A popular ingredient in many confections, candied orange peel is also delicious eaten plain. Dipped in dark chocolate, it makes for an elegant and satisfying end to a meal.

TOMATO CATSUP. MRS. ALICE KRANER. Two and one-half gallons ripe tomatoes; rub through a sieve; eight cups cider vinegar, one and one-half cups salt, two and one-half cups brown sugar, nine teaspoonfuls mustard, four teaspoonfuls ginger, five teaspoonfuls allspice, five teaspoonfuls cloves, five teaspoonfuls black pepper, four teaspoonfuls cayenne pepper. Leap Day joke

Daring Bakers February 2008 Challenge - Julia Child's French Bread When I first joined The Daring Bakers, I knew I'd be challenged to go beyond my usual repertoire of baking. The group would make...

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~LEMON PIE~–This is an old fashion pie, because it is baked between twocrusts, yet many have called it the best of all kinds. Grate the yellowrind of two lemons, take off all the white skin and chop the remaindervery fine, discarding all the seeds. Add two cups of sugar and twobeaten eggs. Mix well and [...]

CHEESE RAMEKINS Use two rounding tablespoons of grated cheese, arounding tablespoon of butter, one-quarter cup of fine breadcrumbs, thesame of milk, and a saltspoon each of mustard and salt, the yolk of oneegg. Cook the crumbs in the milk until soft, add the stiffly beatenwhite of the egg. Fill china ramekins two-thirds full and bake fiveminutes. [...]

“Welcome to the Daring Bakers, You are tasked with making the one thing in the world that absolutely terrifies you.”

Yup, that’s how it felt. I finally decide to go and join up with the rest of the blogging world and try this baking stuff out only to find that my three worst fears had been realized on my very first challenge.

First, I had to make bread. Bread scares me. It’s the simplest thing in the world, I mean four ingredients , that’s it. Four. But yet I have never managed to make a loaf of yeast bead that was even close to edible. No matter how diligently I worked at it, something always went wrong and I ended up with something akin to a hockey puck in the end.

Secondly, This was Julia Child’s’ Recipe! Fer Chrissakes this woman was a culinary deity. I have repeatedly lauded out love and admiration for the Grande Dame of America’s culinary consciousness on many occasions. I was already facing bread, my arch kitchen nemesis, and now I had to try to live up to Julia Child!?!? I was feeling pretty bleak by this point. To fail this recipe challenge meant failing Julia. No pressure there, eh?

Third. The rules clearly stated “No Substitutions”. GiveMeAFreakinBreak! I’m the “Seat of my Pants” Guy, remember?!? I never follow any recipe exactly, no-way no-how!

I thought about backing out of the whole DB thing right there, I really did. I knew there was no way I was going to make this work. I glanced over the nine frakken pages of recipe and sat for a while in a cold sweat. I mean, I’m not a baker! I couldn’t DO this!

And from somewhere deep in my memory came the voice of reason. A voice I had heard all my life at one time or another and in one form or another. A small voice to be sure, but the most encouraging one I have ever heard.

“Well, it seems the souffle didn’t rise as I’d expected. Don’t worry. This will come out much better when you do this at home”

It was Julia’s voice, from a guest spot on Emeril Live just about a year before her death. It wasn’t the fist time she’d said it, though. It was her mantra. She cooked, sometimes she failed. She did this in front of millions of people once a week for most of her adult life. She inspired millions by doing so. Such names as Emeril Lagasse, Cat Cora, Sara Moulton, Jaques Pepin have all been directly influenced by the powerhouse in an apron. Many more of us nameless home cooks have decided that we too could tackle that seemingly impossible recipe just because Julia said we could manage it.

I believed her then, I believe her now, and she was right.

I read, re-read and then read the recipe again. Nine pages is a lot to take in, especially for something as simple as bread, but Julia was pretty adamant about the methods involved in a traditional loaf. I bought the lower gluten flour that was recommended. I purchased a pizza stone to cook the loaf on. I got everything ready and I dove in.

NOTE: This recipe is massive. Far to massive to be printed here. For convenience, I’ve added it as a pdf file [ Julia’s French Bread Recipe - PDF Format ], or you can check the original at the Breadchick’s Website here .

I measured carefully. I let the mixer work its magic. I hand kneaded a bit and then I waited. Precicely three and one quarter hours later the volume had tripled and I was ready to punch, so punch I did. A little knead and back in the bowl to rise again…

About this point the spirit of Julia was in me, so I popped open a bottle or port (sorry, no sherry in the house) and began happily sipping away while I worked on other projects. The dough just kept doing its thing, and two and-a-half hours later, I was ready to get this thing going.

Plop it out, cut, fold into 12 lovely lil’ pieces and wait 5 minutes. OK, time for more of that port. Unfortunately, we weren’t cooking anything I could splash the port in, so I just tipped my glass towards the bread and uttered another of my favorite Julia-ism’s “Some sherry for the sauce, and some to sauce the chef!”

OK, form up some little rounds, lay out on flour rubbed linen and cover. No problem. Back to other things for about an hour, check in and everything looks petty good, so crank the oven to 450 degrees with the stone in the top 1/3. Get a basting brush ready and sharpen the bejeebus out of a boning knife for nice clean slashes on top of my little soon-to-be buns.

With the oven hot and a pizza peel ready and liberally coated with cornstarch, lift each of the little guys and flip ‘em over. One clean slice and it’s on to the next. All 12 in the oven, door closed and brush with water every three minutes for 15 to 20. No problem

And in the end..

Perfection.

You were right Julia. This would come out better when I tried it at home. I’m glad you said it, I really am. Otherwise I would have returned to my happy cook’s world, still devoid of measuring spoons and such, and I never would have had the best bread I’ve ever eaten. I never would have decided to make it three more times over the course of the month, and I never would have thought I could.

Thanks also to the Daring Bakers and to this month’s hostesses Sarah , and the Breadchick , without whom I would not be writing this today or snacking on French bread as I type.

I suppose this makes me an official Daring Baker, so I’ll set about adding the logo to the site at some point today. To all the other daring baker’s out there, have a wonderful day!

(c) 2008 Cooking… by the seat of my Pants!. This feed contains copyrighted photographs and text from cookingbytheseatofmypants.com . If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, at the aforementioned url, or at foodbuzz.com , the site you are viewing might be guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact jerry[AT]cookingbytheseatofmypants[DOT]com.

VEGETABLES. “Cheerful cooks make every dish a feast.” –MASSINGER. Famous Quotes Always have the water boiling when you put your vegetables in, and keep it constantly boiling until they are done. Cook each kind by itself when convenient. All vegetables should be well seasoned. leap year jokes

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Ooh, ooh. It's leap day! Also known as Sadie Hawkins Day. Or, apparaently the day ladies are given social permission to ask men to marry them.

What fun. Hippity-hop.

Me, I'm avoiding (The Ombudsman) any such entaglements, just in case things get weird, and focusing on the important things.

With the blissful weather (Yes, Virginia, there really is a Santa Claus! The Groundhog was wrong! Spring has sprung! Whoopeeee!) I have a whole new zest for life (which was tricky, since I was a pretty zesty girl to start with) and renewed zeal for all things food.

The markets round here are a bounty of early strawberries, asparagus and the last of the citrus. Peppers are just coming to an end and me, I'm all aflutter. (A flutter? Fluttery? Flibberty! I digress...Happy Leap Day!)

Then there is this salad. A salad without greens. Because darlings, not all salads are leafy.

It is a nice little way to combine the best of winter in a summery way. Serve room temperature, and feel the glow.

Try this my peaches, and taste the joy.


6 large red bell peppers
2 teaspoons capers, rinsed
4 cloves of garlic
4 teaspoons olive oil
Salt
Pepper

Roast your peppers over an open flame, or under the broiler until charred. Place in a bowl and cover the bowl to allow the peppers to steam a few minutes.

Meanwhile, mince the garlic and saute briefly in the olive oil add the capers and remove from the heat. Set aside to cool

Remove from the bowl, rinse off the charred skin, and remove the seeds. Slice into strips.

Layer on a platter, drizzle with olive oil, garlic and capers. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and serve.

Serves six

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The edible ice cream cone made its American debut at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis and now, the ice cream cone has won Senate approval to become Missouri's official dessert.

Pork producer Smithfield Foods said Thursday that third-quarter profits fell about 10 percent on lower live hog prices and higher raising costs, but the results beat expectations handily. The nation's largest hog producer and pork processor also forecast a difficult fourth quarter. - AP

I know the picture I took for my food does not look nice and attractive. All because of me do not have a DSLR Digital camera. I was not interested to get one until CP bought one. She keeps telling me how beautiful and sharp image she could capture now. I could see from her [...]

Map of human chromosomes

I am going to take a break today from food porn and food photography and not even talk about molecular gastronomy as you have read me do before (Essentialism and Authenticity in Food: Molecular Pablum, Molecular Gastronomy 101: Part 2 - The Nose and receptors, Molecular Gastronomy 101: Biology Basics - Part 1, Molecular Gastronomy for the masses? (A Rant)) but, rather, I am going to talk about the real molecular universe of what we eat and how food becomes us and how that integration changes our bodies.

I am going to introduce you to a bleeding-edge scientific topic called Nutrigenomics.

“Nutri” comes from nutritional (relating to food) and “genomics” is a term we use to refer to the global study of the molecules that hold the information that becomes our bodies and minds (your genes or DNA, RNA, and other heritable and informational chemical structures).

You may or may have not noticed, in 2001, that the Celera based Private Human Genome Project announced that it had completed a good portion of the sequencing (chemical deciphering) of the entire human genome. Last year (2007), the founder of Celera, Craig Venter, published the sequence data from his own DNA, presenting the 6 billion letter genome of a single person for the first time.

Lots of this information is like an undecorated Christmas tree, lacking ornaments and meaning. It is through the combined study of the genomic data paired with information about a disease state or some other function that the true promise of all these billions of dollars of work is met.

These days, genomics is paired with super dense information about the proteins that your genes make and also ways that your genes are regulated (systems biology, pathway analysis, proteomics, etc) to help scientists understand to the molecular level exactly what is happening in your cells.

Nutrigenomics is a common-sense next step and is fantastically important for our way of life and that of our children for generations to come.

Nutrigenomics is determining how your body (your specific body, one day in the future) uses the food you eat. It is going to help us understand how the food we eat impacts our chemistry and the way our genes behave - why some of us get fat, some of us get diabetes, some of us get alzheimers, some of us get allergies, some of us grow larger others short, some of us are predisposed to heart attacks, etc.

Our nutritional state can make some genes be read abnormally and others not read at all (think autoimmune disease and cancer). Food that you put in your mouth has a direct effect on your genes and your genes have a direct impact on the way the food you eat becomes your body.

More important though, it will help us get molecular and get honest about the effect of the types of foods and the quality of that food has on our bodies.

The Chinese and other ancient cultures have known this simple truth for millennia – food can be medicine. Food can be medicine because what we eat BECOMES us.

This is a post from: Nikas Culinaria. If it appears as a post somewhere else, it has been stolen. Please follow my link and let me know about this scraper so that we can stop him from profiting from stolen copyrighted materials.

Real Molecular Gastronomy: Nutrigenomics