Goth Panda

So this cooking adventure started at Panera. I had their tomato and mozzarella panini a few weeks ago, and I thought, I could make this at home if I had the right sundried tomato pesto spread. The rest of the ingredients are simple.

But I had a hard time finding the kind of recipe I wanted. Most sundried tomato spread recipes were based on cream cheese, which sounds delicious also, but wasn’t what I was looking for. And then there were some that were more pesto-y, with a lot of olive oil, which would be perfect for pasta, but I wasn’t sure how they would work on bread as a sandwich spread.

I finally found something like what I was looking for on a website called Kalyn’s Kitchen.

You need fresh parsley and basil. The recipe didn’t specify, so I used curly leaf parsley. Is there a big difference between varieties of parsley?

Here is where I admit that I am not at all used to using fresh herbs. I have no idea what the best way is to chop, dice, mince, tear, or otherwise properly process them. And to tell you the truth, I am a little afraid of them. So I just kind of roughly chopped them up and figured I could put them in the Cuisinart a step ahead, with the garlic, and let the food processor do the processing. That is, after all, its job title.

Here’s my six cloves of garlic:

And here’s everything chopped up.

At this point, I added the sundried tomatoes. I just threw the whole jar in and didn’t bother draining the oil.

One did not want to join the group, but was eventually persuaded.

Sundried tomatoes may be my favorite kind of tomatoes.

Added two cups of parmesan cheese. I used the cheap stuff, because two cups of the good stuff would have cost $40.

I needed some lemon juice, which I squeezed ineptly by hand.

And then I processed it all up.

This made a ton. I will have to remember to halve this recipe in the future.

In the meantime, if anyone I know would like some sundried tomato pesto spread, you are welcome to come over to my house with a container and take some. It is supposed to be good for up to a month in the refrigerator. You can put it on sandwiches, or pasta, or eat it on crackers. You could probably use it to top some meat products, but I wouldn’t know anything about that.

I put it on sandwiches. This is store-bought sourdough bread (since my sourdough weekend experiment was not successful), brushed with olive oil, with mozzarella and the sundried tomato pesto spread on the inside. And it was good.

Holy crap, people, that is the worst-looking loaf of bread I have ever pulled out of my oven and sliced open with a knife.

When I heard that Mike was going to be away for this past weekend, I thought two things. First, I need to come up with some girly stuff to do since I am usually not doing any girly stuff. Second, I should make that long and complicated sourdough bread recipe in Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Bread Bible. Because Mike wouldn’t be around to try and get me to do other things that would interfere with the bread schedule. Because the bread schedule was long and onerous.

It started last week when I converted my liquid sourdough starter to a stiff starter at her urging.

I got this sourdough starter from King Arthur Flour, and if you think I didn’t also get the matching sourdough starter crock, then you haven’t been reading this website for very long.

Then on Saturday, I got up early and fed and divided my starter and let it rise. Then I fed it again and let it rise. Then I fed it again and let it rise. Then I refrigerated it overnight.

By the way, I have photos of all of this, but I am so depressed by the end result that I don’t have the will to post them.

So Sunday morning, I mix the dough, rest the dough, mix in the sourdough starter, let it rise for an hour, fold it, let it rise for another hour, fold it, and then let it rise for until doubled. This is supposed to take four to five hours, but it is hot on Sunday, and it is doubled after three. This may be important for the final result.

I shape the dough (badly) and set it to rise while I go pick up Mike and Zac from the airport. Now, I am only supposed to let it rise here for 3 to 4 hours (again, in a hot kitchen), but it ended up being more like four and a half. Important? I don’t know.

I think the most important thing, from my internet investigations, is the oven temperature. She says to start it at 475 and then turn it down to 450 after 5 minutes and to bake for a total of 25 to 30 minutes. Now before it was even 25 minutes, I took it out and it was more than hot enough on the inside, and the outside was dark and the bottom was burnt! I think this temperature must be wrong; trying to figure out what went wrong, I read today on the internet that too high an oven temperature can cause that separation of crust from crumb. And my other recipes for these kinds of breads are around 400 degrees. So if I do this again, I will definitely bake at a lower temperature.

It was very disappointing because I had sandwich plans for this bread, and after all the work that went into it, I was very invested. Also, I tasted the inside and it was really good, with a strong sour taste that my other sourdoughs had not had, probably because of all the feedings and risings. So I have been defeated temporarily, but I plan to make a triumphant comeback. Just as soon as I recover.

This may sound like a strange thing to say coming from a person who posts photos of her food creations on the internets, but I don’t consider myself a really good cook. I think of myself more as a person who in most instances can successfully follow a recipe.

I think I associate being a good cook with my mom, who can whip up crazy made-up recipes out of whatever she happens to have in the house. I am not like that. I need a recipe to start with. I may alter the recipe, add or change ingredients, but I need a basic roadmap.

So although I “made up” this recipe, it is really based on a standard recipe for enchiladas that I have used in the past. The only thing I made up about it was the filling, and that was only because I had leftover queso sauce that I didn’t want to go to waste. It is lucky that this happened, though, because these are seriously good enchiladas. And I liked the recipe so much that I later went back and made it again, without the leftovers. Or rather, by deliberately making the leftovers. Do you know what I mean?

So the original recipe was a King Arthur Flour (again!) recipe for Crunchy Cornmeal Waffles with Chili Con Queso sauce, and the queso sauce was the crucial leftover. So I made a batch. Oh, and I left out the spinach. You could use the spinach, but I am not a fan of the spinach.

So I started by shredding my cheese with one of my favorite kitchen appliances:

Every time I shred cheese with the Cuisinart I wonder why I bother buying pre-shredded cheese. Because this is so quick and yummy to shred your own. But still! I do.

Here are my other ingredients:

Basically you heat up the cheddar and the cream cheese and the salsa over very low heat, and then add the scallions.

I don’t think my photos are truly conveying the yumminess here, so you’ll have to trust me.

I made the queso a day before, so that it would be easier to scoop into the tortillas. One of the main benefits of using queso instead of just shredded cheese, like I had before for enchiladas, is that the chilled queso helps the enchilada stick together and stay rolled up.

So the next day I made the enchilada sauce:

I used an easy recipe I got off the internet (I don’t remember where). You take two tablespoons of vegetable oil, and heat over medium heat. Then add two tablespoons flour and two tablespoons chili powder and cook that for a minute. Then add 8 oz of tomato sauce and two cups of water, one teaspoon salt and one-half teaspoon garlic powder. Bring everything to a boil and then simmer for 10 minutes. This makes 3 cups of sauce, which is a lot of sauce.

So now it’s time to roll them up. Take your tortillas:

Add your queso. I use 2 teaspoons with my cookie scoop. I aim for one ounce of queso per enchilada, so you can adjust the queso recipe for the number of enchiladas you are making. Or you can just have leftover queso, which is always a good thing.

Then I added some black beans:

And some corn:

Then I rolled them up and put them in a pan, and covered them with the sauce. I topped them with some extra cheddar cheese, covered with foil and baked at 350 for twenty minutes, then uncovered and baked another ten.

Yum! Good stuff. These photos are making me feel better after this past Weekend of Kitchen Disasters. More on that soon.

This is another KAF-inspired recipe, since it came with a burger roll pan I bought from them. Please don’t ask me why I bought it. It’s better for everyone concerned. Especially since you don’t need the pan to make the rolls. I’m pretty sure you could just bake them spread out on a sheet pan or something.

I was all set to start the recipe when I noticed that I was out of the very first ingredient — milk. I had buttermilk, but I wasn’t sure if I could substitute it. The Google search I did said it was okay in most circumstances, but since it is more acidic than milk, it could mess with the leavening. They gave instructions for baking powder and baking soda, but I didn’t see anything about yeast. So I opted for the safe route and used my dry milk powder reconstituted back to one cup.

Is there anything more gross than reconstituted dry milk powder? For some reason I don’t mind it staying powdered, but when you reconstitute it it has that awful institutional smell, like a hospital or a something. Maybe it’s just me.

Anyway, I added half a stick of butter and warmed it on the stove.

In the meantime, combined some all-purpose flour (2 cups or 8.5 oz)…

…with some white whole wheat flour (1 cup/4.25 oz). The original recipe was all a-p flour, but apparently you can substitute out white whole wheat for up to half of the flour in most recipes to give it a little more nutritional goodness.

Continued to add 1.5 tsp salt, 2 tbsp. sugar, 2 tsp instant yeast, and 1 tsp onion powder (substituted for minced onions, of which I had none), until I had this:

Now with the help of my trusty KAF dough whisk, I was ready to stir.

Mmm, butter lumps.

After mixing, I had this:

Still butter lumps! The Kitchen Aid will take care of those.

The Kitchen Aid does my kneading for me for about 10 minutes. It is at this point that I remember the last time I used my mixer, when I had to get Mike to remove the bowl for me. Luckily that doesn’t happen this time, since he’s in North Carolina.

After kneading, but oddly shaped. The dough hook will do that to you.

At this point we are ready to rise:

And an hour later:

The most annoying part about making rolls — and it’s not even that annoying — is trying to get them evenly divided.

I use my scale to measure out the dough into six roughly equal pieces:

As I mentioned before, I suck at shaping bread, but I actually find rolls pretty easy to shape.

Covered with greased plastic wrap for the second rise:

I flattened the tops after 10 minutes:

And then let them rise for another hour.

Halfway through I started preheating the oven to 375. Mine were done after 16 minutes — the recipe said 15-20, but my oven runs hot — and they looked like this:

They were super tall. I wonder if that is the benefit of using a special bun pan?

I have big plans for these rolls, none of which involve hamburger of course (vegetarian). But I had to freeze most of them since Mike won’t be back until Sunday and there’s no way I’ll eat them all before then. I think.