Cornbread!

All sorts of things have been happening, what with the Eclipse (we watched it through various glasses here where it got only up to about 90% and it was pretty cool and unusual) and whatever else has been occurring. But most saliently, I made cornbread! It is quite good, I suspect at least partly due to having quite a bit of sugar, and multiple kinds of fats. :)

So here is the recipe:

Very Nice Cornbread With Rather A Lot Of Fats And Sugars
After this recipe from Tiffany

2 Cups flour (all-purpose or whatever)
1 Cup cornmeal (stone ground yelllow, say)
1 Cup sugar
1 1/2 Tbs baking powder (this seems like a lot, maybe 1 Tbs or less)
1 Tsp salt
1/2 Cup (8 Tbs, 1 stick) butter (unsalted or as you like it)
1/2 Cup vegetable oil
1 1/4 Cups milk (1%, 2%, whole, even skim probably)
3 large eggs

Preheat oven to 350°F (gas mark 4)

Combine all dry ingredients and whisk or otherwise combine nicely together in a large bowl.

Melt butter and combine with the oil, milk, and eggs.

Pour the wet mixture into the dry mixture, and stir until combined.

PAM or otherwise grease a 9-by-13 inch pan, and pour in the batter. Cook in the 350°F oven for 35-45 minutes or until done (golden-brown, firm, toothpick test, or what have you). If using a glass baking dish (which I didn’t) you may want to cook for 45-55 minutes at 325°F, who knows?

Allow to cool briefly in the pan until safe to touch, cut into pieces, try not to eat all immediately at once.

Sunday afternoon

So I have cut back on social media stuff somewhat, and I’ve been doing more reading and walking and sitting zazen and baking.

It’s been very nice! :)

I’ve been writing up many books for Goodreads here (I keep meaning to use Bookwyrm, but then I forget) as I finish them. Some are books that I also started recently, and some that I started long ago and have finally noticed again and finished up.

And I made a yummy Pain de Mie in the smaller of the two Pullman Pans that I got for Solstice. I think I will write a recipe for it here! It’s based on this much chattier one which uses “instant yeast”, which I do not believe is a thing so I changed it.

Pain de Mie

Obtain a stand mixer with the dough hook attached
Sponge:
1/4 Cup white sugar
1/3 Cup warm milk (2% or whole)
2 1/4 tsp (1 package) dry yeast
Roux:
1/4 Cup bread flour
1/4 Cup water
1/3 Cup milk (2% or whole)
Everything else:
2 1/2 Cup bread flour
1 1/4 Tsp salt
1 Large Egg
4 Tbs unsalted butter at room temperature, cut into pieces

To make the sponge, stir together 1/4 C sugar, 1/3 C milk, and the dry yeast; you can do this in the bowl of the stand mixer. Leave that there until later.

For the roux, whisk together 1/4 C bread flour, 1/4 C water, and 1/3 C milk until smooth. Stir over medium-low heat until quite thick, but not quite bubbling. Pour out into a small bowl or whatever to cool. Wait around until it’s cool, 25-30 minutes.

Combine the sponge, roux, and everything else except the butter in the bowl of the stand mixer. Mix at low speed for about five minutes, scraping down the sides of the bowl if needed.

Scrape the dough off the hook into the bowl, and add the butter. Mix at low speed again for about ten minutes. Don’t forget to lock down the mixer head part so it doesn’t jump up alarmingly.

Remove dough from hook and bowl. It will be at least slightly, and perhaps very, sticky. Shape it into a ball and put it into a lightly buttered or PAMmed bowl (or back into the mixer bowl I suppose come to think of it), cover with a damp cloth, and let rise in a warm still place, 60 to 90 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350°F, and butter a small (9″ by 4″) Pullman pan (a standard 9×5 inch loaf pan will probably also be fine).

While the oven pre-heats, take the dough (which will be surprisingly light, and probably still sticky, but you probably won’t need to add any flour) and punch all of the air out of it. Roll it into a loaf shape, and put it into the pan. Put the lid on if using a Pullman pan. Allow dough to rise in pan at least until the oven pre-heats, like I dunno 15-30 minutes?

Put pan with dough into oven, bake for 35-40 minutes, until the top is golden brown and the loaf sounds hollow. Remove loaf from pan and put onto a wire rack to cool. Can be sliced and eaten as soon as it’s cool enough to touch.

I don’t know why these recipes always say stuff like “cool all the way to room temperature before slicing, about 1 hour”; fresh very warm bread is amazing!

Blueberry Bread

So I want to write about this latest “scientist finds we have no free will” thing, but more importantly I made blueberry bread!

There are a couple of pieces missing there, for obvious reasons.

Here is the recipe! It’s based on this one, which includes tips and tricks and lifestyle advice and so on, like people who want to maintain copyright on their recipe pages are legally obliged to include, so be sure to go over and read it. I admit I chose it mostly because it looked really easy (no creaming together the butter and sugar!) and I had all the ingredients (especially that it required no more than one egg).

Easy Blueberry Bread With Just One Egg

1 1/2 Cups all-purpose flour
1/2 Cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 Cup milk (1% or what have you)
1/4 Cup vegetable oil
1 large egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 Cups blueberries

Preheat oven to 350°F.
Butter or PAM and lightly flour a smallish loaf pan, 8×4″ or so.
Mix the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt) in a large bowl. You can also just put them into the bowl and forget to mix them before doing the next step, and that is apparently okay, but I don’t really recommend it.
Stir the liquid ingredients (milk, oil, egg, and vanilla extract) into the flour mixture until just blended.
Fold in blueberries.
Spoon the batter into the prepared loaf pan, and bake for about an hour (I know, that’s a long time!), until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
Let cool in the pan as long as you can stand, then remove and slice and eat.

It’s very nice! The original recipe calls for sprinkling a tablespoon of sugar over the batter before putting it into the oven, and I did that, but if I made it again I think I wouldn’t; the recipe already has plenty of sweetness.

Later I might write about free will and stuff. :)

P.S. Of course I asked the AI Assistant about this post! Its main suggestion was to separate the thing about free will and the recipe part into two separate posts, about which lol. But it did remind me to set some alt and/or title text for the image (I think it actually said “caption” but hey), and that’s good.

Basic Bagels

Yes, these are New York Style bagels, because there are no other bagels. Anything else is just small toroidal loaves of bread, with which one might as well not really have bothered. This is similar to the way that one can get some rather tasty Chicago-style cheese-and-tomato-sauce-bread, but not actual pizza.

(I’ve been reading Nancy Mitford, and there may be the odd little Britishism sneaking into my diction here and there.)

This recipe for six; it can be straightfowardly doubled for a dozen, or two-thirds’d for four.

Six Bagels

1 1/4 cups warm water
1 Tbs or ~2 packet active dry yeast
3 Tbs sugar
2 Tbs veg oil
1 tsp salt
5 C or so (bread) flour
One pot of water
2 Tbs or so of barley malt syrup (or honey)

Dissolve yeast and sugar in warm water, gradually add flour, oil, and eventually salt, until it begins to be dough. Do not add the entire 5 cups of flour; stop when the dough is kneadable but not dry.

Knead the dough well, and then put into a covered bowl to rise for an hour in a warm draftless place, or a couple of hours in a cool draftless place, or (ideally) overnight in the refrigerator.

Punch down and form into six tori. I find the best way to do this is to make six spheres, and then flatten each one, poke a hole in the center, and spin it around a bit on your fingers to make the hole gently larger.

(There is also the “make a snake and then convince the head and tail to stick together” method, but I find (perhaps especially when the air is dry) that this results in croissant-shaped bagels distressingly often.)

Let these rest while you preheat the oven to 450 degrees (F), boil the pot of water, and dissolve the barley malt syrup in it.

Once the water is boiling, lower the bagels in (likely three or so at a time, depending on the sizes of your pot and your tori), and boil for about one minute per side, turning them over halfway through (obviously).

Put the boiled bagels onto a sheet of baking paper on a cookie sheet.

Once the bagels are boiled and the oven is hot enough, put the cookie sheet (the one that the bagels are on) into the oven (most likely on the middle rack) for something like 15-20 minutes, or until just before the bottoms get too dark. Let cool on a wire cooling rack (or, you know, whatever).

The boiling is the key part of the recipe, and what makes them bagels rather than just weird small bread loaves. The barley malt syrup is supposedly extremely key, but I admit I’ve done it with honey instead and I won’t swear that I could tell the difference. I’ve also entirely forgotten to put anything into the water, and they were still, I would say, actual bagels.

If you compare this recipe with yesterday’s Basic Bread, you may suspect that some of the quantities don’t entirely make sense, and you may be right. The amount of flour is especially approximate; purists will know that it’s really the weight of the flour and not the volume that matters, and I don’t know the weights that I use, I just sort of put in more flour until it seems about right.

All Purpose Flour may be used instead of Bread Flour, and it will be easier to knead and somewhat less chewy and bagel-like (but still bagels) as a result.

You may use barley malt syrup instead of some or all of the sugar. This is said by some to be even more authentic, but note that (1) the substitution ratio is for you to figure out, (2) barley malt syrup is considerably harder to obtain than sugar and if you do this you will run out faster, and (3) if you keep your syrup in the refrigerator after opening (which one in instructed to do), you will want to warm it up and dissolve it in the water, rather than attempting to incorporate a basically solid lump of cold syrup into your flour mixture.

And that’s it! It’s really not a big mystery, which leads one to wonder why the things sold as “bagels” in (for instance) Florida, appear to be small toroidal loaves of bread instead. Possibly it’s something about the water, in which case I can only advise using water from within say 80 miles of New York City in the above recipe, just to be on the safe side.

Basic Bread

I love baking, especially bread baking. I’m sure I’ve told the story before about how we came early to a friend’s party back in college to help with preparations, and she handed my a 3×5 card and said “Okay, you can make the bread”. I’d never made bread before, so that was rather terrifying, but the bread came out delicious. It did have some dense bands because the baker was clueless, but as it was a rich sweet bread the bands were good.

The recipe for that exact bread is a secret, but I’ve posted (long ago) a recipe that eventually evolved away from it far enough that I felt okay posting: Our Golden Bread. It’s a sweet buttery bread, and amazing both for dessert and for sandwiches. I’ve also made various cheesy breads and eggy breads and things over time.

The other month, for some reason, I decided to write down an extremely basic bread recipe (I think there was some reason, but I’m not sure what it was; maybe it was in the uncertain beginning of the pandemic, and I was figuring out the fewest ingredients we’d need to make our own bread if we had to).

It’s not the simplest possible bread recipe (it has more sweetening and oil than it strictly-speaking needs just to be bread), but it is simple. This is it:

Basic Wheat Bread

2 cups warm water
2 tsp or 1 packet active dry yeast
1/4 cup sugar
2 tsp vegetable oil
5-6 cups wheat flour
1/2 tsp salt

Sugar can be reduced to like a teaspoon if you really want to, and vegetable oil can conceivably be left out entirely. Up to half (or all, if you’re bold) of the flour can be Whole Wheat. The flour can be “all purpose” or “bread flour”, and you might or might not notice the difference. Salt is optional, but it’ll be a bit bland with none.

Add the yeast and sugar to the warm water and let it sit for awhile if you feel like it, so the yeast can start doing its thing. Add the vegetable oil and enough flour (two cups or so) that the mixture is like thickish mud. Add the salt last (because it discourages the yeast to some extent).

Give this “sponge” (the muddy mixture) about 100 strokes with a wooden spoon (hey, I like wooden spoons), to incorporate a good amount of air into it (whatever that means, really), and then cover with a warm damp cloth and let rise at least 45 minutes somewhere warm and not windy; inside your oven (when the oven is not on) is good for instance.

Take it out and add more flour until it feels like dough; not quite sticky but not dry. Knead it (probably with floured hands on a slightly floured board) until it feels right; ideally sort of silken and alive. Put it back into the bowl (generally using a touch of oil or butter or cooking spray on both the inside of the bowl where the dough will be sitting, and on the top of the dough itself, for some reason), cover the bowl with a warm freshly-damp cloth, and let it rise in a warm and windless place for another at least 45 minutes.

Punch it down and form it into either one or two loaves (one will be quite large, two will be more normal), and put the loaf or loaves into the corresponding number of lightly oiled or cooking-sprayed or buttered bread pans. Let the loaf or loaves rest in the pan or pans while the oven pre-heats to 350 degrees F.

Put the pan or pans into the oven, on the middle rack I suppose, for 40 or 60 minutes, until it seems done, the bottom thumps nicely, and so on.

Remove from pan or pans and let cool on a cooling rack or whatever until you feel like cutting it open.

And that’s the recipe! You can play with pretty much anything from there; substitute an egg or milk for some of the water, fold in some cool butter instead of the oil, substitute honey for some or all of the sugar, add things like cheese and raisins and vanilla extract and so on.

I was going to include the bagel recipe in this post also, but I think that’ll be tomorrow.

(Partly because just getting WordPress to slightly indent the recipe (and then use a very slightly smaller interline spacing while I was in there) was such a ridiculously large amount of work; I had to convert the paragraphs to “Classic”, and then hand-enter a bit of CSS style separately into every paragraph element in the Code Editor. The new shiny “Blocks” style couldn’t deal with it at all, and kept telling me that I had Invalid Things. How does someone make an editor that has neither “indent paragraph” nor “search and replace” in 2020?)

So that is Basic Bread, and tomorrow-or-soon, I will put up Basic Bagels.

Liebe ist ein welthaftes Wirken

Kaufmann translates this, from Buber’s “I and Thou”, as “love is a cosmic force”, but gives us the original in a footnote to see for ourselves.

One thing I like about German and how synthetic it is (in the technical sense that I just learned; I was going to say “agglutinative“, but that turns out to be wrong) is that you can look at the parts of many words, and see how the meaning compares to the sum of those parts.

The most simple-minded translation of that phrase might be “Love is a worldly work”, which has the same nice consonance of double-ues, but a very different sense, since the English “worldly” has strong connotations that are almost the opposite of Kaufmann’s “cosmic”.

It’s interesting that the translator chose “force” here, rather than the obvious “work” (which would have read a bit awkwardly), or perhaps “act”. Because Buber is talking about love in the context of “those who stand in it and behold in it”, “force” probably makes more sense than “act”, since you can stand in a force (a force field!), but not so much in an act.

But then I wonder why Buber wrote Wirken rather than say Kraft. And then I am at, or perhaps well beyond, the very end of my competence as a translator. :)

The other day the little daughter, watching me staring into my phone and clicking and swiping without end, commented more or less “you’re taking in so much content; I don’t know if that’s healthy”.

I found myself very much in agreement with that thought, and put the phone away (temporarily) and looked at various stacks of books sitting unread here and there, and picked up “I and Thou”, read the Acknowledgements and Translator’s Key, skipped Kaufmann’s very long Prologue (these things should generally be at the end of a book, in my ever so humble opinion, so that one can encounter the work itself with more or less fresh eyes, and then read the prologue-writer’s thoughts about it afterward, when one has already one’s own ideas to compare them to), and started very slowly into the work (Werk, Wirken, Kunstwerk?) itself.

It’s a very dense book, or feels like it deserves to be treated as such, which means that I have to be careful not to spend so much time on each sentence that I eventually drift off and do other things before I get past the first chapter.

As I tweeted not long after starting (and yeah, I know; somehow Twitter and the Face Book and now even plague have all taken up residence in my ways of relating to the world):

Reading #Buber's I and Thou; it's all too easy to read it as a rephrasing of basic #Buddhist #ontology and #epistemology. Empty the cup! :)

— Dale Innis (@DaleInnis) December 29, 2014

I can’t of course actually empty the cup, and I admit I’m not really trying all that hard to.

Currently, a few more pages in, I’m wondering if Buber will go from talking about the ineffable relating that is I-You (and that he identifies with, or as, love in some sense), to a realization that the duality present even in I-You (because after all there is still I, and You) is at some level an illusion. Because that would be so Buddhist.

There are no sentient beings,
And I vow to save them.

It will be interesting either way; if he does get to some kind of non-duality, I’m sure it will have a flavor all its own. If he doesn’t, it will be interesting to see if he simply stops short of it, actively considers and denies it, or goes off in some other direction entirely.

I’ve been meaning to read this book since college sometime :) and it’s nice to finally get to it.

❄

Solstice was nice, thank you for asking, if a little atypical. All four of us were here together, but instead of the usual Christmas Dinner with ham an’ all, we went out to the local diner.

The story: M smelled gas in the basement, so on I forget maybe the 22nd we had the gas man come and test things, and he found there was a leak somewhere in the kitchen range, and while we were moving the range out from the wall it got caught on something and when we pushed on it a little to get it past the something, the entire glass front of the oven door very enthusiastically shattered into a zillion pieces and fell onto the floor.

That was exciting!

We called the appliance place who sent out a person who determined that the range was old enough to vote, and that no one makes parts for it anymore (either for replacing the door glass or fixing any possible leak).

A new range arrived yesterday and I have baked my first loaves of bread in it, but between the breaking of the old and the installing of the new we could cook only in the microwave and crockpot, and although we considered trying to design a satisfying Solstice dinner around those, in the end we decided the local Diner would be more fun.

And it was very nice.

How do Diners do it, by the way; anyone know? How can you have that enormous a menu of available things, and be able to produce absolutely any of them in a reasonably short span of time? Are they all designed to be producible from some smallish set of ingredients, and you keep those around and ready at all times? Do all of the chefs know how to make all of the things? Are there big recipe books? Or do they look at the menu when the order comes in, figure out what you are probably expecting, and wing it?