While I was reading the recipe, I noticed that both the dough and the cooking instructions were extremely similar to my huge passion, pizza. All kinds of buzzers went off in my head, and I made the dough. I didn’t adapt too many of the Peter Reinhart techniques other than to get my oven really hot and well in advance so my stone was at full heat. I made the dough, and cooked it into these beautiful breads, and they tasted awesome. No more Trader Joe’s naan for us! So good and fresh. Almost like pizza dough…

Pictures next time, since I was way too overwhelmed with the other dishes to take any.

The Upside-Down Tomato Planter is a big hit. I wanted to address the comments, add some tips, and give some updates.

First, I wanted to give a pointer to Matt for making the original 2-liter bottle instructions. I did make one of these, but for my patio I figured I’d go with something with more soil volume.

Jen asks if jute/burlap bags would work. I think they should, I don’t have any good ideas as to how to hook it to a hanger though. Could require a lot of sewing. Starla mentions that she’s done it and they dry out quickly. I could see that being a big issue.

Lynn asks about rain barrels, and Matt gives her a good pointer. I got one for Xmas and it came with an attachment to hook it to your downspout. I think it came from Great American Rain Barrels.

Barbara worries about the weight once the plants get big. I don’t know for sure, but I did put quite a few beers in there, and it held the weight. She also mentions the potential UV damage. None yet as far as I can tell.

Robbie mentions using plastic buckets. At one point there was a site that described doing that, but it seems to have gone offline. I think that would be great, I’ve actually been considering them for regular planters.

Posts are still being written, and will be posted when it doesn’t take 5 minutes to load a single web page.

I’m about 1 day away from flipping everything back to dial-up. At least when I got a good connection, it worked. This is horrid.

I have tried. Both times I ended up with sponges that were bubbling away, and smelled wonderful, but did not have the necessary leavening to actually make any bread rise. Needless to say, it is disappointing. So yesterday I decided to try, yet again. Only this time I brought in a secret helper from the homebrewing side, brewer’s yeast.

There’s a great company in San Diego called White Labs who produces vials of all kinds of yeast for beer making, and when I started my new batch of, er, starter, I threw in a vial of Kölsch yeast. Basically I had 2lbs of flour, 2lbs of water, and the extra brewer’s yeast. Things are looking bubbly, and I’ll keep you posted.

Anyway, this is not that recipe. This is the recipe for The Best Carrot Cake in the Whole World. I believe my Great-Grandmother got this recipe out of the LA Times in the 20’s and it has lived in my mom’s head ever since she learned to make it in the 50’s. This is the cake I request any time I have the opportunity to request a cake, and the one I ate at my wedding.

The Best Carrot Cake in the Whole World : Cake

ingredients

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 cup oil
• 4 large eggs
• 2 3/4 cups grated carrots
• 1 8 1/2 oz can crushed pineapple, drained
• 1 3/4 cup shredded coconut
• 3/4 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

method

Grease and flour 3 9” cake pans and preheat your oven to 350.

Mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon in a bowl. Set aside. In your mixer bowl, stir together the sugar, oil and eggs. Put the bowl on the mixer add the flour mixture and start mixing. As the batter is coming together, add the carrots, pineapple, coconut and nuts. Remember you’re making a cake batter, so don’t overmix.

Divide the batter evenly among the pans and bake for about 45 minutes, but check at 35 for doneness. Mom likes the toothpick method, I tend to use the push method, i.e. reach in and push on the cake. When it’s done, it feels done. When it’s mushy inside, it feels like it. Try it a couple times and you can tell.

Let cool and then frost.

The Best Carrot Cake in the Whole World : Frosting

ingredients

• 1 8 oz package cream cheese
• 1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 box powdered sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla

method

Mix with mixer into the best cream cheese frosting you’ll ever taste.

This makes enough frosting for in-between layers and a nice top layer. Double the recipe if you want it on the outside as well, but honestly, it gets pretty freakin rich with that much frosting. For the flour, I would stick with all-purpose, as I think cake flour is not nearly hearty enough to stand up to all the fillings. This comes out like a sweet carrot bread with this rich luscious frosting. Also note, that if you make this cake the night before you need it, you will be rewarded. It ages quite nicely in the fridge. The flavors mellow into happiness, and the frosting develops a nice little shell with the cold.

There you have it. The Best Carrot Cake in the World. I’ve never seen anyone disappointed.

This afternoon I’ve got a how-to for you. The garden blogs have been commenting on, and I’ve been scouring out pricing for, the Topsy-Turvy Upside Down Tomato Planter. For those of you who haven’t seen this, it is a “system” for growing tomatoes, or any other plant really, in a hanging upside down manner. The theory goes that this helps you avoid all sorts of issues from cages, to air circulation, to ground-based bugs, and just get great tomatoes. Also, you can hang these things in places where they’ll get great sun, in many cases even better than on the ground ( especially in small spaces like my patio ).

I was sold. So I started scouring the web for these things, and the best price I found was $14.95. That seemed reasonable until I started looking more closely at the pictures. This is a bag with a little sponge around the bottom. Not rocket science. One day soon after this revelation, I was at Whole Foods and I noticed their new re-usable plastic bags. These are plastic grocery bags, with 2 handles, that are thicker and sturdier than a regular grocery bag. They cost $0.25, and they give you a nickel each time you use it. A light bulb went off, and I realized this could be just what I needed. Hence my own hanging planter. Let’s break it down.

First, here’s what you need. One of these bags from Whole Foods. Or any other bag that can support some weight. I put about 10 bottles of beer in one to check the weight. That was heavier than my bags of wet soil, and I haven’t had any issues yet. You also need a plant, some potting soil ( I added some worm castings ), a paper towel, and a pair of scissors.

Next we’re going to cut a small hole in the bottom. I used scissors, and cut it to about 1 - 1 1/2 inch diameter. Due to ease of cutting issues, I made it a diamond shape. Snip. Snip. Done.

Then, take your plant and carefully stick it in the bag and shove the foilage through the hole. Be gentle, but also realize I did it with this tomato and didn’t even lose a flower.

Now take your paper towel, fold it up, and wrap it around the trunk of the plant. This will help contain the dirt.

Then fill with soil, and water.

That’s it. For 20 cents and a paper towel, you have a hanging upside-down tomato planter.

I’ve had this one up for almost a month, through rain, winds, and normal watering, and it is going strong. It’s a Brandywine, and I’ve already got flowers. I’ll keep you posted on the progress. For all the pictures in big sizes, check out my flickr set Make an Upside Down Planter.

click for larger image

If you’ve been visiting the site, or my flickr stream yesterday, you might have noticed a picture of pork marinating. This was the first of my recipes from the fabled “Marina Cheung Recipe Archive”; Chinese Style Barbecue Pork. Interestingly, it involved no barbecue but I’ll leave that to ponder for a moment.

Marina Cheung’s Barbecue Pork

ingredients

• pork shoulder, cut into roughly 2-inch chunks
• 1 tbsp salt
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 2 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tbsp thin soy sauce
• 1 tbsp shao xing cooking wine
• 1/2 tsp 5 spice
• 2 tbsp hoisin sauce

method

Place pork in a large bowl, sprinkle with salt, sugar and garlic powder. Add the soy, wine and hoisin. Adjust the quantities to moisten without making too soupy. Next add the 5 spice and mix until meat is covered. Cover and refrigerate at least 1 day, 2 is better. I used a Ziploc freezer bag and pushed all the air out to achieve better contact with the marinade.

To cook, pour your pork and sauce into a pyrex pan and bake at 375 about 45 minutes, or until done. Then mix a small amount of honey with water, brush on pork, and broil until shiny. Leftovers keep well frozen and this pork is infinitely useful in a variety of other dishes, as we shall see.

The issues I had involved leaving the pork in the oven a little too long after broiling in an attempt to keep it warm until dinner. It ended up a little drier than I had hoped. Still quite tasty however. Also plan on keeping some toothpicks handy as this texture meat definitely gets stuck in your teeth.

Seemed easy enough. I can type pretty quickly, and I was excited about the recipes. Also makes for good blog content. Then I started reading the recipes. They were not written like I write recipes, nor were they like any in a book, nor is there any consistency in how they were written at all. A few start with ingredients, most start with some technique, and almost all of the quantities are non-existant. To try and make sense of these is going to require me to cook them at least once to figure out the missing information.

I am learning why cookbooks take so long. You can only eat so much, and even then, food is not free. You can only make so much food in a day. And then you start to factor in the fact that your family demands some variety in their meals, and you soon realize it could take a month or two to get through this stack of cards that seemed like an afternoon’s typing for easy content.

First recipe coming up tonight, Barbecue Pork.

I started in the middle of the day with the beans, since Grace recommends that they taste best after standing for several hours. This made sense, since it would give the beans time to absorb the flavors of the oil and vinegar. This dish is beans, fried until wrinkled, then added to some fried ground pork, ginger and sauce. It tasted fantastic. The Princess was insisting on eating all of them before dinner after I foolishly gave her an early sample.

The cabbage was actually the last thing I cooked. The flavor was good, but due to some nap issues my wokking was distracted by a persistent small child and I ended up overcooking the dish. The end result was a tasty but mushy cabbage and carrots. Ah well. At least I had tasty.

I cheated. I used my turkey thigh instead of drumsticks. Also I made this in a sautee pan. To make this dish you start with some garlic, ginger and onions sauteeing. When they are “make tasty” as Marcella says, put them in a bowl and set aside. Then cook your poultry. I tried to vigilantly flip my 2 lb turkey thigh, but it was taking forever so I threw the whole thing in the oven. Nothing suffered, and my attention thanked me. After it was done, I put the onions et al back in the pan, added the oyster sauce and sesame oil, and scraped the turkey goodies off the All-Clad into my favorite sauce of recent memory. Also I chopped the turkey into large chunks after letting it rest for about 10 minutes. This made it easy to toss it with the sauce.

I cooked up some rice in the cooker, and dished it all up. The girls were happy, although I still don’t think J knows there was pork in the beans. Shhh. All the recipes were beautiful, easy enough to cook, and the only failure in the whole evening was my fault. You can’t ask for much more than that.

p.s. for full size pictures, head to my flickr page.

This morning the Princess climbed into our bed asking for muffins. I explained to her that we didn’t have any because Daddy buys ingredients, not food. She persisted and I relented. So I got up and made muffins. J reminded me that if the girl is spoiled, I have no one to blame but myself. Indeed.

I used the recipe from The Foster’s Market Cookbook again, and I was not disappointed. The recipe that follows is out of my memory, so any errors or bad tastes resulting are my responsibility.

Blueberry Muffins ala Foster’s Market

makes about 16 muffins, too bad my tin is for 12. =\

ingredients

• 3 cups flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1 stick butter, melted
• 3/4 cup milk
• zest and juice from 1 lemon ( meyer is preferable )
• 3 eggs
• 2 1/2 cups blueberries ( fresh or frozen )

method

First preheat your oven to 375. Take your muffin tin and oil it, I used PAM, but I have also buttered it. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide how to keep the muffins from cooking to the tin.

Mix together the dry ingredients, set aside. In a seperate bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients. Then gently fold the wet into the dry, and then fold in the blueberries. Do NOT overdo it.

Spoon into the tin, and bake until done, roughly 25-30 minutes. The best way to tell if the muffins are done, is to feel them. Open your oven and push on the tops. If they’re not done, you’ll know it. You can screw around with the toothpick if you want, but I’m not into that.

notes

I think the recipe originally called for all-purpose flour, which I didn’t have on hand. I only had my high-protein bread flour. It produces a more bread-like muffin as opposed to something more cake-like. I actually like it better I think. Also, use a Meyer Lemon if you can find one. It adds a sweet citrus flavor while still being tangy.

Now onto the rest of the day; laundry and cooking. Chinese tonight, plus pizza dough for tomorrow.

Since we’re not going to be home for dinner tonight, I decided to make the Irish-American traditional last night. But before I did that, I was browsing the food web, and found this recipe for Guiness and Onion Bread on Slashfood. I started just after we ate lunch and wound up with some righteous loaves to eat with dinner. The bread is a combination white / whole wheat flour, with Guiness instead of water, and some sauteed onions folded in after the first rise. I haven’t ever thought of myself as a baker, but after my pizza dough experiences I am starting to gain some confidence. I baked these loaves right on my stone, at 400 for about 40 minutes. I knocked the bottoms, but I think next time I would go another 5 minutes.

To accompany the bread I made an excellent Niman Ranch Corned Beef* and for the last 35 minutes tossed in some baby gold potatoes, carrots, and the rest of the onion from the bread. I added some chopped cabbage to the bowls and spooned the hot veggies and broth over the top. This is my favorite way to cook cabbage, since it holds the texture perfectly. Try this with some shredded nappa cabbage next time you’re making an asian soup or curry.

* note that you can buy this beef for about 1/3rd the price at Trader Joe’s.

Let it all be, for about another 40 minutes. ( this puts the chicken at an hour plus, the beets at 45, and the taters at 35. roughly )

When I pulled it all to let the bird rest, I threw together a salad of greens and some vinaigrette. Then I served it up. The food was delicious.

When the time came to do the dishes, there were hardly any. It was great. The biggest mess came from the ongoing sourdough starter situation, and even that was remedied rather quickly.

A couple weeks ago I took the plunge and bought a pizza stone, a peel, and the excellent book American Pie by Peter Reinhart. I’d been increasingly frustrated with the quality of the pizza at my local joint, and wanted to see if I could do pizza justice in my home oven. I was worried after watching one of those Food Network shows on pizza where they showed the coal oven at Lombardi’s in New York. That thing cooks at 900 degrees. My oven hits 550.

So I started with the New York-Style Pizza Dough. As he says in the book, “Here is the dough for the pizza with a medium-thick crust that you find in NYC, any college town, or anywhere else pizza is sold by the slice.” It’s a pretty easy dough, with a little olive oil and sugar ( besides the flour, yeast and salt. ) I’ve been using Bob’s Red Mill Organic Unbleached White Flour. It has the high-gluten, high-protein that’s all the rage for bread making.

I realized when making various batches of this dough, that Extra Virgin Olive Oil was too much. It ended up overpowering the flavor developed by the yeast, and left the dough tasting confused. I also have developed a preference for Natural Cane Sugar over Brown Sugar. I haven’t tried refined or honey yet.

The dough rises nicely, freezes well, and creates this luscious, puffy golden colored crust. If you have been watching the my flickr stream you’ve seen a couple shots of my pies, including The Primus, whose topping list was concocted with the help of My Brutha From Anotha Mutha, Jamie. It was a heavenly combination of spanish dried pork loin, salami, red onions, mozza, tomato sauce, and dabs of ricotta.

Anyway, after the initial investment of about $50 for the peel, stone and book, pizza is one of the cheaper meals I know of. About a dollar of organic flour, some oil, a couple bucks for sauces ( another topic in and of itself ), and a couple bucks for cheese. It can be a little intimidating, but if you love pizza I think you owe it to yourself to try this out. As our patron saint of exclamations, Giada would say, “So Good.”