Emmer is an ancient strain of wheat with only 28 chromosomes.  It was one of the first wheats cultivated by man. Nowadays, you can find it online from Bluebird Grain Farms. It makes a great substitute for bulghur wheat in a tabouli-like salad. The whole wheat berries are very toothsome, almost like very small beans.

Dressing:

• Juice of one or two lemons
• Olive Oil
• Salt and Pepper to taste
• Sumac!

Whisk this all together. It has to sit and soak a while for the sumac to open up. A crushed clove of garlic would also be good but I had enough garlic going on in this meal so I left it out. 

Salad:

• 1 1/2 cups whole emmer berries
• Half a cucumber, quartered, seeded and sliced thin
• A bunch of parsley, chopped
• A bland hot house tomato, regretfully purchased and loathingly chopped
• Half a bunch of scallions, chopped

Put the emmer in a small saucepan with 4 odd cups of water and bring to a boil. Let it boil violently for five minutes and then reduce the heat so it simmers gently for about an hour. After this time the emmer will become toothsome but not mushy (if it’s getting mushy and exploding, for the love of god turn off the heat) and most of the water will be absorbed or evaporated. Drain whatever water is left and then toss the emmer with the dressing. Leave this to marinate for as long as you want. Before serving, toss in the rest of the ingredients.

I served this with fresh pita, hummus, and awesome lamb sausages from The Wedge.

While walking from our place to a new favorite coffee shop, I spotted a crop of kids just out of school enjoying the warm weather. This is how winter was meant to be! If only we had our own ice skates…

A friend recently asked me how I choose items for the apartment. I didn’t have a very good answer—and I still don’t, but part of one is this: As most people are with clothing, etc. I am drawn to certain brands and more broadly to certain countries’ aesthetics. After making a mental list, I realize you could probably describe my tastes as very Eurocentric. I’m also drawn to a wholelottathings that are all very much out of my reach because of their cost. Let’s just say I have a long list of bookmarks in my web browser of the *sale* sections of various modern housewares companies. Sometimes a purchase is knee-jerk—this is true particularly for estate-sale or thrift-store finds for obvious reasons. Other times I have admired an item for a long time before finally going for it (and/or saving for it). Much of the time though, I want something or I get something because it just goes nicely with something else that I already own. This is why I get myself into color ruts. Many of you know of my love for red. There was a black phase (over. so over). Here is an instance where two lovely greens were brought together:

While at the Lansing Volunteers of America Thrift Store as a Michigan State student, I discovered a set of four green enamelware bowls. 

These are a great size; each fits in the palm of your hand. I love to serve sorbet in them. Made of metal, they can be placed in the freezer to chill which makes for an even better treat. I wish I had a picture of the raspberry sorbet (Talenti’s Roman Raspberry) we ate in them the other day. The color combination was amazing.

From what I have found, they are either actual Cathrineholm bowls or decent enough knockoffs; they lack any imprint on the underside as many pieces from the actual line would have. This is not that important though—I didn’t buy them for resale purposes. I think I paid somewhere between $0.25 and $1 per bowl… a bargain either way. You can see more examples of Cathrineholm designs on Flickr. An older post from H is for Home also details a bit more about enamelware, its Norwegian origins, and offers more photos of Cathrineholm pieces.

So… this brings me to my point. I own these bowls. Yesterday I found this at the downtown Minneapolis Salvation Army Thrift Store:

Having easily figured out the maker of my bowls, right away I wanted to learn of the possible origins of my new green pot. This has not been so easy (I haven’t found anything exactly like this), but I have a few clues. I think the wooden handle is teak. Scott Lindberg of sllabs studios identified a similar red enameled pot as a Jens Quistgaard design (1956) part of the Dansk Købenstyle line. He even found it in Bloomington, MN (to the immediate south of Minneapolis). This gentleman had one advantage over me… an actual manufacturer’s mark with designer’s initials. No such markings on mine. Plus, the lid bears no resemblance to the typical Købenstyle lids.

Will we actually cook with this pot? Another blog author is horrified by the idea. Enameled cast iron, of Le Creuset fame, is fantastic for cooking in because of the wonders of cast iron; enameled steel apparently wins no awards for even cooking, conduction, etc. The important question for the moment is: is it lovely and squatty and nice? Yes. I like to think we might at least serve food in it. Perhaps it would make a nice planter…

Oh! The price? $1 (that includes tax…). Can you identify this pot? What would you do with it?

Since I don’t have to work on the weekend I avoid that nagging pressure to interact with the other humans by baking bread. The rhythm of bread baking is such that it is both leisurely and consuming.

The first thing I did in the morning was cover 10 grain hot cereal mix with boiling water as the starter for the multigrain bread that was featured in Cook’s Illustrated a year or two ago. This is my go-to basic bread to have around the house, great for toast and sandwiches. The crumb is not so dense as a lot of multigrain breads thanks to copious amounts of white flour and instant yeast makes for a predictable rising schedule. The flavor is earthy, as multigrained breads should be, and tinged with honey. This recipe is simple, not very time consuming and reliably produces a pretty pair of loaves.

With that out of the way, I went to the store to get more flour (3 lbs was not going to cut it). I had refreshed my sourdough starter the day before and left it out all morning to bubble and grow. I needed to make pitas for dinner and I also wanted to make a couple of european-style breads. I like a loose crumb so I was aiming for about 66% hydration, and I wanted to use a pound of my starter, mostly to facilitate storing the rest of it in the fridge. I was figuring I wanted about 3# of final dough for my european breads and at least 2# to be able to make 8 four ounce pitas. Math time!

A pound of starter was 8oz water and 8oz flour. I wanted to end up with about 80 oz of dough and I was going to have 2/3 as much water as flour (and I like round numbers that my scale can handle) so I planned to add 40 oz of flour. That gave me 48 oz of flour total, 66% of which is 31.68, which I rounded to a nice even 32 (which meant I would add 24 additional ounces).

With my formula figured out, I proceeded to mix and knead the dough, adding a good amount of salt. With wild yeast rising times are pretty unpredictable, and salt inhibits rising, so I had no idea when the dough was going to double in size. I set out to work on some other things.

Around 5 p.m. I got tired of waiting and decided to weigh and shape my dough. I recently discovered that weighing individual dough pieces so they are the same really helps with the uniformity of the final product (durh) so I got out my scale. 1.5# of dough went to a boule which I left to proof in a heavily oiled and floured glass bowl. Three .5# pieces got rolled into baguettes and placed on my couche to grow. The remaining 8 4 oz pieces (plus a small leftover piece) I shaped into small boules to rest for pitas.

Mostly because we were hungry I rolled out the pitas within an hour of shaping the dough even though they had not grown much at all. Apparently, that is not very important with pitas. Here they are in the oven:

That is what we like to call pocket-city. Below you’ll see them in a nice little stack (wrapped in a towel to keep them warm and chewy):

After dinner I decided it did not make much sense to wait up till all hours for the rest of my breads to proof in the meantime wasting all that heat in the stone in my oven, so the baguettes were transferred to a floured peel, scored and baked. For the record, they were underproofed, but I think they turned out fine.

Lastly, the boule. I apparently did not flour my bowl enough because this bread stuck to the sides and did not want to land on the peel. When it finally did, it was horribly deformed. It is pretty annoying to spend this much time on a piece of bread only to have some stupid mistake destroy everything you worked and fought for; much can be learned about life from bread baking, evidently. I made a feeble attempt at scoring this bread artfully to make the mistakes look intentional and then slid it onto the stone. I was surprised by a good amount of oven spring, but upon eating the bread the next day found dense areas that suggested underproofing. Great crumb for the most part though thanks to the relatively high hydration!

And so passed another Saturday.

Rarely do my sambo (read: sahm-boo) and I have corresponding days off. My work keeps me busy Thursday–Monday, sometimes Tuesday and Wednesday, sometimes evening hours, etc. while he enjoys a standard Monday–Friday, 8:30–5:00. This means that what would be three-day weekends become celebrated Mondays-only holidays for the two of us. This Martin Luther King, Jr. Day we were determined to seize the opportunity to go adventuring together despite the cold, the snow, and the limited time only! special offered by our employers.

We got started a little late as the day had to begin with a two-month late oil change. This meant we headed straight to the first food we saw upon reaching Red Wing’s Main Street. A straight shot from the 9-hr. free parking lot was a choice of a restaurant/bar in the basement of the city’s former Armory and Liberty’s. Tom’s only requirement after driving 1+ hour from the cities was “I need a beer,” and Liberty’s seemed to be able to live up to that requirement. We had sandwiches and indeed a beer each—I a short and Tom a very tall. And, of course, being so close to Wisconsin we started off with a basket of cheese curds with the liberty’s “special” lemon-peppercorn ranch.

My sandwich was a new item on the menu, the turkey-chipotle sandwich served on cranberry rye bread. The spicy/smokey chipotle flavors paired nicely with the occasional cranberry in the toasted bread. Tom discouraged my knee-jerk toward the burger list as he’s planning on making burgers tomorrow. Then, for some reason, he ordered a patty melt (Which is, IMO, a burger on toast.). We both upgraded ($1.25) to what Tom described as “Sysco-cut fries.”

Our conversation was fun and full of excitement about our new web page and my occasional laughter at the sight of Tom’s hair after removing his wool hat:

We finished, declined dessert, and moved on.

After lunch we wandered and found a number of shops closed, but I remained optimistic as I’d expected this. I expected this because it has happened before. That’s the trouble with taking daytrips on national holidays. We browsed the Scando-bric-a-brac at Uffda! and then found ourselves in an antique store. Either a good sign that he’s come around to shopping/antique gawking or a sign that the trip itself was uneventful and *maybe* a little boring, this was Tom’s favorite part of our visit. I purchased some antique Red Wing Pottery mugs in a lovely deep-blue as well as some long-forgotten lead type (an M and G specifically, $1 per!).

In the basement level we separated, poking around and picking up various items. I noticed some cookbooks at one point and was very excited to find a portion of the TimeLife set recently mentioned in Bon Appétit magazine. Not only did I find part of the set, but the exact volume (out of 25+) that Tom said was the only one worth owning when I read him the article last month—Terrines, Pâtés & Galantines, for the low price of $10 (see link). He was especially excited to find when we got home that the book references multiple Elizabeth David recipes—the subject of his senior thesis in the Michigan State history department.

Once through with the antique store, Tom wanted to sit down with his new find… so we headed to Lily’s for coffee and (I) found the pumpkin cake with cream cheese frosting too good-looking to resist (I was a little too full to enjoy it, though). Also too full, Tom did not eat his entire half as he’d begun to feel a bit ill from the earlier cheesecurd/pattymelt/beer extravaganza, but he did mention it reminded him of his mom’s applesauce spice cake, which is a big compliment indeed. I insisted that we were both beginning to feel sick from just looking at the very very very vivid photography of pigs stuffed with turkeys stuffed with chickens stuffed with rabbits in the book, so I made him put it away.

Finished with coffee and water from a jug which Tom described as soft-tasting, it was time to head home. The drive was uneventful except for the shocking blackness that occurred once the twilight faded. Despite what the opthamologist said, I don’t think “bad night vision” is just something his patients make up. Coming in on I-94W was also reminiscent of our drive 1 year ago with all of our belongings in tow, and I commented to Tom how different it felt to be driving “in the city” this time. The fast pace seems natural now, even a bit slow. “I know,” he said, “you change lanes when you need to, you just signal, and you just go…”