Blueberry Turnovers > getting kicked in the pants

The other day I was fortunate enough to spend my evening picking pounds of free blueberries. I've been making a lot of things with them since, but mostly just eating them by the handful. then, yesterday, I saw a picture of some blueberry turnovers and felt obligated to make them myself. They're just so damn good looking. The way the blueberry filling oozes out is a beautiful thing.

You will need:

2 1/4 cups of whole wheat pastry flour

3/4 cups butter or shortening

1 tsp salt

5 Tbs cold water

2 heaping cups of blueberries

2 Tbs cornstarch

2 Tbs honey

lemon zest to taste (1+ tsp)

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1 egg beaten w/ 2 tsp water

sugar for toping

For the filling: mix the cornstarch, honey, and lemon zest together. Then, blend in the blueberries and vanilla extract. Feel free to smash a few berries.

For the crust: mix the salt and flour together. Add the cold water. Cut in the butter with two knives or a pastry knife until the pieces are small pellets.

Preheat the over to 400. Place half the crust batter and place it between wax paper. Roll that shit out. I couldn't find anything to roll it with and ended using a frozen pint glass from the freezer. This ended up being a great substitute since it kept it cold. Spread it real thin and cut it into 4 squares. Place a big spoonful in each and then fold them over into triangles. Pinch the edges with forks. Brush each with an egg wash and sprinkle with sugar. Cut lines on the surface for ooze ventilation and throw em in on a greased cooking sheet. Mine baked in about 14 minutes.

Sprouted Spelt/Whole Wheat Bread > Whole Wheat Bread

This is the first bread baking blog post of what I hope will be many on 9 Inch Meringue. Paul and I are both really jazzed about experimenting with bread and hope to some day have a whole catalog's worth of bread recipes available for you here. With this experiment we decided to make two different loafs of bread: one using mostly sprouted spelt flour and one using entirely whole wheat flour.

You will need:

1.5 cups of lukewarm water

3/4 Tbs of dry active yeast (real cheap in bulk at a food co-op)

1/8 cup of a sweetener (we used molasses. you could also use honey or sugar)

1/2 cup of milk

1 pinch of salt

1 40oz of Malt Liquor (we used Camo Naturally Brewed Silver Ice xxXxx high gravity lager)

3.5 cups of flour (for one loaf we used 3.5 of just wheat, the other 2.5 spelt & 1 wheat)

1/6 cup of oil or butter (we used sunflower oil and were really happy with our results)

additional flour for kneading (and probably a lot of it)

-First things first. open your 40oz and take a sip. you have a lot of baking ahead of you and this will really come in handy during those long waits.

-Make the yeast sponge. Dissolve the yeast into the water and add the molasses and milk. if you are using actual milk (and not soy or almond, etc.), you must first scald the milk and let it cool down before you add it to yeast. after you put all this stuff in you should beat the shit out of it until it's like a thick pancake like batter. Let it rise a while, maybe even 45 minutes. it will grow and get real bubbly

-Add the salt and oil (or butter) and then another 1.5+ cups of spelt flour (or whatever). Add just enough flour so you can get it out of the bowl in one piece.

-Drink your 40oz

-KNEAD! this is the fun part. Do it for ad least 10 minutes, adding flour as necessary until it is smooth. flatter it out, dust it with flour, and let it rise for 50+ minutes (or until double in size). do this step twice for an even fluffier bread.

-Drink your 40oz

-Punch it down to get all that dank air out, form it into a loaf, place it on a greased pan, and let rise for 25+ minutes. Preheat the over to 350 F

-Drink your 40oz

-Cut sweet designs on the bread and then put it in the over for about an hour.

-(optional) take the bread out partially through and brush it with an egg wash (beaten egg whites and water and/or salt). Paul recommends putting the egg yolk into your 40oz

-Drink your 40oz

-Eat dat bread
It might look like this when your bread and 40oz are done. These loaves came out HUGE. The spelt loaf had a lot of flavor compared to the wheat. However, the wheat loaf did have a better consistency and made better toast.

What we learned:

-Camo was a bad choice. That 5th "x" was really too much. We had planned on writing this post immediately after baking, but found ourselves at 2AM entirely way too drunk to do so. After my first few sips I was already making mistakes. Baking is a science. As such, it requires a certain level of care and consideration in order to bake effectively. Camo is NOT a good choice of 40oz to bake with. The egg yolk in the Camo actually made it better.

-Wheat bread tasted better with honey

-Sunflower oil and Molasses were good choices.

-Sprouted spelt flour ruleZ.

(click on the image to enlarge it)

BEETZA > pizza

Remember the last time you tried to make a nice tasty pizza, but your homegrown tomatoes were wiped out by midnight scavengers, and those pesky tomatoes in the store were just too expensive to make a sauce out of, and canned sauce was all sold out in every store in town, and you had just used your last jar of homemade sauce last night on a mediocre pasta dish, and you were facing a pizza apocalypse?

Solution: Beta vulgaris. Beetroot, table beet, garden beet, etc. Take them out of your root cellar where they have been happily hanging out, laughing at other vegetables who rot more quickly and making pun jokes like "hey tomato, when it comes to shelf life, nothing beets us!", or "hey DJ, drop those beets!". Beets make a wonderful savory neon purple sauce, and the creaminess of the boiled root adds a pleasant texture to your beetza. The best thing to happen to beets since sliced beets, or at least since my fellow Prussians invented the sugar beet in 1747.

The method:
Start your favorite pizza dough recipe. Select a bunch of beets, I prefer the dark red Bulls Blood but I am sure golden beets would make an equally vibrant sauce. Peel the beets if they are bitter, or leave the skins on, cube them, and boil until you can easily stab them with a fork. Transfer the beets and a little bit of the beet water into a blender/food processor, and blend until smooth. Now you will have a dark red beet puree. Stir in some tahini, enough to satisfy your sesame craving but not too much that you crowd out the beets. Tamari/soy sauce/Braggs is also good to add in a smaller amount to give it a little salt base. A few pinches of thyme mixes well with the earth taste of the beets, and really, nobody ever has enough thyme for anything (zing!). Now it is ready to step in for tomato sauce and save the world. It may look something like this:




We topped it off with some kalamata olives, green peppers, mozzarella cheese, sun dried tomatoes, red onions, fresh basil, and sliced tomatoes. Other good top additives would be blue cheese, caramelized onion, chopped kale, roasted garlic and anything you want.



If you were to place a crotch near a baked beetza, this is what you may expect it to look like, and if you were to then enjoy a beetza on a second floor porch, it may resemble what you see here, but obviously results may vary depending on crotch and porch.

Banana Muffin < Banana Bread

banana bread.

Totally boring, old news.

Who would want to start off an epic culinary blog with a post about banana bread?

Good thing Jared and I really mixed things up, and made banana muffins.

We used a recipe from Edward Espe Brown's

Tassajara Bread Book, which has been a source of obsession and inspiration for breadmakers,

breadlovers, and whole-wheat-weirdos for a long time now.

The taste was about the same in muffin-form as it was in loaf-form, but the texture was a bit different. Chewier, baked-through, firmer, generally

less delightful than the classic loaf.

we learned:

1. Etta James is the right soundtrack for banana muffins.

2. Cooling racks are elitist.

3. Teatree toothpicks taste funny with 'nana-dough on them.