GZ Tai-Tai

Baking Eggy Buttery Bread on a Saturday

This recipe is my adaptation of a recipe in one of my favorite cookbooks Dough by Richard Bertinet.
The bread is a rich egg bread that is not too rich for sandwiches and yet is a real treat spread with caramel, tastes just like dessert. It also does well with a smear of jam or marmalade, I can be transported to a small cafe in Europe or a Breakfast buffet at Raffles in Singapore with just one bite.

In this adaptation I make the dough in the bread maker and then shape the loaves and bake in my oven. Yes, it is bit of a cheat, but, sometimes I just don't have the time. The bread machine gives me the perfect temperature for the dough to rise in an air conditioned home that is in a hot and very humid climate. I do enjoy getting my fingers into the flour and yeast but today is a day that I have a lot of little jobs that need to be done, so the machine will do the work for me.

I have made the bread by hand as Richard Bertinet describes in his book and the bread comes out beautifully that way too. Bertinet describes the bread as a cross between brioche and white bread and he says the dough is in the milk dough family. I had bread similar to this as a kid, and in my travels, it was called Sally Lunn bread. I also love that Bertinet in the book tells us to weigh the ingredients even the liquid ingredients, it is more accurate. I am a believer and love this method it is so much easier than dealing with cups and spoons and the clean up is easier too!

Here is a link to Richard Bertinet's Cookery Classes in Bath.

Let's bake bread!

Sourdough Bread

Sourdough Bread finally made ........ I forgot what a long process it was as it has been quite a while since I have done sourdough. The outcome was two loaves that did not rise as high as the lovelies that I would buy in Seattle. The taste was not as tangy as the loaves bought in the states either, however,  I think I will give this a little time as the starter is still quite new. The bread was a hit though with the whole family as we munched a half a loaf with our soup and salad last night over dinner. I will probably make english muffins next time with the starter that is hanging out in the refrigerator.

The recipe is below again this is from the Alaskan Sourdough Cooking book.

Sourdough Starter

This has always been a favorite of mine. Last week Expat son said " Mom I want sourdough bread. I told him I would work on it next week. Well as promised I have started my sourdough, it should be ready by Sunday to bake a loaf of bread, waffles or the lovely English muffins that I love so much and we cannot get in China. There has been a lot of talk of Sourdough on the blogosphere this past week. I will be watching the eggbeater to see what lovely creation is made at that site.
For now I will stir and wait and sniff to see if my little friend on my counter does what it is supposed to do. I got my recipe for starter from a book my parents picked up on their travels to Alaska. It is called Alaskan Sourdough Cooking the book has many recipes for all things sourdough.

Sourdough brings back memories of drives to Seattle for the day when Expat Daughter was small, we always visited this bakery and brought a few loaves home. When we were relocated back to the Northwest this became tradition again and how Expat Son became a lover of sourdough too. Of course before we stopped at the bakery for the loaves of sourdough bread to take back home with us we had a trip through the Seattle Aquarium.

After visiting all the fish in the aquarium depending on how close to lunch and how hungry the kids were we would either stop at Ivar's for some chowder,or head up to Pike Place Market and have a feast with our eyes as well as our stomachs on the various wares that were available, a few more things would be bought for the trip home as well. Usually some seafood and a jar or two of jam would be enjoyed at home. The monster size Char Siu Bao were a welcome reminder of the home we had left behind in China too.

So here we are in China dreaming of that lovely tart tasting sourdough loaf. I hope that my Sourdough Starter takes off and we won't be disappointed.

My starter... I started this yesterday April 17th, this photo was taken after it had been stirred on day 1 of fermentation process. Smelling kind of yeasty and pungent too.

 

Corn Bread

Last night was comfort food night for me. I love soup in the Autumn not that our temperatures in Southern China resemble the cold November rainy days of Oregon. Thank God! I really hate that weather day in and day out. I hate wearing a lot of clothes. Strappy tops and Levi's or Capri pants is my uniform in November here in China. Yet I long for the occasional bowl of soup or chili, and a nice sweet, golden square of Corn Bread with butter and honey.

When I was growing up Tom's Pancake House had the best corn bread.  Dad and Mom would take us there for breakfast after Church on Sunday mornings. We all loved it! My brothers would usually order Waffles or Pancakes with loads of fruit topping and whip cream. I got hooked on the Country Omelet with corn bread instead of toast. I still love this for breakfast when I visit Oregon. The corn bread was sweet but not so sweet that you could not add the honey butter that they served with it. Over the years I searched for a recipe that was close to the recipe that they were making at Tom's. I finally found it on the back of a box and clipped the recipe and, I keep it safely with my other treasured recipes.

When visiting Oregon this summer we ate at Tom's quite a few times. The corn bread was hit and miss though, but I remember Dad saying that the corn bread lady had retired. I think she left the recipe because on the good days the corn bread was great, on the other days it was not up to par. Like anything I think your heart needs to be in it, on those days that the corn bread was not up to par I think the new corn bread maker did not put his/her heart into it.

Here is the link for the "back of the box" corn bread recipe Sweet Corn Bread. It comes off the Albers Corn Meal box.

I still think it is the closest to that childhood memory of good corn bread.

   

Baking Binge

Yesterday was a busy baking day for me. Ex-pat son's school is having a difficult time finding a food provider that does GOOD food for lunch.

Life is always a struggle in China even after so many years and so many changes in those years.

Ex-pat Son and many of his friends have even quit bringing home the school lunch order forms because the food is SO bad! My friend Carla was doing the lunches last year and they were excellent. However the demands of her family had to come first, so this year she is not doing the lunches.

Instead the choices have come to Korean pizza which ex-pat son says is disgusting... He says it tastes like they sprinkle sugar on it and the toppings are not appetizing at all. The other items are pasta and Chinese food. Which is fine but not for everyday. One of my friends was at the school when her daughter had gone to get her lunch at the canteen, she had ordered pizza that day, and it was given to her in a plastic bag. So the pizza was no longer looking like a slice of pizza and no doubt was impossible to eat. Why not put it on a paper plate?

OK.... I can go on and on about school lunches here at our school in China, and the schools in the States. I won't today because it will be a longer rant than I have time for now. Jamie Oliver is doing a great thing in the U.K .

Because the lunches are terrible and Ex-pat son refuses to buy his even for one day. I have been sending him nice things in his lunch. Most days he needs to heat something in the microwave that I have prepared at home for him. We always have leftovers from dinner, so I can make up a nice little meal for him to take to school in his lunch box and heat up in the microwave. I also need to pack a snack for him as his lunch time is quite late. He usually takes two pieces of fruit one for his lunch and one for his snack.  I try to pack a yogurt UHT variety( no spoilage) and a cereal/granola bar, or a muffin of some sort for snack. Whatever he does not eat at snack time, he will eat at lunch with his microwave meal or like today he requested a sandwich.

Yesterday I baked two batches of Banana Bread but made them into muffins I used my usual recipe for Banana Bread which comes from a cook book that our Church did for a fund raiser in the mid 1980's. Some of the best recipes are found in those silly cookbooks. I also used another recipe that was given to me by a friend. I had plenty of bananas that needed to be used up so this was the reason for baking Banana muffins, and we needed muffins for Ex-pat Son's snack.

I also baked Chewy Oatmeal Cookies. A recipe from Nick Malgieri that I found on David Lebovitz's site.  The recipe called for applesauce, I had a couple of apples that were needing to be made into applesauce so while the banana muffins were baking I made applesauce to make the cookies. The cookies are a hit with GZ Expat and Ex-pat Son.

David has an interview with Nick Malgieri on his site today!

Wow David is a man after my own heart! If I wasn't so in love with GZ Expat,  I would have to go and pay David a visit in Paris, a much more civilized city than Guangzhou. I am content visiting his web site and reading about all that lovely chocolate, balsamico, gelato etc. YUM!

I will leave you with both of the recipes for the Banana Muffins/Bread.

Zucchini Muffins/Bread

This weekend was the big fund raising event for the local charity GIVES. Our cooking club reserved a table and made different things to sell. We are 7 in our cooking club and we did a great job! We made over 2000 RMB for our food items, and it all went to GIVES. My donation to the table was Zucchini Muffins, Spinach Quiche and Bacon Quiche. Unfortunately I was not able to work at the table that day, but I heard it was a good day, and we sold out! Perfect! What a great way to help out in our community!

I also have a story about the the zucchini. On Thursday I needed to get the zucchini for the muffins. I sent the driver to the market, that I know has zucchini all the time. When he came back without the zucchini, my helper Ling gave him a real tongue lashing. My suspicion is he went to a different market and did not follow instructions. She jumped in the car with him and they headed to a market closer to our house. They came back with zucchini and he looked like a puppy with his tail between his legs. I tell you what... I would not want to get my butt kicked by her, and I think he had a serious butt kicking.

Now for the Zucchini Muffins. 

Blessed be the Bread

Bread - One of my favorite things in the whole world is homemade bread. The smell of it in the house is comforting. The look of it with its warmness as the butter is melting into it how could one resist the temptation of bread. Bread ... The Staff of Life... When my parents grew up it was on the dinner table every night.When I was a small child, I remember sitting at the dinner table in my Grandparents house and always there was bread with butter. I could barely see over the table but I remember the colored crystal bowls and the dishes with pictures of different scenes. The dining table was enormous, the wall paper had pillars that you would see in Greece and other far away places.

A couple of weeks ago was Oktoberfest in Guangzhou this whetted my appetite for pretzel bread or Laugenbrezeln,Laugenrolls as my German friend Tina calls them.   In the Spring, Tina showed our cooking club how to make the Laugebrezeln and I had made them a couple of times since. I happened to be flipping through one of my many cook books and The World of Bread by Ulrike Kraus,Ruth Mader, and Werner Stafelfeldt there I came across the recipe for Pretzels, I made it and it was very good. I can be lazy so did not do too many fiddly pretzel shapes, instead I went for the roll shape.

My two boys GZ Expat and Expat Son, finished off the pretzel bread and made comments that they would like more, so I am going to make more bread today. I will leave you with Tina's version of Laugenbrezln since I will do her recipe today.