Baking bread is something primal everyone should really try once. I mean, not to be preachy, but there’s something really basic about this that I find really relaxing. Oh, and you make the best bread imaginable, baking your own, as well. Plus, it can be stored in the fridge for weeks, or frozen for months. And you can make oatmeal bread, which is what I consider to be one of the best twists on straight up bread out there.

The only thing is this recipe takes a bit of time. Not a lot of active working time, mind you, but plenty of rising downtime and the baking time make this something of a time commitment. But, bake this bread and you get 2 loaves of bread, which last me about 2 weeks, and taste amazing even as straight toast.

Plus, your house smells like bread, and you get to knead it. It’s really wonderful, or at least, I love it.

Recipe: Oatmeal Bread (2 Loaves)

Ingredients

1 3/4 cup warm water

1 tablespoon yeast (1 packet)

1/3 cup brown sugar

1 teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons canola oil

2 cups oats (steel cut preferable)

4+ cups all purpose unbleached white flour

Instructions

Proof yeast in a large bowl with water – that is, let the water and yeast sit for 5 or so minutes, so that the yeast becomes active.

Next, add  the oil, salt, and sugar,  and mix them well. Then, add the oats, and mix them in. Next, add the flour, 1 cup at a time, mixing it in as you go. The final resulting dough should still be moist, but it should not adhere to your hands, so it will pull free any wet dough from kneading as you go.

Hand knead the dough for at least 10 minutes. After this, lightly oil the dough, place it in a covered bowl and let it rise in a warm, not hot place, for 1.5 to 2 hours, until the dough has doubled in volume.

While the dough is rising, butter 2 loaf pans well. After the dough has risen, punch it down and split it between the 2 buttered pans, and let it rise again until it has again doubled in volume. This will take anywhere between 45 minutes and 1.5 hours.

Once the loaves have risen, put them in a preheated oven at 375F for 35 to 40 minutes. Once they have baked, removed the loaves from their pans immediately, and let them cool fully before doing anything except eating them (this is fine when the bread is warm, in fact, it is encouraged).

Have fun!

I love chili. This recipe is one of my favorites to do, as it’s great for a crowd, or even solo – you just need to freeze the leftovers. The only unfortunate thing is that making it solo means it’s not really workable to do cornbread with it, unless you really want stale leftover cornbread for cornbread stuffing. Which isn’t a bad option, considering. Really, it just comes down to the fact I’ll use just about any excuse to break out this recipe – I love chili, and this version is my favorite.

Which is not to say that it’s perfect, or the one true chili. There are way too many varieties for that to work. One variation to run on this would be to swap in ground turkey for ground beef for a slightly lighter and healthier chili. I don’t drain my chili, which makes it a bit fattier and richer. Different sources of heat also twist the flavor different ways. Personally, I find straight red chili powder is the best dry source of straight heat, but others like tabasco as a traditional flavor. When I did a run of this yesterday, I used thai Sriracha hot sauce, which proved to be a very good choice, with its garlicky flavor adding to what’s already in the recipe. Anyway, on to the recipe.

Chili Con Carne
2 lbs ground beef

4 (16oz) cans kidney beans, drained (or 1 bag of dried beans, soaked overnight)

1 large onion, chopped finely

2 large (16oz) cans of crushed tomatoes, or tomato puree

1 tablespoon garlic powder (or 2-3 cloves, crushed)

1 quarter cup chili powder

hot red pepper to taste (or tabasco, or Sriracha)

Instructions

In a large pot, brown the ground beef and onion, chopping finely, then drain them and simmer

Add everything except the beans (tomatoes, spices, heat, garlic) and simmer the recipe for half an hour

Add the beans (drained and rinsed, if canned), and simmer for another half an hour

This can be left on the stove all day, and if anything it’s better left over.

Makes enough chili for about 5 college students, or 6 or 7 normal people.

This is a quick update. It’s been almost a year since this project started, then went idle. I’ve since regretted this going idle, as it was a good exercise in note-taking, record keeping, and photography, besides the fact that it might have shared some good recipes with people. However, I think, my formal style and extreme focus kept this from being a relaxing and easygoing project, and also the fact that I had not found an image optimization program yet, which would allow me to add pictures to this site without them being miserably slow uploads. At any rate, things got bogged down, then I went on a month long trip, and never really got back to this. This changes now.

So, I’m restarting this,  as a less formal blog which will contain both recipes, as well as bits from my life. In particular, I’m probably going to add some writeups of some of the trips I’ve experienced as a geologist, as well as any future ones I get involved in. I’ll try to make those interesting, too.

Given that I never particularly aimed at having any sort of readership, if anyone’s still out there, hi. And if anyone begins reading now, hello as well. Future posts will probably contain more content than this announcement.

Stir fried chicken is a lot of fun to make. By which, I mean, it’s exciting and the results are tasty. It’s even easy, if you do all the preparation ahead of time. And, it involves working with a wok and very high heat, which is fun and exciting. You could do it in any large pot, too. It’s well worth trying, as it’s a delicious and unique flavor.

For the record, this recipe doesn’t just work with chicken. I’ve done it with pork, and I’ve done it with shrimp. I think it works best with chicken, but it’s by no means the only way to use it. Also, being stir fry, it’s a flexible recipe, so experimentation with throwing in other vegetables can and has worked out, both when I’ve done it myself and when my mother did it.

Anyway, in regards to technique, I’ve been doing this one for a year, and I nearly nailed this one this time. Back in the red shrimp recipe, I mentioned that I ignored cooking the ketchup with the garlic and ginger. I tried it here, it rocked, I will do it every time now. Oh, and for the curious, this is the brand of Hoisin sauce I use:

But any you find at an Asian market will probably do. Still, this stuff is fantastic, I definitely recommend picking up a jar… it’s been best described as sort of similar to barbecue sauce, which I can agree with – it’s a bit sweet and I tend to like it even straight, for both.

Ingredients

1 lb chicken, cubed (though you can definitely scale this up, this is ~ enough for 2-3)

2 tablespoons cooking wine

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 cup scallions, chopped (I used an onion here, works as well)

5 cloves of garlic, chopped

3 tablespoons grated ginger

4 tablespoons hoisin sauce

Instructions

First, chop the meat into bite sized chunks, and get it marinating in the soy sauce and cooking wine in a sizable mixing bowl.

Next, chop the scallions/onion, and add 2/3 of them to the chicken. Then, chop the garlic, and grate the ginger. This completes the preparatory work for the dish.

When you’re ready to start cooking, heat up the wok (or large pot) on the highest heat, with a thin coating of vegetable oil on the bottom. When it is good and hot, add the chicken, and then quickly rinse the bowl, as it will be used again. Stir the chicken with a metal spoon, being careful not to burn it.

When all the chicken has turned color and is opaque (cooked through, takes about 4-5 minutes), then remove it from the wok into the rinsed mixing bowl, and lower the heat to medium high. Then, add the hoisin sauce to the pan, along with the garlic, ginger, and remaining onion.

Cook the sauce for about a minute, no more, carefully stirring to make sure nothing burns. Then, add back in the chicken, stir everything together, and cook for an additional 5 minutes.

When this is complete, pour it into a serving bowl, and immediately clean the wok. Then, enjoy over rice – the sauce is the best part.

To me, at least, spring tastes like fresh strawberries. Well, those, a lot of rain, and allergies, but the fun part would be strawberries. Strawberry rhubarb pie utilizes them in the best possible way, to create warm, gooey deliciousness. I made this pie last week while I was home with local rhubarb, and it was so delicious.

I made a few mistakes in the execution here, which overall served to make the process a little more messy than it had to be. All was saved because the oven was line with foil, however. In the future, I’ll be sure to both use a 10″ pan rather than a 9″ pan, and put a cookie sheet under the pie to catch any drippings.

Anyway, this is a Betty Crocker recipe, modified to use strawberries, and with a few specific notes for making it easier (also, omitting orange zest). It’s pretty simple, but it tastes fantastic.

Ingredients

3 1/2 cups rhubarb, chopped

3 1/2 cups strawberries, chopped

2 1/3 cup sugar

2/3 cup flour

1 double pie crust (see here for pie crust recipe)

a bit of butter, as needed

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 425 F, then mix the fruit, sugar, and flour in a large bowl. Fresh rhubarb can be frozen chopped, in preparation for this recipe. Then, make the pie crust.

After the crust is all ready, and the filling is complete, place the lower crust in the bottom of a 10″ pie pan, and then add the filling. Cut the upper crust into strips and form a lattice over the top of the filling.

Once this is done, place the pie in the oven, and a cookie sheet on the rack directly below the pie to catch any drippings. Bake for 35 minutes, or until the crust is slightly browned and the pie is bubbly. Remove for the oven and allow 2 hours for the pie to cool and set. Then, enjoy delicious spring.

In my haste to get all my pictures for my other posts uploaded, and the post on the pork chops done today, being home and done finals and therefore having time to write all this up, I nearly forgot about a little midnight experiment I had while writing papers. I was hungry, there was one last chunk of fish in the fridge from the aforementioned fish fry, and I needed to use it up. Therefore, I threw it in a baking pan with what I had on hand, and the result was pretty tasty.

What I had on hand, sadly, wasn’t lemons. It was some spices, some butter, some orange juice, and some vinegar. That said, the sweet of the orange juice blended well with the vinegar – I could have probably used more of each, and even some salt. That said, I was almost ready to eat the fish raw, and nearly did, until I remembered to flip it in my sleepy haze. For all that this is a product of a long night, it’s not bad by any stretch, and would probably work with any relatively plain fish – I’ve done the same with flounder before.

Ingredients

1 large chunk ( ~ 3/4 – 1 lb) fish

3 tablespoons butter

A splash of orange juice (under 1/4 cup)

A splash of vinegar (about 3-4 tablespoons)

A sprinkling of dried basil (fresh is better, but I don’t normally have it)

A sprinkling of black pepper

A sprinkling of salt
Instructions

Put the fish in a glass baking dish. Put the ingredients on top of it, carefully spreading out the butter so that it is distributed nicely over the fish.

Next, broil the fish on high heat, rotating it after 5 minutes so that each side of teh fish gets at least five minutes. It should brown a little, and come apart easily.

When it’s done, enjoy with bread, or straight up.

Thus, why I made it yesterday for mother’s day. I didn’t get pictures, so none are coming, but this one should stand on its own merits: it’s the best thing I’ve made all year, flat out.

One little note before I go straight to the recipe – this dish hinges upon having a good berry jam. The first time I made it I had my family’s homemade black raspberry jam, which is completely seedless, and the best jam I’ve ever tasted, such to the point where I’ll shed blood to make it (my own, I’m pretty bad at picking raspberries). This run used red raspberry jam mixed with blueberry – both also homemade. That said, this could be done with store bought jams of any of those varieties, or blackberry, or currant, as the original Silver Palate recipe this is a modification of suggested. I would advise against moving outside ‘berry’ type jams – that deep, fizzy flavor really is what sets this apart from more classic apple based pork dishes. Anyway, without further ado, the recipe.

Ingredients

2 large pork chops

1/4 cup jam

2 tablespoons Pupoun mustard

3-4 tablespoons olive oil

black pepper to taste

Instructions

To prepare for this recipe, mix the mustard and the jam in a small bowl on the side. Ready the pork any way you like, I used 1 1/2 inch thick chops which I didn’t bother to de-fat this last time and they came out great: the recipe will cook off any fat.

Then, heat the olive oil in the pan, on a medium high heat setting. When the oil is hot, add the pork chops to the pan, searing them, and grating as much black pepper as you want onto all sides. Once the chops are browned, lower the heat to a medium-low setting, add the sauce, coat the chops in the sauce, and cover the pan. Then, let this simmer for 20-25 minutes, depending on how thick the pork chops are. Stir and turn the chops occasionally, but it should mostly be fine left alone.

That’s all there is to it. Serve the pork chops straight out of the pan, if you wish, and be sure to use the sauce.

I wasn’t the one to pull this one off, I just helped. My good friend Alex P led it, with me just assisting as needed and prepping the aforementioned beans as a side dish. That said, we agreed afterwards the results were phenomenal, and he was OK with me posting it. And, thus, a post on beer-battered pollock, because this affordable, everyday dish can be a real marvel with some effort.

This session was done with pollack, and the recipe used is a modified version of an Alton Brown recipe off the Food Network website. I didn’t have any Old Bay seasoning, so Alex looked up the ingredients and pulled some of my spices to cover for it, and the results were fantastic. He also was able to do the deep frying in my cast iron pan with a fork and spatula, but we both agreed afterwards a deep pot would have probably been easier. Also, the beer we used was a standard Yuengling, but I suppose any would work (just not crap). Anyway, on to the recipe.

Ingredients

1 1/2 lbs white fish (Cod, pollock, flounder)

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 dash tabasco, or red pepper

2 bay leaves, crumbled

a dash of cinnamon

a pinch of black pepper

a pinch of crushed red pepper

a dash of dried mustard

cornstarch

1 bottle beer

At least 3 cups canola oil

Instructions

Turn the oven on warm (lowest setting), and have a cookie sheet lined with paper towels in it ready to receive the fish.

Fill about 1-2 inches of oil in a large pot, and warm it up on medium-high heat on the stove. Then, mix together the flour, baking powder, salt, and spices together in a large mixing bowl. After they’re all mixed, add the beer, and beat it until smooth. Refrigerate this mixture for 15-20 minutes.

Cut the fish into whatever size chunks you wish, but they should be no more than an inch thick. To fry, dip the fish first in a small bowl with cornstarch, then in the batter, and then into the pan, getting a coating on all sides in each dip. In the pan, turn fish with a fork, tongs, and/or spatula, frying all sides until golden brown. Oil temperature can be determined to be correct by the fact that many bubbles come up around the fish. Each fish will take ~2 minutes to fry, and can be removed to the sheet in the oven until the process is complete.

After you’re done, go ahead and eat! This works great with any sort of potatoes or coleslaw, but we had it with beans and a salad and that was good as well

At least, this recipe seems to have everything in it – though oddly enough, you don’t really need to use the sink aside from rinsing the beans and picking out any bad ones. This recipe is basically a baked beans recipe modified to have some fun and flavor – smoky barbecue flavor, that is. It’s got a whole range of fun ingredients, and my version, while modified with several substitutions from the original (largely my mother’s suggestions, which removed some of the overpowering elements and upped the barbecue flavor), still has a whole mess of fun ingredients which turn baked beans into something, which, if not gourmet, is at least fun at parties.

That said, this is a time consuming endeavor. The actual work for the recipe takes maybe half an hour to 45 minutes, but the baketime required is upwards of 5 and a half hours. The best bet for this is to do it a day, maybe 2 in advance of when you want to eat the beans. I, personally, yet to manage this, but there’s always next time. The results taste good enough to warrant multiple testings.

The other difficulty with this recipe is the pan – a large, deep roasting pan with a lid is a must. The lid is necessary to properly trap moisture and cook the beans, while the size of the pan is needed to contain the liquid for the cooking. I suppose this could be done without a lid – I went without one the first time I made this, but the beans were dried out then, to the point of major texture issues. Very frequent stirring and repeated adding of water could compensate for this, but it’s a patch fix.

At any rate, though, the payoff is huge. I like beans quite a bit, so a version of baked beans with a fun, complex flavor is a dynamite idea, and I think it completely washes away the idea baked beans are canned crap, or warmed over cafeteria mush. These beans are worth the effort.

Ingredients

1/4 pound bacon

1 onion, chopped

4-5 cloves garlic, chopped

1 lb navy or similar beans (I use great white northern)

1 cup black coffee (stronger is better, I use espresso)

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup pancake or maple syrup

1 1/2 tablespoons mustard

1/2 cup barbecue sauce (A good brand is key here, I use Masterpiece, but will prefer Cattleman’s or Stubbs when I can get them a good price)

dash of hot sauce, or ground red pepper (heat is a personal preference, it’s better to go low than high here)

ground black pepper

additional barbecue sauce, to taste

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees (It will be there for a very long time – this is not a recipe well suited to hot days). In a pan, cook the bacon, dice it, and add in the onion once the bacon has released most of its fat. Once the onions are somewhat browned and carmelized, add in the garlic, and cook briefly to brown the garlic. Then, add all of this to the large roasting pan.

In the large roasting pan, add ~8 cups of water, the coffee, the beans, the barbecue sauce, the sugar, the syrup, the mustard, the hot sauce, and the pepper. Cover this, and put it in the oven, cooking it with the lid on, stirring every 30 minutes to an hour, for about 4 hours, until the beans are cooked through and soft.

Then, once this is complete, cook the beans with the lid off for ~1 1/2 additional hours, to thicken and complete the recipe. Add any additional barbecue sauce, hot sauce, salt, and pepper in this period, and taste as you go.

At this point, the beans can be served, or let cool, and refridgerated or even frozen. They’re done, so enjoy them.

Peanut butter cookies, for whatever reason, just feel easier to make than chocolate chip cookies. Maybe it’s that their cooking time isn’t as long, or that the batch is smaller, or that I can fit more onto a cookie sheet, or that the batter is easy enough to mix by hand, but this is a nice quick batch of cookies.

This recipe is from the standard red Betty Crocker cookbook with one key modification – I’ve replaced the shortening that recipe called for with butter, because I feel butter adds flavor while shortening is a fat with no value. This is an age old war in baking, and this is the side of it I tend to firmly stand on. I guess shortening has a place – I just haven’t found it yet.

Anyway, not a lot else to say about this recipe – peanut butter cookies are pretty much a standard most people have been having since they are kids, and this recipes produces a solid rendition of that.

Ingredients

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup peanut butter (I like creamy for cookies, but chunky would work too – it would just make a peanut butter cookie with nuts in it)

1 egg

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, left out to soften

1 1/4 cups flour

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 375 F. In a bowl, mix the softened butter, the sugars, peanut butter, and the egg. Then, add in the flour, baking soda, and baking powder.

Then, when all this is done, form the dough into balls with 2 spoons, and press in a cross-hatch pattern using a fork. If you’d like, sprinkle a little granulated sugar on the top to form a coating. A standard cookie sheet can fit about 11 cookies (The arrangement pictures, as well as 3 more staggered as a center row)

Bake the cookies for about 7-9 minutes, checking them and pulling them at your desired level of browning. Cool the cookies on a paper towel, and enjoy fresh or for days later!