The joys of sourdough baking

Rachel has turned into a tremendous fan of sourdough, perhaps in part because I keep referring to our sourdough mixture as "our pet." Today, after we used a generous donation from our pet to make some sourdough pizza, Rachel told me that she wanted to use our pet to make pretzels sometime.

So I have gone and found myself a recipe for sourdough  pretzels. They look delicious. We'll have to try them on Tuesday, when she's  home from preschool.

Next step should be to find a good recipe for sourdough bagels, since  bagels are about the only bread product I'm still buying at the supermarket.  Although of course I don't want to end up baking nonstop, since there are other  things I have to do in life. (But this is fun, and I can't deny a certain appeal  to making bread the way it was made for thousands of years. I'm probably going  to break off some of our pet to take camping next month so we can try making  fresh bread over the campfire if we're up for it.)

The sourdough pizza, by the way, had a very strong flavor to it. I had put  our pet out on the table overnight Friday, and when I came down Saturday  morning, she had swollen to twice her earlier volume. It was a very  striking contrast to what had happened when I made the sourdough bread, and I  now suspect that it was too chilly the other night to proof the starter properly,  which is why the bread tasted kind of bland and floury.

I need to stop referring to this as "our pet." I need to ask the girls to  give the yeast a name, since they've already decided that it's a  "she."

how to bake fresh bread

1. Toss and turn in bed before falling asleep at 2 a.m.
2. Get up at 6 a.m. to make bread before everyone else wakes up.
3. Find bread recipes in your cookbook. Realize that you don't have the necessary ingredients for the first dozen or so recipes.
4. Rule out going to the supermarket because of time constraints.
5. Find recipe for potato rolls that doesn't require milk.
6. Upon re-reading ingredients, discover that recipe calls for two packets of yeast, whereas you have one.
7. Begin halving the recipe.
8. Two steps into the process, forget that you are having the recipe and add the full amount of sugar, eggs, salt, butter, water, potato-boiling water, and flour for mixing.
9. As you mix in third cup of the next 8¾ cups of flour, notice that the dough is getting thick and floury very early in the process.
10. Realize your mistake.
11. Panic.
12. Having calmed down, try deducting the "extra" flour from what's left.
13. Knead the dough. Notice how it keeps sticking to your hands in much larger amounts than it did with that nice buttermilk you bread you followed the directions for perfectly two weeks ago. Maybe you shouldn't deduct any flour.since you did add the full amount of water.
14. Add more flour, but without measuring it.
15. Jeez, this stuff is really sticking to your hands.
16. Add more flour. Why bother measuring this time either? You've no idea how much you've put in at this point.
17. Keep kneading.
18. Try to flip dough over. Hold down kneading surface with one hand while you remove dough with other.
19. Add more flour. Who knows how much?
20. Debate tossing mixture into garbage and finding something else to take to friend's house. Like leftover stir-fry with frozen vegetables.
21. Knead.
22. Add more flour once you pry your hands loose from doughy morass.
23. Imagine potato rolls as hard as rocks, and everyone lying as they compliment you on the delicious homemade bread.
24. Dread moment when your friend, who loves to bake, asking you how you made bread.
25. Add more flour.
26. Finish kneading.
27. Cut dough into 12 pieces -- recipe calls for 24, but you're halving this, remember? -- and roll into balls.
28. Wonder if you should let dough rise twice as long, since you did include only half the yeast.
29. Accept the inevitable: Either it's going to suck, or it won't, but it's out of your hands now.
30. Thank God that cooking isn't a science.

Cooking dinner, and other unnatural acts

I frequently claim to be a liberated man of the 1990s, even though it is now the 21st century. I think my work around the house will support my claim to be progressive.

I'm not saying that I do a lot of housecleaning. Actually, I think my mother-in-law did more housecleaning in the week she was here than I have done the entire seven months I've lived in this house.

But I do a fair share of the domestic chores. My father once observed that I run the house. I run the dishwasher, the washing machine, the clothes dryer, the lawnmower and the errands. I also run at the mouth, but that's a specialty of mine in a different field.

Lately, I've discovered that I also enjoy doing the cooking. Wherever I learned that trait, it wasn't from my father, who only helps in the kitchen at holiday time, until my mother finally chases him screaming from the kitchen with the electric carving knife, threatening to give him extensive plastic surgery if he ever comes near the roast again.

No wait, that's what my sister-in-law Tammy does to her husband. My father helps with meals by watching CNN on the television in the family room, then coming out at dinner time and proudly serving the meal as though he has been slaving over the kitchen stove for hours.

Anyway, I only recently have started to come into my own with cooked meals. At the beginning of our marriage, Natasha and I prepared fairly simple meals: baked chicken, tacos, pizza or some pork product; a canned vegetable like corn or peas; and some form of potato, usually french fries. Whenever the food became too routine, Natasha and I went out to eat.

We went out to eat a lot.

Toward the end of the summer, as Natasha's due date steadily approached, we were searching for ways to reduce our living expenses. One of the big ones was to eat out less, which meant someone would have to start preparing meals at home more frequently, which meant one of us would have to start learning some new ways to prepare meals so we wouldn't feel a need to go out as much.

One of the most useful gifts Natasha and I received at our wedding has turned out to be "The Good Housekeeping Step-by-Step Cookbook." For someone who nearly failed Home Economics back in middle school, the book has been a godsend. In its pages I found directions for carving poultry, how to identify slices and parts of meat and even how to slice bread.

Best of all, it has recipes, oodles and oodles of them. I haven't verified it by counting, but the cookbook claims to have more than 1,000 recipes. Slowly but surely, I'm working my way through them, but I have to admit my experiences cooking have been a little unpredictable at times.

This past Monday, I decided to try a new chicken dish and leafed through the cookbook, hoping something would catch my eye. As luck had it, my eyes fell upon a picture on Page 155 of a sumptuous chicken dish coated with a mushroom sauce.

"Country french chicken," I said thoughtfully. "Hm. Country french chicken..." My mouth started to water, and I made up mind. Without another word, I set myself to making dinner.

My troubles began as soon as I opened the package of chicken, which I had transferred to the refrigerator that morning. To say the chicken had not yet thawed would be an understatement. Even Frosty the Snowman would have found this cold.

Things just went downhill from there. The recipe said I had to pound the chicken breast to a thickness of about an eighth of an inch. I tried thawing it with hot water, and began pounding the chicken breast as hard as I could once I felt the cold meat start to warm.

I'm afraid I desecrated the chicken's remains so thoroughly that if the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ever learns of it, they'll want my head for such acts of unnatural barbarity.

The chicken now pounded thin -- mangled might be a better word -- I turned to the cookbook for the next step in the directions. It claimed I was suppose to coat my victim in a mixture of flour, salt and something I had never heard of before.

"Honey, what's a 'tarragon?'" I asked Natasha in the next room. It sounded to me like something from a cheap fantasy novel. (But look! Here comes mighty Tarragon, his bright sword gleaming in the morning light. Had he come to save the beauteous Paprika from the evil nutmeg horde?)

"It's a spice," she said, "but I don't think we have it."

We didn't. We also didn't have a shallot, a pound of assorted mushrooms or a quarter-cup of white dry wine. I decided to make some substitutions, because we did have a third-pound of miniature Portabella mushrooms, a bell pepper and half an onion. On the bright side, I was able to muster the two tablespoons of olive oil. Natasha convinced me not to substitute orange juice for the white wine.

Whatever we had that night, it was good. But I'm sure it wasn't country french chicken.

surviving easter

If I have to eat another ham sandwich, I'm going to throw a fit.

This past Easter Sunday was the first Easter my wife and I celebrated as a married couple. Last year, when we were only engaged, I think we observed the holiday by eating out at a restaurant, hanging out for a while, and finally heading back to our respective apartments, where we passed the rest of the day doing our individual things.

Not this year. This year, by gum, we're a family and I was determined to make sure we celebrated Easter properly. So on Holy Saturday, I paid a visit to the local supermarket to buy the proper ingredients for a Learn family Easter dinner.

It was about the time I pushed the shopping cart through the front door that I realized I had no idea what a proper Learn family Easter dinner involved. I don't know why that should be the case; I've been a member of the Learn family for 28 Easters, and all but five of them had been with my parents.

"Mashed potatoes," Natasha had told me before I left. "You have to have mashed potatoes."

I'm not sure why she thinks she's an expert on these matters; she's been a Learn for only 10 months. Still, in only 10 months I've learned that when Natasha uses that tone of voice, I have to listen. Natasha is only 4-foot-11, but she can make every inch count when she has to.

I picked up the potatoes in one aisle, bought some pork stuffing from another aisle, and found the perfect Easter ham in the back. ("I can't wait to hear how you plan to stuff a ham," one friend told me Sunday morning at church. Before I could tell her that that wasn't the point, Natasha cut in with, "He just likes to eat stuffing," and proceeded to embarrass me by recounting the time a box of stuffing was all I ate for dinner one night when I was a bachelor.)

Now I should mention that due to various circumstances, I have become the de facto househusband. I take our dirty clothes to the Laundromat every week, I wash the dishes after most meals, and more and more lately, I have been preparing the meals. I'm a liberated man of the 90s, and this is not a problem for my self-image.

The only problem is I don't know how to cook.

So it was that late Sunday afternoon, Natasha was talking to my parents about their Easter celebration. I walked into the study where she was and asked, "Honey, how do I glaze a ham?"

She told me, and when I still didn't get it, she made a mixture of mustard and brown sugar and glazed it for me. I popped the ham into the oven, peeled the potatoes and went back into the study where she was now talking with my brother Brian, who had just called.

"Honey, how do I make mashed potatoes?"

"Boil them!"

"How long?"

"Until they're done!"

(My brother later commented that it sounded like Natasha and I had been at any moment ready to file divorce papers over the mashed potatoes.)

Next it was, "Honey, how do I cook broccoli?"

"Steam it, or it'll lose its nutritional value," she said. (She really does talk like that, mind you. She's the only woman I've ever known to complain that she has a large surface area-to-volume ratio and that her glomerular filtration rate is higher than convenient.)

Of course, we have no bamboo steamer, despite the many TV ads I saw for them when I was a boy. I finally improvised a steamer by placing a colander of broccoli on top of a pot of boiling water.

By 8 p.m. - thank goodness for daylight-saving time - dinner was finished. We had a nicely done (if I do say so myself) box of stuffing; mashed potatoes with undercooked, unmashed pieces of potato mixed in for variety; mostly cooked broccoli and the ham.

All 10 pounds of it. For the two of us.

Did I mention that I'm sick of leftovers?