House of the Rising Dough

Dear Reader,

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Love,
Kelly

Meat madness, airplanes, and a new restaurant

Wowsers. What a week. Actually the past two or three weeks have all been a bit crazy, but in a good way. On my last day staging at the Italian restaurant, I helped the pastry chef make 150 or so desserts for a book signing with none other than food blogger/cookbook author extraordinaire David Lebovitz. It was a long day but overall a great first experience with making and plating large quantities of desserts. At the end of the day, I left the restaurant, took the train to the airport, then boarded a plane for Arizona. Just in time too, because Chicago had been hit with MORE snow. Sheesh.

Scenes from an Italian Restaurant

Hello there, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? I was so much better at updating this when I spent a large amount of my time sitting at home baking. I’m still baking at home whenever I get a chance, but between packing to move, working on my final project for school, my new job/stage at a restaurant in the city, and planning a dessert table menu for a charity event, my free time seems to be evaporating quickly.

And I love it. I haven’t been this busy in a long time, or as happy. I feel like I’m finally a contributing member of society again!

The most exciting thing happening is this new restaurant job, (unpaid, unfortunately, but expected). So as I recount my first real-world kitchen experience, I will share some pictures of things I’ve made in class and at home these past two weeks.

Home cooked meals

My sister Denise came home this past weekend from college. And since dorm food is often less than satisfactory, I was determined to make her a home cooked meal. Not to mention, it is so much more fun cooking for others than just for yourself.

I’d like to take a moment and talk about ciabatta. It is a pretty excellent bread. It can also be infuriating because the dough is so wet and sticky it is difficult to work with. So difficult that your first batch sort of looks deflated and you have to make another batch just to prove you can do it right, which you do. Then after sampling bread from the two batches you find they’re both quite delicious and now you have twice as much bread! At which point you forgive the ciabatta and become friends again.

But back to dinner. Although I love all sorts of food and cuisines, whenever I haven’t had Italian in a while, I crave it like crazy. It is my ultimate comfort food, and best when cooked and shared with others.

So we made homemade pasta, to go with my Nana’s famous tomato sauce recipe. We even figured out how to shape them into bowties/farfalle. It was a tremendous success.

Lastly, because a fabulous dinner is best followed by a fabulous dessert, we made a chocolate cake. The same one, in fact, that I made when I learned I could, with great effort, whip egg whites by hand.

And so, we made our cake and ate it too. Of course, my sister took dusting her cake with powdered sugar to a whole new level.

Then proceeded to eat it within the outline of the sugar. If you know Denise, you wouldn’t be surprised by this. Then again, maybe this is just what inhaling too much sugar does to your head.

Pine nuts, cannoli, and figs, oh my!

A couple weeks ago, I held a taste testing party for my cousin and some of his friends. I made Italian cookies to practice and test out recipes for the bakery, and they ate said cookies and provided feedback. Wine was also part of the deal, naturally.

But first, let’s rewind to 48 hours earlier when I began this adventure in the kitchen. It started at my favorite grocery store which has almost any ingredient I could ever need, Italian or otherwise, and so inexpensive! It is a horrible enabler to my grocery shopping addiction.

In any case, I made my mother’s almond biscotti recipe, which I cannot seem to make without getting extremely frustrated. I cannot begin to fathom why this recipe just doesn’t cooperate with me. It’s not that anything goes wrong either, they just aren’t perfect. Grr. The pine nut cookies on the other hand, those were fun, if not very, very sticky. The cookies themselves are a chewy macaroon made with almond paste. Delicious. I skimped a little on the pine nuts, but those little buggers are expensive!

And oh the fig cookies.

These were big winners.

Then of course, there were cannoli. You can buy pre-made shells if you’re short on time, and then you just mix ricotta and powdered sugar until creamy, then add in your flavor, in my case, orange and cinnamon. Easy peasy.

Of course, even with all this baking I had three pounds of leftover ricotta cheese. So later that week I made ricotta and polenta cake full of honey and ricotta muffins, which were barely sweet but fascinatingly good. I think I was photographed out by this point because I documented neither item. However, ricotta is such a wonderously versatile cheese that I have a long list of ricotta desserts to try out, so this will not be the last you hear of it.

Of all the treats I made for the evening, I was most proud of my rosemary bread. It turned out better than ever before.

It was just divine. Most especially with butter. (Obviously). Unfortunately, I have since let my rosemary plant die. Oops! I don’t know how I will ever start and keep a garden.

Blizzard Baking: Part Five

I can’t spend a full day baking and NOT make bread.

In class last week our teacher raved about this bread she once had that used the spent mash (grains) leftover from the beer making process. As luck would have it, one of the girls in my class visited a brewery last weekend and went home with a gigantic tub of the stuff. She quickly became everyone’s friend when she brought it to class to share.

So those of us who wanted to got to bring home some of the pungent, (in a good, beer-y kind of way), soggy grains. You use them as you would a regular soaker, where you soak whole grains of all sorts in water before mixing into your dough so you don’t have little crunchies in your bread.

They say beer is liquid bread, and probably for many reasons, but it makes sense since both are just fermented grain. The carbon dioxide and alcohol dispelled by the yeast give beer its bubbles and fun-factor and bread its rise and flavor. And when you combine the two? Well, you get really dark, flavorful bread that will make the most excellent breakfast tomorrow.

What to make when you break your oven

Why, donuts of course! Or bombolini in this case, little donut holes rolled in sugar and filled with cream, jam, or nutella. Is it donut or doughnut? I never know which to use, but for the sake of brevity (in typing) I will use the former.

You should make these even if your oven isn’t broken. Even if you didn’t stupidly pour water on a hot oven door, cracking the glass window rendering the oven useless and a glass-shattering hazard. (And even if you finished baking your bread with the glass broken, risking said hazard, because you were not about to waste good dough).

Or was that just me?

I was terribly distraught when I learned my oven would not be operational for an entire week. However, I can use this week to make things that do not require an oven. Or get other things on my to do list done without getting distracted by proofing bread or baking cookies.

Mocha Walnut Bundt with a side of rambling

This was a particularly long week, no? I found myself on Friday evening completely exhausted and in need of a break. So I grabbed a beer and made a cake.

Ok, probably not what most people would consider relaxing. But we all take care of ourselves in different ways. Some people might get a massage or manicure to pamper themselves. I give myself a cake.

Honestly, I don’t know what I would do without these three things. Chocolate, coffee, and butter. They complete me. And by adding in a little sugar, eggs, flour and walnuts to that mix, well, then we’ve got ourselves a pretty fantastic dessert.

Integrale

Let’s talk about whole grain flours. In Italian the word for whole wheat is integrale, which makes sense. Integrale=integral=whole=the entire grain is used so we get full access to all those good-for-you things like fiber, vitamins and minerals. I realize I have spent the majority of my time writing about fabulous yet not-so-good-for-you desserts because they are usually more aesthetically and deliciously pleasing. However, I need not neglect my wonderful whole grains.

I’ve been experimenting with various whole grain flours. We’ve got here wheat, spelt, and rye. Spelt you say? I had never heard of it until a couple months ago when I checked this book out at the library. Oh great. I just realized that it’s overdue. Drat. Anyways…spelt flour. It makes a pretty killer pancake. And I am someone who generally considers pancakes to be boring.

To market to market

For the past few weeks, I have been working for Green City Market, the farmer’s market in Lincoln Park in Chicago. I am the “social media intern”, though I don’t know if that’s actually a title. Anyway, I update their twitter and facebook pages, among other things. My favorite part about the whole job is making friends with the farmers and vendors. I have already learned a ton about different foods and ways to prepare them.

I discovered my love for radishes (with salt and butter), though jury’s still out on whether I’m going to muster up enough courage to buy and prepare mushrooms. The guy who sells them told me he used to be a mushroom-hater (like me) until he tried the ones from the farm he works for, now he loves them. One of these days I’ll give it a shot. Just not yet.