Straight from the Farm

 

Bread and butter puddings.  How many have you made?  A few?  Maybe a dozen?  Well, apparently I’m way behind the rest of you because I’d never even heard of bread and butter puddings until just the other day when VegeYum mentioned them as one of the things she cooked when she was first starting out.  I have, mind you, made bread puddings before, but they are decidedly different, or so it seems to me.  For one thing, bread and butter puddings let you play with your food by cutting sandwiches into triangles.  I always cut my sandwiches into triangles when the fillings allow so this was a real selling point for me.

From what I can gather, I guess bread and butter puddings are rather a staple in the U.K. and its former colonies. I wonder where it got lost along the way when the pilgrims came to these shores?  Oh well, it doesn’t matter now.  I’ve happily claimed any long lost bread and butter pudding heritage after making this Berry Bread and Butter Pudding.

I’ve still got a few jars of Sparkling Holiday Jam hanging out in my cupboards so I thought that would be a great flavor to use in my very first bread and butter pudding.  I then decided I’d even go so far as to make the bread, using that old trusty stand-by, Miracle Bread.  (I didn’t have to though as I remembed a loaf I had in the freezer still. Sweet!)  I just wish I still had some of that fresh milk left from the ice cream I made last week.  Store-bought worked just fine.  Although, after considering the amount of butter going into this dish, I decided to use fat free milk and was please with how creamy the flavor was still.  

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There’s no two ways around it… I’ve got writer’s block today.  For the past two hours I’ve been blankly staring at my computer screen, occasionally flipping around a couple other blogs, trying to come up with some inspiration. Really, just a smidgen of the stuff would do.  But I’ve got nothin’. Not even a pinch or a dash.  I guess it was bound to happen during this feverish bread affair. 

 

But don’t worry; I do have a lovely little recipe to share.  I’d never leave you unnourished in that sense and certainly not smack in the middle of our second week of bread baking together.  Today’s recipe is actually one I’ve been contemplating for awhile and rather unique in that I couldn’t find a recipe written to my required specs so I made it up as I went along, very loosely referring to a basic recipe for plain white rolls in my copy of The Big Book of Bread. 

Very late in the summer last year, I was “gifted” with a big bag of leftover Lipstick Red Peppers at the end of our day at the Headhouse Market.  Really, if recollection serves me right, it felt more like I was being forced to take them home, seeing as how no one else wanted them.  I know that sounds absurd to anyone who doesn’t have their own vegetable plot. But for those of us who have such a good fortune, all that bounty of summer (bushels of tomatoes, eggplant, okra, squash and peppers) can eventually wear thin.  By late September, we farmers (and many of our customers too, I think) had grown disinterested in those gorgeous Lipstick peppers.  Saying that now, in February, I think we must have been absolutely insane!  In any case, I ended up with a bunch of peppers I didn’t want to eat in September so I dried them to have for just such a moment as now in the midst of winter when I’ve returned to my senses and want that sweet pepper flavor. 

Only trouble with the dried peppers was that, at the time, I really didn’t know how I was going to use them.  I have since used them in baked corn.  But previous suggestions of bread or maybe pasta dough sounded like good possibilities too.  Of course once I hatched the concept of having an SFTF Week(s) of Bread event, I knew I’d need to find a recipe to use the peppers.  The only “pepper” bread recipes to come up in my searches were ones using ground black or cayenne pepper, which really wasn’t of much use, save for several of them had cheese included and that made me think how tasty a contrast it would be to have a sharp aged cheese in the same dough as the concentrated sweetness of the dried peppers.

   

 

In the end, I decided I was in the mood for rolls for a change, what with so many loaves piling up on my kitchen table, and adapted a basic white crusty roll recipe to give my dried peppers their first shot at doughy stardom.  Are the rolls good?  Yes!  Do I need to continue experimenting to get just the right combination of flavors?  Yes.  This time around, the cheese stole the spotlight, making the peppers mere supporting cast members.  A very good first attempt though and if you don’t have a baggie full of dried sweet peppers, these rolls with just the cheese would still pack powerful flavor. 

Huh!  Would you look at that?!!  I didn’t have writer’s block after all!

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If you’re like me and you’re missing the warmth of the summer sun and all the flavors that spring up in it, I’ve got a secret weapon for you.  The first bread recipe for the SFTF Week of Bread event is one that harkens back to the joy of feeling the juice from a ripe heirloom tomato dribbling down your chin and the scent of basil in the air, growing perky and tall under the sun’s kind eye.  Sigh…

Woops, zoned out there for a minute.  Well, I may not have the summer sun warming my back right now, but I do have my stash of preserves to recall warmer days behind and ahead of us.  We’ll start with some oven-dried tomatoes that I put up in September.  Oh, and let’s not forget the frozen basil puree I stashed away at the end of October.  Now let’s pull together a salty, crusty dough to carry the tomatoes and basil (and me) into blissful summery daydreams.  Mmmm…

Snap out of it, Jennie!  There’s a lesson or two to be taught still before surrendering to the flavors of the Oven-Dried Tomato Braid. 

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The coo-coo weather we’ve been having here in Philadelphia this week – temperatures in the 60s where the “norm” used to be the 40s – actually succeeded in tricking my brain into thinking it was early autumn again.  Last night I had such a craving for sweet corn, I was >this close< to going to the supermarket to see if they had any from California.  You see, early autumn yields the sweetest of sweet corn, with small ears that actually aren’t that juicy since the corn’s sugars get concentrated during the cooler nights.  I may be the only person in the world that doesn’t like juice dribbling down my chin when I chomp on an ear of corn, but that’s exactly why I like that last few pickings of corn. 

My personal preferences aside, I’d all but hopped in the car when I remembered my stash of dried corn.  Silly me, almost forgetting!  And I even had a new recipe I wanted to try with it that I’d picked up in the tiny bulk foods store near my parents.  Half the fun of making a trip home is going to the Walnut Cheese Nook with its rows and rows of spices, flours, grains, sugars, and pastas. And, yes, they ever have dried corn on occasion.  Since some shoppers might be hard pressed to know what to do with, say, a four pound bag of wheat gluten, the store is so kind as to offer a pamphlet of recipes and ideas.  It’s proven handy more than once.

On this occasion, I thought I’d up the ante a bit by reaching even deeper into my dried preserves larder to use a few oven-dried sweet peppers. I hadn’t done anything other than pop a few in my mouth while I was bagging them up way back in October.  My curiosity was getting the best of me, and they seemed like a perfect addition to a savory dish of baked corn. 

The dish was delish.  So much so I think I might take another batch of it to tomorrow night’s Philly Food Blogger’s Meet-Up potluck.  What struck me about this Baked Dried Corn Casserole with Dried Peppers, in comparison to the previous one I had made with dried corn for Christmas dinner, was how soft the kernels were.  If I hadn’t made it myself, I would have sworn this dish was made with fresh sweet corn.  Only the flavor belied the state of the corn and peppers when they went in the pot – it was a much richer, deeper, sweeter taste. 

I am sad though.  I only have enough dried corn left for two more dishes.  I’ve made a mental note to start tackling the corn drying early next summer so I can have a much larger bin of it.  With global warming, there’s surely many more winter days to come with the temperatures of early autumn.  No doubt my hankering for sweet corn will likewise rise to the occasion.

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Finally! 

Today I get to tell you all about my homemade dulce de leche.  I’ve been absolutely bursting at the seams with anticipation, chucking the last of the cranberry recipes at you.  That’s not to say those weren’t worthwhile.  Oh no no.  It’s just that this recipe for the creamy dreamy caramely treat from South America can’t be kept under wraps for long. 

So do you have a minute for me to tell you a little story about how I came to be on a quest for the perfect dulce de leche recipe?  I really hope so because it’s worth telling.

It all started in April of this past year when I went to Argentina and Uruguay to celebrate my birthday.  I read my copy of the Lonely Planet guidebook from cover to cover and then read Kiss and Tango: Dairy of a Dancehall Seductress just to get a sense of the culture I was about to soak up.  In both the LP and Kiss and Tango, there were whole pages devoted to this sweet treat called dulce de leche, or “milk jam” in translation.  I had some seriously high expectations for the stuff and looked for it the moment I got off the plane in Buenos Aires.  Just at the airport convenience shop alone I found nearly fifty different types of prepackaged cookies and candies boasting a dulce de leche filling of some kind!  I bought two or three and drooled in anticipation as I unwrapped the first one…

It was terrible!  Well, okay, maybe not terrible since it was a candy bar.  But it certainly wasn’t worth pages of prose or even a mention in a postcard home.  And so it was everywhere I went as I journeyed alone through Argentina and Uruguay for a few days.  Then my friend Fred flew in from the States to join me for a week and we hopped on a plane to Iguazu Falls.  Same story there – nothing but prepackaged disappointment.  Okay, maybe there was some of the most amazing scenery I’d ever seen, but the dulce de leche was still nothing to write home about.  After a few days in the tropical heat, we came back to Buenos Aires and split up for the afternoon, he to La Recoleta Cemetery and me to the San Telmo neighborhood in search of dog walkers and street artists. 

And then it happened.  On a rundown little side street far away from any tourist traps, I found heaven.  In the tiniest of mom-and-pop bakeries, rows and rows of alfajores (cookies), big and small, all bursting with dark, thick dulce de leche, promised to make amends for all the inferior prepackaged milk jam that had come before them.  Of course no English was spoken, but I didn’t let it stop me as I pointed and cooed until I had what I wanted.  That first bite…oh that first bite…it was worth an entire novel.  The biscuit cookies sandwiching the dulce de leche were merely a vehicle for the sweet-but-not-sugary-creamy-like-the-best-fudge-you’ve-ever-had-deep-richness-of-caramel-with-a-hint-of-vanilla-goodness.  Sigh….so good, in fact, that basic sentence structure fails me even now.

Unfortunately I didn’t stock up on enough and when we jetted off to Mendoza early the next morning, I was all out of alfajores and my beloved homemade dulce de leche.  I didn’t even bother to try and find any during our time in Mendoza.  I didn’t want to risk contaminating that one beautiful and pure moment.  (I’m sure you’re rolling your eyes by now at my lavish descriptions, but I swear it really was that good.)  But it was time for Fred to have his own dulce de leche epiphany.  He’d been enamored with the massive steaks all along our route so sweets hadn’t been a priority.  An early morning trip to see the Andes had Fred on the hunt for breakfast in the bustling Mendoza bus station, where he found a bakery selling freshly made rolls, cut in half and spread with a thick layer of dulce de leche, put back together and rolled in powdered sugar.  The huge grin on his face after the first bite said it all. 

    

My three weeks tromping around Argentina eventually came to an end, as did my small stash of alfajores I got from the Buenos Aires bakery just before my flight home.  But my determination to find good dulce de leche here in the States was just getting started.  As you can probably guess, the packaged stuff here just doesn’t cut it.  Nor did the recipes that called for a can of condensed milk that yielded a caramel flavor but lacked the intense creaminess I knew was possible.  As Christmas rolled around and I thought about what I should give Fred for a gift, I just knew I had to figure out the dulce de leche “problem”.   Scouring the internet for websites from Argentina, I finally found what seemed to be an authentic recipe that called for whole milk and no shortcuts. 

It worked beautifully.  I couldn’t be happier.  I almost cried when I took my first bite.  Sigh…. There it was again, that same sweet-but-not-sugary-creamy-like-the-best-fudge-you’ve-ever-had-deep-richness-of-caramel-with-a-hint-of-vanilla-goodness.  I made some homemade rolls, slathered them with it, and rolled them in powdered sugar for Fred. 

He confirms it’s “unbelievable!”  

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