a rhino walks

Books I've Read in 2010

2010-03-09T20:50:31Z

In 2009, I finally completed my 52 book challenge. Not only that, I read twice as many books as in 2008. For 2010, at the moment at least, I don't have a specific goal. I will continue to keep track of my books read as I finish them.

Total pages read: 4,388
Shortest book: 192 pages
Longest book: 350 pages
Fiction: 1
Non-fiction: 11
Cookbook: 5

Last book read:
17. How (Not) To Speak of God by Peter Rollins. A theological look at post modern Christianity and why a conflicting ideas may not be a bad thing. 144 pages. (Finished 9 Mar 10).

Full list below the cut:

Past Lists:
2009 List
2008 List
2007 List
]]> Books I've Read in 2010:

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: a memoir by Haruki Murakami. Murakami reflects on the lessons learned while running and while writing. How both activities have taught him things about himself, the art of running, and the art of writing. 192 pages. (Finished 3 Jan 10).
The Half-Life by Jonathan Raymond. The story of two men in the 1820's and two girls in the 1980's. How they became friends and how their two stories intersect. 350 pages. (Finished 5 Jan 10).
The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar Capon. An amateur cook (and Episcopal Priest) writes a mediation on the simple spirituality of cooking. 273 pages. (Finished 13 Jan 10).
Cooking from the Coast to the Cascades by the Junior League of Eugene. A cookbook featuring recipes inspired by life in Western Oregon. 224 pages. (Finished 15 Jan 10).
Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession by Julie Powell. The story of her apprenticeship to become a butcher, and the marital problems that inspired her apprenticeship. 288 pages. (Finished 19 Jan 10).
Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman. A collection of essays about pop culture and society. 256 pages. (Finished 25 Jan 10).
The Book of Whole Meals: A Seasonal Guide to Assembling Balanced Vegetarian Breakfasts, Lunches, and Dinners by Annemarie Colbin. This was a find at Bart's Books in Ojai, a locally famous outdoor bookstore. Vegetarian recipes with a whole grain focus and a slight Asian influence. 240 pages. (Finished 31 Jan 10).
The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions by Winifred Gallagher. The title pretty much sums it up. A really interesting look at how our surroundings affect us, in surprising ways. 256 pages. (Finished 2 Feb 10).
Winemaking: Recipes, Equipment, and Techniques For Making Wine at Home by Stanley F. Anderson & Dorothy Anderson. A book about making wine at home. 304 pages. (Finished 2 Feb 10).
News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez. The story of the kidnapping of 10 prominent Colombian journalists in the lead up to the surrender of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. 291 pages. (Finished 15 Feb 10).
Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice by Alissa Hamilton. A look at the Florida Orange Juice industry, the standardization of orange juice, and what you are really buying at the store. 288 pages. (Finished 18 Feb 10).
Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter. A child of hippies moves into a run down section of Oakland and builds a farm on the vacant lot next to her (and her boyfriend's) apartment. 288 pages. (Finished 23 Feb 10).
Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods by Sandor Ellix Katz. A book about the benefits and the art of fermenting foods, with plenty of recipes. 200 pages. (Finished 25 Feb 10).
Jesus Freak: Feeding Healing Raising the Dead by Sara Miles. A book with a radical call to be like Jesus. The book my community (and church) is reading for lent as we give up God for lent. 208 pages. (Finished 25 Feb 10).
Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan. A journey of eating and rediscovering native foods within 250 miles of his desert home in near Tucson, AZ for a year. 330 pages. (Finished 4 Mar 10).
The Southern Italian Table: Authentic Tastes From Traditional Kitchens by Arthur Schwartz. My third KCRW cookbook club selection. 256 pages. (Finished 6 Mar 10).
How (Not) To Speak of God by Peter Rollins. A theological look at post modern Christianity and why a conflicting ideas may not be a bad thing. 144 pages. (Finished 9 Mar 10).

Bagels

2010-03-07T05:18:36Z

When I mentioned to folks at work that I was planning on making bagels a few weeks ago, I got a look like I was going to try to reinvent the wheel. Of course they all wanted to try them as well.

The "classic" bagel, made most famous by the Jewish bakers of NYC, is boiled for a short time before baking. The BBA bagel formula takes this style of bagel as its inspiration and adds a sponge to get the fermentation process going earlier. Like most of the formulas in the BBA, this is a 2 day process. Unlike the other 2 day breads I've made so far, you get to do most of the work on day 1 for the bagels.

The bagel dough is very stiff, so stiff that the formula recommends mixing and kneading by hand (so as not to endanger your stand mixer). That of course is a non-issue for me as I don't have a stand mixer to use anyway. After mixing up the dough, you actually get to shape the bagels before putting them in the refrigerator overnight to retard.

On day 2 its time to boil and bake the bagels. I boiled 3 bagels at a time for a minute on each side. After I had boiled enough to fill a sheet pan, I placed them in the oven per the instructions. I think for my oven, I needed to bake them longer than I ended up doing. My bagels didn't get that nice golden brown color on the top. They were fully baked through the inside however. I sampled my first bagel when it was still slightly warm and it was good. However, the texture and the flavor of these were much better after they had fully cooled.

Oh and those folks at work? They liked the homemade bagels.

Giving up God

2010-02-24T15:40:57Z

The thing that sucks about being a Christian is that God actually lives in other people.
-- Sara Miles in Jesus Freak:Feeding Healing Raising the Dead

The community I am a part of is giving up God for Lent. No, we haven't all decided to give up church for hedonistic pleasures. What we are doing is giving up our notions of who (or what) God is. The goal? To be open to new ways God can manifest in our lives. As part of this exercise, our 10:15 community (along with the rest of the parish) is reading the book quoted above. Unfortunately, because of a prior commitment, I won't be able to participate in the discussions. It's going to be an interesting read (and Lent) based on the quote above from the books introduction.

Italian Bread

2010-02-10T17:31:35Z

Diving back into the BBA Challenge, I started a biga on Monday night. This was the only one of the 3 pre-ferments in the BBA that I had not used yet. As this is an Italian style pre-ferment, I chose to make the Italian Bread.

Italian Bread is similar to a French Bread, but with a few extra ingredients. This dough is enriched with oil, sugar, and dry malt extract (which I happened to have due to my trip to the home brew supply store for beer ingredients last weekend).

As always, I kneaded by hand. I'm really starting to want to take a class on breadmaking. I feel like I'm always adding a bunch of extra flour to my dough to get to a tacky but not sticky dough. I also don't think I'm always passing the "window pane" test. I do get a little window pane...but it also tears pretty easily as well. The dough was within the right temperature range when I left it to ferment. The other reason I'd like to take a class, is to work on my shaping. One of these loaves ended up pretty close to what it was supposed to look like, but the other i didn't quite get my edge sealed so I had a little edge on one side of the loaf.

Super Bowl!

2010-02-08T05:18:02Z

What a great game! Sure I was excited that the Saints won, but even if the Colts had won, it would have been an enjoyable game to watch.

One thing that surprised me was how disappointing the commercials were this year. Not really a stand out among any of them. For as much money as these companies are spending on these things, put a little work into them. I did however have two interesting connections to commercials this year.

First, the main guy in this Budweiser spot goes to my church...in fact my girlfriend and I sat next to him and his wife this morning:

And in this spot, one of my friends from church in High School is mentioned by name (turns out the writer of the spot is a buddy of his):

French Bread

2010-01-24T20:04:33Z

French baguettes are going to take some practice. While the bread tastes fine, it doesn't have the gassy texture you should have with a good baguette. Also my scoring lines were apparently not deep enough, as the bread didn't crack on them. This however my first attempt at hearth style baking in my oven. I cooked these on my pre-heated round pizza stone, which is why two of the loaves are shorter than the third. Maybe the next time I attempt this formula, I'll have a rectangular stone, so all three loaves can be equal.

Kaiser Rolls

2010-01-24T15:12:35Z

My journey through the Bread Baker's Apprentice continues with Kaiser Rolls (inspired by the pictures of Pinch My Salt and What We're Eating's Pulled Pork on Kaiser Rolls). I considered substituting brown sugar (per the advice of Pinch My Salt) as I was having a hard time finding barley extract powder or barley malt syrup at the store. When I found it, I wasn't sure I wanted to spend $5.99 on a 16oz jar of which I only needed 1 1/2 teaspoons of. But in the end I decided to splurge and get it (figuring I could use it the next time I make the Anadama Bread for instance).

My second bump in the road making these rolls, was that I didn't have a spray bottle. This was needed both for creating a little steam in the oven at the beginning of baking and for putting on the seeds on the tops of the rolls. I ended up using flax seeds instead of the more traditional sesame or poppy seeds. They fell off the finished rolls easier than I think the sesame or poppy seeds would have, but they still tasted good.

I made these in mind of using for buns for bison burgers. To match the size of the rolls, I made my patties a little smaller than normal, between a "slider" sized patty and a regular sized patty. The burgers were kept pretty simple with a single slice of provolone and a piece of lettuce. They definitely made a tasty MLKjr Day dinner.

Anadama Bread

2010-01-23T16:15:50Z

This bread is described by Peter Reinhart as one of the great New England breads. The story he relates to the name of the bread is the story of a man who's wife has left him, leaving behind only a pot of cornmeal mush and some molasses. He mixes that together along with some yeast and flour and mutters "Anna, damn 'er!" It later gets amended to the more genteel "anadama"

For this bread, I used agave syrup instead of the molasses (I had the agave syrup and not the molasses). It made for very nice sandwich bread, I had roast beef and provolone sandwiches for my lunch for a couple days with this bread. The next time I make this bread, I think I'll replace the molasses with the barley syrup I bought for the next bread I'll be posting about.

Mesquite Chocolate Chip Cookies

2010-01-22T23:02:15Z

I've had the Super Natural Cooking cookbook by Heidi Swanson (of 101 Cookbooks) for a few years now. One of the recipes that I marked right away was this cookie recipe. The only thing holding up a batch of these cookies however was getting some Mesquite flour. Mesquite flour is made from the pods of the Mesquite (not the wood) which is ground up into a flour or meal. Of course in the book there are resources on where to order it online, but I never got around to doing that.

This year, as part of my Christmas present, my girlfriend gave me a half pound of Mesquite flour from the Arizona Mesquite Company. So it was finally time to make the cookies. Baking with the mesquite flour was fun. The flour is very aromatic, and while its only a fraction of the flour in these cookies, you can definitely smell its there. There was one casualty while baking these cookies though. Breaking from my normal routine of only mixing by hand, I pulled out the electric hand mixer. Just as I was about done mixing there was a spark and smoke from the inside of the mixer. The mixer alas had mixed its last. I guess that's what I get for trying to use technology while baking. In the end it was worth it though...these cookies were quite good.

So. Cal. Rain

2010-01-22T19:44:58Z

Even the Pidgins don't like the rain in So. Cal. Its been raining all week in LA. And not just the normal barely a shower type of rain, but close to a half of a years average rain fall in a week kind of rain. Lots of streets have flooded and mud slides are happening all over the fire ravaged mountains on the east side of LA. A little rain is good (at least in my opinion), but the rain we've had this week is a little more than the environment can handle down here. Most of it is just going to run off down the river beds into the ocean and not help the drought conditions anyway.

Why ya gotta be H8N?

2010-01-20T21:21:50Z

Seen on the 101 in Thousand Oaks, originally uploaded by rhinoblues.

UCLA H8NUSC

No-Knead Bread

2010-01-15T19:45:54Z

In the midst of starting to bake through the recipes of the Bread Baker's Apprentice, I received my second KCRW Cookbook Club Selection, My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method by Jim Lahey. As I was planning on getting my dutch oven out of storage in Oregon anyway, the bread that inspired this cookbook was very enticing.

I actually ended up making this bread twice before I was satisfied with it enough to post pictures of it. The first time I made it, I used the same flour I mentioned in my focaccia post, a freshly ground hard red wheat. I think there were a couple of factors contributing to that bread not turning out as well as I'd have liked. First, I probably needed a little bit more water in the dough to let the yeast fully do its stuff. The other problem, the temperature of my parents house. My parents have one of those fancy programmable thermostats, and as there isn't normally anyone home during the day on weekdays, it was set somewhere in the 60s. This also being a house I've never lived in, I didn't know where the thermostat was to bump it up to a more normal temperature. That loaf of bread ended up tasting ok, but it was a little dense and smaller than I expected.

Upon returning to LA, I had to try again, this time using actual bread flour instead of the fresh ground red wheat. The dough definitely ended up doing a better job of fermenting this time and the size while still a little smaller than I expected was better as well. I also didn't get it quite shaped in a perfect round, so it looks a little like a waning moon.

After cutting into the bread, I was quite pleased to find the nice gaseous holes that were supposed to be there (and weren't really there in my first attempt with the hard red wheat).

The bread wasn't quite as tall as I expected it to be, but when I went back and looked at the pictures in the book, it was pretty comparable to the loaf there. I was quite happy with the results (and it was wonderful dipped in the Roasted Garlic Rosemary Dipping Oil from the Olive Pit).

Intern intentionality

2010-01-07T21:47:24Z

While looking for information on a different non-profit service org today, I came across the new site of the Episcopal Urban Intern Program (EUIP). For those of you that don't know, applying to the EUIP in 2007 led to me moving down to Los Angeles in August of 2007, though not as a participant in the EUIP. One of the reasons I wasn't selected was because of my age. The EUIP is designed for folks approx 20-30 years old. I was turning 31 in Auguest of 2007 (when it would have begun). The program directors job was to choose good candidates who would have a good shot of forming a good community. The interns that were selected were all between 21 and 24 that year (if I remember correctly). I knew when I applied though, that I was pushing the age range, so I wasn't too bummed out. Plus I ended up getting offered a different opportunity to intern in Los Angeles through the Episcopal Church. While that internship didn't end up working out as well as I'd hoped it would, it was still a valuable experience for me.

This year, another one of my friends was accepted into a new intern program affiliated with the Campus Ministry at Cal State - Channel Islands...the Abundant Table Farm Project. She luckily still fit under the 30 yr old ceiling most of the intern programs have.

Anyway, all this got me thinking about those of us in our 30s or 40s (or more) that are searching for ourselves, our spirituality, our intentionality. Where can we participate in these kind of things? I know my age group is more likely to be more settled into family life or a career (though maybe less so into careers in the current state of the economy), but there are many of us that are still searching for our vocation...or a vocational change. Where do we go to find our community now that we are out of school?

I think this is something that I'll add to my list to explore in the next year.

Focaccia

2010-01-07T19:05:36Z

Since I figured I'd have some spare time, I brought my copy of the Bread Baker's Apprentice with me while visiting my parents over Christmas. On the drive up to Oregon from LA, a stop in Corning at the Olive Pit inspired my third bread from BBA. (That and the memory of Nicole's focaccia.) The Olive Pit's Roasted Garlic Rosemary Dipping Oil was just perfect for the herbed oil called for in the recipe.

When I hit up the local grocery store (Market of Choice) to get some bread flour, I discovered something I'd never seen before. In the bulk section, they had a machine full of wheat berries that would be freshly ground into flour. Pretty much exactly like the more common fresh peanut butter machines, just for flour. So I got a bag and set into filling it with around 4 pounds of freshly ground hard red wheat flour.

This was another two day bread, that started with making a poolish. The poolish is a starter that you allow to ferment ahead of time to get nice start on long strands of gluten. Because I was using whole wheat flour, without any of the normal bread flour additions, I gave my poolish a little more time than normal. It also probably could have used a little more water for the yeast to work with. Nonetheless, the bread ended up turning out pretty good. It might have been a little denser then it would have been if I had used bread flour, but it was a big hit with the family.

just out of the oven

cut and ready to eat

Cornbread (and Bison Chili)

2010-01-06T22:06:22Z

The success of the Homemade English Muffins, had me wanting to explore the Bread Baker's Apprentice even more. It being winter (a relative term in Southern California), a dinner of Chili and Cornbread seemed like a good idea. The BBA cornbread is no Jiffy Mix cornbread though. It takes 2 days to make and has a special ingredient full of win. Yes, the love of hipsters from SE Portland to Williamsburg, Brooklyn...Bacon!

The night before baking, I started a soaker of polenta and buttermilk. After soaking overnight the rest of the ingredients are mixed together and crumbled on top, 10 slices of thick cut bacon.

In the spirit of trying to eat locally and ethically, I picked up a pound of ground bison at the Hollywood Farmers Market. With this I made a simple red bean and meat chili to have alongside the cornbread. Both were excellent, especially as leftovers the next couple days (though the chili did outlast the cornbread).

I made this almost a month ago, so unfortunately the details of the cooking/baking are a little short.