National Poetry Writing Month
April 1, 2013
Prompt: Begin with an opening line from a well-known poem

Seattle Summer Sonnet

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art less transient and less o’ercast;
Chill rains do soak the mossy growth of May,
And August’s warmth has seldom proved to last;

This northwest sky presents a face so blue
That hearts are torn asunder by her face;
Her fickle winds to reason’s course won’t hew,
Though wizards would their winding path fain trace.

But all of summer’s brightness quickly’d fade
Did thee but smile, or merely quirk a grin;
And all those sweetly scented days I’d trade
To wrap a single night with thee therein.

So long as in this soggy land I be,
My port in stormy weather’s found in thee.

April 1, 2013

Most years, I do a brisket for the December holidays. Huge Flintstone-style slab’o’beef, root vegetables, sweet and sour tomato sauce… perfect things for entertaining hordes. But this year, for some reason, there was no entertaining; there were no hordes.

And yet… the year cannot possibly end without me cooking a brisket. Which has just gone into the oven at midnight. It will come out of the oven sometime between 8 and 10 in the morning. And we won’t be eating it for another day and a half, ‘cause that’s how we roll with a properly-cooked and prepared brisket. It’s always better the day after, so we wait until the day after to eat it the first time.

Photos after the beast comes out in the morning.

It being Saint Patrick’s Day, I thought it was a good a time as any to learn to make a traditional Irish Soda Bread. One might think this would be easy to learn to do. Au contraire, mon frere! Turns out there’s a huge, steaming controversy out there as to precisely what “traditional” Irish Soda Bread is.

Naturally, I did some research, looking in some cookbooks, hitting the web. I have to be honest; I found the arguments presented by the Society for the Preservation of Irish Soda Bread to be persuasive. (Not to mention hysterical.)

In any event, I worked out a rough consensus recipe. Flour, baking soda, salt, buttermilk. My recipe looked like a very high hydration dough (14 oz. flour and 12 oz. buttermilk); sure enough, when initially mixed the dough was too sticky and sloppy to effectively work.

Because this is a chemically-leavened dough, rather than yeasted, I couldn’t just leave the dough to hydrate for a while and thus eventually be workable; you really need to get this sucker shaped and onto the baking stone pretty quick. It only took an extra tablespoon or two of flour to give me something I could work. The feel of the dough reminded me that overworking it would be a bad idea; it really felt like another 30 seconds of kneading would leave me with the same sticky mess I started with.

I’d been heating my baking stone for an hour. I popped open the door, scattered a very thin layer in the center, used a bench scraper to get the shaped and scored dough round off the counter, and laid it on the stone. 30 minutes later I had a beautifully domed round, with a nice golden color and an aroma way more complex than four ingredients (even given that one was buttermilk) had any right to exude.

(“Where’s the picture?” I hear you cry. I forgot to take one, and we had a party to attend, and I brought the bread and a big chunk of real imported Irish butter, and… nothing but crumbs. I’ll fix that real soon, honest.)

Over on Red + Black Apron I saw this interesting-looking recipe for seriously chocolate cookies that was adapted from a less-intense recipe posted on Martha Stewart’s web site. I did a little more reading, did a little more tweaking, and produced my own variation.

I found I got much better results using dutch-process cocoa. The additional alkali neutralized some of the acids that would otherwise react with the baking soda, resulting in a thinner, crispier cookie that came closer to my family’s preference. The recipe already uses melted butter as the shortening, so it really seems to scream “thin and crispy”; all the chocolate makes it chewy nonetheless.

If you wanted to go the other way ‘round, i.e. get something cakier, you could make two big changes. First, switch to regular cocoa instead of dutch-process, ensuring the baking soda saw all the acid it wanted for maximum lift. Second, instead of melting the butter with the chocolate over the double boiler, soften the butter at room temp and cream it with the sugar first (let the mixer run at least 5 minutes) before combining with the chocolate, eggs, and vanilla. The extra lift plus all the air trapped by the creaming process should yield a taller, less-dense cookie.

Recipe: Triple Chocolate Cookies

I am eternally fascinated by the huge variety of things that sugar can do when you cook it. Cotton candy, caramel, toffee, candy canes… just amazing.

Most of these tricks are simple if you have a reliable heat source and candy thermometer. One of my favorite simple candies is toffee. My dentist doesn’t like it (although his dislike for toffee is a mere pimple on his hatred for crown-removing caramels), but I love the stuff. It’s made even better with the addition of a layer of dark chocolate, and we all know chocolate (and almost anything else sweet) is greatly improved with a tiny hit of salt.

The photo shows my almond-chocolate toffee made with 70% cacao organic dark chocolate and pink flake salt from Murray River Salt Works. This salt has very large but delicate flakes, so it shows up quite nicely but doesn’t deliver a huge chunk of saltiness in a small area.

shesalty asked: Actually, I return to the CIA in March to start my bachelor's degree! Until then I will be relaxing (for once), possibly doing some trails in restaurants, and lot's of cooking/eating! Rachel

Two more years for the Bachelor’s, or 4?

Enjoy your time off, and keep blogging about what you’re cooking!