Norm Matthews

@Maison Rustique Thank You

A couple months ago, I bought a cookbook because I know the author. There is apost about it here at "Cookbooks and References". It is the next to last entry on the topic Show Us Your Latest Cookbook Acquisitions. I'd post a direct link to it if I knew how to do it. I've read the book from cover, now I am starting to try some of the recipes. the two I did today are Travelers Meat Pie and Jalapeño Bison Jerky... only I used a round roast.The Jerky shown here is about half the recipe. The rest is already gone. The author is half sister to my son's former wife and her heritage is Mexican and Potawatomi.

My mom was born into a poor family who lost their farm during the Depression in Arkansas She was superstitious about having black eyed peas (for good luck) on New Years Day. Just for fun I have had a traditional Southern New Years Day meal every year until I didn't. The next day I broke my ankle. Now I am superstitious too. Charlie is tired of ham hocks and does not like black eyed peas. He likes collard greens and corn bread. I was going to get a prime rib roast but a two rib roast was $100.00. That was too much money and too much meat for the two of us. I got two rib eye steaks, cooked the greens with some bacon and ham and made a cheesy dip with the black eyed peas. I think next year, I'll make Hoppin John to see if he will like eyed peas with rice. Oh the black beans are a Southwestern American Indian staple that almost went extinct when they were moved to reservations but is making a comeback.

Last month, I was reading the newspaper and it had an article about Pyet DeSpain. I know her. We aren't close friends and the last time I saw her was at my son's wedding. He was getting married to Pyet's half sister. At the time she had an office job for a local car dealer. I learned from the article that she had gone to culinary school, moved to LA and was making meals for delivery to clients when she decided to start creating meals based on her background. She and her mother and grandmother are members of the Potawatomi tribe and her father and his Mexican family lives in Kansas City She grew up in both cultures. Her food attracted some attention in Los Angles and was asked to be a contestant on Gordon Ramsay's Next Level Chef She was the winner of Season One. She has a cooking show on PBS. This was all news to me. I preordered her cookbook and after it came, had it signed it at a book signing event here in Kansas City. This is the first cook book that I will have read from cover to cover and am acquiring items for her recipes that are not often found or grocery store shelves, like sumac and juniper berries. I remember sumac trees all along an area where I used to take walks in Junction City and made tea with them once in a while but now have a chance to learn how to put them to greater use. Same for juniper berries. I have a tree in my backyard that has a gazillion of those blue seeds on it. She has some sauces that have been modified to use as BBQ sauces and I do a lot of BBQ in my smoker and have used fruit flavors in my sauces and her sauces also use fruit flavors. I have inclded another picture of my son's wedding day taken with is bride and her siblings. Pyet is on the left.

I have been cooking Christmas cookies all day and part of yesterday too. Dinner was a humble Southern comfort food that mom used to make whenever we had a leftover ham bone. Instead of Navy beans, though, I used Mayocoba beans. I had not seen them on shelves for quite a while but remembered how good they are and decided to use them with the ham bone i had in the freezer. The cookies were some brownies made in a skillet, some spicy oatmeal cookies that nearly everyone would not know they were oatmeal cookies and some eggnog flavored cookies.

@Shelby I have been AWOL from here for a while and I thought I just posted a reply here but I don't see it now. I'll try again. I did probably did say that about Kansas sunsets. I remember saying somewhere a while back that God didn't put mountains in Kansas because He knew they"d block the view (of our Sunsets) )

@Shelby I have been AWOL from this site for a few days and didn't see your quote until now. I probably did say that about Kansas sunsets. I know I once said" God didn't put mountains here because He knew it they would block the view of our sunsets

There are four of our families living here in Kansas City.We each take turns hosting the other three. Last year was my turn. My nephew's family hosted this year. Each day after Thanksgiving, when it isn't my turn to host, I cook an abbreviated version so we can have leftovers. I made turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, gravy, cranberry chutney, Parker house rolls and deviled eggs . I bought a frozen pumpkin pie but plan to cook it tomorrow.

Thank you. There was no sauce with the rice but the chicken had a sauce made with pan drippings, chicken stock, rosemary and thyme and thickened with butter. The chicken was seasoned with herbs de Provence, cayenne and salt & pepper

I came across a chicken breast recipe that has a crispy skin and is juicy inside like a thigh. It is served with the first joint of the wing still attached, otherwise boneless. It was first served at the Statler Hotel but everyone refers to it as Airplane Chicken because when airlines still served hot, fresh cooked meals, it was a mainstay. I cooked an Italian recipe to go with it called potato pie but there must be a learning curve on that and I served the chicken with rice instead.

Charlie found a recipe that looked like it was similar to a mussels appetizer he always ordered at an Italian restaurant but it isn't on the menu anymore. He said it tasted just like it but it didn't come with pasta but it was good cooked in the sauce until it was absorbed. I was cooking the Brussels sprouts first and he thought it was the only thing we were having. He was relieved to find it was just a side. I am not a fan of tofu, generally, but is was good roasted with the the garlicky seasonings.

Bahn Mi sandwiches were requested for dinner today. I like when I don't have to figure out what to have for dinner.

When we had a Cuban recipe for lobster, it made me want to do lobster again as I usually have it (not that I usually have it). So when Charlie asked for a crab boil dinner a few days ago, I thought it would be a good time to use lobster instead of shrimp with the crab legs. Only I broiled the lobster separately.

Through the KC Star newspaper I have been getting free NYT recipes. Yesterday was one titled American Itallian Meatballs. It had ricotta and Romano cheese as well as parsley, garlic and egg. Cherlie said it was good but liked our regular recipe better. I made two loaves of French bread this morning. One went to make garlic toast for today and plans for tomorrow is to use the other to make Bahn Mi sandwiches.

@Tropicalsenior I enjoyed the first video a lot. What I liked the most was number 7 "Sourdough should" Like people telling you what sour should be or else it isn't "real" sourdough. I think @MaryIsobel should watch it too as it addresses "my sourdough died" as probably a mistaken diagnosis of the reality of the sourdough condition. The one on preferments left me more confused about what it is and if it ever isn't something, if you know what I mean. I want to keep the bake wth Jack so I can watch the other episodes..

@Tropicalsenior Thank you. I will look at the videos later today

My son and I went to a Cuban restauant a couple days ago. He wanted to order a Creole Lobster dish for us to share but changed his mind when he found out it was $60.00. He ordered a Cuban sandwich and I ordeered aa appitizer of three empanadas. We shared both. While we were waiting, he looked up the lobster recipe on his phone and asked me if I could make it with lobster and shrimp. I said I would and made it yesterday

@Tropicalsenior Wow! Your breads look very good. I have not been able to get good slash marks on my only-sourdough starter breads. I did not know the term was preferment. I just called it aged yeast. A long time ago I read that commercial yeast cannot reproduce itself as the hybrid it was made, and will revert back to wild yeast if kept alive by repeated feedings. I don't know if that is as true with newer instant yeast or not. When someone gets some sourdough starter from me, I tell them "it's not a pet, it's ok if it dies. It isn't hard to start another one. I have not been in touch with other sourdough bakers before now. I didn't realize there are so many of us. Up to now it has just been trial and error for me.

@ElsieDKAF used those measurements by volume. I used those too until last month when I visited more recent sites to get some different recipes. They say to use equal parts by weight and those measures by volume are fairly equal by weight. ( I don't imagine a pioneer woman in a sod hut on the prairie used a scale to get weight exactly down to the gram) I like the consistency of that mix better. The flour depends on your taste. AlaMoi used buckwheat. That sounds good. I tend to use all purpose flour because it is neutral compared to others and you can use other flours in your recipe with it if you want something different. I did use instant or rapid rise yeast but now I am trying to develop my skills to handle making more varied recipes using just the starter. In the future, if I need to make bread for an occasion and i absolutely need it done it a couple of hours, I will use the recipe with instant yeast added. I use the starter for the taste and the yeast for dependability. Come to think of it, the two new recipes I tried, used starter and used baking soda and baking powder for the levening. Isn't that more or less the same thing?

@haresfur and others, I did not expect people to want to copy me. I expected a heated discussion calling me names and decrying my methods. I have read that some bakers age their yeast on a regular basis. It gives the bread it makes a more complex flavor. It is not real sourdough but to me it does resemble sourdough very much. I did not mention the details of aging yeast but you should use 1 cup of dechlorinated water at room temperature, 1 1/2 cup flour and 2 tsp. yeast. Every day pour out half and add back the amount of water and flour you discarded, and in three or four days you will have yeast aged enough to use in a sourdough recipe. If you use just flour and water, without yeast, it will start to ferment on its own from natural wild yeast that is present everywhere, in about a week or two and you will have real sourdough starter. Using commercial yeast is a quck start way and some people will tell you it isn't real sourdough but I can't tell much, if any difference and using it with the addition of store-bought yeast will give you a good tasting loaf of bread and be more predictable. @Maison Rustique The first sourdough I got in the mail was dehydrated and it revived well. If you did not use high heat to dry it, it should revive and be as good as before. I kept it alive for sevral years and refrigerated without feeding it very often it when I did not plan to use it again for a while. You can also freeze sourdough starter. Just don't get it hot.

Not copper. The bread pan have is steel. The pictured one was from King Arthur, but I bet you can find one on Amazon for less

@ElsieD Maybe you could try the recipe called King Arthur Flour Rustic Sourdough Bread. It is very reliable and I didn't attempt to keep sourdough going in the last year. What I did was to mix equal amounts of water and flour with a two teaspoons of commercial yeast, feed it for two or three days then use that "aged yeast" in place of actual sourdough in the recipe. It makes good bread. I bake mine on a double French loaf pan and brush them with egg and sprinkle with sesame seeds just before they ot into the oven.PS that recipe also uses store bought yeast to assure a quick and good rise without relying on the sourdough or aged yeast for anything but flavor.

Thank you. Your post made me realize that I forgot to post the recipes for today on the blog. They are there now.

I thought I had been making sourdough bread for around forty years. I thought. Maybe I was fooling myself. The recipe was called King Arthur Flour Rustic Sourdough bread. It says it is sourdough bread and it is from King Arthur Flour for goodness sake. But here is the the problem. The ingredients are sourdough starter, flour, water, salt, and sugar and yeast. Yes store bought yeast. I read somewhere years ago that you can make sourdough starter using store bought yeast because it is a hybrid and cannot reproduce itself in its hybrid form but will revert back to its original wild yeast form. I had heard that when commercial bakeries made sourdough, they used the starter for flavor and regular yeast for dependability. Now I don't know if that is still true today as it might have been a while ago before fast rising yeast was developed. I found conflicting opinions on whether or not that is cheating. If I have sinned, forgive me. I want start doing more stuff with my sourdough starter besides the same loaf I have made since forever. It was easy, dependable and everyone, I mean everyone likes it. Now that sourdough has become popular, there is more information about it out there and also the recipes are easier to find. So I started fermenting flour and water to get 100% wild yeast. I made three starters. One with whole wheat flour, one with AP flour and one with rye flour. They all started and I grew them all for a while. I ended up keeping the rye starter but have been feeding it with AP flour since then, so now it is just white flour starter. In the pictures, the round loaf and the French bread loaf are the same sourdough recipes I have always used but without any yeast other that what was grown in the new starter. The recipe is one cup starter, 1 1/2 C. water, 2 teaspoons saltr, 1 Tablespoon sugar and about 5 cups of bread flour. I say about because, since everything else was measured by volume, 5 cups isn't always exactly enough. This time the dough was a little wetter and stickier than normal which means it had higher hydration and so the air bubbles are a little bigger than before. The round loaf was baked in a preheated cast iron Dutch oven. The recipes for the sourdough apple fritter bread and the sour dough pancakes with the notes and that came with them are at my blog. I am not sure I am allowed to post them here. I think the fritter bread would be improved with the addition of chopped pecans. The blog address is at the bottom of the page. I welcome your thought and comments.

I was going to make these chicken thighs with a garllic and lime butter sauce, but I opened the package as I was getting ready to make it, I discovered that I was given boneless, skinless chicken thighs instead so I had to change plans. Both recipes are together on my blog. This one needed a crispy skin and we had it with baby bok choy, snow peas and rice. The other one was sauteed with wine and vegetables.