Teleidoscope

Sun, Jan 27, 2008

Flour Techniques

Posted at 8:16 pm MST to Technology

Lots of different uses of flour this weekend.

Last night I made a pound cake. I used my bundt pan, and the cake did not come out of it intact. Little patches stuck, even though I greased the pan carefully and thoroughly. I don't think I have ever gotten a cake to come out of that pan intact, in all the years I have had this pan (25 years?), and I've about decided that it is the fault of the pan. I think I even tried Pam, once, without much luck. I think it is time to invest in a new bundt pan (and not the cheapest one on the rack this time).

This morning I made biscuits. The pound cake recipe uses buttermilk, and I always feel bad about wasting the rest of the quart, but buttermilk is not something we ever had in the house when I was growing up. The same goes for biscuits, actually: I learned to like them at a restaurant that served them with honey. If my Mom ever served biscuits, which I don't recall, they were 'poppin-fresh'.

The biscuits I made came out pretty well: they were nice and flaky and puffed up so much that the ones on the outside of the group sort of toppled over. (I only used 3/4 of the bakingpowder called for in the recipe, to adjust for the altitude...) I ate some with butter and some with honey and a couple with both, and still have some waiting in the breadbox.

I have the week's bread rising now.

And I have fresh pasta cooking and drying. I decided that yesterday's red sauce deserved homemade pasta, so I dug out the pasta machine (which hasn't been used since before I started travelling) and the pasta drying rack. According to Mario Batali and various cookbooks, the ratio for pasta should be 100 grams of flour per egg, but I think that is sea-level, soggy-climate flour. The pasta came out OK, but was almost impossible to knead by hand.

I think I need to ease back on the flour next time, which won't be for a while: I'm going to be freezing most of these noodles. I'm cooking the angel-hair-like stuff that came out of the machine's cutter, and freezing the parts of the batch that I put through the fettuccine cutter.

I don't think I'm ready to try to make ravioli with the noodle dough from the machine. I need more practice before I will be able to produce wide strips of noodle with parallel edges. I'm going to shift the machine's storage location to a more accessible location, though so it will be used more often. Maybe I'll get to ravioli sometime this year....

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Charlies

Posted at 7:44 pm MST to Media

Two stories about wild animals, living with people, both named Charlie.

First, the Daily Coyote blog has wonderful photographs of Charlie the coyote, who has lived with a human and a tomcat since he was 10 days old.

Second, a book I got from the Quality Paperback book club: A Buffalo in the House, by R. D.Rosen about a buffalo named Charlie who lives with a sculptor and her husband near Santa Fe and works as a model and buffalo ambassador..

One fascinating thing about both animals is how small they started out: Charlie the coyote was able to walk under the tomcat's belly (later, the tomcat was able to walk under Charlie's belly), and Charlie the buffalo is described as the size of a golden retriever and was brought home the first time in a dog crate.

Charlie the buffalo really did spend time in the house when he was a baby. And once when he was getting to be too big for the house, he snuck into the house and up the stairs and was found standing on the bed in the bedroom. There is a song (by Rolf Harris, my parents had one of his albums) about a herd of buffalos coming in the house and jumping on the bed... at least Charlie was just one buffalo.

I found the lyrics to the song "Two Buffalos" (they increase throught e verses by powers of two) here. For a long time growing up, we only had a few records in the house so I pretty well have the Rolf Harris albums lyrics memorized.

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