I had fun showing off my artisan multi-grain sourdough bread but it took three days of my visit to prepare and was gone in a few hours. Wanting mama and all to have the most nutritious bread I decided to try a more quick and dirty recipe.

I prepared a quart of my starter and then mixed it with about 6 cups of spelt flour, the recipe (from Nourishing Traditions) said to rise from 4 to 12 hours depending on the temperature. I let it go overnight, which was probably too long as it got a bit deflated. I didn’t have loaf pans, so they were kind of batard style loaves. The shap of the slice wasn’t ideal but the flavor was wonderful and went great with the raw cream cheese spread I made.

As soon as I got home I started on another batch. This time I started with spelt berries and ground the flour myself. It sounds like a job for a toiling little red hen, but it’s just an electric gadget and doesn’t take any effort, but yields the freshest flour you can get, ensuring no rancidity. Spelt is a nice grain for home grinding because its gluten level perform like an all-purpose flour, which is actually a mix of soft and hard wheat. So, unless you want to grind two different grains, spelt is a lot simpler.

In my first go at grain grinding I just followed the directions and ground the whole berries on the finest setting, which gave me two distinct layers of flour, a fibery hull and a fine powdering flour. I used it as it came for the bread, which turned out delicious and hearty. After some expert advice, on the next batch I first ground the berries on a coarse setting and then ran it through again on the smallest setting which gave me a much more even flour and more flour per cup of berries (which seems to be about 2.5 c. of flour to 1 c. berries, but it depends on your grind- I am still working out that ratio)

The recipe called for the dough to be soft and easy to work with. To knead Sally says to stretch and fold, a different kneading process that I usually use.

I have now made three batches of the bread and the best results actually came from making the dough in my Kitchen-Aid mixer with the dough hook. The pictures below are from the batch made by hand, and it turns out beautifully, but the mixer does allow a wetter dough since you dont have to add more flour to be able to handle it. This was my fist time making dough with a machine and it left me standing there watching it, sort of wondering what I should do while it worked. It was strange to not be able to feel the dough change. So, I am still a bit conflicted about the thing. I was also hesitant to do sourdoughs in metal, but apparently it makes no difference.

Cooked in a loaf pan, this bread makes a great homemade substitute for sliced sandwich bread. Not the handsomest, but probably the freshest, healthy bread you can get in your mouth.

                          

This summer I spent a lonely week with a terrible cold. I passed the time watching the first three seasons of Bewitched, the old sixties sitcom. I got through so many episodes because, as the show progressed, I felt like I was getting a different impression of Samantha Stevens than I had ever before (since watching Nick at Night as a kid, that is).

I think we now have something to learn from Samantha and her struggle with the instantaneous rewards of her magic. As a witch, Samantha has the ability to conjure up whatever she would like, anytime, anywhere. Her magic makes life fun and easy, and who would give it up? Many critiques of the show lament that in a burgeoning feminist era Samantha is forced by her husband to give up her magic, and thus her independence, to be the picture perfect suburban housewife. This point fails to give Samantha agency over her promise to stop using magic for everyday things.

As I lay on my couch sick as ever, home alone, wishing I hadn’t made so many dishes fixing myself chicken soup from scratch, I saw that Samantha (magically immune to mortal sickness) wanted to work, she wanted to do things by hand with her own skill and body. By (trying to) give up her magic she was claiming her independence from her mother, her upbringing, and- importantly, from the instant, no effort life that sixties consumer culture was selling to women.

There is an interesting mess of consequences that came from the post-war production of consumer goods and technology and the intense marketing of these products to women. This marketing, combined with women being interested in, and allowed to, or obligated to work outside the home, successfully undermined the skill of the domestic realm while also allowing women to expand outside of it (the home that is). It is relevant to us now because most of us are living without necessary skills to live a life that is not dependent on consumerism. We have to buy things from other people, usually large companies to cover our most basic needs.

Knowing the role of marketing, pushing tv dinners and touting new gadgets, in the Bewitched era I think it is commendable for Samantha Stevens to pursue a more hand-made life. Granted, at those time she back-slides and does up a whole clean house, new dress, and elegant dinner in one nose twitch, the audience was more entertained and probably reassured knowing that, while maybe eating their tv dinners, even the best wives wouldn’t do all the work if they didn’t really have to.

Is Samantha Stevens a good example of how we should live today, no. But I think she is an unexpected reminder how liberating and often positive it can be when we don’t always take the easy way in life, especially when it comes to our kitchen and our food. We are happier people when we put time, effort, and skill into basic tasks and the fact that we do very little of that puts us in an interesting mess indeed, and the history of all that is something I plan to explore/discuss further (sneak preview…new book called the Radical Homemaker, learn more here).

                          

I have begun working on other print projects since this piece was published, but it is now online and available to share. So share I will. The article is based on an interview with my granddad who grew up in the East Bay (where I currently live) in the Great Depression. We talked about eating, buying food, labor issues, family, and all those issues that come up when you talk about what we eat. Read on in the current issue of Edible East Bay

                          

We had banked on having leftovers for many days after attending two Thanksgiving dinners (the strategy in visiting different families) and doggie bags from restaurant trips over the weekend when no one felt like cooking. We forgot to factor in how quickly those leftovers would disappear when we had days of people over around lunch time. So the only goods found ourselves with come Monday were two halves of two different turkey carcasses and some gravy that ran out of something to be put on.

Yet again my Alice Waters cookbook came through on a lovely soup, rich enough to fill you up on those first December days and too rich to make more than once a year. The reason for the richness is obvious when soup cools sort of becomes a solid turkey fat jello mold…but just heat it up, forget what you saw, and it’s back to a lovely filling broth. (For that gravy I just roasted some potatoes I needed to use and just ate those in a bowl of gravy waiting for the stock to cook…it was pretty medieval feeling)

Since the carcasses had been really picked over, I didn’t have any meat to fill up the broth with so I went with two of her variations of a Turkey and Kale soup. I added a bit (1/8lb) of pancetta and some cups of cooked brown rice. Even though we have beautiful chard in the garden I decided to buy a bunch of kale since I think it holds up better for a soup we have been eating for three days already (I’d say one or two more to go). I kept the pieces big so they would slurp up like wide noodles.

The turkey bits cooked in 3 quarts of water with some vegetables and herbs for the standard stock time of about two hours. I never really count this cooking time since it doesn’t have to be dealt with. Then I just fried up the pancetta and added carrots, onion, and celery and sauteed that for a while until it was all tender enough for soup. The broth is then strained into the veggie pot, add the kale and the cooked rice.

(This picture is well before these were done, they cooked up into a lovely browned tender mess)

A note: Alice calls to parboil the kale which I find unnecessary. She lives here in the East Bay so I wish she took it upon herself to be a bit more water conscious on some of these techniques. If something asks me to use extra water I usually just figure out another way. We’ve only have two good rains since April or something. Deciding to just add the kale straight to the soup made me wonder if there are any low-water-use cookbooks out there, and if not there should be.

So, this is a great way to use all that Thursday bird, even if all the meat is gone. I would note to make sure no stuffing is attached, I ended up composting one back piece that had too much bread in it.

                          

An emerging lesson on things like bread, pizza dough, and homemade pasta is that is takes half as long to make twice as much. I didn’t do this here, but if I had, it would have cheap, fast(er), and delicious.