St. H’s bible accompanied my seasonal breakfast this morning (small cheese omlette, eng. muffin, bowl of blackberries lightly sugared, coffee). Why? Well in part because I restarted my cultures Friday night and in part because I got some white whole wheat flour and wondered what I should know about it. The only thing I know for sure at the moment about it is that you can’t just add it to pizza dough and get the same results. Good results? Yes – nice bready pizza crust. Delicious but not crispy and crusty.
The cultures? Perking right along after one feeding. Isn’t it good to know that such wonderful stuff as yeasties are all around us, ready to do their thing to help nourish us with good bread?
Meanwhile, Fortune, maker of 32 inch rolling pins, tried out her wondrous new tool and reports that making fresh egg noodles:
anyway, pasta is one of those things that books make seem terribly complicated and difficult to create. actually, it’s even easier than ciabatta. Marcella herself somehow devotes about 12 pages to the process, making it seem rather like rocket science or nanotechnology or something. It’s nonsense. making the darn pin is waaay harder.
My mom talks of her mother making egg noodles on the kitchen table but I wasn’t fortunate enough to have had any of those. (When you’re mothering and feeding a family of 11, I’m sure the arrival of packaged noodles and convenience foods seemed heaven sent!) But my Mom’s description of the process mirror’s Fortune’s experience – well of flour, eggs, mix with hands, eventually roll out and slice.That awareness of what food is is, I believe, the missing key to getting folks to eat better. (That and reading the ingredient list for stuff you’re buying!)
