Grandma Nan's Kitchen

We got up early this morning to go to the Fisherman’s Market to buy some freshly caught fish directly from our local Santa Barbara fishermen.

I bought sea urchin while my husband Dave chose some fish from a fisherman down the row. Urchin diver Stephanie Mutz shared a recipe for scrambled eggs with urchin and we talked about possible variations. I bought two big beautiful live urchins.

When I got home I cleaned the meat out of the urchins. Dave heated some oil with fresh garlic for a quick saute of the urchin pieces.

We had four eggs from my son Shaun’s backyard chickens, two brown eggs and two blue eggs. I went outside to pick a chili pepper and some kale leaves.

I diced a locally grown organic tomato and salted it to draw away some of the juices. After mincing the chili and chopping the kale, I heated the chili in a couple of tablespoons of local olive oil and began to scramble the eggs.

I put the urchin pieces into the scramble just as the eggs began to set. When that was hot, I wilted the kale in it.

The diced tomato went into the scramble just before serving. I set aside a few freshly diced tomatoes for garnish.

I topped each serving with freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

Shaun’s wife Kris wasn’t sure she’d like urchin with eggs but changed her mind quickly after tasting this. That’s a piece of urchin at the middle left. Smaller pieces are integrated into the scramble.

We saved a few urchin pieces for pizza later today but this is a brilliant way to use fresh live urchin purchased in the morning before breakfast.

Formerly the shy one, Frida has been acting really strange lately. Even the other four chickens think she has been possessed by an alien being. Then last night Shaun found this in their nesting box.

Shaun has raised three of these chickens since they were 1 day old (Zelda, Frenchie, and Abigail). Frida is one of two chickens we got partially grown from Dare 2 Dream Farms in Lompoc. We were warned that we might not see any eggs until the days begin to get longer. Apparently Frida didn’t get the memo.

Breakfast this morning was an exciting event.

We gathered for the egg opening.

It was everything we’d hoped.

Good color, thick shell, standing yolk.

These chickens spend their days in Shaun’s side yard where they wander around eating bugs and the plants Shaun grows for them. They have intimidated the local cats into becoming vegetarians and managed to elude the raccoons a few nights ago who discovered before we did that the chickens weren’t safely bedded down in the coop for the night.

Yes, Frida’s egg was delicious!

On a visit to Martian Ranch and Vineyard to learn more about their farming methods, I tasted the syrah grapes still hanging on the vine, sweet, ripe, and ready to pick. Winemaker Michael Roth let me bring a cluster home to make a wild yeast starter.

Wild yeast cells cling to the waxy coating on the outside of the grapes at this time of year. These particular grapes are grown in Los Alamos, so this yeast is a variety that grows in that orchard on that variety of grape. Yeast on the nearby Mouvedre grapes might produce a starter with different characteristics.

At home I rinsed the grapes lightly and put them into a thin mixture of flour and water. I covered the container with plastic wrap and let it sit until the yeast began to bubble up in the flour mixture. This took less than 24 hours.

I strained the starter, purple with grape juice, and added more flour and water. I repeated that process until my starter was bubbling up within a couple of hours after being fed.

Last night I mixed up a batch of bread to rest overnight and then baked my bread in the morning.

Here’s my first loaf.

I’ll be making more of this!

I promised I’d go back and blog about some previous kitchen adventures, so I’ll start with our Pasty Party last August.

I’m lucky to have friends who are great cooks. Bob and Dianne Armitage used to own a restaurant in Iowa. One of Bob’s specialties is Cornish pasties. His grandma used to make them. Bob says the miners in Wales took pasties to work for their lunch. Sometimes the pasty was divided… half meat and half fruit.

For those who haven’t had them, a pasty is a meat-filled turnover, sealed so the filling doesn’t fall out. They are usually made with a meat and root vegetable filling. The secret ingredient is suet (the fat that surrounds the beef kidney). The first time we made them together, we couldn’t find suet anywhere. Bob searched all over town. We had to settle for another type of fat for our filling and pastry.

Then when I was interviewing John de Bruin for my grass-fed beef article, he told me that Dey Dey’s beef sells suet. I quickly made a mental note to rush to the computer when I got home to email Bob that I’d found it!

At the next Sunday Farmer’s Market I ordered a lot of beef suet and explained to John’s wife Nadine what I was planning to use it for. She offered to bring the suet to my house and make pasties with us.

We all agreed that we should make a LOT of pasties. That meant peeling a lot of potatoes, parsnips, and turnips.

Once they were peeled we cubed them and added minced garlic. Hmm, not enough garlic. Bob sent Dianne out to buy more garlic. There’s also some parsley in this mix and a lot of diced (she wipes away the tears) onions.

We used pork and Dey Dey’s beef with the turnips, onions, and potatoes for one batch.

We diced our meat about the same size as the vegetables.

We also made lamb pasties with parsnips and mushrooms.

I made the pastry dough ahead of time and chilled it.

The next step was for Bob to show us how to roll the dough and form the pasties.

Nadine made the first pasty.

Beautiful!

Bob told us that the folded edge around the pasty was traditionally made wide and thick so the miners could hold onto it while they ate the center of the pasty. The miners probably didn’t have clean running water to wash their hands before eating. They didn’t eat the edge… unless they were really hungry.

We had to figure out how to distinguish the lamb from the beef/pork pasties so I used my alphabet cookie cutters to put an “L” on each lamb pasty.

We baked the pasties until the tops were nicely browned and the juices were flowing from the cooked meats. It took about an hour. The final step was to brush the top of each pasty generously with melted butter.

Dianne said that back in Iowa, Bob’s pasties sold out quickly as news would pass though town that they were available. We were not surprised.

A recipe? Bob doesn’t need a recipe. Use your favorite unsweetened pastry dough and design a filling based on your own tastes. I’ve made pork pasties with butternut squash, potatoes, and kale. You could also make a vegetarian pasty, but use plenty of oil or a sauce in the filling so it doesn’t taste dry.

Bob came up with some great ideas for a Thanksgiving pasty. We’ll keep you posted.

I figured since it’s almost Easter, we should make bunny houses. The graham cracker version of a gingerbread house looked pretty easy in the photos on the Internet. So I gathered together some ingredients and a couple of extra kids to work with us on this project.

Sticking together the graham crackers wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. Trying to avoid canned frosting, I used melted chocolate for the wall cement. That required putting the joined walls into the freezer to harden the cement. We used white chocolate sprayed with green food coloring on the cake boards and added green sprinkles for the grass. Then we put our houses onto the grass.

Fortunately my daughter-in-law Kris decided to run to the store for cans and bags of prepared frosting, throwing all hopes of these being “healthy” candy houses to the wind.

As you can see the shingles are Necco wafers.

Building houses takes a lot of concentration (and finger licking). Here Kris helps to apply a baby chick to the roof of Fifi’s house.

Success!

Meanwhile, Aliyah added some flowers to her roof.

Saraphina was happy to have these lovely princesses helping her with the candy house project.

Phina’s house came out quite beautiful. She was especially fond of the pink pearls and her rabbits seem quite pleased with their new home.

I’m a bit behind on blog posts. This, of course, doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been a lot of cooking in my kitchen, just not enough time to write about it.

I’ll backtrack a little after this post to post some photos of previous cooking adventures.

But first I want you to see Sunday’s bread harvest:

These are made with the sourdough starters I developed for my Winter Edible Santa Barbara article on making bread with wild yeast. Two of the starters are made with grapes from Alma Rosa Winery, two were made with yeast from a locally grown wheat. None of these breads have commercial yeast in them, just wild yeast starter.

Yes, there were actually four loaves, but one didn’t last long enough to be in the photo.

Yesterday was our annual Cookie Bake. It has been 16 years since we started this tradition. My family really likes to bake cookies. Our grandparents made lots of cookies and candy during the holidays, and other times of year as well.

So we gather on the Saturday after Thanksgiving to share this tradition with the next generations.

The youngest kids do the decorating, although some of the older generations participate. Dave’s sister made up a really large batch of icing and the kids colored it.

She also brought a load of sprinkles.

Most of these ended up on just a few cookies. At one point there was a contest. The theme seemed to be More is Better.

Here are a few of the simpler ones.

Here are some that were in the competition. The prize was… a cookie!

Meanwhile, the older family members were working away in the kitchen on various batches of dough they’d brought to try out this year. One was chocolate chipotle.

(photo stolen from Ed)

So we’re off to a good start for the holiday season. As you can guess it’s not so much about the cookies as the chance to be together doing something we enjoy.

My daughter-in-law Kris showed me a recipe she had for Easter Dragon Breads and suggested we try it for Easter. The dragon is about the size of a medium baguette and has a red-dyed egg in it’s mouth.

We tried dying brown eggs with a pureed beet. Brown is not the best color to start with for this and the dye didn’t really get absorbed into the eggshell. The bread recipe was kind of boring and the thin parts (the feet) tasted like crackers. I didn’t take any photos so you’ll have to trust me that the result was disappointing.

I decided to use my reliable cinnamon roll dough for the bread and use cloves instead of small balls of dough for the eyes. I also wanted to make smaller dragons so I used malted milk Easter egg candies instead of the full-sized red egg.

Note that the legs are folded out from slits cut into the sides of the body and then pressed with a fork. These looked pretty hopeful at the rising stage. I liked the multiple color choices for the eggs.

When fully risen, I brushed each one with egg wash so the dragon’s skin would develop a nicely browned color as it baked.

At this point they were beginning to look a little more like fish than dragons but I was still hopeful.

Surprise!

Disgusting! Okay, this is not the effect I had been expecting. I should have realized that when a malted milk egg reaches 350 degrees, it will melt. What was I thinking?

And the final shape looked more like a flounder than a dragon. But the flavor and texture were perfect. I’d rolled cinnamon into the center before I shaped the dragon, so we enjoyed eating them anyhow.

Next stop was the Japanese market in Goleta to buy some quail eggs. This time I used vinegar with the beet juice when I dyed the eggs. It worked better but the dye tends to bleed a bit. I also decided to skip the slit and fold technique for the legs and go with separate pieces of dough.

Voila! This one looks pretty good. Not intimidating, but far more like a dragon would be expected to look. The quail eggs are perfect but next time I’ll use standard Easter egg dye.

Krista’s recipe for this Triple Berry Pie is in the latest issue of Edible Santa Barbara.
I made two of them for Easter Dinner yesterday. I used strawberries from Shawn and Melissa of Out of Step Farms and blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries from Chuy at the Sunday farmers market.

This pie actually has four types of berries, but triple is a lot easier to say. It also has a coating of white chocolate and cream cheese spread onto the inside of the pre-baked crust. The berries are coated, not cooked in the glaze, which is made from some of the blueberries and a little cornstarch.

It looks spectacular and tastes fantastic. I had to test the recipe for the magazine. I “tested” it four or five times before the issue came out.

You can read my step-by-step description of how to make this pie (with photos) on the Edible Santa Barbara blog.

Broccoli Flower Salad

I didn’t cut my broccoli florets from the plant quickly enough so some of them have begun to flower. I feel better about this when I see how many bees are enjoying these flowers when the sun is out. However I decided to experiment with a stalk to find out how much of it was still edible. Some of parts of the stems are tender but there are also some stickery parts up near the flowers. My first salad involved some chewing and spitting out.

For the next salad, we used just the flowers.

This salad was very successful. My husband Dave made it using volunteer lettuce. Last fall I let my lettuce go to seed for the bees. When I finally pulled it up, my compost bin was too full so I left it on the ground near the bin for a few weeks. A few months ago I noticed that I had a patch of lettuce on the ground near the compost bin.

The sugar peas are also from my garden, but they were planted there on purpose.

Cupcakes

I agreed to do a tea as an auction item for Guide Dogs for the Blind. The woman who got it is a 3rd grade teacher at Howard School, so she is bringing her class to Braille Institute to have tea. My friend Adelaida is joining us with her guide dog, Caraway, to introduce Caraway to the children. I’m working on some fanciful items to serve.

I want to do some mini cupcakes. I decided to try Cat Cora’s batter for Alma’s Italian Cream Cake. I love this cake. It has a great texture and keeps a long time in the refrigerator. I left out the nuts and the coconut because I want a basic simple reliable cupcake recipe–one that domes nicely but doesn’t cross over into muffin territory. The texture needs to be light and delicate, like this cake. I can add in coconut, chocolate, or nuts once I have the basic recipe figured out.

My first attempt didn’t come out the way I’d envisioned it.

They looked fine coming out of the oven but they sank in the middle as they cooled. (They tasted great, but I want the appearance to be appealing too.)

Cat Cora uses a great technique for getting rise. Buttermilk and baking soda give the batter some initial rise, but then she also separates out her egg whites and beats them to fold into the batter. The innovative thing is that she saves out a little of the sugar to beat into the whites after they begin to foam. That makes the egg white more meringue-like and more stable.

So I wasn’t having a problem getting rise, but as they cooled, the cake structure wasn’t strong enough to maintain height. If you look on the Internet, some experts say this is caused by beating too much and some say it’s from not beating enough. I’d opt for the not beating enough since the gluten strength comes from beating (beating too much will make cakes tough, but probably won’t make them fall).

I decided to decrease the sugar in the recipe, since sugar weakens the gluten strands that provide structure.

The texture of these is delicate and they are sweet enough without the extra sugar, but the lovely domes they had coming out of the oven disappeared as they cooled. At least these didn’t sink, but they look a bit shriveled. (Any of these cupcakes would be fine with a bit of frosting, but I want the unglazed cupcake to look perfect.)

So I decided to decrease the buttermilk just a bit so see if that would help. Here is the result.

This makes me happy. Next I’ll try a chocolate version, figure out how much to put into a mini muffin pan, and decide how I want to decorate them.