A Million Words

This is the weekend of the Martha's Vineyard Agricultural Society Fair . It's the biggest event of the year in West Tisbury (barring presidential visits) and although some curmudgeons avoid it like the plague, I've gone almost every year for as long as I can remember. The exceptions were 1986, when I was in Japan, and 1991, when I was in New Zealand. This is the first year in a long time that I've entered anything. I decided that if we're going to settle down here again, I'd better start participating. So I went the category I've been working on most lately: baking. For my entry, I decided to make carrot cake. I used fresh local eggs, laid by my brother's chickens, and carrots from the local CSA. I spent about an hour peeling those tiny little roots, put everything together as planned, and stuck it in the oven. Ten minutes later, I looked up and noticed that a key ingredient was still sitting on the counter. Ooops. When I took it out of the oven, I ...

When I was young, my mother had a nearly-complete set of the Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks. Although the recipes in these were not, as a rule, very good, I was much taken with the photo on the cover of The Cooking of Vienna's Empire -- a Spanish Windtorte. I told my mother that I wanted one for my birthday cake. I had not grasped quite how difficult they were to build. I think we wound up with more of a Pavlova instead. The thing is, a Spanische Windtorte is almost exactly the same thing as a pavlova, only with a fancier-shaped meringue. So, when I set out to make one again yesterday, I used a combination of this Pavlova recipe and these Spanische Windtorte instructions . I increased the quantities in the pavlova recipe by about 1/3, and, in the final step, did not macerate the fruit but rather mixed it with sugar immediately before adding it to the whipped cream mixture... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Making the meringue was fairly straightforward, except that...

Baking Bread with Children by Warren Lee Cohen My review rating: 4 of 5 stars I got this book on loan from the local Steiner/Waldorf playgroup, and didn't have time to work my way through the whole thing, but what I did see, I liked. I was mostly interested in the bread recipes, because my daughter is too young for wordy stories, but I'd like to look at it again in another year or two. The recipes included a lot of very different breads; bagels, soft pretzels, and chapati, along with the usual range of loaf breads. I tried two of the recipes, a basic whole wheat loaf and the Roman Army bread. I made enough modifications to the first recipe that I couldn't really judge it, but the second one I tried was very good. I look forward to getting another copy of this book in the future and doing more of the bread-related story telling and perhaps even make the outdoor oven, which looks like a fun project. View all my reviews.