The Pressure to Cook Seasonally

I don’t know about anyone else, but I am finding that I have some anxiety related to some imagined pressure I feel to take full advantage of seasonal produce. I’ve said it so many times that some might even call it annoying, but I love to cook seasonally. This can be challenging at the end of autumn, in the depths of winter and in the early weeks of spring, especially when one lives in a part of the world where basically nothing grows from October through April. The end of the summer and the beginning of autumn, though, should be a seasonal eater’s dream. Gardens are bursting with the supple red globes of tomatoes, the shiny and colourful skin of peppers, and the slightly obscene shapes of cucumbers, hidden beneath broad green leaves. At farmer’s markets, every table is overflowing with the local harvest, and even at the grocery store, it’s no challenge to find a cornucopia of lovely local produce. So in this heaven of plentiful fresh, local fruits and vegetables, how could I possibly complain?

Sometimes, it just seems like too much. I love the variety of different summer squash I’ve been seeing lately at the farmer’s market, and I imagine what I could do with it, but then oh! Look at those yummy cherry tomatoes—I’ll have to get some of those as well. And then there’s the corn, the eggplants, the cucumbers, the peppers, and the fruit as well. Bright little berries, ripe round peaches that make you swoon when you take a whiff, and richly coloured plums that you know will be the sweetest of the year. I buy it all, and I scramble to use it all up in salads and sauces, omelettes and stir-fries, compotes, and pies. There isn’t always enough time, though, and tragically, some of that beautiful seasonal bounty seems to always be lost to rot.

The solution is simple, of course: only buy as much food as Andrew and I can eat before it will go bad. Maybe don’t buy every possible squash next time, and also, perhaps it would be best to get raspberries or blackberries, rather than both. When I do that, though, I always feel as though I’m missing out. It’s as if I’ve let some golden opportunity slip through my fingers by not snatching up every delicious fruit or vegetable that catches my eye. This is the source of my anxiety.

What I’m trying to do is to find some middle ground. I try to buy the best stuff, and then I look for different ways to enjoy it. Sometimes this means eating the produce as-is, sometimes it means discovering new ways of preparing fruits and vegetables, and sometimes it means returning to favourite recipes again and again because I know how well the showcase these beautiful fresh foods.

Going back to favourite recipes and repeating them does not necessarily mean that they will be the same each time. Recipes can be adjusted and altered to utilize whatever is on hand at that moment. Strawberry season is just about done here in the Pacific Northwest, but peach season is in full swing. This means I can go back to that old favourite, Strawberry Shortcake, but with a peach-y twist. I, for one, was not surprised at all to learn that peaches go equally well with sweet whipped cream and dense, flaky shortcake as strawberries always have.

Any strawberry shortcake recipe could be adjusted to use different fruits, but at the moment, I’m partial to this one from Food & Wine magazine. It’s specifically a peach shortcake recipe, which, of course, could be turned into an anything shortcake recipe … even strawberries!

Peach Shortcake with Vanilla-Peach Whipped Cream
Adapted from Food & Wine Annual Cookbook 2011, p 300
Makes one 9” x 13” cake

2 sticks unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly, plus more for buttering the dish
6 large eggs, at room temperature
2 tbsp. milk, at room temperature
1 1/3 cups plus ¼ cup granulated sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. salt
1 cup peach schnapps, divided
8 peaches, cut into wedges
1 cup heavy cream
½ cup confectioners’ sugar
1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 375. Generously butter a 9-by-13-inch glass baking dish. Using an electric mixer, beat the eggs with the milk until frothy. Add the 1 1/3 cups of sugar; beat at high speed until the mixture is thick and pale, about 5 minutes.

In a bowl, sift the flour with the baking powder and salt. Fold the dry ingredients into the egg mixture; fold in the melted butter until incorporated. Spread the batter in the prepared dish; bake in the centre of the oven for about 30 minutes, until golden. Transfer to a rack and let cool.

Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, mix the remaining ¼ cup sugar with a ½ cup of the peach schnapps. Stir in the peaches and let stand at room temperature for at least 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

In a bowl, whip the cream with the confectioner’s sugar, remaining ½ cup of peach schnapps and the vanilla until firm. Cut the shortcake into squares and serve with the peaches and whipped cream.

Not Your Grandmother's Dinner Roll: Cilantro-Scallion Bread

One of the many reasons why I love cooking from food magazines: when I am using a recipe from one and see another recipe right next to it that I absolutely must make at that moment. This is what happened last weekend as I was working on the marinade for the delicious Green Shawarma Salmon in this July’s Bon Appétit. Two pages later, there is a recipe for Cilantro-Scallion Bread that immediately tempted me. The picture was enticing as well: swirls of golden bread, sprinkled with sesame seeds, and filled with something green. I had extra cilantro left from the salmon recipe, I had scallions in the fridge that I needed to use up, and I always keep ingredients to make bread on hand, so how could I not try this recipe out?

If you’ve ever made cinnamon rolls before, you’ll find the process of making this bread familiar. If you’ve never made cinnamon rolls before, don’t worry, because it’s a pretty simple procedure. Start with making your dough, and proofing for about an hour and a half, until it doubles in size.

My dough proofed a little more slowly than the recipe said it would, but I think that’s because my yeast is getting old. So, if you’re using older yeast, expect the proofing to take longer. Another note: I halved the recipe, which is always a little bit risky when it comes to bread because the chemistry is so delicate. In baking, when scaling recipes up or down in size, one is supposed to use a system using percentages so that proportions stay as precise as possible. I was lazy about it this time, and simply halved everything, and it worked out fine, so if you want to make six rolls instead of twelve, go ahead and do the same.

Meanwhile, you can make the filling, a combination of scallions, cilantro, sesame seeds, and olive oil. The recipe calls for both black and white seeds, I only had white, and yet, the sky did not fall, so use what you’ve got. Once your dough has proofed, roll it out into a rectangle, and then spread the filling over it to cover it.

Here is where your memories of cinnamon roll making will come rushing back to you, if you’ve got them. Roll the dough up tightly. Next, slice the roll into ¾” slices. Use a very sharp knife, or use a good serrated knife, one that won’t tear the dough to shreds. A dull knife will squish your roll down, tear the dough, and leave you with some very unhappy looking swirls. Your hopefully-happy swirls can then be transferred onto a baking sheet, get brushed with olive oil, and then into the oven they go.

In half an hour, they should come out golden brown and ready for dinner. The addition of eggs, sugar, and butter make this a rich bread, but I didn’t find it to be overly sweet or fatty. It had just the right amount of richness to compliment the flavourful filling and the nutty sesame seeds. I don’t normally serve bread with fish, but like I said, this recipe called to me while I was making salmon, and so I made an exception. The two recipes complimented each other well, and the meal was excellent. But how could any meal involving freshly baked bread not be excellent?

Bake Bread

It’s generally accepted in this part of the world that resolutions—big plans to eat healthier, be more organized, volunteer more, and so on—are made on January 1st. When I was growing up, that never quite felt right to me. I don’t think I’m alone in the feeling that September was a more appropriate time to be making changes: after a summer of fun and freedom, September meant back to school, a perfect time to vow to quit procrastinating, do extra credit work this year, and get involved in that drama club I’m always saying I want to join. Even as I grew older and summers meant getting a job and working most of the hot hours away, September was always a time for a new beginning, an opportunity to resolve to do better and to be better. Today, I’m still going to school, and will be starting up again in a week. As I mentioned in my last post, I have had an eventful summer: I planned a wedding, had a wedding, and now I’m married! I do feel a little like a new person, and so the start of this school year seems an especially appropriate time to start making promises to myself (and now, to you) about how I’m going to be a better new me. I won’t bore you with the list, but I do have one that seems relevant enough to share: bake more bread.

By making my own bread, I will know exactly what is going into my bread (you can never really be sure with a lot of the breads you can buy at the grocery store today—most are full of suspicious-sounding preservatives). Also, baking bread is fun—at least, I think it is. I love the multi-step process of making bread, from mixing, to proofing, to forming, to baking. I love learning about the process of feeding starters, building gluten, and fermenting dough. I also love how the bread-making process always holds a certain level of uncertainty, and how one can never learn everything there is to know about bread. Finally, making more bread gives me an excuse to use some of the wonderful wedding gifts Andrew and I received, notably my KitchenAid Professional 5 Plus Series 5-Quart Bowl Stand Mixer.

I am in love.

To kick off my new life as a regular bread baker, I decided to make a loaf of whole wheat French bread. It’s a basic, straight-forward bread, and seemed like a good starting point. One of the keys successful bread is accurate measuring and, whenever possible using weight measurements rather than volume measurements. Weights are far more accurate, whereas volumes can have some variations.

This dough can be mixed using the straight dough method, which essentially means tossing everything into a bowl and mixing it up—sort of. The rest of the process is your basic knead, ferment, make-up, rest, and bake. If you make bread already, you know the drill. If not, I’ve explained the process in detail below, with pictures.

At the end of the process, you have yourself a beautiful, simple loaf of bread, the kitchen smells amazing, and you have (I hope) passed a relaxing bread-baking afternoon.

Some resolutions are easy to keep.

Whole Wheat French Bread
From Professional Baking 5th Edition by Wayne Gisslen
Makes one 1 lb. loaf

0.5 lb. water
0.4 oz fresh yeast, or 0.2 oz active dry yeast
6 oz whole wheat flour
8 oz bread flour or all-purpose flour
0.3 oz salt
0.07 oz malt syrup or honey
0.3 oz sugar
0.3 oz shortening

First, if using fresh or active dry yeast, dissolve the yeast in warm (100 F-105 F) water.

Then, combine the dry ingredients in the bowl of the mixer. Pour the water and yeast mixture over that, and add the remaining ingredients.

To start the mixing process, use the paddle attachment on mixer to form a somewhat uniform dough.

Once the dough starts to come together, switch to the dough hook. With the hook, mix the dough on second speed for about 10 minutes—until the dough is smooth and elastic. Since this is a whole wheat dough, you won’t be able to get a great window, but it should be done once the dough is quite elastic and doesn’t break quickly when stretched.

Ferment (rise) the dough in an oiled bowl, covered lightly in plastic wrap, for about two hours (at room temperature), until it has doubled in size.

On a clean, floured surface, flatten the relaxed dough into an oval about the length that the loaf will be, using hands and/or a rolling pin.

Then, roll the loaf up tightly, and seal the seam is well.

Flip the loaf over so that it lies seam-side down. Tuck in the ends, and then roll the loaf under the palms of your hands to even out the shape. Place the loaf on a cornmeal-dusted baking pan to proof until it has doubled in size again (the loaf should be covered during proofing).

Before going into the oven, brush the loaf with water, then give it diagonal slashes along the top (this will create a more evenly-shaped loaf).

Bake the loaf at 425 F for around 20 minutes, with steam for the first 10 minutes. “With steam” means exactly what it sounds like: there should be steam in the oven during the start of the baking process, moisture in the air to keep the dough from drying out too quickly. There are a couple of ways this can be done. The way I chose is to place a dish with hot water on the bottom tray in the oven, while placing the tray with the bread above it. This way is simple, and works great.

Another option is to spray water into the oven every two or three minutes using a spray bottle. This way involves less dishes and less moving trays around in the oven, but it also involves a lot of opening and closing of the oven door, which means your oven temperature will not stay consistent.

Once the first 10 minutes are up, the water tray should be removed from the oven, and then baking continues until the crust has a rich, deep brown color.

Chocolate Candy Cane Cookies & Christmas Baking Traditions

Normally, I don’t do very much baking. The reason is not because I don’t enjoy baking because I do, very much; it’s more because I don’t enjoy eating baked goods all that much. Sure, I like the occasional muffin with my coffee, and sometimes I’m in the mood for something sweet after a meal, but it really is a rare occurrence for me to eat desserts. Sweets just don’t appeal to me the way savory foods do.

However, there is one time of year when my non-sweet-loving nature completely changes, when I have a healthy appetite for sugary delights. That time of year is Christmastime.

When December rolls around, I’m in full baking and cookie-craving mode, and I stay that way until January 1st. I love holiday baking, the memories I associate with it, the way it fills the house with the most tempting aromas, and, of course, the scrumptious results it produces. Holiday baking brings me back to childhood Christmases, and baking with my Mom. One of the highlights of the season was always making Christmas cookies: classic shortbread, soft ginger cookies, fun, marshmallow-filled “church windows”, and elaborately decorated sugar cookies. Though we made cookies often, none compared to these special, sacred baked goods that we could only make once a year. We would start baking around mid-December, but we were not allowed to eat anything we made, not a single glittery sprinkle, until the evening of December 24th. After dinner on Christmas Eve, my mother would fill a platter with a variety of our baked masterpieces, and we were allowed to dig in. After days of anticipation, those cookies seemed like the best ones we had ever tasted.

I speak about these things as if they are in the distant past, but that isn’t the case at all. In fact, my Mom and I still do holiday baking together, and we still save the fruits of our labor to enjoy on Christmas Eve. At the moment, we live more than 2000 miles apart, and though I will be home for Christmas, I decided to get a jump-start on the holiday baking on my own. I am making a few different cookies to bring home to my family, and none are the ones I listed above. I’ll save those to do with my Mom when I get home. Instead, I’m trying out some new recipes because though my family is all about tradition at Christmastime, we’re like to create new traditions as well.

The cookie recipe I want to share with you is one that I made for the first time last year. As soon as I sampled it, I knew that it would become an annual tradition. I cherish the Christmas traditions of my childhood, but it’s also exciting to be creating traditions of my own.
So, on with the baking. This little bit of heaven is called Chocolate Candy Cane Cookies. Imagine this: pink, peppermint buttercream, frosting squished between two chocolate cookies that are not too hard, and not too soft, then rolled in crushed candy canes. Now, make it: the recipe is from last year’s December issue of Bon Appétit, and you can find it here. But I have shiny pictures, so I recommend that you keep reading …

First, you make the chocolate cookies. These consist of a very simple combination of flour, unsweetened cocoa powder, sugar, butter, egg, and a pinch of salt.

While that chills, you make your peppermint buttercream frosting. Have you ever made buttercream frosting before? If you haven’t, I am warning you, it is rather shocking to discover what a sinful combination of fat and sugar this sweet indulgence actually is. In fact, you may just want to stop reading right now. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss, and you may want to stay ignorant of the true nature of buttercream frosting in order to enjoy eating it in the future.
No? Really, you want to know the truth? All right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Buttercream frosting is pretty much half butter and half powdered sugar, whipped up together. For our recipe, we will also be adding peppermint extract and red food coloring to get the color and flavor we want.
So, now you know the truth, and hopefully you have processed it and you are able to move on with the recipe. Yes? Here, this might help: I love the pink fluffiness of it. I have to say, as much as I love to cook, it is very unlikely that I would ever create anything this pretty when I am making something savory.

Now, before you put your frosting to work, you’ll need to bake your cookies. You do this by scooping out tablespoons of dough, forming it into a ball, and flattening it into a two-inch round on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. The recipe says to place them two inches apart, but I don’t find that this much space is necessary. The cookies don’t really expand while they bake, so as long as they aren’t touching to start with, they will stay separate in the oven.

Once the cookies have baked and cooled, you can assemble your sandwiches. That starts with a cookie, placed flat side-up.

Now, spread on about two teaspoons of frosting.
Then, top with another cookie, flat side-down, of course. Now, you’ll need to crush up some candy canes. Choose candy canes with the best colors. I did two types, actually: red and white, and red, green, white, and brown. You don’t quite want them to be crushed to a powder, but you don’t want the chunks to be too big, or they won’t stay stuck to the frosting.

Roll the edges of the cookie sandwich in the crushed candy cane so that the pieces stick to the frosting. Now, you have a Christmas treat that is sure to tempt and impress friends and family. I mean, doesn’t this look enticing? These cookies freeze really well, by the way. You can assemble them completely, then place them in parchment paper-lined containers and freeze them for up to two weeks. When they thaw out, you can’t tell that they were ever frozen. In case you missed it, here’s the recipe again for Chocolate Candy Cane Cookies.

This is my newest Christmas tradition. Do you have one too?

Lemon, Lime, and Orange Snowball Cookies

At Christmas, I made a variety of cookies, both here in Redmond, and in Montreal with my Mom. One of the favorites was definitely the lime snowball cookies I made using a recipe from Bon Appétit magazine. They are shortbread-like, but packed full of lime flavor since you add lime juice, lime peel, and lime oil. Lime oil, you might ask, what’s that? Well, that’s what I asked anyway, because I’d never heard of such a thing. I wondered if this was one of these strange, impossible-to-find ingredients recipes in food magazines often call for that I would have to order online for some overblown price. Actually, this was one option, but the magazine also said that the oil could be found at Sur La Table stores. Sur La Table? I thought. There’s one of those right near me! So, I bundled up, hopped on a bus, and headed over to the Sur La Table location near me. Yes, I took a bus to buy one ingredient for a recipe, an ingredient that I would only need half a teaspoon of, but if I didn’t and found some kind of substitution for the ingredient, I would drive myself crazy wondering how the cookies would have come out if I had found that elusive lime oil. Also, I love going into Sur La Table—it’s kind of a culinary fantasy world. Even though I can barely afford anything in the store, I like to wander around and drool over the gorgeous pots and pans, fancy cooking utensils, and shiny appliances.

So, one twenty-minute bus ride later, I made it to the store and immediately began to search. I’m not going to get into the entire story, but I will tell you that finding that tiny little bottle of lime oil was something of an ordeal. The bottle had to be bought as part of a set, but half the set was missing. After more searching, the rest was eventually found, but then there was no SKU for it, so I almost didn’t get my oil. I was a cook on a mission, though, so I did eventually get what I had come for, along with a small bottle of lemon oil and a small bottle of orange oil.

After all that trouble, I figured I had better make the most of my tiny little bottles of citrus oils. At the time, I was focused on making the recipe the way it was written, so I made the lime snowballs and they were fantastic. I was itching to try making lemon snowballs and orange snowballs as well, which brings me to my most recent baking experiment. I call it an experiment because I was straying from the recipe a little—something I pretty much never do with baking—but I guess it wasn’t exactly the riskiest of experiments. I simply wanted to make the snowball recipe with lemon, lime, and orange and compare the different cookies. I decided to make one batch and divide it into thirds rather than making three full batches, since I figured that would be more cookies than Andrew and I could (or should) handle. I divided all the different ingredients into three bowls:I kept everything exactly the same except, of course, for the fruit juice, peel, and oil. Here is where my lovely little bottles came into play:
After mixing the ingredients, the important thing was to make sure to keep track of which fruit was in which bowl. I took note of the order the bowls were in, and also the order that I placed them on the baking sheet. I did a row of each: lemon, lime, and orange. Before and after, they all look the same, right?
That’s why I thought it would be fun to add a few embellishments to these guys. I got some gel food coloring and decorated the cookies, using yellow for lemon, green for lime, and orange for orange:Certainly not necessary, but definitely fun. When the world gets you down, decorate cookies! Maybe that should be my new motto.

So as for the results? The cookies were all delicious. My favorites are still the lime cookies—I find the lime flavor comes out the best in the cookies, but the lemon and orange are good too. In fact, I find the subtlety actually works in favor of the orange cookies—I had been concerned that those ones would have too much of an orangey flavor. And a hint for when you make these yourself: they taste best about a week after you make them. When they’re fresh, the citrus flavors are very muted, but after some time, they are much more prominent. My guess is that as the cookie dries out a little, the fruity flavors are absorbed more deeply into the cookie, bringing out their taste more than when they are fresher and a little moister.

Finally, I have a question for you: what should I do with the rest of my lemon, lime, and orange oils? I only used a very small amount of each one, and I am curious to know what else I could use these odd little oils for. I would love to hear all of your brilliant ideas!

The recipe for Lime Snowball Cookies can be found here: http://www.bonappetit.com/magazine/2008/11/lime_snowballs