The Roots are not only one of my favorite bands, they are the class of my favorite vegetables. Roots and Tubers (which would be the name of my chickens’ band if only I would let them into a recording studio) are the very last thing the Earth yields before turning to stone for a few […]
Category: Yeast Breads
Whole Wheat Tartine Bread Moves People
In the Emergency Department, one of the primary goals is to “move people.” One of my consultants told me that a common question in an EM residency interview is to be asked, “how are you at moving people?” An inquiry into how efficient you are with patient care, with, I believe, more of an emphasis […]
Five-Grain Bread with Walnuts for ED Stamina
And now for one month of emergencies. I brought home the RED pager last night, still turned on. This is a most godawful device. An RSS feed of tragedy. For twenty minutes I let it chirp from my bag its stream of reports on the strokes and overdoses people were having around town. A twitter […]
Tartine-Style Polenta Cornbread and Tomato Sauces
Mix it till it looks like quicksand, he’d say. Till it moves like a slow song sounds. Patricia Smith’s description of making cornbread with her father is perfect. Dough churning like a slow song sounds, smooth but with grit and fleck. I’ve made cornbread so many many ways. In waffles with chili, on a skillet […]
Segale con Pancetta
“The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.” The first line of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, a book that made me laugh for five hundred pages. The first line of the novel is a sentence fragment, rather than a whole sentence, which properly foreshadows the family dynamics of the Midwest characters. It is […]
Green Peppercorn Bread and Not Yet Dead Chickens
Don’t worry, Betty White is still with us. My husband has an uncanny gift for bird watching. We have narrowly missed horrific car accidents because instead of the road, Karl-Peter’s eyes follow the skies for unusual fowl. For years I made fun of Karl-Peter for his obsession with birds, until this weekend, when his bird […]
Tartine Style Country Bread
I picked up a copy of the San Francisco Tartine Bread book at the library because the pictures made me drool. I had no idea it would forever revolutionize the way I make bread. No joke, no hyperbole. For real, the Tartine technique is a game changer for this baker. First of all, the recipes […]
Herb Bread and the Mailbox
You must know how I love real mail. If the USPS goes belly up, I will literally hire owls or pigeons, any entrepreneur in flight, to keep mailboxes fed with my letters. If I had to argue the significance of the tangible, which I don’t because I assume the readers of a food blog have no […]
Panmarino Rosemary Bread with Auto-Abdominal Exam
So, I say, it is in fact impossible to do a proper abdominal exam on yourself. I haven’t eaten solid food in three days, which is an unconscionable state of affairs for a food blogger, due to what feels like a Charlie Horse of the bowels. At first I thought it was sepsis from the […]
Pane al Formication, er, Formaggio
Bitten I thought I was by Cupid’s arrow on the morning of my seventh wedding anniversary, but No. It was in fact a hornet. There I was, flying into my Friday at an eye-opening clip on the moped, my blouse, apparently, open. Within sight of the hospital, I felt a thwap on my chest which […]