Grandma’s Bread (via Uncle John)

With St. Patty’s Day a few days away, thoughts turn to my lovely, enormous Irish family in Chicago and Grandma. She woke up every morning to make this bread for Grandpa. They were married for more than 70 years and passed in their nineties within a year of each other. Grandma didn’t use a recipe, but Uncle John learned how to make it her way, and still does. He graciously gave us this recipe with actual measures, and I’ve only had it come out badly once. I hope that by the time I’m 94, I won’t need the recipe either.

Also, since technically, this is a gardening blog, a reminder: Plant your peas on St. Patrick’s Day before you go to the Parade. You’ll have lots of peas and everyone will be green with jealousy.

“OK, you know how things evolve but let’s try.” -Uncle John

                                      Ma’s  Bread

About 8 cups of unbleached flour
2 cups warm milk (she always used reg milk not 2%- I find no difference)
1 block cake yeast (I find dry yeast is fine)
1 cup raisins
2 and one/half sticks butter (no margarine allowed)
Water as needed
2 tablespoons orange juice
1 pinch of salt
1 tablespoon of sugar
5 tea bags
 
Crumble yeast into one half cup of lukewarm water in which you have added orange juice. Set aside in a warm place and note yeast rising.

Mix a cup of flour into milk and slowly add more flour. Melt 2 sticks of butter in microwave and add to milk flour mix add more flour, sugar, salt and continue mixing. When yeast mix has bubbled up, add to flour mix and continue mixing. I do this by hand and do not use a dough hook. Continue to add flour until mixture has a nice feel. That is it should be smooth, elastic and slightly sticky, not dry. If you need to, add a bit of water to get the right texture.

The amount of flour should not be much over 8 cups if that much.  Next, dump mixture on a floured breadboard. Scrape out every thing from the bowl and add to mix. Put bowl in sink and fill with hot water and let it soak as you will be using the bowl in the next step.

Next start to knead the mixture. You cannot knead too much so go ahead, it is good exercise for your fingers. Press with the heel of your hands and turn over the mass and push it together. Add the raisins as you knead. After about 15 min of good kneading form it in a ball and rub the surface with the  half soft butter stick. Place it on the breadboard and clean out the bowl with warm water. Dry it and rub the inside with the butter stick and place the dough ball in the greased bowl. cover with a dishtowel and place in a warm location (125 degrees max). Next clean up the breadboard and all the mixing tools. Dry the breadboard.

Grease the inside of two loaf pans with the butter sticks. Make a pot of strong black tea. Let it brew for at least 10 min and use a tea cozy to keep it warm. Enjoy the tea after it is brewed. Only use milk and sugar in the tea.  

The first rising will take around 1.5-2.0 hours. Dump the dough on the breadboard and knead it a few times to release the gas. Not too much just a few times. Next, shape it in a flattened ball and cut it in half sealing both halves at the cut. Shape each piece and place in a loaf pan, cover, and put in a warm location for around an hour. Start to heat the oven to 400 degrees.  

Watch the bread rising while you have another cup of tea. It should rise over the top of the loaf pan and bulge out in a nice loaf shape. Carefully, but quickly place both pans in the preheated oven Bake for 15 min at 400 degrees and then reduce the temperature to 375 degrees. Continue for another 30 minutes or so. The loaf sides should shrink away from the sides of the loaf pan and the color should be a golden brown. You can check on the bread’s condition by removing it from the pan. It should just slip out into a towel and if you tap the bottom, it should have a nice hollow sound. If it does pass the sound test place the loaf back into the pan, put it on the top of the oven, and cover it with a towel. Shut off the oven, make some more tea, and let the bread cool for 30 minutes or so. You can also let the loaves cool by removing them from the pans and placing the loaves directly on the grates on the stovetop. Cover loosely with towels.  

After the bread has cooled a bit, rub the top and sides with the butter stick covering the entire surface. All of these times are approximate and as you gain experience, you will find the optimum time and temperature for your particular oven and pan type. Some time for no reason at all, the bread will not rise very well. When this would happen with ma, she would shrug her sholders and say something like “Well, it didn’t rise,” So if it doesn’t rise well you know what to say. Certain things are important, however. These include making lots of strong black tea, only use butter, warm up the milk, do not kill the yeast with hot milk, do not let the bread rise too much (like running over the sides of the pans and falling on the table,) and do not use cream in your tea.  

Serve with butter, black current jelly or jam and strong black tea with milk and sugar.  

Love,    Uncle John

From MF: Uncle John’s note on yeast when I asked him about using cake yeast:  

If you use the orange juice, it usually works. Yeast likes an acid enviornment. Try some of the sugar in the orange water and maybe a teaspoon of flour. Also the yeast water should be lukewarm not cold. geting bread to rise is always the most common problem. I use the whole cake when I get it. it’s hard to find because the dry stuff works so well and has a long shelf life.

(Whole foods and natural food stores carry cake yeast in the dairy area, but check the expiration date: I used expired cake yeast once, and it tasted like someone washed their feet with the dough.-MF)  

Bagel recipe

I’m posting this here because facebook wouldn’t let me post the whole long thing.

Thanks for coming and taking all my stuff! Well, not all of it, but a goodly chunk of it. As a requested, here is my Great Grandpa Abe’s bagel recipe.

• 2 pkg yeast
• 2 cups warm potato water (boil a potato in water and eat it for dinner the night before or for breakfast, but don’t leave the - water on the stove all night as it will get fuzzzunky.)
• 4 eggs
• 1 tbsp salt
• 1 tbsp malt aka barley syrup (or sugar if you must) (at most health food stores)
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil (use decent quality, because you can taste it)

• Approximately 8 cups flour (you must sift the flour: a sieve is easy and fast) (On a damp day you will need more flour)

• 2 egg yolks beaten with 2 tbsp water (I make this one egg at a time, because it gets gooey if it sits on the counter between baking batches)

• Everythings for the tops: sesame seeds, poppy seeds, minced or dried garlic flakes, onion flakes, kosher salt, etc.

Soften yeast in 1/2 cup of potato water (heated to 100 degrees if leftover from the night before).
Beat eggs in a large bowl. Blend in softened yeast, rest of potato water, salt, malt syrup, oil, 2 cups flour.
Stir in rest of flour to make a soft dough.

Knead on a lightly floured board for 10 minutes, adding a little flour to make a firm, but not stiff dough. (I usually leave it a little sticky, and flour only the outside to keep it from sticking to my table.) If you add too much flour, the bagels will be dry and tough inside. Place dough in a greased bowl, cover with a clean dishtowel, and let rise in a warm place until doubled.

Punch down, and knead the dough until it’s smooth and not much more. Again, too much flour and maybe too much kneading makes the bagels tough. (I don’t remember what Grandpa said specifically, but I vaguely remember him cautioning against too much kneading with a dismissive hand wave, as per usual.)

While you form the bagels, bring enough water (dutch oven size pan) to a rolling boil with 1/3 of a cup of malt syrup. (”Enough water” was actually part of Grandpa’s instructions.) The malt syrup seems to make the skins more glossy and nice. Again, sugar is ok, but after using malt syrup today, I’m sold on Grandpa’s method.

This is the part that is more about practice and personal preference than instruction, but I’ll try. Divide the dough into small pieces. My recipe says 32 pieces, but that seems like way too few. I like small bagels for the best ratio of soft innards to crusty outside, and I think we got about 60 or 70 out of the batch today. I think I make my ropes of dough about 4 or 5 inches long. Form each rope into a loop, and don’t just pinch the ends together, they have to be worked together so they’re really one unbroken ring. Otherwise, they’ll come apart in the boil. Let them rise about 10 minutes before boiling, no longer. We learned today that you have to boil them right after forming them, or they over-rise and then get really soggy and gross in the boil.

When you have a rolling boil, drop (gently, no splashing) your bagels into the water. Only put enough bagels in each boiling batch to cover about 2/3 of the water’s surface. They expand in the water, so best to put fewer in than crowd them. If you crowd the bagels (Grandpa’s dismissive hand again), they won’t cook properly and they’ll be doughy and wet inside. After they’ve boiled for 2 minutes, flip them and boil the other side for 3 minutes. This step is something you learn by doing: you are cooking the bagels at this step until they are more firm. I touch the tops in the water to feel when they’re done, but you may develop a better method for you. I ruin plenty of bagels this way, but they always get eaten anyway.

Remove the bagels with slotted spoon to a greased baking sheet. Brush the tops with egg wash, and sprinkle your seeds, salt, garlic, etc on top.

Boil enough bagels to fill a cookie sheet. Bake at 425 for 20 minutes.

While you’re baking one sheet, boil the next batch, and so on, making sure not to let them rise too long.

Gorge yourself on bagel-y goodness and lay on the floor patting your distended belly. A good bagel doesn’t need to be toasted.

Of course, call me with questions.

Superfund not my problem anymore!

We’re moving!

Our new apartment is in a coop building with a ground floor courtyard.
The owners are thrilled that I compost, are happy to let me to lead the composting effort for the building, and are letting me have at the yard to do what I want. They may even pitch in for plants and let me do flowers out front. I think petunias are the best, don’t you?

O happy day!

I’ll do a soil test to make sure 100 years of lead paint haven’t ruined the soil too badly, but I have high hopes, given the 2 miles we’re putting between us and the Gowanus. It’s at the top of the Prospect hill, so nothing’s been rolling down on it for a hundred or more years like the old spot. I will post photos at the beginning of April.

In the meantime, it’s a great time to get your soil tested, and CUNY is now doing it for cheap in the 5 boroughs. I’m pretty sure that students and scientists are using the data for research, which is always nice. Also, their turnaround time is only 2 weeks.

In other news, Wednesday is St. Patty’s Day, which as we know from last year, is Pea Planting Day. I can say with certainty that it was effective to plant that early. I’m gonna put my peas in a little late because of the move, but if you can, plant early. My peas were in containers, and even with a pretty heavy snow after sowing, they were bountiful early.

If urban gardening interests you, check out a video of Leslie’s garden in Braddock, PA. She’s across the street from a steel mill, and has done amazing things designing her garden with Permaculture principles to maximize water retention, etc.

Pass/Fail

The harvest is all in, with the exception of all the delicious herbage and greenery that I am using as cover crops this year due to unknown toxic loads. (Still unable to find a lab willing to do small scale test for under $500.)

Time to evaluate this superweird gardening year in order that next year be more successful. To note, we had a million rainy days this summer, (yes, one million) which mucked up the whole works including washing away the seeds, rotting the seedlings, incubating our largest mosquito population ever, and delaying the warm stuff. I also felt like nothing put down deep enough roots to hold water well, so when the rains slowed, everything wilted in a day. (This is Catscience, so please ignore if it sounds nuts.)

Total harvest was around 100 lbs, so all in all, a good year, with some surprise underdogs. (*=successful plants from last year, repeating this year; **=plants started last year, but squished by cat-love or melted in great seedling death of ‘08)

• Multicolored Pole Beans: WINNER! Multiple poundage, lots of variety. Early plantings rotted, so direct seeded in early May with first harvest 7/4.
• Scarlet Runner Beans: WINNER! Planted 5 year old seed packet, maybe even from my garden in SF (10 years ago). Same as pole beans. NEED MORE SUPPORT, maybe horizontal next year.
• de Bourbonne Pickling Cucumbers: RIP: rain. Direct seeded. They came up (or other variety did), but no fruit. Lots of flowers.
• Little Leaf Cucumbers: RIP: rain Direct seeded. Three stunted, ugly fruit that tasted like soap. Lots of flowers.
• Northern Pickling Cucumber** See notes on other cukes above.
• Red Russian Kale: DANGER/POISON Easy to sow, easy to grow, still going strong and beautiful. The first few harvests were tasty until I learned about danger of cruciferous family taking up toxins.
• Be my Baby Cherry Tomato: RIP: Every last one washed away.
• Genovese Basil* WINNER DANGER POISON. still going strong
• Thai Basil* WINNER DANGER POISON. still going strong
• Borage* WINNER! As noted in prior posts, seedlings easily rot from top watering and torrential rains, but easily recover, self seed and pop up in every crack. Direct seeds were in bloom by mid-June. A happy volunteer that I will gladly host forever. Probably best to tie up because it looks terrible when it falls, and can knock down bean vines because it’s so heavy. First two plants carpeted with aphids, but after a couple weeks, I didn’t see another aphid. There were ants, though, but couldn’t see that they were farming them.
• Flying Saucers Morning Glory RIP: rain. All but one seed rotted, but it was beautiful sprouting out of burned out guitar planter in late August. Blooms were about 4″ across, streaky and stunning.
• Daddy Mix Petunia: RIP: rain
• Pink Wave Petunia: RIP: rain
• Mission Bells California Poppies: RIP: Rain. We do not have this kind of rain in California, and they never popped up at all. So, not poppies but poopies.
• Beneficials Mix (to draw nice bugs): Middling results. These were damned impossible to tell from weeds. Yes I know they’re weeds by another name on purpose, but still… Some pretty pink and white flowers. I noted a couple tiny waspy things on them that weren’t drawn by other flowers, but the bees preferred the borage and lemon balm by far. Bachelor’s buttons included, which I loved. Also, the easternmost bean container’s leaf cutting mystery coincided with emergence of the white tufty flowered plant. Useless info without photos, I know. Next year.
• Black Beauty Zucchini: RIP: rain
• Bouquet Dill* RIP: rain
• Lemon Cucumber* RIP: rain
• Chadwick Cherry** RIP: rain
• Pronto Beet RIP: rain
• Butter & Eggs Marigold** WINNER! One of few plants that survived transplanting. Very leggy, needs to be planted with lower growing ornamentals or basil? Not anything super dense, though, because choked out last year by pink petunias.
• Caserta Zucchini** RIP: rain
• Cascadia Bush Snap Pea** WINNER! Several pounds harvested, DEFINITELY plant on St. Patty’s day. (added note to calendar to remind me every year.) Organic peas never dropped much below $5/lb, so a significant money saver. Plus, they’re delicious.
• Scarlett O’Hara Morning Glory** RIP: rain

Perennials

• Concord Grape: WINNER! Over 40 pounds harvested. 27 pints of grape juice canned! Harvested about a week late due to rain.
• Rosemary Alta: RIP: rain
• Mints: (some survived, not sure which) Only icky mint survived. Bought new one at farmer’s market. WINNER!
• Lavender: (seems to have survived) RIP: rain
• Paul’s Glory Hosta: Still going strong. Not too much blooming because of the rain.
• Chives WINNER! This the first year I cooked with the flowers. Very nice for fancy pasta salad.

New friends:

• Cherry tomatoes: as noted in prior post. Farmer’s market. Lots and lots of pounds. I failed at weighing them, but I would say upwards of 10 lbs, and with organic tomatoes in the $4/lb range because of late blight, definitely a money saver.
• Butternut squash (Volunteer) WINNER! I think this is my favorite argument in favor of composting. I didn’t plant this at all. I will say it’s a descendant of Hubert’s squash because the squashes were nice, but I’ve had other squashes since he forayed to the Golden State, so it’s parentage is in question. That said, 20 lbs of food from a plant that sprung wildly from a garbage heap is pretty f’ing awesome.
• Liriope From the Bronx, a plant with no home. Happy, if a little dry. A little boring, but surprising August/September purple flowers.
• Bleeding Hearts: Also from the Bronx. Transplanted just after bloom, unsure of color/variety. Should come back next year.
• Lemon Balm: another Bronx transplant. Seems invasive, but smells so nice, I don’t mind it yet. Easy to weed. Loved the wet weather, but roots seemed ill suited for dry spells.
• Thyme: DANGER POISON from farmer’s market
• New Rosemary: DANGER POISON

By next year, I hope to have the toxics issue sorted out, but it certainly didn’t make me want to dig around in the Gowanus-tainted dirt. It’s probably mostly fine, but small amounts of PCBs and PAH’s can be very bad for the living, and I’m not a fan of that kind of risk. All in all, very successful in hindsight, though the mosquitoes and potential PCBs made it tricky to work down there. The nice thing about gardening is that next year is only a few months away. I saved a bunch of seeds, which will make next year cheaper.

Grape Harvest!

Several folks have asked why there haven’t been more updates: the skeeters have driven me out of the garden. Even running down with DEET on for two minutes to dump compost and grab as many tomatoes as I can, I get bitten all to hell through my clothes. I seem to be allergic to these f**ers and get quarter-sized lumps from them. Maybe one of those beekeeper outfits would do the trick? Are they mosquito proof?
Totally depressing.

In good news, the rogue squash growing from the compost pile has been identified: it is a butternut squash.

Since I took these photos on Monday, the visible squash is almost full size, though still green. I think we’re gonna be making and freezing butternut ravioli again! Yay! Lowfat, filling and delicious. And cheap. Did I say cheap?

The tomatoes don’t seem to have late blight, but I’m watching them as much as I can. Another pound of tomatoes today, some fugly cucumbers and more beans. The beans have been surprisingly bountiful, and very very pleasing.

And today, the grapes are ready.
Harvested for 20 minutes, lazily in the heavy rain (no mosquitoes) and got 3.5 lbs of grapes. They’re sweet and grapety grapey. In Cat News: Gary is a fan of grape detritus.

I’m gonna see which grapejuice extraction method is going to be best, as the Interweb is divided evenly between juicer and boiling. Then, in the next few days, any and all are welcome to come to my house for harvesting, stemming and canning of grapejuice. Then, popsicles with the new popsicle mold Paul found on the street.

Tomatoes and more rain

Again with the rain. I haven’t needed to even hook up the irrigation system or the rain barrel. This is silly.

Lots of tomatoes ripened in the couple sunny days this week, almost a pound yesterday. Which makes about a pound and a half thus far. The beans have slowed dramatically, and irritating neighbor cut the stray ones back. Grr. I even left him a nice note inviting him to eat the ones that strayed to his side of the fence. What I thought was a volunteer tomato in the kale/bean/borage box is actually a sungold, which must’ve sprouted from a wayward seed from the cold frame when I transplanted the kale. So sad that all the rest of the sungolds washed away, because they’re so delicious.

The kale is taunting me, it is so beautiful, but no soil lab has said they can test for the contaminants at issue, so the kale is just for pretty right now. The herbs don’t scare me as much, which is irrational. Kale is meatier and therefore more likely to be poison?

The basil box is fluffy and prolific, but growth has slowed again with the renewed rainfall.

The borage dropped a lot of seeds when it fell over, and I crawled around on the ground yesterday picking them up. I think I collected almost a full seed packet’s worth. They are pretty and black and ridged. I think by now enough of them have been washed around the yard that next year will have more than three volunteer borage plants. I collected about half a packet’s worth of snap pea seeds, though I’m pretty sure they were a hybrid and won’t come true from seed. It can’t hurt to grow them, now that I know the St. Patty’s planting day secret.

I think this week, I’ll try for a second planting of beans and marigolds.

First Tomatoes!

Two red tomatoes today! Sarah at the store got one, I’ll have the other with dinner.

They’re the ones all the way to the right. I looked at the tag, but forgot the variety on the way upstairs.
I know they’re from Silver Heights Farm Nursery, and that I put them in on Memorial Day. I bought them at Union Square market, and it was the leggiest specimen there.

That seems to be how the plant looks, though. I just looked at the Silver Heights catalog, and think it might be the Silvery Fir Tree Tomato. (All organic nursery! Yay! And lovely ladies working there too.)

Something is eating the leaves of the red flowering beans. I turned over lots of leaves looking for the culprit, but couldn’t find anybody. Lots of cut leaf margins, and a couple vinelets stripped wholly of leaves: could it be ants?

Green beans and PCBeans?

I went to the Center for Urban Pedagogy’s Goo Gone event the other day about the nomination of the Gowanus for Superfund status. Very well presented and attended. It did, however, put the fear into me about toxins that I might inadvertently be putting into my garden.

While my containers are all fresh new soil, I have been composting weeds and giant trees and grape offal that sprout from the actual soil between the cracks in the patio. Calls to CHEJ and a soil lab they recommended up in Boston have eased my mind a little, but they recommended testing for sure. Steven Lester at CHEJ pointed out that the fruits are most likely fine, as plants have a barrier that prevents heavy metals from being taken up from soil and deposited into their fruits, and that the larger molecules of concern (PCB’s and PAH’s, in this neighborhood) are too large to get taken up by most plants. He warned me that there are, however, some plants better at uptake than others. Thus, testing is a good idea, if only because dust and loose stuff from Gowanus could be blowing around the neighborhood.

I hope to hear from the labs on Monday. In the meantime, I will wash all the produce I eat, steer clear of the greens until I know more, and assume the best case.

Half a pound of various beans harvested. Paul has the camera, so no pictures today.
The scarlet runner beans seem to be a different variety than I’ve grown before. Rather than all purple beans, they are green flecked with little purple stripes. I am a fan. The yellow beans (no idea of variety) are long, flat, fuzzy and very sweet. Also, first squash and cucumber blossoms opened today. The spiky vine growing out of the composter identified itself with blossoms today: it’s a squash! Bees were making time with it today, so soon we will know what kind of squashlings have volunteered.

Food Independence Day!

Today’s harvest is the last of the peas, First Beans (!), rosemary, chives and thyme to take to a party. In addition, I’m bringing bounty from the Borough Hall farmer’s market: Eightball Zucchini, sweet potatoes, garlic scapes, red spring onions, beets and more for grilling.

Everything local, and everything gorgeous. I have more pics of yard, but it’s been raining a lot a lot (26 of last 28, I believe). So not much fruit, but much greenery. Hopefully, July will dry out some.

The herb stairs are very pretty, and the Lemon Balm is ready to have balmy babies, so let me know if you want some.
Happy 4th!

Tenderly, tenderly

I was just passing messages back and forth with Christa about hating to harvest. As seen below, my veggies look so happy that I am loathe to bother them.
The Cascadian peas are sweet and dripping with rain:

I don’t know when to harvest the Red Russian Kale, but it looks so pleased next to beany buddies.:

Happily, I need not worry about the tomatoes

or the grapes (which are trying to get into the guitar store) until much later in the season.

Note the bright blue planters that I built. They are made of old shelving units, my former neighbor’s nightstand, and some cedar wainscoting that was on sale for having a ripped package. They are painted with AFM Safecoat Very Low VOC Exterior paint in Cerulean Blue. I love this paint and the people behind it are lovely, upstanding folk who make their product in the US and have gone about it the right way, by not putting any toxic garbage into it. I thought the blue would be very nice against the green, especially once the marigolds and petunias pop up everywhere. So far, not too many flowers, but that will change (I hope).

The grapes flowered last week, (maybe 5/29?) and I believe I am allergic to the pollen, but only sneezy. Hopefully the bees and wasps and whatever pollinates them went nuts, because it has rained most days this week. If we get as many grapes as there were flowers, we will have a bumper crop and possibly, a collapsed grape arbor.

I planted the tomatoes from greenmarket sixpacks on Memorial day. I spent 20 bucks replacing the seeds that didn’t germinate well or don’t grow well from seeds. All told, I believe only $5 of fedco seeds weren’t successful, which is a million-fold increase over last year’s results. (75% have been successful, and wildly so.) Yay Fedco! (To be fair, some of last year’s failures were 100% successful this year with better planting habits and timelines, such as Cascadia Snap Pea from Seeds of Change.) I probably should’ve thinned the peas, but can do next year.

In other big news, the white Bleeding Heart plant that I rescued from a garden project in the Bronx has come back from the dead. Good to know, as it was totally flattened by the wind in the back of the truck. It resprouted all over the place, and should be healthy enough to put in a prettier container soon.
The Liriope and Lemon balm looked good the next day, but I knew they would be forgiving.

Next week I will post pictures of the Herb Stairs I made, as well as the rain barrel which I am acquiring from NYC DEP’s Rain Barrel program. If you are at all intimidated by rain barrels, I assure you they are easy peasy pie, and only make your life better and cheaper. I hooked up (and will again) connect a drip system to it, which makes your life even more betterer and cheaperer.

I am off to harvest, tenderly and lovingly, some mint and peas for dinner. Maybe we’ll have Kale too!