Tag: cooking

Adventures in Cooking

February has been a crazy month, with various events prompting me to look more into preparing various food stuffs from scratch rather than buying them from the store. I started with bread last month, finally getting to the point this month where they don’t deflate like a spent balloon in the oven. For those bread loaves less than perfect, I found a use for them as breading for home made stuffing mix. Waste not, want not, as they say. Finally satisfied with the results, I decided to move onto home made saltine crackers.

I’ve been making soup for quite some time now, but what’s soup without a few crackers? I went to the following website: https://www.servedfromscratch.com/saltines-from-scratch/. I used cake flour and since I didn’t have any vegetable oil, I substituted lard. The resulting dough was difficult to work with, especially after leaving it in the fridge overnight like the web-site suggested. Using a rolling pin just didn’t get it as flat as it looked in the pictures, never mind getting the nice, neat squares she showed. After baking them in the oven, this is what I wound up with. Those little suckers would just not compress.

Saltines-first try
My first attempt at home-made saltine crackers

Hmmm, definitely not nice flat crackers! However, they did taste like saltines, and were actually quite good, so I figured I was headed in the right direction. It’s possible the measurements given weren’t quite accurate or maybe using lard instead of oil affected it.

So, I tried a different recipe. This one is from Homemade Saltine Crackers – The Mountain Kitchen . It has fewer ingredients, uses unbleached flour instead of cake flour and doesn’t have the overnight resting time in the fridge which the previous recipe suggested. One ingredient was 7 tablespoons of water, but I found I needed to add a few extra tablespoons to make the dough more workable. The dough ball flattened out much better under the rolling pin. After cutting out roughly square shapes and using a fork to make the classic indents, I basted them with butter and added Celtic Sea salt to the tops. After baking, I achieved the result below.

second try of saltines
Results of the second try at home-make saltines

This effort was much better and had a good flavor. I may experiment with a few more variations before settling on a favorite. Since I only use crackers intermittently, I had run into the problem with store-bought crackers going stale before I used them up. Home baking allows me to make small batches as needed. I haven’t tried assessing the cost of making these but I’m sure it’s more economical than buying the store brand and ending up wasting some because I didn’t use them up quick enough.

Hope this inspires any readers to make their own stab at home cooking.

Have a safe and happy March.

Cooking stuff

Year’s End: Food For Thought


Now that the year is nearly out, the Christmas bacchanalia has receded, so things are quieting down. New Years usually doesn’t get celebrated by me. I gave up on watching the ball drop in Time’s Square years ago as I found getting a good night’s sleep more desirable. With the Winter Solstice past and the chill this time of year settling in, I find myself thinking more about food.

Cooking stuff

I like cooking from scratch, something I took up when my late mother began having too much difficulty moving about. It tastes far better than prepared foods since I can make meals from fresh ingredients without all the additives which make commercial foods questionable.

The old Rival crock-pot which my mother rarely used, though a bit beat, still works and get a lot of use making soup stock, so much so that I never buy commercial soups anymore.

Rival crock pot

Making stock (or broth, I’m not sure on which to call it) is astonishingly simple. Just save up bones and skin from poultry, beef or pork. I use a zip-lock freezer bag. When I have enough collected, I thaw and place in the crock-pot along with some chopped onion and celery, add water until it’s just barely covered then turn on the pot. It has a low and high setting so I use the high setting to start with. When it reaches a simmer, I turn it to low and just leave it. Four hours for poultry, six or so for beef or pork. For bone broth, simmer for at least 24 hours with beef bones or ox-tail. Be sure your meat is of good quality.

Some people may express concern about the fat content of poultry skin or bones but if you get meat from pastured animals rather than battery raised, the fat profile is far more healthy and should not be a matter of concern for you. Fat has been demonized for so long that it’s hard to get across that it’s not the enemy. Locally produced meat, which I have access to, has far less to travel and if you have a farmer’s market near you, you can become acquainted with the farmers who raise these animals. Healthy animals translate into healthy meals for you.

Years ago, I made loaves of whole wheat bread. The loaves came out dense and chewy but good. However in the press of work and looking after aging relatives, bread making fell by the wayside. Now with food prices looking to rise, I want to resume bread making. This time I will be looking to lighter bread, with some whole wheat but enough unbleached bread flour to make sandwich breads or rolls.

You-tube is an interesting source for bread recipes and methods of making loaves as I re-familiarize myself with bread-making. As with all their how-to videos, it’s a mixed bag with some just using it as a venue for showing themselves off. Others can’t seem to hold the camera completely steady, a non-starter as I am prone to motion-sickness so a herky-jerky video is pretty much unwatchable. But more than a few do a good job demonstrating their techniques.

Now which is the best technique for making a basic loaf of bread? Well, my come-away is that they all work. Some use bread-making machines but others do it by hand, which is my preference. It doesn’t seem to matter if you knead or don’t knead. Not kneading tends to give you a rougher more artisanal type loaf, while kneading and shaping produces the traditional rectangular loaf. Ingredients may vary but basically are wheat flour, salt, sugar or honey and yeast. Sourdough can get a good rise without yeast but maintaining the sourdough starter is more work than what I want.

So, once I settle on a good recipe, I will begin baking and with any luck add to my repertoire of recipes.

bread loaf goal

Happy New Year!