In Season! Blueberry Muffins

Fresh blueberries

Blueberries are in season! My family are crazy about them. I buy a couple of pints at a time and put them in the refrigerator. The next thing I know, they are half gone. This year I am freezing some for winter. They are easy to freeze, just place them on a cookie sheet in the freezer until frozen and then place in freezer bags. My favorite thing to do with blueberries is to make muffins with a brown sugar crumble topping. My favorite part of the muffin is (you guessed it) the crumb topping. It is Katie's favorite part too. She would eat just the tops if she could get away with it! Here is my favorite recipe:

Blueberry Muffins

1 1/2 Cups (188 g) of Unbleached Flour
3/4 Cup (150 g) of Granulated Sugar
1/2 Tsp of Salt
2 Tsp of Baking Powder
1/3 Cup (80 ml) of Vegetable or Canola Oil
1 Large Egg
1/3 Cup (80 ml) of Milk
1 Cup (140 g) of Blueberries

Crumb Topping

1/2 Cup (109 g) of Brown Sugar, Packed
1/4 Cup (31 g) of Unbleached Flour
2 Tbsp (28 g) of Butter, Softened
1 1/2 Tsp of Cinnamon

Preheat oven to 400F/204C/Gas Mark 6. Grease or place muffin liners into 12 muffin cups. Combine flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder in a large mixing bowl. Break eggs into a one cup (240 ml) measuring cup, add 1/3 cup of oil (80 ml), and add enough milk to fill the measuring cup (about 1/3 cup (80 ml)  of milk). Add egg mixture to the flour mixture and gently combine. Do not over stir. Fold in blueberries.

Folding in the blueberries

Fill muffins cups about two-thirds full.

Muffins ready for the oven

Make the crumb topping by missing the crumb topping ingredients to together and sprinkle on top of muffins before baking. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes. 

Beautiful blueberry muffin

The bottom line: will I make these again? Yes, I will. I might just make the crumb topping and eat it!

Banana Bread

Finished banana bread

I have a confession to make. I don't like bananas. I never have. I think it is a texture thing or a taste thing or the smell..... It is challenging for me to make something I don't eat. Somehow, I seemed to be surrounded by banana bread lovers so what can you do? Make banana bread that's what.
In the last two weeks, I made banana bread two times: in Nashville and right after I got home. Both times it was devoured. They told me it was good; so I will take their word for it. It was easy to make once I got past the mashing of the bananas.

Bananas ready to be mashed

 Bananananananana Bread
1/2 Cup (113 g) of Unsalted Butter, Softened
1 Cup (200 g) of Brown Sugar, Packed
2 Large Eggs
1 Cup (3 Bananas) Ripe Bananas, Mashed
2 Tsp of Vanilla
1 Cup (120 g) of Whole Wheat Flour
1 Cup (120 g) of Unbleached White Flour
1 Tsp of Baking Soda
1/2 Tsp of Salt
1/2 Cup of Chopped Walnuts (60 g) or Mini Chocolate Chips (85 g)

Preheat oven to 350F/176C/ Gas Mark 4. Grease a 9x5 loaf pan. Mash the bananas.

Mashed bananas

Combine flour, baking soda, and salt in a small bowl and set aside. In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar. Add eggs, bananas, and vanilla to the mixing bowl and beat until combined.

Mixing the ingredients

Blend the dry ingredients into the banana mixture (I do this by hand) and fold in the walnuts/chocolate chips.

Adding the chocolate chips

Pour into the prepared loaf pan.

In the loaf pan and in the oven

Bake in preheated oven for 60 minutes.

The bottom line: Will I make this again? I am sure I will. I just don't know if I will ever eat it!

Bread Salad

Bread salad

 After a hard day working in the garden, I wanted to use the herbs I planted and tended to. I had some leftover bread that needed to be used. It was an incredible loaf of bread- an oatmeal bread made with an oatmeal stout. You can use whatever bread you want. It is bread salad so choose wisely (no pressure!) Also the amounts are flexible, you add more or less of an ingredients. Or do what I do when I am not blogging, don't measure just add. My family loves this salad; they eat as much as I make. I can only imagine how good this is going to be with summer tomatoes....

Bread Salad

4 Cups of Stale Bread (205 g)
3 Tbsp of Fresh Herbs finely Chopped (I used Chives, Parsley, Rosemary and Thyme)
1/2 Cup of Good Quality Olive Oil
1/4 Cup of Vinegar (White Wine, Red Wine, or White Balsamic)
1 Cup (145 g) of Tomatoes, Diced
1 Cup (140 g) of Cucumbers, Diced

Toast the bread in a 325 F/165 C/ Gas Mark 3 oven for 10-20 minutes. Take out of oven place in a plastic bag and add olive oil, herbs, and vinegar.

Marinate for 20 minutes and then add tomatoes and cucumbers.

Marinate for 10 minutes and serve.

The bottom line: Will I make this again? Yes, especially since I seem to be going through a bread-making phase and I always seem to have extra bread.

Irish Soda Bread

It seems the only time I make Irish soda bread is when I make corned beef.  It goes perfectly with the broth that the corned beef cooked is in (which in my case would be beer); I can't imagine corned beef without it. Everytime I make it I wonder why I don't make it more often. It looks like a wonderful and rustic loaf of bread.

Irish soda bread is an easy bread to make and I usually have all of the ingredients for it (except the buttermilk). This time I even had the buttermilk, because I recently made a limoncello pound cake. The trick to this bread is (1) don't over handle it; (2) don't add the buttermilk to the dry ingredient until the oven is preheated; and (3) check the bread after 30 minutes to determine if it is done.

Irish Soda Bread
3 1/2 Cups (440 g) of Unbleached All Purpose Flour
1 Tsp of Sugar
1 Tsp of Salt
1 Tsp of Baking Soda
8-10 oz. (about 250 ml) of Buttermilk

Preheat oven to 450F/230 C/gas mark 8 If using a convection oven preheat to 425F/220C. Lightly flour a baking sheet and set aside. In a large bowl throughly shift together the dry ingredients.

The ingredients are ready to go

Once the oven is preheated, add 3/4 of the buttermilk and gently mix together. Add more buttermilk if needed. You are trying to get a "raggy" consistency.


 Quickly knead the bread on a lightly floured surface for about 90 seconds. Shape the bread into a slightly domed circle.

 Place the dough on the cookie sheet. Cut a cross across the circle. The cut should go halfway through the dough.

Bake for 30-45 minutes (convection 23-34 minutes). Check after 30 minutes (convection check at 23 minutes) by picking up the loaf and tapping the bottom. If you hear a hollow sound, the bread is done. Cool on a rack.

Lavash

Katie holding up a piece of lavash

The first thing my husband (who by the way is a huge Monty Python fan and remembers every line from every movie he has ever seen) said to me when I told him I was making lavash was "Fetchez la vache!" To which I, of course, responded "moooooooooo!" Once I explained that lavash was not part of the Holy Grail but in fact a Middle Eastern flat bread that we know as cracker bread, he was quite excited about trying it. As a side note, we had to watch the "French Taunting" scene from the Holy Grail again. Ok- maybe we had to watch the whole movie again but whose counting?

This recipe comes from a cookbook our friend, Gail, lent us. It is a great book and it has changed the way I think about bread. The cookbook focuses on using your bread machine for all or some of the process. For instance, the lavash you make on the dough cycle and then finish it in the oven. The cookbook is The Cook's Encyclopedia of Bread Machine Making by Jennie Shapter. It ended up ordering the book online. I changed the recipe slightly because I did not have millet seeds and I wanted to cook the bread on a pizza stone.

Lavash

1 Cup of Water
3 Tbsp of Strained Plain Yogurt
3 Cups of Unbleached White Bread Flour
1 Tsp of Salt
1 Tsp of Rapid Rise Active Dry Yeast

2 Tbsp of Milk
2 Tbsp of Sesame Seeds
(I prefer a topping of olive oil and garlic brushed over the lavash and then topped with Parmesan or Asiago Cheese)

Pour the water and yogurt into your bread machine, followed by the flour and salt. Place a small indentation in the middle of the flour (not touching the salt and not down to the water) and add the yeast. (Note- If your bread machine requires that dry ingredients go in first, reverse the order).

Set the bread machine to the dough setting (use basic or pizza dough setting). Press start. It takes my bread machine an hour and forty minutes on the dough cycle.

Risen dough

At this point preheat your oven to 450F/230C/gas mark 8. Place the surface you are baking the lavash on in the oven. When the dough cycle is finished take the dough out and place on a lightly floured surface.

Gently punch the dough and then divide into 10 equal pieces. Roll each piece into a ball and then flatten into a disc.

Place under an oiled piece of plastic wrap and let rest for 5 minutes.

After the dough has rested, roll each ball of dough out until it is very thin.

If the dough starts to tear, let it rest for a few minutes after rolling. Stack the lavash between pieces of oiled plastic wrap.

I like lavash topped with olive oil, garlic, and cheese

Brush the lavash with milk and sprinkle with sesame seeds or brush with olive oil and garlic and sprinkle with cheese. Bake the lavaah for 5-8 minutes or until puffed and starting to brown. If you use a pizza stone, you should check the lavash after 4 minutes.

Baking on the pizza stone

If you use a convection oven, reduce the temperature to 425F/220C/gas mark 7 and check after 4 minutes.

Finished lavash

Making Naan

I decided to try to make a bread that I love but haven't made before. That was pretty easy to do, because I seldom make bread. In addition, I rarely, if ever, make bread by hand. If I make bread, I buy a bread machine mix at the grocery and use my bread machine. Unfortunately, that won't work for naan.
After much angst and research, I decided to use the Fine Cooking naan recipe (found here: http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/homestyle_indian_naan.aspx). I was going to  make one batch in the regular oven and one in the convection oven. But the regular oven only took 4 minutes to cook the bread so I decided to add topping the second day instead.

Without repeating the recipe which is available at the link above, here is what I did:

Yes, I used a mixer to mix the ingredients

Slowly adding the flour. I did the last mix of mixing by hand.

Finished mixing; time for kneading.

I put the dough in my favorite bowl to rise overnight.

It's finished rising. I should have used a bigger bowl!

The dough is ready to be worked with.

Half of the dough ready to be divided.

The other half in a plastic bag.

The dough is divided into 5 parts

and buttered.

After the dough was allowed to rise, I shaped the dough into 6 inch ovals.

All ready to go on the pizza stone

The biggest issue was getting the naan onto the pizza stone. The first time I foolishly tried to place it on the stone with my hands. It did not work well (the naan was still tasty).

Opps! They did not go onto the pizza stone as planned

Not quite perfect but still tasty

I regrouped and strategized and used a cookie sheet (without a rim) the second time. It worked like a charm! I think it would have worked better if I had a peel but I don't.

Taking the nann off of the pizza stone onto a cookie sheet

The second day was much easier because I knew what to expect. I heated the oven to 475 F/246 C/ Gas Mark 9, put the pizza stone in the oven, and got the dough out of the refrigerator. The dough was still soft and pillowy unlike the pelimini dough I am used to working with. I followed the same steps as yesterday, expect this time I used a convection oven and added toppings. The results? We liked the naan baked in the convection oven better. It was lighter and cooked more evenly. It also had to be watched more closely because it cooked faster.
We also loved naan with toppings. We did the traditional garlic naan (topped with olive oil, crushed garlic, and Kosher salt). I loved the garlic naan.

Garlic naan

Herbs de Provence naan

Naan brushed with butter and topped with cinnamon and sugar

Was it any good -- well it was gone as soon as I made it.  The bottom line -- will I make it again. It was a fair amount of work and I have flour all over my kitchen. I have flour allover my camera. It is difficult taking pictures with flour-covered hands and working with dough. But it was fun work and I often make a mess when I cook. I really enjoyed making the naan. Most importantly, I have to try more toppings on the naan. So yes, I will make it again and soon. Will I use this recipe again? I may at some point but I already have another naan recipe to try -- a chile-cilantro naan. If anyone out there has a naan recipe they like - please post it or send me a link. I would love to try it.