Flour

A few days ago I cooked up a couple of wonderful steaks from Saffire Farms, but it was a bit too cold out for me to want to do it on the grill outside, so I put them onto one of my cast iron griddles in the oven. When the steaks were done, there were about a half cup or so of drippings left on the griddle, so I poured them into a small bowl and tossed them into the fridge. Drippings of course have an incredible amount of flavour, and are something I am really loath to waste. If all you get is small amounts like what I got from these steaks, it is really easy to keep a container in the freezer that you can keep adding drippings to until you get enough to do something useful with. This time I combined them with some deer drippings I'd canned up a few years ago, and made a truly fantastic sauce / gravy.

Ingredients

• about 2 cups of drippings
• 1/4 cup flour
• onion powder to taste
• salt to taste
• pepper to taste

The dripping usually have a small amount of fat in them, so the easiest way to separate it is to heat them up in a mason jar in the microwave, then stick the jar into the fridge (setting it onto a small cork heat pad / coaster, if you have glass shelves in the fridge like we do). The fat will come to the top and you'll be able to pick it right off with your fingers, like in this video. You then use the fat and some flour to make a "rou", and make your sauce from there.

Bleenies were one of the first "indigenous" foods I learned to make on my year on a student exchange in Soviet Ukraine. I wish for the life of me I could recall exactly how we used to make them, but I do recall it was really easy, and not really a recipe per-se but just tossing a few things together. It almost always involved some sort of soured milk product - either something like kefir that had been intentionally soured, or milk that had gone off, which happened a lot with their shoddy milk supply chain.

This recipe is one I got from a Romanian woman who served them at a BBQ she hosted last summer. It is easy to throw together, and pretty flexible too. In fact, the "recipe" she gave me did not really list the amounts of anything except the 1 litre of milk! So I've put some solid numbers on those ingredients in the many times I've made this since then.

• 1 litre milk
• 70 to 100g sugar
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 2 to 2 and 2/3 cups flour (see below)

A few days ago an old friend asked me to give him my bread recipe, so I did that and also pointed him at my video on Youtube. That is when I realised how terrible my video was, and decided I needed to shoot a new one! This uses my basic dough recipe, which is 600g flour, 1 tablespoon oil, 1 tsp salt, one tsp yeast, 1 tablespoon honey, and 350ml water.

I've been using my basic dough recipe the last while and experimenting with different combinations of flour. The recipe calls for 600g, but you can mix-and-match it just about any way you like. I've been on a bit of an oats kick lately, so that has been factoring into my bread as well. Oats are very low in gluten, so I've found that when using 1/4 of the flour as oats, you have to add gluten flour to account for this.

The loaf on the left here is made with barley, and the French bread is made with oats. Here is the basic recipe I've been working with :

• 75g gluten flour
• 125g oat or barley flour
• 250g whole wheat flour
• 150g white flour

I've made cinnamon buns, a fair bit of French Bread, as well as regular loaf bread.

Here is a great recipe that my wife got from the Harrowsmith cookbook. She is still tweaking it and will post her final version when done. In the meantime she says that her variation is to omit the orange rind, and add instead 1/4 - 1/2 tsp cardamom. The last cake she made, which I served at our weekly CSA pickup since it was made with zukes from our CSA Saffire Farms, she even added 1/2 cup of teff (an Etheopian grain) for the extra nutrition -- it added the teeniest little crunch, which was rather nice. She has also used up to 2.5 cups of zucchini in this recipe and it has worked fine.

The kids love this stuff - even after knowing it has so much zucchini in it. Indeed, you'd never guess. It simply tastes like a really awesome chocolate cake.

This yeasted dough is really easy to throw together if you have a bread machine. Actually, even if you do not, mix it together just til everything is wet and then let stand covered in a bowl for 12 hours and let the gluten develop on its own. This is a new method I've just recently seen and will be doing a video for. Missing from this video is the addition of the 1/4 cup of olive oil - somehow I managed to mess up that clip while doing the video.

Mix

• 350ml water (or beer)
• 1 (generous) tablespoon honey

This is my mom's recipe, which is enough for 5 pies. I give her original recipe, as well as my own version below which is good for just 1 pie if you don't need the full amount. Her recipe calls for lard but you can use vegetable shortening if you wish. I actually use my own home-rendered pork fat. Another fun thing to do is save up your bacon fat and use it, to get a wonderful bacon-flavoured pie crust!

• 5 cups flour (I use whole wheat)
• 2 tsp brown sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 egg
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 4 tsp vinegar in
• 3/4 cup cold water (may need up to 1/4 cup more)
• 1 lb lard or shortening

Pancakes are an easy, wholesome, healthy breakfast to make for kid and adult alike. I usually make a double batch of these on Saturday morning, and it leaves enough leftovers for a few days of breakfasts for the boys. Like most of my recipes, this one is basically a rough guide and lets you experiment until your heart is content. Instead of milk you can use buttermilk, yogurt, kefir, or any similar milk product. For flour I generally use 2/3 whole wheat, and the other 1/3 either plain white flour, barley flour, or oat flour. But you can use all white if you like. Use any type of oil, butter or margarine that you like.