Ciabatta amore. Finally.

There's something about rising at 4:00 a.m. and making your way down dimly lit streets to start baking bread before anybody else has even thought of getting up and going to work. There's also a rhythm to bakery life - the groan of rotating ovens coming to life, the metallic clank of measuring cups against mixing bowls and the slow, eventual filling of the air with the best aromas known to humankind - yeast and coffee.

There's also the occasional Frenchman who drops by to instruct you on the perfect baguette:

I loved every aspect of bread and cake baking, every ingredient, every recipe. Except one. Okay, maybe two, counting the dreaded holiday tea ring, but don't look for that recipe here. Because of its wet, sloppy, impossible-to-form dough, I did not love ciabatta. It was the only bread that had to be poured out of its rising bucket "into a rectangle" that could then be cut into 16 similarly sized loaves. Right. Who can't pour a perfect rectangle of gooey dough?

Now that I bake mostly for myself, my friends and family, and the occasional client, I've learned to love ciabatta. This love did not come easily. It came after months of my parents' insistence that Kroger ciabatta was their favorite bread. It made the best toast, they exclaimed. Toast? How can you make toast with a 1-1/2 inch tall slice of bread? Much less, a sandwich. Initially, their comments just fueled my dislike. Until one day, when they pushed a buttery, crunchy piece of toasted ciabatta into the hand that wasn't holding my coffee and I gave it a try. Like an English muffin, there seemed to be flavor (and by that, I mean melted butter) in all the holes, but with a decidedly Italian essence that comes from baking with olive oil. So began my search for a ciabatta recipe I could work with - not prohibitively gooey, with that great Mediterranean flavor, that baked up crunchy and airy. After much trial and error with flavor and texture, the one below, from Gourmet magazine's March 1998 issue, is dependable and immediately replaced my parents' store-bought product. Start this bread 18 to 24 hours before you want it to come out of the oven. The sponge stands 12 to 24 hours. The first rise of the dough in the bowl will take about 2 hours and the second rise of the shaped bread, maybe 1-1/2 hours. Bake time is 25 to 30 minutes.

CIABATTA RECIPE
For the sponge:
1/4 tsp. yeast
1 C. room-temperature water (add more if it's stiff - flour and weather can affect this)
2 C. bread flour (if all you have is all-purpose, use it)

I mix this part in a piece of crockery that came with a lid, from Big Lots for $3. It lets the sponge breathe without drying out and has just enough room for the rise. Let rise for 12 to 24 hours, depending on your schedule - 12 is enough but 24 won't hurt it. The yeast does not need warm water to activate - the long, slow fermentation process is what gives the bread its wonderful airy texture.

For the bread:
1 tsp. yeast
4 T. warm milk (105-115 F)
1-1/3 C. room-temperature water (see below for adjustments)
2 T. olive oil
4 C. bread flour (again, I've used all-purpose when I had to)
1 T. salt

When the sponge is ready, place it with remaining ingredients in moderately powerful stand mixer with dough hook. (Or put it on a floured surface and dig in, but do not scoff at my Kitchenaid - we'll see what your rotator cuff has to say in 10 years.) Knead for at least 7 minutes to develop the gluten, and up to 10 minutes to incorporate all ingredients into a smooth, sticky dough. As you can see, this dough does not ever cling entirely to the hook. If it does, it's too stiff. It's important that any needed additional water be added early on, before any hard balls of dry or oily dough can form. If this happens, just crank the mixer up to the third or fourth power setting and let it go. When you see ciabatta start flinging dough from the hook to the sides and don't see any lumps, it's happy again.

As with the sponge, the secret to ciabatta's chewy texture is in the gas bubbles that form with a slow rise - allow at least 2 hours. On this day, my house was not overly warm so I left the dough for 4 hours.

It will be gooier than when it went in to rise, so LIBERALLY flour your counter or cutting board surface. This is not a bread to make in a square foot of workspace. It likes to spread and it likes to stick. So again, LIBERALLY flour that surface. If you greased the bowl plenty, you'll still have to help the dough out into its approximation of a rectangle. This recipe makes 2 loaves, so once it's on the counter, use floured fingers to push the sides into shape. Sprinkle the top with flour to further form the dough. A bench scraper comes in very handy here, as well. Use it to push the sides of the dough, but most importantly, it's great to then cut the rectangle roughly in half.

Again, with floured hands, lift each loaf, sliding fingers underneath the ends to gently pry up and over to the parchment-lined baking sheet. I have stones on one rack of my oven and therefore place my loaves on parchment paper on the back of the baking sheet and when risen, slide them onto the hot baking stones for an even crisper crust. If you're brave or bored, feel free to try this, but make it the easy way at first so you can learn the other aspects without stress.

This is a "hearth bread" and therefore likes a hot oven. Preheat to 425 and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, letting the crust get nice and brown and caramelized. Having no resistance, I always cut into one loaf immediately.

Later, when your loaves are nice and cooled and easily sliced, again with a sharp, serrated bread knife, use them for extra-special toast (2 slices per slot, it turns out), or bruschetta, or any kind of sandwich that supports a crusty full-bodied bread. I like mine with braised kale and Asiago cheese, under the broiler for a minute.

Oh, did I mention that ciabatta makes excellent croutons? Toss with melted butter, salt, pepper and garlic powder and broil to crispy goodness, then throw some on your next bowl of soup.

Another personal favorite and late-night guilty pleasure, inspired by Giada De Laurentiis, is Nutella between 2 slices of ciabatta and grilled in the pan with a touch of olive oil. A slightly more substantial version is brie and dark chocolate on ciabatta, either grilled or pressed into a panini. It's sweet and savory and buttery and, well, what are you waiting for?

Valentine biscuits, y'all.

A lot of people seem to think there's a secret to making good biscuits. Yankees A lot of others probably never gave it a thought. For me, there was always a bit of mystique because my mother's biscuits are so good.

In my twenties and married, I finally got up the courage to try my hand. She gave me the recipe, told me how she made them and I bravely assembled my ingredients.. I rolled out my dough, cut nice circles, loaded the oven and waited. The results were decidedly underwhelming. Nothing like my mother's fluffy, mile-high, cat head biscuits, so called by her slightly older brother, my uncle Ben. I tried a number of times more over the years, always with the same flat, dry, crunchy results. I even used what she claimed to be the secret to husband-catching biscuits - Virginia's Best self-rising flour, milled only 15 minutes from my house and the freshest product available in the Blue Ridge. I did not do them proud.

Unwilling to accept my failure at this most basic of Southern recipes, one Christmas, I finally caught my mother in the kitchen, about to make the biscuits. Well, she measured everything just as she'd told me (the usual culprit when my recipes don't meet expectations). But then I noticed two very distinct differences in our technique.

One, after only a couple of turns at kneading the dough on the counter, she very gently patted it into a circle, almost reverently, so as not to toughen it texture. And two - this is the big one - the dough she was cutting out was almost an inch thick. Duh! It seems that if you want tall biscuits, you have to cut them out that way. My embarrassment at missing this important detail was easily overshadowed by my delight at having discovered her secret!

Below is her recipe and if you have any doubts at all about your ability to re-create it, be assured that if she can teach my pa (he's from New York) to make biscuits so good that their B&B guests don't know the difference, yours will not be shabby. Pay no attention to the abundance of cheese and green onion I added for today's breakfast, unless you like that sort of thing.

Biscuit ingredients:
2 C. Virginia's Best Self Rising flour
1/4 C. shortening
1 C. buttermilk

Use a pastry blender to cut the shortening into the flour pretty well. Not pea-sized or corn meal in texture, but keeping the softness of both ingredients. Use a fork to stir in the buttermilk, again looking for a nice, soft, but not too wet, dough. Do not over-stir. (This is where I added a mountain of cheddar, Asiago and green onion, but again, you don't have to, especially if you're craving jelly biscuits.)

Turn the soft dough onto a well-floured counter or cutting board, knead a few times to make sure it's not wet, just soft, pat out a circle, and cut like so:

I told you they were tall. Place on an ungreased baking sheet and bake at 450 for 10 minutes or so, as always, depending on your oven. Try to resist grabbing hot biscuits from said oven because if you're like me, you'll be hungry and the coffee'll be ready and, well, you know.

So, I baked these biscuits in heart shapes because I like hearts. Also, it's the Valentine holiday.

If you're looking to find the way to someone's heart through their stomach, start picking out dresses right after you serve these hot with butter melting down the sides.

If you're like me and currently baking biscuits for one, don't you dare forgo the pleasure. Instead, ask yourself Willa Cather's most appropriate of questions, "What if life was meant to be our sweetheart?"

Oh, and then there's day two of biscuit love with some salty, savory North Carolina country ham...

Cobbler, the humble pie.

I don't know about where you live, but in the Blue Ridge, we've had a lot of this lately:

I admit to having grown weary of driving in the snow, but when I saw this beautiful old barn in my recent travels, out came the camera. Later, I would want to pull up that photo of claret-colored boards and heavy silent snow and remember how scenic the Tennessee mountains were that day, how much I enjoyed having lunch with my boy, and the drive home to Virginia with my thoughts and gratitude for company.

Sometimes a recipe card is like a piece of history or a photo, with its memories attached. Take this one, for example.

It is written in my former mother-in-law's hand, butter-stained and well used. The recipe outlives her and belonged to her mother-in-law. It reflects a thrift that comes of feeding many mouths with few resources, but also a dependably good flavor. Great-Grandma Speaks raised her family on cobblers and such, but mostly a large pan of biscuits baked every morning to get them through long days of farm work. As humble as her recipe, I still remember the tears she cried when we delivered a new range to replace her worn-out old one. I like to think about all the homegrown and canned fruit she added through the years - peaches, apples, berries - and my own compromise version with one fruit on each side of the baking dish, to please any divided household.

The recipe really could not be simpler and starts with a stick of butter melted in a 1-1/2 quart casserole or 8 x 8 baking dish while the oven preheats. Then, make a batter of:
1 C. sugar
3/4 C plain flour
2 t. baking powder
1 t. vanilla (my addition)
1/2 t. cinnamon (my addition)
pinch of salt
3/4 C. milk
Pour this over the melted butter. Stir 2 cups of fruit with 1/2 to 1 cup of sugar, as desired, and pour the fruit over the batter like this:

Today, I chose tiny, wild Maine blueberries and, because they're so sweet and I'm trying to be good, I did not add any sugar (though I sneaked in several raspberries looking for a home).

Bake at 350 for one hour, until golden and bubbly. I found these adorable heart-shaped baking dishes on another trip to Michael's for an unbelievable 99 cents and note that I divided one recipe in half and cut the baking time to 45 minutes:

Now, as if this wasn't sweet and warm and gooey enough, I took a quick Google trip, looking for chocolate cobbler recipes and found the amazing and mouthwatering blog: http://cherryhillcottage.typepad.com/cherryhill_cottage/
Go there now - it will make you smile. But come right back, because there's more.

Anyhow, I'd always fancied trying chocolate cobbler and their proportions were close enough to Great-Grandma Speaks' recipe that I felt comfortable taking it for a spin. I therefore substituted Ghirardelli 60% cacao chips, leftover Madagascar milk chocolate, and some southside Virginia pecans instead of fruit, plopped in a tablespoon of Nutella for good measure, and about that, let me just say this:

Constant craving: Iced cream cheese sugar cookies.

It's been way longer than I intended since my last post. But life, day jobs and blizzards sometimes intrude and what are you going to do? Make cookies, I say.

Valentine's Day is just around the corner and in fact there are holidays all year long that beckon us to dig through our recipes for a way to celebrate that's not only tasty, but kinda cute. Of course, we've all been victims of those beautifully adorned but utterly bland celebratory desserts and those experiences (plus the fact that some of our formerly enthusiastic toddlers are now 6 feet tall) caused us to put away our cookie cutters.

But maybe you're like me and some days you just want something adorable on your plate and you want it to taste darn good with your favorite cup of tea. And maybe you want it to be pretty and tempting enough to share with say, your fellow cube farmers, or maybe you still know some first-graders who appreciate your skills. What you need is the recipe I'm about to divulge, the much-tested, now published (on the first page of the first cookbook I ever edited), go-to cookie that my kids always loved to make. There's cream cheese in the dough that gives them actual flavor in addition to the almond and vanilla. They're simple, fool-proof and if you're typing away at 2 a.m., are perfect with whatever you're drinking.

Tyler and Laura's cream cheese sugar cookies:

1 C sugar
1C butter, softened
3 oz. cream cheese, softened
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. almond extract
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 egg yolk, reserving egg white to decorate
2 C plain flour

Preheat oven to 375. In large bowl, use mixer to cream butter with sugar, then cream cheese. Add next 4 ingredients, blending well, then add flour and mix until incorporated. Refrigerate 1 to 2 hours, which really makes them easy to work with. On lightly floured surface, roll out dough, one-third at a time, to desired thickness, and cut into shapes with lightly floured cookie cutters. Depending on the size of your cookies, this recipe makes 4 dozen or so.

Place 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheet (they will spread a tad). Leave plain or brush with egg white and sprinkle on colored sugar, or paint with a mixture of 1 beaten egg yolk and 1/4 tsp of water and food coloring for "stained glass" effect. Bake 10 minutes or so, depending on your oven, until they begin to brown lightly at the edges. Cool a few minutes in the pan, then transfer to rack.

As you can see, I like to frost mine with this simple, glossy ice:
Mix 2 C powdered sugar and 6 tsp. milk (adjust for your desired consistency), then add 4 tsp. of light corn syrup and food coloring.

 

Save some white icing and thicken a bit to pipe dots, stripes or whatever you like on the iced cookies.

I found the pink boxes below at our local Michael's store and packed up some cookies for the couple next door who welcomed a new baby girl into their hearts this week. Before they know it, she'll be wanting to drag out the cookie cutters to bake some shapes of her own.

Thought I'd show off these last lovelies on the plate I received from my brother and his sweetie for Christmas. I think they might just be for the baker...

A little soul food.

Last evening, I had the extremely good fortune to share a meal with four of the best friends a girl could ever have. We are a group that has come together over the past 20 years or so and I can say, with no small amount of gratitude, that they have seen me through the very toughest of times. As anyone of midlife already knows (and the rest of you will find out), life is full of ups and downs, of sickness and health, of snow and sun. You can't always do anything about whatever is swirling around you at those times, but you can, if you're lucky, find some hearty souls who'll stand by you until the dust settles. If you're very, very lucky, they'll show up on your door with food on the day you think your world has ended and you'll never be hungry again, but oh how good things taste when there's love cooked in. They'll tell you how good you look even when your highlights, for various reasons, are 6 months old and your pants are new because none of the old ones fit. They'll bring you chocolate and prayers and hugs when you need them most. And they'll just seem to know when that is, even if you don't.

I'll show you a picture of them one day soon, but last night we were having so much fun, nobody thought of it. See all the chocolate?

Today I am back home, two hours away from my best friends, and outside there is ice and snow everywhere and the sky is a cold blue. Some very basic instinct in me must have known tonight would settle heavily, because this morning I thought to put a pot of brown beans on the stove to simmer all day. On another burner, I sauteed garlic, onions and kale and added vegetable stock again and again as the emerald greens braised gently down in their pot. Being a tad lazy and melancholy but craving still more comfort food as suppertime approached, I passed on the traditional cornbread that accompanies soup beans in this part of the world and poured a quarter-cup of grits into a cup of boiling water, instead. After about 5 minutes of slow simmering, I added to this a handful of sharp cheddar and a shaving of Asiago cheese and stirred. As someone very smart once said, "I just want something out of a bowl," and tonight I poured soupy beans into one bowl, spooned a layer of cheese grits in the other and ladled kale and broth on top of that, and sat down in front of "You've Got Mail."

Everywhere in the world, every culture has some form of comfort food. Whether you remember the smell of it in your mother's kitchen, there was a time of hunger that was finally satisfied, or perhaps a happy memory of eating with folks you love, we all have food memories.

For my friends and me, we always seem to gather around chips and salsa, margaritas and handsome waiters. My mother and her mother strengthened their families with what they could grow and preserve themselves, so it's no surprise that my go-to comfort meal would include basics like beans and greens. Tonight I'm just missing my friends and trying to keep warm. But if the holidays are starting to get to you, you think you'll never get the shopping done or the tree decorated, or everyone's coming to your house for Christmas dinner, or perhaps your boss is a bit of a Scrooge - I hope you'll stop for a few minutes and think of something (or someone) that makes you feel warm inside and feed that hungry soul of yours.♥

Muffin Homage to Sweet Potato Casserole

In my previous life as director of a fledgling local museum, the biggest task tended to be fund-raising and one of our most successful projects was a collection of local recipes celebrating our town's bicentennial. It was my job to edit the recipes and once I corralled them into several categories including one called Heritage, for flavors handed down through generations, the book was so popular that it has since been reprinted to mark the museum's 25th anniversary. The second edition allowed me to replace my old food-stained copy.

One reason I don't ever want to be without this cookbook is that it contains a recipe for the holiday dish titled, simply, "Sweet Potatoes" contributed by a Mrs. Ann Gardner Gray. Mrs. Gray's combination of mashed sweet potatoes, butter, crushed pineapple and marshmallows, topped with coconut, gets me every time.

Another favorite recipe is Mix-N-Match Sweet Bread or Breakfast/Snack Muffins and comes from Deborah Taylor-Hough's book, Frozen Assets. In a later previous life, I was a personal chef and referred to this book often for ideas and foods that could be prepared ahead of time and frozen. If you're looking for a go-to muffin or quick bread recipe [do me a favor and please don't call it sweetbread(s) because that is not something that ever belongs in a muffin], this is your lucky day. As the title implies, it's a basic formula to which you can add your favorite ingredient, be it fruit, chocolate chips, nuts, etc., and mix it up!

So, I'd been thinking for a long time that the sweet potato casserole flavors belonged in a muffin. Then the family of my brother Ben's sweetie, the lovely Elyse, gifted me with some Virginia-grown sweet potatoes and pecans from their farm. These are pictures of the actual produce. Aren't they pretty?

Okay, they're not as pretty as Elyse, but they're not bad either.

Now, it seemed, the sweet potato casserole-in-a-muffin's time had come. And lucky for you (unlike the unfortunate pepperoni omelet incident of 1982), this time I was right! Totally, spot-on, 100%, bullseye. The resultant blended recipe is below and when you make them, gratification will be instant and sweet, as soon as those babies come out of the oven. The cinnamon and sweet potatoes' aroma will have already tempted, and let me tell you, they don't lie. When you pull one apart and melted marshmallow droops across your finger, just go for it -- crunchy pecans, tangy pineapple and sweet potato goodness all merge into one fabulous mouthful. Luckily, the recipe is also generous so when you eat 3 of them right away, no one will know because there are 15 more.

Sweet Potato Mix-N-Match Muffins

3 C all-purpose flour

1 t salt

1 t baking powder

1 t baking soda

3 t cinnamon

1 C sugar

1 C brown sugar

Sift or mix together all dry ingredients. Then add remaining ingredients below and stir gently, only until incorporated.

2 eggs

3/4 C oil

3 t vanilla

2 C mashed sweet potato

1 C crushed pineapple

1/2 C roughly chopped pecans

1-1/2 C mini marshmallows

Spoon into 18 standard muffin cups and bake at 375 for 25 minutes or until tops are springy.

I hope you all have a great weekend, whether you're shopping, baking for friends and family, or kicking back in front of a warm fire or holiday movie.

Snow Day

Don't know if I mentioned this before, but I pay the bills at my house by being something of a virtual assistant. That means I spend a lot of time at the computer, transcribing doctorspeak into electronic records, or possibly helping someone like my parents create a website for their bed and breakfast. To this end, I travel Interstate 81 between southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee up to 2 times a week. But since my son lives and attends college in Johnson City, this doesn't feel like work because it means we get to have lunch most weeks. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, however, my presence wasn't required in the volunteer state and the boy drove here for the big meal. So today, as I took up the work routine once again, and because it snowed and sleeted on me all the way, I felt a treat was in order.

Whether you're a smoked meat fan or not, I personally think everyone in America should eat at Ridgewood Barbecue at least once in their lives. Tucked up against the side of a mountain in rural Bluff City, with just enough parking for restaurant patrons and staff, Ridgewood is something of a monument to barbecue.

It's been written up in Gourmet magazine (a long time ago, but there's a copy on their wall), and this month was featured in the Travel section of Southern Living. The story of the Proffitt family, who started the business in 1948 and are still there today, can be found on the Southern Food Alliance BBQ Trail oral history, http://www.southernbbqtrail.com/tn/ridgewood_slideshow/ridgewood.shtml.

A stone's throw from Bristol Motor Speedway, on race weekend you can watch to-go orders fly out the door so teams can get their barbecue fix. Plenty of autographed photos of drivers line the walls, along with those of television and music personalities, a testament to Ridgewood's fan base.

But today there were no celebrities, just a determined foodie and her boy, along with a handful of others who braved this blustery first day of Appalachian winter. Arriving a few minutes before the "open" sign came on, I got to enjoy the quiet ping of icy white stuff hitting my windshield (the boy called it Dippin' Dots snow) while the smokehouse chimney puffed away.

Now, before you hear about the menu, a confession: I don't actually order any barbecue. For one thing, the sandwich is huge. See all that juicy, saucy pork goodness? For another, I can usually count on somebody at the table not being able to eat all of theirs.

But most importantly, the side dishes at Ridgewood are so crazy-good that meat almost becomes the "filler." Their baked beans are magically tangy/sweet and warm in their little crocks and rated Southern Living's best side dish mention. They also dominate reviewers' comments on sites like TripAdvisor and Google maps (urbanspoon.com has a copy of the menu). The fries, I'm told, are hand-cut fresh daily into these long spears with the skins left on and cooked the way Lewis Grizzard used to say his mama made them -- crispy golden on the outside while the inside is just this side of done. There's a big house salad that's always surprisingly fresh and while not ordinarily something you'd write home about - and this is where I was hooked - they make their own blue cheese dressing and as near as I can figure, use very large blocks of cheese and punch it up with a shake of cayenne pepper. The lovely servers bring the dressing to your table in its own bowl, and this is where you get lucky. There's enough for the salad AND dipping your fries. Look at those chunks!

If your mouth's not watering yet, check for a pulse. This blue cheese dressing is so renowned that it's earned its own spot on the menu.

And here's some more good news: My son and I split a sandwich and 3 sides for $18 and there's often some left for later when he's studying microbiological stuff.

Needless to say, it's a very satisfying way to celebrate the first snowy December day here in the Blue Ridge.

The Original Ridgewood Barbecue is located just off Highway 19E between Bristol and Johnson City, Tennessee. They're only open for lunch and dinner but if you're in the area, I hear this place serves a gooey bowl of breakfast cheese grits: www.EvergreenTheBellCapozziHouse.com. Also, their website is pretty cool.