Wildish

I’ve been working on a project lately that involves making little fuzzy homes for wildlife. I’m not quite ready to post up all the details about that yet, but it made me think to put up a link to the Hinterland Who’s who website’s list of what you can do to help wildlife.

In a dream last night

Dan said “I’m waiting for the rock concert to start.” We were on the grassy side of a hill that led down to the cliffs and it’s egde, the ocean and at it’s edge; the horizon. I was looking out onto the bay, a dark storm cloud was forming on the horizon, soon it was a huge purple menace hanging in the air. Particles almost still, but not quite. Lazily pulling itself together, close, inevitable and Wild.

I said “we should move to Montreal”. but then the rock show was coming. We are waiting in silence looking at the swollen cloud.

then I woke up. I feel like something is coming, something big and out of my control. something exciting.

I’ve been inspired to make these by my little jay friends who so dearly love peanuts (see last post). My boyfriend Dan loves these dense peanut cookies. This recipe is really easy and yummy so we make these together at home pretty often. I’ve also notice that if Dan is pressed to bring something to a party he usually shows up with these bad boys. They’re an easy crowd pleaser.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies

1 cup (100% natural) peanut butter
1/4 cup butter
2/3 cup dark brown sugar packed
1 cup white sugar
1 1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs
3/4 tsp baking soda
3/4 cup all purpose flour
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
at least 150 g of chocolate chunks

Make sure to pick up natural peanut butter, by that I mean made with 100% peanuts. The other stuff has way too much added sugar, preservatives and is always low on peanut flavour and texture. It just won’t cut it.

Cream the butter, peanut butter, sugars and vanilla. Add the eggs one at a time, stirring just until incorporated. Stir in the soda and flour, then the chocolate chunks. If you are a real crunchy peanut cookie fan you could also toss in a few roughly chopped peanuts at this point. I prefer creamy peanut butter myself, but I’ve had great results with both.

Bake at 350f for 8-10 minutes.

On this weeks edition of cute animals: Blue jays.

I love these little guys. They live behind my house and are crazy for peanuts. We spend the early morning eating peanuts together and whistling at each other. I hope to see them again tomorrow morning.

 

Yesterday’s bread, a Rosemary Olive Oil Bread, was particularly good so when it came time for breakfast this morning there was nothing left. I thought about having a piece of store bought bread with the rest of my meal, but when I looked at the measly plastic wrapped rectangle of a loaf I decided against it. When you get used to making things yourself, mass-produced things start to seem like a very poor substitute for the real deal.

I told my mom about this and she said that everyone on the Irish loop* used to make their own bread, at first just because bakers bread was not available there. When store bought bread came around people referred to as the “bakers fog”, because it was insubstantial and left you feeling hungry. Everyone agreed it was just a pale comparison. You wouldn’t buy it unless you ran out of the good stuff. It’s not hard to see why; they made their bread themselves so it was customized to their exact tastes, it was always fresh and sometimes wood fired. It allowed for variation based on seasonal ingredients, creativity, not to mention the fulfilling experience of making the bread and sharing it. One more skill to take pride in, one more act to enjoy, something to add to yourself instead of another daily task removed from your direct experience.

I think the “baker’s fog” is a great metaphor for a lot of things these days. We take for granted that we are constantly encouraged to buy and surrounded in things which are uniform, cheap to produce and fast. It’s hard to see (or taste) how hollow some of these mass-produced, prepackaged foods and objects are unless you have something to compare hand made to. Otherwise how are you supposed to see through all this fog!

We think of a lot of food preparation as a chore, but what is a chore? Something you’d rather not have to do? A waste of time? Based on my experience and family stories I view some tasks in a very different light. There is hard work, boring work and then there is nurturing work, gentle work, things that involve all of your senses and pique your attention. Intimate details become important, so does what you are doing right at that instant, right now. These things make us feel alive. Losing this connection is a poor substitute for convenience.

Sometimes making something fast and easy, cutting corners, or getting rid of a task all together is actually the loss of a more fulfilling experience. If things are too easy they become boring and unrewarding. From the outside a skill might seem mysterious or unattainable, but in reality all they take is time and patience. If we have no relationship or connection to our food (or objects), it’s just sustenance and it could be a much deeper experience.

PS: homemade bread = no plastic bread bags or extra shipping necessary! (except for the flour and other ingredients which had to come from somewhere of course. That said try to get it local.)

**The Irish Loop is a group of culturally rich communities of irish descent on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland.

These cookies are satisfying in so many ways: buttery, chocolatey, thick and a little nutty.

Chocolate chip cookies with ground walnuts and oats

1/2 pound of unsalted butter
1 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs (preferably free run and room temp’)
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
100g of walnuts
300g dark chocolate chips (approx 1 bag, set 1/3cup aside to grind up)
2/3 cup of rolled oats (not quick oats)
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/8 tsp cinnamon

Preheat over to 350f. Grind the oats, 1/3 cup of chocolate chips and 100g of walnuts in a small chopper, coffee grinder or food processor until quite fine. (You could also use a knife, but I imagine it would take a while to get it fine enough.) In a medium bowl wisk together the flour, ground ingredients, cinnamon, baking soda and salt. Set aside.

In a large bowl beat the butter, sugars and vanilla until it is light and creamy. Add the room temperature eggs, 1 at a time, mixing just until incorporated. Gently stir in the dry ingredients from the first bowl, and finally the rest of the bag of chocolate chips. (This is quite a bit of chocolate, you can always add less if you’d like.)

I usually used a 1/8 measuring scoop to make these. Drop them onto an ungreased cookie sheet and bake until almost cooked, about 8-10 minutes. These cookies will set up a bit out of the oven, do not over bake them or they will be too firm. They usually look a little moist on top when they come out of the oven, but not wet.

 

When I am trying an experiment or a new cookie recipe I usually put one or two tester cookies on a sheet and take it out when I think they are done. Then I give them a few minutes to cool and then taste them. This gives me a better idea of how long it takes to bake the whole batch just right or if something needs adjusting. After all, ovens temperatures vary and it’s easy to take them out a little too early or too late.

**It’s not a big deal if the eggs aren’t room temperature when making most cookies, cakes on the other hand are a different story! If you are in a hurry to warm them up submerge them in a bowl of hot water.

Last night the full moon was at perigee, the closest it comes to the earth during it’s orbit. We didn’t catch it until late last night, but it was still stunning. It was so bright Dan kept saying it looked like a light bulb. The moon tonight will be nearly full and still very close to the earth, so if you get a chance go out at sunset (it appears largest at sunset) and feast your eyes on the moon.

Wolf Moon

Binoculars are great for picking out details. I tried to get a shot through my binoc’s, but this is the best I could do without a tripod.

There is nothing that reminds me of home quite like fresh bread.

My grandmothers bread was the stuff of legends. I’m not sure if the slices were really as huge as I remember, but I just loved having a piece so thick it could barley pass as a slice topped with a liberal spread of half melted peanut butter. We grand kids didn’t look forward to being spoiled with money or toys, our grandmother doted on us by bringing us a loaf and the best part is there was nothing that we could have wanted more.

I have a large family, so my Grandmother made so many loaves at a time no bowl could possibly be big enough so she used a huge laundry basket. My aunt followed in her footsteps, and so I also have early memories of her long counter in the old house being overflowing with rising loaves of bread, she covered them all in a long damp tablecloth with some poppy blue 70’s print which I wish I had to use for many reasons. The smell of the bread rising in the kitchen is palpable, I can almost taste it, the memory seems so old that it’s fused the touch softness of the dough, the smell, and the taste all together. And now that I have remembered this the memory with be forever changed, reality is just like dreams in a lot of ways. but then I digress…

When I was a kid I abhorred walnuts, there was no way I was going to go near those things. I thought of them only as the spoiler of brownies; bitter, unpleasantly crunchy and infuriatingly inseparable from the delicious prize. Even chocolate couldn’t tempt me to eat something ruined by walnuts, I considered it an exercise in futility. So I guess I just assumed I still wouldn’t like them,

until one fateful green bean salad (topped with chopped walnuts) gave me a taste for them and now I am putting them in everything. My mother must have noticed since she gave me a lovely bottle of walnut oil for christmas. It’s wonderful in salads, but since I love to bake and I had been thinking about trying some new oils in bread, this is the first thing I made with walnut oil. The oil is light and lovely, in colour and in feel I find, with a delicate walnut fragrance and taste. I was so pleased with this delicately fragrant bread, it turned out to be a real winner. We ate it with strawberry jam, for a little taste summers past and summers yet to come. Preserves really warm your heart in the dark months. If you’re feeling the winter blues you might want to give this bread and a bottle of good local jam a try, also super delicious with butter and honey. If you don’t have walnut oil you can substitute any other oil you have handy (extra virgin olive oil, grape seed oil, etc) and it shouldn’t affect the texture very much, but the bread will be quite different in flavour depending on what you use, of course. Walnut oil is definitely a treat. Mmmmmm.

 

Walnut Scented Homemade Bread

3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp sea salt
3 tbsp walnut oil
1 tbsp butter (or vegan margarine, such as earthbalance)
1 1/4 cup warm water (should feel like a warm bath, not hot)
4 1/2 tsp yeast (quick/instant)
2 tbsp packed brown sugar

If you have a bread machine set it to knead the dough, put everything in and turn it on, pretty simple. Take it out when it has been kneaded for twenty minutes and place on a clean, lightly floured surface. Cut the dough into thirds with a sharp knife, form these into proper boules and place them into a loaf pan which has been butter and floured. Cover with a clean tea towel and set it aside to rise for about a half an hour; it should have doubled in size if not give it more time. Brush the top with a little melted butter and bake at 400f until it is nicely golden and the underside of the loaf sounds hollow when you tap it.

A quick tip: right before you put your loaf in the over use a mister bottle to give a quick furious spritz of water into the hot oven, the steam will make your bread crust pleasantly crisp.

I started making these again over the holidays to give as homemade gifts, but they soon took over my holiday baking all together. I had plans for mocha cakes, shortbreads and sugar cookies, but soon I was craving, making and eating nothing but gingerbread cookies. I hadn’t made this recipe in a long time and I think I had forgotten just how yummy they are, not to mention how easy they are to make. The secret ingredient in this recipe is the cardamom, which makes for a much more aromatic cookie with a little more spice and a sweeter fragrance than a regular gingerbread.

You can make these thin for a crisper cookie or quite thick for a satisfying slightly chewy cookie. (Sometimes I mix a little glaze up with icing sugar, a splash of milk, a pat of butter, and a few drops of vanilla. I don’t have a recipe for this since I always wing it, just mix it to the consistency and taste that you like for an extra sweet treat.)

Cardamom Gingerbread Cookies

3 cups all purpose flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 baking soda
1 1/2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cardamom
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 stick of butter (you can use salted or unsalted, just remember to add a pinch of salt if you do use unsalted)
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup super dark brown sugar
1/2 cup molasses
1 egg

In a medium bowl whisk together all of the dry ingredients; flour, baking powder and soda, and finally your spices. Set this aside. In a large bowl beat the brown sugar, vanilla and (room temperature) butter until creamy and light, add the molasses and egg mixing just until combined after each addition. Gently stir in the dry ingredients. These can be rolled into shapes right away, it’s a very forgiving recipe. Enjoy!

A quick tip: to avoid overeating these yummy little cookies divide the dough into thirds and put 2/3rds of it in the freezer right away. Next time you have friends drop by or someone needs a little cheering up you can pop them into the oven and have fresh baked cookies in no time.

Also, I’ve made these with lactose free margarine (Earthbalance is a good one) for my lactose intolerant sis’ and they turned out great.