Free Range

It’s 8:27 p.m. the night before Thanksgiving. My husband is peeling sweet potatoes and my feet are throbbing from standing up in the kitchen for hours. I hope I’m not speaking too soon in saying we’re in good shape for tomorrow. Here’s what’s on the menu for my very first Thanksgiving as chef:

• Fresh young 10 lb free range turkey, currently brining in the fridge
  
• Cranberry, apple and sausage stuffing (to be put together tomorrow). Based on this recipe.
  
• The classic green bean casserole, but with fresh (no cans!) ingredients (mostly assembled already)
  
• Candied sweet potatoes, complete with toasted marshmallow topping (This may be the only way our 3.5-year-old eats it.)
  
• Whole berry cranberry sauce (from a can — I can’t do EVERYTHING)
  
• Homemade dinner rolls (already ready, to be warmed tomorrow)
  
• Homemade vanilla ice cream, to be served with a pie that one of the guests is bringing (batter is ready for freezing tomorrow)
  

Wish me luck!

Few things evoke a more universally positive reaction than the smell of baking bread. It hits humans somewhere very basic and instinctual, comforting us.

As anyone who reads this site and/or follows me on Twitter/Facebook knows, I’ve been on a bit of a baking kick lately. I’ve tried basic French bread, honey whole wheat, and experimented with a variety of flours and methods recently — all in the bread machine. So far, my very favorite has been a 1 lb brioche loaf — one of which just came out of the oven and is perfuming the air in the apartment.

Here’s the recipe (based on one in Beth Hensperger’s The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook):

1 lb Brioche Bread

• 2 egg yolks and enough water to total 2/3 cup
  
• 4 tbsp softened butter, cut into pieces
  
• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour (original recipe calls for bread flour)
  
• 1 tbsp sugar
  
• 1 tablespoon wheat gluten (original recipe calls for 2 tsp.)
  
• 1 teaspoon salt
  
• 1 1/8 tsp SAF yeast
  

Place all in bread machine according to manufacturer’s directions. In my case (Williams Sonoma machine), it’s liquids first, then solids, with yeast last. Bake on basic cycle. When it’s finished, slice up and slather with butter. Enjoy!

From one of my favorite blogs, SweetJuniper.com:

I do see this economic climate as an opportunity for change. It is a chance for us all to step back and think about where the things we buy are made, and all of what that means. It is a chance to accept that much of what we consider wealth isn’t even real. If we’re going to spend $700 billion to bail out those greedy firms who successfully used chicanery for years to manufacture an economy built of lies, shouldn’t we also spend $25 billion to save one of the few remaining industries that actually design, engineer, and manufacture something real and necessary in this country?

Jim/Dutch has such a gift for expressing even complicated things in such a passionate way that always resonates with me. He talks about the satisfaction of making things yourself, which is sort of what I was getting at in my “skills to collect” post a little while back. It’s hard to say where we, as a country, should be focusing our efforts. When it comes down to it, it’s probably more satisfying to put your hand on the hood and admire a car you’ve produced than it is to look back on an ephemeral financial transaction. But which really has greater value in the current global economy? On an individual level I’m all about growing food, baking bread, knitting and making preserves, but do we as a nation, sell ourselves short by sticking to pursuits that seem to be undervalued? Then again, is giving up a manufacturing capability — the capacity to make something that we’re still consuming — something we’d end up regretting?

This is a photo of the front door of our building this morning. I think our neighbors are excited, for some reason. We stayed up to watch the big speech, in part because it was too hard to sleep with the excitement and the honking, shouting and other loud expressions of joy outside our apartment. Michael wandered outside at one point to take a look and caught a black woman estatically greeting those exiting the subway with the words, “You’ve got a black president!” Indeed.

This is video taken in Harlem by a co-worker’s significant other. (Thx, Apostolia!)