Buttermilk Pancakes

I've been making pancakes for years.  I regularly made them in Tanzania (with whatever ingredients I could get my hands on), and have tried various recipes over the years.  For many years now I've been using the Joy of Cooking for a standard buttermilk pancake recipe.  But they weren't always as fluffy as I wanted them, and I always had trouble getting consistent proportions.  Recently, I pulled out the Cook's Illustrated recipe, but that uses sour cream instead of buttermilk -- and I'm morally opposed to sour cream.  However, there were some good tips on ratios of baking powder to baking soda, good weight and volume details, and other tips.  I then combined these two recipes and... Eureka!  Perfect, reliable buttermilk pancakes.  We usually cook these on a griddle on the grill outside on a beautiful Sunday morning.  (And in California, this can be all year long.  Depending on your location, YMMV.) I strongly recommend weighing the flour -- the consistency of the pancakes depends on getting this right, and it's hard to get a consistent amount by measuring 2 cups of flour by volume.

Buttermilk Pancakes
Makes 12 pancakes

Ingredients:

2 cups (9.5 ounces) all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
1 Tbs sugar
2 cups buttermilk
2 eggs
3 Tbs unsalted butter (melted)

Preheat griddle to 350 F or until water droplets "dance".  Whisk flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.  In a separate medium bowl, whisk eggs together.  Then whisk buttermilk, and finally whisk in butter.  Pour liquid mixture onto flour mixture, and whisk until just incorporated.  As Alton Brown says "count to ten and then just step away from the bowl."

To check if the grill is ready, drop a few droplets of water on.  If they "dance" but don't boil away immediately, the griddle is the right temperature.  (Alternatively, you can use one of those awesome laser infrared thermometer doohickies.)  Brush a small amount of butter on griddle using a paper towel to wipe up excess.  Using a 1/3 cup measuring cup, pour on 6 pancakes.  Wait until bubbles start to form on top, or bottoms are nice and golden brown.  Flip pancakes until browned on the other side.  Repeat with the second set of 6 pancakes.

Serve with butter and real maple syrup.

Peanutty Peanut Butter Cookies with Peanuts

Who doesn't love peanut butter cookies? Other than those who are allergic, of course...

In the past year, I expanded my cookie repertoire to peanut butter cookies. Sam loves them, Becky loves them, and my sister Amanda loves them. In honor of Auntie Amanda's upcoming visit, I'm finally blogging the recipe that I use. Of course, it's basically a Cook's Illustrated recipe for "Big Super-Nutty Peanut Butter Cookies", which I grabbed from an adaptation here. They contain extra-crunchy peanut-butter as well as ground peanuts, so I call them "Peanutty Peanut Butter Cookies with Peanuts" which is even more accurate.

Curried Butternut Squash Soup with Cilantro Yogurt

A couple of years ago we were looking for a good butternut squash soup recipe to take advantage of the beautiful squash we find at the farmers' markets around fall and winter. Becky found an old Cook's Illustrated recipe that somebody else had reposted online. It purported to extract the most flavor out the squash by steaming it and sauteing the seeds. Unfortunately, we found it to be watery and bland. Though the cilantro yogurt garnish was delicious!

I got to work on it, roasting the squash instead of steaming it (similar to my pumpkin pie recipe; adding more squash and less water; and a bit more salt. I've been meaning to post this online for a long time, and here it is!

Roast Turkey

Okay. So I haven't posted to this blog since January. And Thanksgiving was last Thursday. But that doesn't mean I can't post my roast turkey recipe now! And if I do it now, it'll be written down before I forget it again next year.

There are many schools of thought on cooking a turkey. But something that everybody who knows something about cooking turkey knows is: you'll get much better results if you don't stuff it.

The "traditional" method (that is written on the side of the frozen turkey bag) has low heat (325F) for 15 minutes a pound. But this doesn't actually yield very good turkey, and 325F isn't hot enough to brown the skin to give you that nice roasted-turkey look.

But then there are people who say you should put it in high heat first, then low heat. Or low first then high. Or you should deep fry it. (This is slightly dangerous, but yields a good turkey).

Anyway, what do I do for Thanksgiving every year? That I can answer. I learned this method in my professional cooking class. It works well, and can be applied to any bird, though I've only roasted chickens and turkeys. You need to keep an eye on the bird -- the cooking time depends on the size of the turkey! But it's considerably less than the canonical 15 minutes per pound. This Thanksgiving, the 20 pound turkey took about 2 hours and 40 minutes.

Pumpkin Bread

Some time ago, I posted a recipe for courgette (zucchini) bread, inspired by a particularly successful loaf of pumpkin bread that Mike V. and I baked in Tanzania. And I'm sure everybody has been wondering...but what about that pumpkin bread?

Well, at long last, here is a fantastic pumpkin bread recipe, adapted from an article by Christopher Kimball, the editor of Cook's Illustrated. I recommend using fresh pumpkin, the preparation of which I described on my pumpkin pie recipe.

Want To Make Bread? There's No Knead!

In November of 2006, Mark Bittman introduced the world to Jim Lahey's No-Knead Bread. This recipe totally rocked my world, and demoted the bread machine to a sad, unused corner of the kitchen. And it wasn't just me...everybody I knew who baked was talking about it. Four years later, it came up at lunch, which inspired this post.

And what is this Wondrous Bread Without Kneading of which I speak? A homemade bakery-style boule, with a wonderful crust, open crumb, and the feel of a real loaf of bread. There's no complicated technique, no sophisticated equipment. Though you do need a 6-8 quart covered dutch oven (cast iron, glass, etc.) that can withstand a 450 degree oven, and time to mix the dough a day in advance.

The secret behind the no-knead method is water. To get a good bakery crust, you need a steam-injection oven, which most people don't have in their home. Jim Lahey realized that if you have a relatively wet loaf of bread in a covered pot...you get the steam for free! His next insight was that when you mix up the wet dough you don't need to physically knead it. Over a long stretch of time (12-24 hours) the rising dough will naturally stretch out the gluten, and when the dough is wet the gluten molecules are free to assemble themselves into alignment and create the network necessary for a great loaf of bread.

In December, 2006 Mark Bittman posted a follow-up article with some tweaks to the recipe, and later Cook's Illustrated picked up the baton for their "Almost No-Knead Bread" (subscription required) in the January 2008 issue. Both of these contained key insights to improving the technique, and I've added a few tweaks of my own. One suggestion from Cook's Illustrated that I tried once and didn't find very useful was to replace 6 Tbs water with mild-flavored American lager. Unfortunately, as mild-flavored American lager is like making love in a canoe, I didn't find this to be very useful.

Black Bean Veggie Burgers

Back in Ann Arbor, Becky and I would grill all through the summer grilling season. And one of our favorite things to grill on short notice were the Morningstar Farms Spicy Black Bean Veggie Burgers. These are exceptional veggie burgers because they don't try to taste like fake burgers. (Becky doesn't eat meat, and I like real burgers.) With black beans and corn and spiciness, they are delicious and full of protein. And they are not available on the west coast. And the grilling season lasts all-year round here! It's tragic.

So this has forced us to roll our own.

Ramble On!

When we started this blog, I pitched it to Eli as a place where we could share recipes, pictures, and travel stories. But my ulterior motive was getting Eli to blog about the financial meltdown. And it worked! Temporarily.

Meanwhile, we used my Flickr account for sharing travel photos and stories. And when Sam was born, we figured people were more interested in pictures of him, so we use Flickr for his pictures, too. We have posted lots of recipes on this blog, though, so at least that has been useful to us (and hopefully to you!).

However, I really wanted to have a personal website, with a blog. I've wanted to rant about all sorts of things, but some of them didn't quite seem right for a shared blog. So I'm announcing (after only three paragraphs) that I am now blogging at www.rebeccastanek.com. I'm not yet sure what I'll be focusing on, but please come along for the ride!

Telling the Internet to get LOST

Like some people in this article, I will be going on an internet blackout at 6 p.m. PT tomorrow night. And if you don't know why, then I must ask you what cave you've been living in for the past six years.

With the rise of VCRs and then DVRs, the networks have been worried about people time-shifting their shows and skipping the ads. But now, people are connected by Facebook and Twitter, and having real-time conversations about shows. So why not start simulcasting the biggest events -- like awards shows (as has been done recently) and big finales -- in all time zones? Wouldn't that increase the buzz even more? I know that NBC is full of epic fail when it comes to this, but I can't think of a better time for ABC to take that kind of risk.

At one point I threatened to start a "Simulcast the LOST finale in all timezones!" campaign. I half-suspected that was why ABC was airing it on a Sunday. But I never had time to do that, so instead, I will avoid my internet tomorrow night, and catch up with everyone on Monday morning. Maybe when the next Big Television Event rolls around, I'll be able to watch it live with everyone.

S is for Sam, and for Santa Barbara ABCs!

The ABCs of Santa Barbara
Originally uploaded by R Stanek

Back when I was pregnant, I wanted to make an alphabet poster for [untitled], using letters from signs around town. Well, Sam turned 7 months old today, and I finally finished the poster! We hit up many local Santa Barbara institutions, particularly the nearby neighborhood joints (Derf's, Los Gallos, etc.) that we frequent. And this was definitely a joint effort: I took nearly all the pictures, and dealt with cropping and scaling, but Eli did the assembling of the poster in Photoshop. In my defense, there is no way my laptop could have handled it.

I can't wait to see the poster on the wall. Happy 7 months, Sam!

(Week 20 of Project 52.)