SereneCooking

Convalescence food #1:

Homemade veggie stock, heated with a tablespoon of miso paste. Yummmm, miso broth.

Convalescence food #2:

Canned low-sodium chicken stock, cooked with a handful of rice until the rice was very soft. Yummy, but too filling on a convalescing stomach.

Convalescence food #3:

Pastina cooked in veggie stock with a pat of butter and some salt and pepper. Not bad, but not my mother's pastina, which is cooked in chicken fat with onions.

Convalescence food #4:

Savory Bread Pudding

Cube up enough non-sweet bread (I used onion-poppyseed that had gone stale) to fill a 9-inch-square baking pan

Over the top of that, pour a mixture of 4 beaten eggs, 2 cups of milk, some salt and pepper, and, optionally, some poultry seasoning or, if you want a stuffing vibe to it, something with some sage in it, like Costco's organic no-salt seasoning

Turn on the oven to 350F. Using the back of a wooden spoon (or, if you're lazy, as I am, the whisk you just beat the eggs with), push all the bread down into the liquid until it's all smooshed in there, and let it sit until the oven's preheated. Optionally (yeah, like butter's an option here), put a few pats of butter on the top. Bake for 40-45 minutes, until the top is puffy and starts to brown.

Yummy.

someotherguy was in the mood for chocolate-chip cookies, so we walked to the store to get the 'gredients. They didn't have chocolate chips, so we got some 72% dark chocolate and some other stuff -- eggs, butter. So we went home and I proceeded to prepare the cookies...

...and dropped the bowl of chopped chocolate onto the floor. *sob*

So, when life gives you spilled chocolate, you make lemonade, right? Or something.

Added some good cocoa powder to the cookie dough, then instead of chocolate chunks, stirred in a little less than half the volume of coffee beans. Yum. Crunchy, but yum. I wouldn't feed these to any but the most coffee-addicted of my friends and family, but they're pretty damn good for improvised cookies.

Whole-wheat dinner rolls (bread machine)

Yield: 12 rolls

1 1/4 cups water
2 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour
1 cup bread flour
2 1/2 tablespoons vital wheat gluten
2 tablespoons sugar
1 heaping teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast

Put ingredients in your bread machine in the order suggested. Run machine on "dough" setting. Shape finished dough into 12 balls. Place almost touching in a baking dish (I use a glass, 9"x13" dish) that's been either lightly greased or lined with parchment. Cover with plastic wrap or a towel and let rise until double in size, about 30-40 minutes. Bake at 375 for about 15 minutes, or until they look golden brown and sound hollow when you tap their little bottoms. :-)

	NYT bread Baked 1/8/07
	NYT bread with Earth Balance (Earth Balance is at http://www.earthbalance.net )

It's no secret how much I love my NYT bread. Today, though, I bothered dragging out the camera. Yum. Bread.

Just as a fun experiment, took the NYT bread dough (I seem to be making it every other day or so) and cut it into roll-sized pieces and baked 'em. Fun rolls, like a cross between a bun and a sourdough english muffin. We had TVP sloppy joes on them tonight, along with coleslaw. Yummy.

I looked up some versions of anadama bread, found a vegan version on fatfree.com, and adapted it to what I had on hand. So far, it's the best bread I've made in my new bread machine. It didn't *look* like bread dough, it didn't *rise* like bread dough, but the loaf that resulted was gorgeous and tasty, and stonebender and I ate most of a loaf yesterday. I made more for tonight's party, along with an Ethiopian stew. They both went over really well.

Here's how I did it:

Place wet ingredients in breadmaker (or do it in the order your bread
machine says to):

1 1/2 cups water
1/3 cup molasses

Add dry ingredients:

1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tablespoon gluten
1 1/2 cups white whole-wheat flour
1/3 cup yellow cornmeal
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Put 2 1/4 tsp. yeast into a depression in the top of the dry
ingredients. Run machine on basic setting.