Pancake Days

I've been dealing with sourdough for a few months now. Dealing... not in a bad way... rather like how one might say one has been "dealing" with Spike Jonze for a few months now. Which is to say this deal is super good and exciting and is producing consistently surprising and delightful results.

This is wild yeast sourdough I'm talking about. The world's easiest party trick. You don't need to buy yeast from a store, and you don't need to have children*. You can do it all with just a bowl o flour and water. Just add a cup of flour and a cup of water (I initially started mine with raw milk but later read that's not the best idea, as the enzymes will compete and the starter will be stymied by internal conflict) and leave it out a couple days and your very own local yeast will settle in and colonize that shit. Then you can do whatever with it. Keep it in the fridge and take it out to make bread, pancakes, pizza dough, whatever; or you can pamper it, cook with it every day, feed it obsessively, give it all kinds of special grains and treats... There are many books on the subject. One of the first I found that gave significant ink to wild yeast was The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. The cover of that book features what is surely an unfathomably proud and skilled young baker cradling a great big loaf of what turns out to be a rustic wild yeast sourdough bread, made from a really complicated starter. So there's that. Also excellent is Forgotten Skills Of Cooking by Darina Allen which contains an excellent and relatively simple recipe that inspired my early attempts at crafting sourdough loaves. The book I got my basic starter concept from was A World Of Breads by Dolores Casella which is older but hey, it was already in the kitchen! Dolores was the first to tell me "hey girl, just put flour and water together." No doubt the more complicated recipes produce enviable starters, but I'm starting simple so I can learn. And I think I'm getting better and better results the longer my starter endures.

Today I made pancakes. It was one of the most restful experiences of recent memory.

I started the batter last night (along with some bread dough for what is shaping up to be a pretty keen loaf of bread; more on that later on. It's still rising) using my grandpa's recipe. I always end up modifying and fudging recipes, and Grandpa and I also use different starters. His pancakes were usually made with white flour, and I use wheat. For this batch I used the gaspingly cheap Nebraska-grown wheat flour from Open Harvest Organic Grocery or whatever they currently call themselves, a nice if increasingly starbucksy co-op type grocery store here in Lincoln that has all the delicious stuff. I used to work for them and they are basically the only decent employer in town, but the capitalism train is on its way to its final derailment, and they're just getting on board. Digression!

So To Make The Pancakes
(it couldn't be simpler)
Mix a cup of starter, 2 cups warm water and 2 1/2 cups flour in a large bowl, mix it up and let it sit overnight.
The next day it's all bubbly and lively and exciting. You will want to take out one cup of that wonderful stuff and give it back to your starter, as a way of saying thank you. You can also feed starters on just fresh water and flour but this is better. I'm not 100% sure why, but it makes intuitive sense...?

Next, add to your pancake batter:
one egg,
2 T oil (or butter) (I didn't exactly measure, just melted some in a skillet which turned out to be a good way to prep the skillet for frying the pancakes)
1/4 cup buttermilk (or dry milk or regular milk; Grandpa's recipe calls for dry but I have never done it that way. Today I used buttermilk)

Beat thoroughly.

Next I combined a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of baking soda and dumped it in and stirred it up. Effervescence occurs. I added roughly 2 T of honey, also.

The batter can now rest while your skillet heats up, and once it's ready you just pour out your batter as desired, and cook those pancakes.

In our household they're known as No-Coast Westie Cakes, but since yours will be made with your own local wild yeast and your own local flour and water and your own random variations, name yours whatever you want. Be proud.

In my ignorance I can't be sure why today's cakes were the best I've ever done, but here are some theories:

• that little cast iron skillet
• medium-low heat and patience
• that butter (homemade, very nice, see below)
• that buttermilk (byproduct of butter making)
• the flour I used seems to be pretty good, as the bread I made from it is looking good, too. But I'm getting ahead of myself there.

 (butter)

*why raise one human child when you can have a quiet, stationary, unassuming jar full of BILLIONS OF SINGLE CELLED LIFE FORMS which you can care for without the pesky interference of local and state governments.

The mission continues!

Thank you to Joseph's mum MareJohn for the beautiful new header! Now everyone will know we mean business! And have loving mums! Which we do.

I just thought I, Rachel, would step in for a moment and talk a little bit about our plans for this blog. It came into being one afternoon when an unexpected lens flare made us feel like culinary geniuses (which we are, obvs) and Joseph found himself spending the afternoon expressing the fullness of what his lunch meant to him. This is all par for the course in our relationship.

However, we are both recovering computer addicts (it is a real problem; if you're reading this you probably have it too. Sorry) and had to quickly say to each other Wait, hang on, let's not go nuts.

We might never update this blog again.

To plan to do so could easily come to mean looking at every meal, every eggplant or zucchini or loaf of bread, every precious cooking experience, with an editorial eye rather than a hungry/artistic stomach. So you're only going to see things here that turned out exceptionally well, and things we got really good pictures of. We can't predict that. We can't make it happen. We can only be prepared.


For now, here's a quick opinion from me, and a picture of some eggplants we bought on a gleaming golden Sunday morning at the farmer's market.

You can't have your eggplants and your ratatouille, too.

On The Virtues Of Drinking Out Of The Bottle

We here at The Dinal Frontier like wine very much. I wouldn't say we're experts, but I wouldn't say we're NOT experts, either. Just because we generally buy and consume whatever the local grocery store has on hand for $3 (all vineyards exploit migrant workers, "3 Buck Chuck" is just the one where we know someone died. In our defense we still generally eschew Trader Joe's, if nothing else because it's too far away from our house. Digression!) doesn't mean we don't occasionally sample and appreciate the finer things.

We recently noticed an odd effect, however.  You know how the wine's always gone? Well, have you ever tried drinking it pirate-style, straight from the bottle, rather than pouring yourself a big ol' easily quaffed goblet full? 

Maybe our sipping style is a bit more modest than the average pirate, and maybe we tend to be overenthusiastic when we do use glassware, but we've found we actually drink way less when we don't pre-ration ourselves a third of the bottle straight off. So if you aren't afraid of cooties or being judged, I think you'll find yourself drinking as much wine as you really want, and no more. Plus it's more fun.

Later perhaps Joseph will follow up with an essay in defense of eating with your hands. Starting to get the picture? The future is now.

Late Summer Mishity-Mash Eat Some Yeah

The "Late Summer Mishity-Mash Eat Some Yeah" is the name of the pictured dish, and oh yeah, one wants to eat some. It's just so good, I can't believe I'm here in this place, at this time. This food turns me into Carl Sagan, all thinking about my place in the universe, observing the miracle of nature, and then eating most of it. But oh! That's totally okay, because the food becomes a part of me, and I am a part of it, I am food cooking itself, the iron in my blood was formed in the heart of a red giant star, and the ancient Hindus knew exactly how old the universe was, and that Greek guy, Eratosthenes, who figured out how big the Earth is by hiring a guy to walk to Syene because what else did he have to do back then. You've seen Cosmos, you know what I mean.

Eating this food, you might emerge somewhere else in space, somewhen else in time. I started with the last of the latest batch of butter. It is homemade, but I used a mixer because if we're going to live in an industrial model, we might as well have some practical benefits. The cream is from a very nice lady who is the best at dairy. Bring your dairy game. But be careful. Josie might embarrass you. This cream is nuts, I have to chisel it out of the jar and I get like half cup of buttermilk from 2 quarts of cream. It is outrageously thick and I won't do grocery store butter again if I can help it. I chopped up some garlic into the butter, so when it melts in the fry pan, bam, you've got garlic. Thanks, Last Month Me for chopping all that garlic, back then. All the doing of garlic is done, and it doesn't even matter anymore.

Then! I add olive oil, because mixing butter and olive oil is the way to go, and I owe the idea to Nina Planck in "Real Food." I owe my life to Nina Planck. Without her, I would've died of an overdose years ago. Just kidding, I don't know Nina Planck, and I'm not interesting enough to have a heroin addiction.

So at this point I made the one move on this dish that I wish I could take back. I added the hot pepper (cherry bomb) in with the potatoes (yukon gold). I feel that I lost both the heat and the flavor of the c-bomb to a too-long cooking time. No use crying over spilled raw, unpasteurized milk bought in an environment that feels like a drug deal.

I covered and simmered while I chopped up stew meat into something resembling a fajita cut. Maybe someone can tell me why that's crazy. I'm sure someone can. But I can't find hanger or skirt steaks here off grassfed cattle here in Lincoln, Nebraska of all places. I suppose what I should do is buy a deep freeze and a steer, but my last job I made $2.50, which might be illegal...in EUROPE, but not in these United States. Digression!

So I chopped that stew meat up finely, oh yes, oh so finely until it was kind of like those thin strips of meat you see in fajitas. These meats are then placed on top of the tater and pepper mixture. And now I'm getting HUNGRY, but there's nothing I can do, and I'm past eating off the week and a half old fast food pizza in the fridge, because I'm a grownup.

At this point, I chop up a yellow onion, an orange sweet pepper, and a tomato (Jubilee). My friend who gave me the tomato to try works at the Old Cheney Farmer's Market booth for an amazing organization here in Lincoln called Community CROPS. They're good people doing really good work. They take low-income, beginning, and immigrant farmers and work with them on land and education, where these fine farmers go on to grow things that aren't silage corn and soybeans. Everyone wins.

So the meat is browned, the taters are crispy, and the hot peppers are black. I make a space in the center of the pan, where, using Science, I calculate the hottest place will be. Here I crack three eggs. I cover. I wait for the yoke to get covered with that translucent film. I flip. Flip. Now I add the onion, sweet pepper, and I make a little space for the skin of the tomatoes to come in contact with the pan, so they'll get that roasty blackened skin. Yes. Yes!

So I cover this briefly. In the past I have cooked onions and sweet peppers too long, just like I just did with the hot pepper. Those days are over! I steam them this time until they're just a little cooked, you know? The onions still have a little sulfur in the final product, and the peppers are still a little sweet, like the God of Philip K. Dick intended, before blasting you in the forehead with a pink light of flavor called the Late Summer Mishity-Mash Eat Some Yeah:

Not pictured are the Jubilees, a very tasty, low acid tomato. Also, a secret nuclear weapon of a sourdough buttermilk pancake called a No-Coast Westie Cake. I heated a cold one up on the skillet between the first and second serving. Maybe its creator, my friend and partner and all-around dynamite dame will come around later and tell you all about it. Pictured, but not credited is some cilantro grown by another CROPS friend. Don't ask me how he's growing cilantro in this heat. Maybe he bought them at Hy-Vee? No way, that dude quit banking to grow food. He believes.

Everything is local except for the olive oil. Here's to hoping global warming turns Nebraska into USDA Zone 11, and we can do it Alice Waters-style here on the prairie.