rockin’ rolls: bread hits of classic rock

And my brother’s back at home
With his Bagels and his Scones
We never got it off on the Cornbread stuff
What a drag, too many crumbs

               David Breadbowl
               - All the Yeast Dudes

Boulanger Records announces Rockin’ Rolls: A Collection of Classic Rock Bread Hits. This two-disc set promises to be the best thing since sliced bread.*

Disc 1 -

Creedence Crumpet Revival – Fortunate Scone
Rusk – Frybread by Night
Fleetwood Matzo – Dough Your Own Way
Iggy Poptarts – Crust for Life
The Doughs – Challah, I Love You
Deep Pumpernickel – Toast on the Water
Croissant, Stills, Lavash & Young – Teach your Ciabatta
The Bagels – You’ve Got to Hide Your Loaf Away
Steve Muffin Band – Take the Honey Bun
Pink Flatbread – Dark Side of the Croissant
Croutons Trio – Where has all the Flour Gone?

Disc 2 -

Pita Frampton – Baby I love Your Grain
Blood Sweat & Tortillas – You Bake Me So Very Happy
Blue Oyster Crackers – (Don’t Fear) the Sourdough
Nick Cave and the Bad Seedbuns – Into My Oven
Americrust – I Knead You
Lof Zeppelin – Stairway to Leaven
Grateful Bread – Uncle John’s Baguette
Rye Toast Speedwagon – Kaiser Roll with the Changes
Chapati Smith Band – Biscuit the Night
Challah and Oatbread – Naaneater
The Rolling Scones – Sympathy for the Bagel

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*I wonder if I need to start having warning labels on my posts: This post contains extremely high levels of puns, wordplay and other silliness. Proceed at your own risk.

breaking bread

Today is Thanksgiving in the US, a holiday marked primarily by having a large meal together with family and/or loved ones. In previous years, I’ve set the table with utensils, and served up some turkeys. This year, I want to make sure we include bread (and a few other bready baked goods) in our ongoing ThThTh feast.

• break bread: an expression meaning “have a meal together with people”
• “Breaking Bread,” a song by Johnny Cash
• “bumped his head on a piece of bread”: a line from the song/nursery rhyme “It’s raining, it’s pouring” in the version I learned as a child (though not in more commonly known versions). Did anyone else learn this version?
  

  It’s raining, it’s pouring
  The old man in snoring.
  Bumped his head on a piece of bread,
  And didn’t get up till morning.

• bread: a slang term for money
• breadwinner: one who earns money for a household
• dough: another term for “bread” as in “I’ll need some dough to buy bread”
• dough: a mixture of flour, water and other ingredients used to bake bread, as in “I’ll knead some dough to bake bread.”
• The Pillsbury Doughboy: an anthropomorphic wad of dough used to sell products for Pillsbury.
• half a loaf is better than no bread or half a loaf is better than none: an expression meaning, roughly “getting something is better than getting nothing”
• “Half a loaf is better than low bred:” a joke made by John Steed in The Avengers episode “The Correct Way to Kill”



• The Little Red Hen: a fairy tale about a hard-working, wheat-growing, flour-grinding, bread-baking hen who gets no help from her lazy companions, who prefer to loaf.
• “give us this day our daily bread:” a line from the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer recited by Christian church-goers
• bread line: a queue to receive food from a charitable organization
• whitebread: a slang adjective used to describe someone whose tastes are bland and culturally mainstream, or things associated with such a person. Such as white bread.
• bun in the oven: an expression meaning “knocked up”
• The Muffin Man: an English nursery rhyme. Do you know the muffin man?
• muffin top: the lumps of flesh about the waist caused by wearing pants that are too tight
• Hansel and Gretel: in this fairy tale, two children leave a trail of breadcrumbs to mark their path so that they won’t get lost in the woods. It’s not a particularly effective method.
• bread is the staff of life: a saying about the importance of bread. Etymology online says:
  

  Staff of life “bread” is from the Biblical phrase “to break the staff of bread” (Lev. xxvi.26), transl. Heb. matteh lekhem.

  I’ll take a page from Magpie and redirect you to this blogger, who poked further into the orgins of the phrase.

• “I’ll grind his bones to make my bread,” a line spoken by the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk:
  

  Fee-fi-fo-fum!
  I smell the blood of an Englishman.
  Be he ‘live, or be he dead,
  I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.

• the best thing since sliced bread: an expression said appreciatively of something really innovative, or just something really good. Often said facetiously.
• bread and circus: as the wiki says, since I’m too tired/lazy to say something on my own “is a metaphor for handouts and petty amusements that politicians use to gain popular support, instead of gaining it through sound policy”
• Project Bread, a Massachusetts anti-hunger organization. I’ll donate $5.00 to them for each commenter who includes the name of a type of bread in the comments below.

image credits: bread from wpclipart, Little Red Hen from Ella M. Beebe Picture Primer (New York: American Book Company, 1910) 87 from clipart ETC.

baking bread

Last month, Magpie wrote some posts (and even a nonet) about baking bread. I left a comment saying that she had just about inspired to give bread-making a try, as soon as I got some yeast. She replied by sending me a link to Laurie Colwin’s recipe for oatmeal bread.

The idea with this recipe is that you can fit the steps of baking bread into a busy schedule, investing only 15 minutes of active work. You make the dough at night before going to bed, do a bit with it in the morning, and then bake it when you get home in the evening.

Once I finally got around to remembering to buy yeast at the grocery store, and after an additional wait for another shopping trip because I’d forgotten that the recipe also called for wheat germ, we were good to go.

I thought that making and kneading the dough would be a good activity to do with Phoebe, since she really likes to help. (I’m eager to train the kids for hard labor, which should free up more of my time for blogging. Or maybe I should just train Phoebe to blog for me.)

The recipe suggests that the whole process should take only 15 minutes. I figured that the first step shouldn’t take much more than 10 minutes. With my cluelessness, I planned to tack on another 15 to 20 minutes. And then with Phoebe’s help, we knew to expect things to take at least an extra half hour.

I’ll let you decide whether Phoebe liked the process.

Phoebe smiles for the camera. (“That was a really big smile,” she said afterwards.)

The next day, I “knocked down the dough,” which was a new expression for me, and split the dough. The recipe said to use 2 loaf pans. We have only one loaf pan, so I figured I try to make a “boule” on a cookie sheet. (As the dough spread more than rose, I think the shape of the bread could be better described as a “frisbee.” )

The resulting bread was tasty, but not quite what I expected. It was very dense. The recipe called for leaving the dough out to rise during the day, covered with a tea towel. My guess is that the air in our house is too dry this time of year for such prolonged exposure. It did seem like there was already a bit of a crust before I even put the bread in the oven, so I wonder if once that crust formed, the dough stopped rising. (I wonder if the tea towel used to cover should have been damp. I’m open to other suggestions, too.)

We had the “boule” (or “discus”) for dinner. The loaf bread, also quite dense, worked really well for slicing thin to make toast.

The flat-topped loaf, which worked to make tasty toast.

What was left of the discus could have been used as a weapon the next day.

apples and crisp fall days

Big bins of apples.

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I love the fall. I especially love fall in New England, with the stunning foliage and trips to pumpkin patches and apple orchards. (And you know we’re big fans of Apples in this household.)

On Sunday we paid a visit to a local apple orchard that has an apple tasting each year.

We’d been apple-picking at this orchard in previous years, but I wasn’t sure what to expect for the tasting. It turns out that it was a very low-key event, with not too many people. But there were a whole lot of apples.

Inside the barn/farmstand building, they had set up a long row of wooden bins, each with a different kind of apple. In front of each bin was a little bowl with apple slices, and attached to each bin was a tag with the name of the variety, and bits of information about the cultivar and its history. I felt like I should have taken notes. (For example, I wish I could remember to tell you which kind was the most popular apple in the US in 1900.)

I knew that the orchard claims to grow over 50 varieties of apples, but I thought they’d perhaps have a dozen or so available to taste. I was quite impressed that they had probably closer to 2 dozen kinds out on display with samples set out for tasting. It turns out the folks at the orchard store apples that are typically only available earlier in the season specifically for the tasting weekend.

In spite of all the varieties, I ended up choosing a couple of bags of some familar apples: Macouns (a Mac variety) and Empires (which I love for making applesauce). And now I should have plenty of apples to make an apple crisp.

The orchard has this gigantic walk-in refrigerator. I wish had someone in there for scale.

Apples of my eye.

Theo, post-smooch-from-Phoebe.

Sevilla Tapas tour

Three glasses of Manzanilla sherry being poured at El Riconcillo, the oldest bar in Sevilla.

I’ve been meaning to share some more stories and photos from our trip to Spain, which was (shockingly) now over a month ago. I have largely given up on sharing a detailed chronlogical account of the trip, so I’ll dive in here.

In Sevilla, my mother and I had the fantastic opportunity to go on a tapas tour with azahar, Sevilla blogger extraordinaire of casa az and Sevilla Tapas. (Yes, you should be jealous. It was an absolutely fantastic evening: the company, the sights and the food could not have been better.)

To make you even more jealous, I thought I’d share with some highlights of our evening. With photos.

We met up with az around 9:30 p.m. on a Friday, after I got Theo settled in for bed. (John was kind enough to be the one to stay home with Phoebe and Theo.) We arranged to meet at a little park near our apartment, which was bustling with folks heading out for dinner, and then walked through Sevilla’s maze of streets and alleys to our destinations. We went to 3 very different places for tapas, each with a distinct charm and menu.

Our first stop was El Rinconcillo, which az tells us is the oldest bar in Sevilla. I loved the decor of the place, which was dominated by dark woods, patterned tiles, and shelves well-stocked with bottles. (Not to mention hanging hams.) We stood at the bar.

Our second stop was Modesto, a more modern, bustling bar-restaurant with friendly waiters and lots of outside tables. (We sat inside at the bar, though.)

Our third and finally stop was La Sal, a charming and elegant small restaurant specializing in fresh seafood dishes. We sat inside at a table by the window.

Here’s the menu from our tapas tour:

El Riconcillo:
• Espinacas con garbanzos: spinach stewed with spices and garbanzo beans.
• Revuelto de setas : eggs scrambled with mushrooms
• bread and bread “bullets”: a fresh, crusty roll plus bite-sized bullet-shaped crunchy breadsticks

Modesto:

• Calamares de campo: batter-fried onions and green peppers. (When I read the help “food translations” page at the Sevilla Tapas site, I was quite amused by the name, which translates roughly to “squid of the field.” It reminded me of “land squid.” )
• Aceitunas: olives (and the Spanish, they do know a thing or two about olives)
• Alcaparrones: pickled capers (these are large capers, about the size of smaller olives, not small ones like are used in cooking in the US. You bite them off the stem. They are tasty.)

La Sal:
(Sadly, I don’t remember what these things were called in Spanish. For that matter, I forgot what they were called in English, so I snagged the names from the Sevilla Tapas page on La Sal.)

• fresh sardine on toast with black olive paste
• tuna “tataky” in a light soya sauce
• warm goat cheese salad (This was advertised as being with roasted cherry tomatoes. The tomatoes were actually not roasted, but sliced in half

Peering in through the wide open window of El Rinconcillo from the sidewalk.

The bartenders wrote the tabs on the bar in chalk. They’d cross out the numbers once the tab was settled.

Here was our tab–a pretty good deal for 3 glasses of sherry, an omelette, and some spinach.

My glass of sparkling water at Modesto.

Some olives and az’s beer, and a really big bowl of really big capers.

The Land Squid.

One of the waiters at Modesto gave us red carnations. Az put one in her hair.

Tuna tataki at La Sal. I think the stuff on top was something leeky. The sardines, which az cut in 3 for us to share, are in the background.


The very yummy goat cheese salad with carefully halved (not roasted) tomatoes.

I liked the way this wine rack glowed, but felt a bit awkward about taking a picture of it while there were people sitting at the table in front of it. Happily, we stayed so late (enjoying the food and conversation) that we were the last ones there!

Az also posted about this night, though in a more timely manner! In case you missed her post back in September, check it out: “girls night out.”

If you want to be tormented by photos and descriptions of delicious food about daily, you might want to follow Sevilla Tapas on twitter. (Or join the Facebook fan page.)

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This post is trying to pass itself off as a Monday Mission. The assignment for this week was to write a post in the form of a menu. I actually did such a task once before about 2 years ago, and you should totally go read what I wrote before, because I re-read it, and I cracked myself up. (“cereal: it’s what’s for dinner“) Also, go check out the other Monday Missions at Painted Maypole. The illustrious Painted herself has a brilliantly creative menu posted that I would have liked to have written myself!

roasted caramelized pears

I made a discover recently: I love to roast things. Mostly I roast vegetables, but a couple of months ago, I decided to try roasting pears. Now I have a new food love.

Roasting pears is really easy, and if you use juicy ripe ones, you get the added bonus of caramel flavor without adding even a bit sugar. Here’s what I do:

1. Start with ripe pears. I like to use Bartlett, once they’ve turned from green to yellow. I find things work best with pears that have gotten somewhat soft, but not totally mushy.
2. Cut pears in half, peel, and cut/scoop out the cores.
3. Arrange them flat side down in a single layer in 13×9 glass baking pan, or your roasting pan of preference.
4. Bake at 350 degrees for about an hour.
5. When finished, the pears will be lightly browned and the juices that have run from the fruit will have mostly evaporated and caramelized.
6. Remove the pears from the pan with a spatula. Put a tablespoon or two of water in the baking pan, and stir around with the spatula, scraping the caramel from the bottom of the pan. (You may want to let the pan cool a few minutes first, especially if using a glass pan.) Poor the resulting caramel/juice mixture over your pears, which will absorb most of the liquid.
7. Serve warm. (I like them as they are, but I imagine they’d be good with vanilla ice cream, as well.) (They’re also pretty good cold, for that matter.)

1. The ingredients: some ripe bartlett pears.

2. Some pears that have been halved, peeled and cored.

3. Pear halves arranged in a baking pan.

4. Roasted pears just out of the oven. (Okay, I did add a bit of extra cut-up pear. You don’t want the pan too full, though, or the juices won’t caramelize.)

5. Some of the caramelized juices stuck to the pan.

6. Roasted caramelized pears, ready to eat.

Spanish toast

A Spanish toast: una tostada con mantequilla y marmelada

Our trip to Spain was full of adventures. We traveled by train, by bus, by air, by boat and by foot and had one rather scary taxi ride. We saw historic landmarks and breathtaking scenery, an ancient palace and some masterpieces of modern architecture, and many more things that I’ll hopefully tell you about soon. Among my favorite memories of the trip, however, are the calm moments we had just enjoying sitting still for a little meal.

In Sevilla, we stayed in an apartment located in a little pedestrian square. A perk of this particular place was that the owner also owned the little bar/cafe down in the square, and breakfast was included in the nightly rate. (I’m ever-so-grateful to az, who helped us pick this place, from among a dizzying array of apartment options.)

Breakfast was served from 7 a.m. till noon. After the first rather stressful morning (during which we found that it didn’t work too well to actually have breakfast downstairs due to the difficulties of wrangling small children out the door before their breakfast, combined with the rush of people breakfasting at the hour of the day coinciding with our ability to get the small children out the door), we found that it was very pleasant to sit outside for a late-morning snack.

The included desayuno consisted of a beverage (such as coffee or cola cao, the Spanish version of hot cocoa), plus fresh squeezed orange juice, and a “tostada.” The tostada was a toasted mini-baguette, which we could get with various toppings. A couple of times, I had my tostada with tomato and olive oil, a popular and tasty Spanish breakfast. Mostly, though, we would get mantequilla y marmelada (butter and jam). The toast was always fresh and hot, and the butter was so sweet and tasty that I rarely added jam. The coffee was excellent, as was the orange juice.

A view of the cafe tables set up in the square.

The square was shaded by little orange trees.

The window where we'd order and collect our breakfast. We did, however, need to be cautious as we walked from the cafe window to the tables, as you never knew when a moped might drive along the sidewalk in front of the cafe.

Phoebe and Theo.

Phoebe enjoys the last drops of her hot chocolate.

Theo enjoys his crust of bread.

Here’s a little movie of Phoebe and Theo down at the cafe. I warn you that nothing much happens in the movie, but it captures a bit of one of those pleasant mornings.

If I could, I’d go back there in a heartbeat. I’d raise my glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice in a toast:

To the pleasures of a tasty mid-morning snack, sitting in a little outdoor cafe, in a little square, on a beautiful day, in a charming old Spanish city.

(Actually, I probably wouldn’t actually say all of that. But this post was inspired by this week’s Monday Mission, which was to post in the style of a toast. I chose to post about toast.)

blueberry breakfast

This week’s PhotoHunt theme is “breakfast.”

These are pictures of Phoebe at breakfast this morning. She’s wearing my mother’s blue beret and eating frozen blueberries. (As in blueberries that are still frozen. She likes them that way. They’re like little blueberry popsicles.)

pink applesauce

My grandmother wasn’t a big fan of cooking. She wasn’t a bad cook, but just didn’t like to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. She made food that was, for the most part, pretty uncomplicated. When possible, she would use shortcuts.

For example, when making apple sauce, she wouldn’t peel the apples first. She would just steam them right in their skins, and then mash them in some sort of a ricer. I remember her using some tart apples that grew in her back yard, with skin that ranged from green to light red. The resulting apple sauce would have a bit of a pink tinge to it.

I made apple sauce a few weeks ago with some of the apples that we picked the weekend before. And like my grandmother, I didn’t bother to peel them first. I just quartered up about a dozen of them, and cut the cores out. Then I steamed them in a big pot. When the apples were soft, their flesh just separated right from the skins. I pulled off the skins, and plopped the apples into a food processor. The deep red skins of the Empire apples tinted the resulting sauce to a rich rose color. There was also quite a lot of juice that pooled in the pan, and since I’d used only a bit of water to steam, the juice was not only pink, but really tasty.

Pink apple sauce (and juice) and an Empire apple.

The rosy apple juice byproduct of steaming unpeeled apples for apple sauce. (This photo shows the color a bit better, though the light's not as pretty.)