(Listen to the prelude.)
(mid-April 2023)
The third of April is a red letter day in our house as it’s our youngest cat, Piper's, birthday. And this year she turned the big 1-0.
Here she is as a wee kitten. I remember well going to the cat adoption lady's house and seeing her newest litter. Piper was so new and so small and zipping around the room like a madman. Or madcat, rather. She'd charge at me as I sat on the floor and then carom off my leg before launching an attack one of her siblings or maybe a defenseless pillow.
And here she is on her big day 2023 trying to relax in one of our plush cat houses and looking irritated that one of her humans is sticking some device in her face. "Go away, hoo-man!"
Of course I gave her plenty of extra treats to celebrate. I tried to get a photo but she nommed them down too quickly to get a decent picture with my very basic phone camera.
We hope to have her for many years to come and, with all of the money I pay the vet, I expect we shall.
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Earlier this month I was poking around the websites of local bakeries to see what my rye bread options were when I discovered that one of them offered rye brownies. I pondered this miracle food and suspect that one of those cartoon clouds appeared above my head as I did some quick culinary ratiocination. I came up with:
rye flour + dark chocolate = manna from heaven
So I set out to conjure some of these magical treats in my kitchen. I began by assembling a double boiler and melting the chopped bittersweet chocolate cubes and extra dark chips.
As the chocolate melted, I mixed the eggs, butter, sugar, and whatnot.
Everything got thrown into the same bowl and mixed together. I poured the batter into a pan and it looked rather half-assed, truth be told. “But,” I reasoned, “appearance is no measure of taste. Never judge a book by its cover and whatnot.”
The old adage was right. The brownies may have come out of the oven looking like my cat's (not Piper) diarrhea, but they tasted incredibly delicious.
I sampled, of course, but took the rest to work. I am just not to be trusted with brownies.
The whole brownie thing threw me off of my original task which was to find rye bread. While rye is less common, it's certainly not impossible to find a loaf of it in these parts. I think it's more the case that you have to get to a bakery for a good variety as grocery stores don't stock a lot of quality Central/Eastern European breads. Can I go to my local supermarket and find a pukka loaf of rye bread that my German, Ruthenian, and Polish ancestors would recognize and be proud of?
Yes.
Is there more than 1 or 2 varieties that fit the bill?
Nope.
And so, in the end, I decided to just bake my own rather than running around town trying to find the perfect loaf. I began by retrieving the bread maker that a cousin had given us from the basement. I gave it a good cleaning and then set to work.
The recipe in the manual for rye bread is quite lame, in my opinion. It called for a mere ¾ cup of rye flour but a whopping 2¾ cups of wheat. How is anyone supposed to taste the rye with that ratio? So I tweaked it a little bit.
Things went well at first. The dough rose as expected.
It smelled great too. And then I took another peek some time later and saw that it had fallen. Soon the bake cycle kicked in and I ended up with this.
Not exactly Martha Stewart level aesthetics.
Besides needing to have the flour ratio adjusted further, it tasted fine. Hearty and a bit dense with a rich, nutty wheat sweetness. It simply needed more rye. No doubt there is some arcane wisdom out there on baking bread which describes the best rye to wheat ratio, which wheat varieties taste like what, the best yeast to use, how to get a certain texture, and so on and so forth. My bready experiments shall continue.
In addition to baked things, I found myself with an inexplicable craving for pozole earlier this month. Pozole is Mexican pork and hominy soup. While I do not recall how or when, I nonetheless acquired a taste for it and have tossed around the idea of hitting all of the Mexican restaurants in the area to find out who does the best pozole.
I bought some pork and hominy thinking that I had the rest of the ingredients already. The recipe calls for dried ancho chilies which are boiled and then pureed before being added to the soup. Now, I’ve made pozole before and would have sworn that I had some dried anchos in the cupboard. But, when I went and looked, I found that I instead had a lifetime’s supply of guajillo chilies and had no idea why.
I tried in vain to recall what motivated me to buy those but couldn’t. My best guess is that they were leftover from an attempt to make mole sauce at some point in the dim and distant past.
Another trip to the store and I was ready. I made my pork stock.
As that cooked, I boiled, rinsed, chopped, and pureed until everything was ready to be thrown into the pot.
No, that cup of coffee was for the chef, not the soup.
Once the pozole was cooking, I thought it looked nice and hearty with chunks of stuff everywhere. It smelled great too.
I cooked it long enough for the marriage of the flavors to be consummated and then served myself a bowl.
It turned out very well and I was happy that I hadn’t gotten lazy and simply bought a can at the store. That stuff isn’t bad but it doesn’t have all the onion and jalapeno in it. Plus, I think my version has a more piquant chili taste to it, if I do say so myself.
Lastly on the food front, I’ll note that I recently discovered that the Wisconsin Brewing Company out in Verona, a Madison suburb, had brewed a Grodziskie once again and had it available in their taproom. I managed to convince a friend of mine to head to the brewery with me for a couple so I’d have some company.
Grodziskie is a Polish style of beer that dates back centuries. It’s traditionally brewed with 100% smoked wheat and “should” be light in body and color with a good dose of fizz and a nice hop bite. Usually it’s low in alcohol but that can vary according to the brewer’s taste.
It was delectable! Light, smoky, fizzy – I wish they’d brew it more often than once every couple of years. My only gripe, which really isn’t much of a gripe, is that I wish it were just a tad hoppier. A minor quibble. I wonder what would happen if some of that wheat were to be swapped out for rye...
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Bonus photo. It was Easter not too long ago so here’s a rabbit I saw in a backyard. I am used to seeing what I think are Eastern Cottontails so I have to wonder if this was someone's pet that that was set free or if it escaped like a scene from Watership Down.
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