baking sheet to make polenta for dinner.

** Cast-iron pans get very hot. I keep the flame on the lower end of medium for the duration of the cooking.

One of my favorite food-related movies of all time is Tampopo. You meet lots of different people with all kinds of bizarre relationships with/involving food. In one of many bizarre scenes, a little boy meets a random hobo and they break into a restaurant at night and make this dish called omurice. Makes perfect sense, right? Right. But it’s wonderful.



Now, I’ve been to Japan a couple times but I’ve never had an actual omurice so I am making nooooo claims about anything involving “authenticity” here. But I’m not a half bad cook, and that food looks comforting as hell, so I set about making my own version. It’s been through a few different incarnations, and what I have finally settled on as “my” omurice bears very little resemblance to the original inspiration in the film. Here’s what mine looks like, and I’ve included the method below, and even with a little video I made on how to poach an egg.

There are two parts to the recipe: the rice and the egg. I typically get the rice started and a couple minutes later move over to make the egg so they get done at about the same time.

to make one omurice 9.0:
ingredients:

1 tsp. canola oil
3/4 c. leftover rice – I use Japanese short-grain brown rice, but whatever you have around is fine.

1/8 c. barbecue sauce
a dash of sesame oil
a dash of sriracha

1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. white vinegar
1 egg

for the rice:

Mix bbq sauce, sesame oil, and sriracha together.
Heat canola oil in a small pan over medium-high heat.
Add rice and saute for about 30 seconds.
Add bbq sauce mixture and mix to thoroughly coat the rice. Keep frying this mixture for another 5 minutes or so, until the rice has crisped up a bit.

for the egg:

Fill a large pan with straight sides (or a medium sized sauce pan, although this is easier in something with fairly low sides) with about 1.5 inches of water and place it over high heat.
When the water is steaming significantly but not boiling, stir in salt and vinegar.
Crack your egg into a small dish such as a small prep bowl or ramekin.
Carefully slide the egg into the water and immediately put a lid on the pan.
Leave it alone for 3-5 minutes. (It depends on how firm or runny you like your yolk. I’m a 4 minute kind of gal – some runnyness, but definitely cooked.)
Slide a spatula under the egg and carefully lift it straight up out of the water, and tip the spatula slowly and ever so slightly to each side to let any excess water run off.
Slide the egg carefully on top of the rice on the plate, and dig in!

If there’s any confusion about the egg poaching, don’t get frustrated – it’s hard. Here’s a little video I made that might help. My method is pretty much like what Mark Bittman describes in How to Cook Everything, but this may not work for you. If you find something else to be easier, please share! (Oh and don’t judge my video too harshly, please. I may take okay photographs but I’m a real crap videographer, and since I was the only one home when I was doing this I was not about to poach 9087 eggs to get just the right take. Oh, and I introduce myself at the beginning because I also made this video for the “Hi, I’m…” video group on flickr!)

I hope you enjoy the recipe!

BRING IT, Cooking Light.

Seriously.

Yesterday I made a recipe from their June 2007 issue: Penne with Asparagus, Spinach, and Bacon, and it was lacking, to say the least. Besides being boring as all hell, I really think that recipe might be missing a step. Careful readers (following the link above), will notice that after sauteing the onions in bacon grease and adding asparagus that you add a whopping CUP AND A HALF of chicken broth. Sure, some of that broth boils away when you’re cooking the asparagus, but unless you’re planning on cooking that asparagus until it doesn’t resemble the succulent vegetable that it once was, by the time it’s ready to go you’re going to have a whole hell of a lot of liquid left and nothing to do with it. Does it all just get dumped on your pasta? Poured out – which would be stupid because it has all that great flavor from the bacon and the veggies??? WHERE does it GO?!?!?! Also, as is frequently the case, this Cooking Light recipe doesn’t have nearly the quantity of bacon I wish it did. Here’s my modified version of this dish, which I affectionately call “Piles of Pasta in Bacon Gravy,” or, for those of you who don’t eat pork (this would still work with turkey bacon fyi, and still be delicious!!!!!): “Cooking Light, I’ve Officially Outdone You.” Oh yeah, and this recipe allowed me to break in my new knife. (Review of the knife forthcoming…)

8 oz. uncooked penne pasta (or whatever. I used fusilli because I had it on hand.)
5 bacon slices (or turkey bacon!!!!!) (instead of the measly 2 slices in CL)
1/2 c. chopped onion!
1/4 t. kosher salt
1/4 t. black pepper
2 1/2 c. 1-inch slices asparagus (about 1 lb.)
1/4 c. dry vermouth
3/4 c. chicken broth (I use the low-sodium Trader Joe’s variety – note that this is HALF the broth CL calls for.)
4 c. baby spinach leaves
1 T. unbleached white flour
2 oz. shredded parmesan cheese (WHY oh WHY would they tell you to get pre-shredded parmesan? What a ripoff. Just buy a microplane!!!)

1. Cook pasta according to package directions.
2. Cook bacon in a large cast iron pan over medium-high heat until crisp. (CL calls for non-stick – this recipe just screams for the flavor of cast iron, if you ask me.) Remove bacon from pan; crumble.
Add onion, salt, and pepper to drippings in pan; saute 1 minute until just tender. (You could pour out some of the bacon grease if you feel there is too much. Trust your instincts here!)
Add asparagus to pan and saute for about 30 seconds. Add vermouth and cook for about a minute more. Add the broth.
Bring to a boil and cook until asparagus is crisp-tender.
Add flour and stir vigorously into the broth mixture, amidst the vegetables until sauce thickens. (Unlike the CL recipe, you are USING all the liquid and making it into something thick and tasty with this flour!)
Toss spinach until coated with sauce and turn off heat, continuing to toss until spinach is just wilted, but not cooked to death.
Plate pasta, cover in veggies and sauce, sprinkle with crumbled bacon, add more salt and pepper if desired, and sprinkle with parmesan cheese.

Serves 2 if you eat like me, or 4 if you eat like a regular person.

Folks, I am writing this entry from a computer that’s not even mine, that uses an operating system I don’t even understand to deliver this news.

I bet you can’t stand the anticipation…

……..

THIS JUST IN: ITALIANS MAKE DELICIOUS FOOD!!!!!

I know, REVELATION OF THE CENTURY.

But seriously, residents of Chicago. Hell, RESIDENTS OF ILLINOIS, WISCONSIN, AND INDIANA: Run, DON’T WALK, to MIKO’S ITALIAN ICE on N Sacramento. It’s amazing. That’s the best, most refreshing food I’ve ever purchased while standing on the sidewalk and peering through what is basically a hole in the side of a building. AMAZING!!!!!!