Bron and the Bearded Bagel Baker

Once upon a Saturday, Bron and her bearded beloved decided to bake bagels for the first time.

The library lent them "Bread: from sourdough to Rye" by Linda Collister. The bagel recipe looked promising (though they didn't recognise any of the recipes supposedly from Australia and NZ in the last chapter!)

They mixed the dough, let it rise, punched it down, then formed it into a dozen springy balls. Next they poked their fingers through each ball, spun it around on their fingers, and made a bagel-ly, doughnut shape. Then they remembered to take pictures for posterity!

After another rest, the dough was plunged into a pot of boiling water and Bron and her bagel baker took turns to deftly flip each bagel with a scoop.

Each doughy tourniquet was brushed with egg white, and some were sprinkled with sesame seeds.

And baked in the oven to golden brown perfection.

It was hard to wait for them to cool down.

Beautiful bready aromas filled the kitchen as Bron and the bearded one waited... and waited...

... and finally gave in...

... smothering their beauties with homemade strawberry jam! MMMMMM!

The Bakery

Ever since the food course, we have been much more conscious of what we are putting in our mouths, and what food we are buying. More about that in another post - suffice to say that we are now using organic flour whenever possible.

The flour is important because it is the most basic ingredient in bread-making. Our place has begun to resemble a bakery over the last few months as we've hardly bought bread from the supermarket since July.

It started when we returned to Canada in July, and I was home while Nathan did Hebrew at summer school and I got ready for teaching school. Long periods in an empty basement suite were filled with yeasting, waiting, mixing, kneading, waiting, rising, waiting, baking, and waiting while cooling. I tried my hand at a sourdough starter with rye flour and water. It was a bit of a hit and miss affair. I made a VERY dense loaf at one stage (pictured below) and threw a large amount of starter into the compost! The last lot migrated to the compost when I cleaned the fridge earlier this month. It was 'well fermented', shall we say? No recipe for you, as it was probably one of my least successful baking endeavours ever.

I reverted to my trusty basic bread recipe from our awesome Aussie friend, Susannah. Once you've made the plain white loaf a few times you can easily judge if the dough needs more flour or water by touch. If you double the recipe, it makes one large loaf, or two smallish ones.

Susannah's Basic Bread

2 cups of flour
1 cup warm water
1 teaspoon of dried yeast
1 teaspoon (or less) of salt [sometimes I put in vegemite/marmite instead of salt]
1 teaspoon of sugar/honey etc
1 tablespoon of oil.

Activate yeast by putting it in warm water with the sugar. When it is frothy, mix it with the dry ingredients and oil. Knead. Allow to sit in warm place, covered with loose cling film. After about and hour, knead again then form into desired shape. Place in cooking pan and allow to rise in a warm place for about 30 mins. Bake in a moderate oven for 20-40 minutes.

I also found success making cinnamon rolls - the Vancouver specialty. Here they are before... and after baking, but without their crown of cream cheese frosting.

Nathan tried his hand at making bread over the recent reading week, and has been bitten by a yeasty bug too... making bread every 4 or 5 days ever since. He experimented with whole wheat flour and decided that a mix of white and whole wheat was more pleasant than the dense rolls he first started with. Next he's going to try using spelt flour.

So, now that we've perfected this recipe, Nath suggested we try making bagels (one of the few bread products we have bought recently). A visit to the library was duly made, and we spent a fun Saturday morning making a dozen bagels to a recipe in "Bread: from sourdough to rye" by Linda Collister (adapted to include more marmite, of course!) My next post will be a photo-journal of our fun.

Church & State

Church & State... no, not more theology. Just a winery we visited on our way home from Vancouver Island today. It is definitely set up for the tourist market (located on the road to Butchart Gardens) but brought back fond memories of our wine trailing with Rhoda and Phil in NZ and Chile.

The wine itself was good. The sav blanc was quite different from the NZ savs, and the pinot not so rich. We did end up buying the Merlot/Cab Sav and a bottle of Cab Blanc - very moreish!

We dined on the deck with our hodge-podge of picnicky leftovers from the weekend away: hard-boiled eggs, baby carrots, corn chips, bread and butter, yellow tomato, and oranges. How's that for haliday fare? April hasn't yet developed a taste for wine so she graciously accepted the role of designated driver! Thanks, Ape.

P.S. Food Course: Other Resources

Films

• Babette's Feast
• Eat Drink Man Woman
• Big Night
• The New World
• Fiddler on the Roof
• Garbage
• The Future of Food

Children's Books

• Jam: A True Story - Margaret Mahy
• Whose Garden Is It? - Mary Ann Hoberman
• Mrs. Moskowitz and the Sabbath Candlesticks - Amy Schwartz
• Goops and How to Be Them - Gelett Burgess
• Mice Squeak, We Speak - Arnold Shapiro
• Stone Soup - various versions of this traditional tale
• An Angel For Solomon Singer - Cynthia Rylant and Peter Catalanotto
• A Bad Case of Stripes - David Shannon
• Blueberries For Sal - Robert McCloskey
• Little House in the Big Woods - Laura Ingalls Wilder (and other books in the series, especially Farmer Boy)
• Green Eggs and Ham - Dr. Seuss
• The High Rise Glorious Skittle Skat Roarious Sky Pie Angel Food Cake - Nancy Willard
• The Pipi Swing - Sarona Aiono-Iosefa
• Bread and Jam for Frances - Russell Hoban

Websites

• Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer
• Love Food Hate Waste
• Eat the Seasons
• Koanga Institute
• Salt Spring Seeds
• BC Farm Fresh
• Local Food BC
• River Cottage
• Jamie Oliver
• Simply Good Food (NZ CSA)
• City Farm Boy (Vancouver)
• Kitsilano Farmers' Market

P.S. Food Course: Reading List

Here are some of the most interesting and helpful books that were in our reading list.


Reading List

• Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp, and Camille Kingsolver
• Food and Faith: Justice, Joy, and Daily Bread - ed. by Michael Schut
• For the Life of the World - Alexander Schmemann
• Hungry Planet: What the World Eats - Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio
• In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan
• Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos, of an Ordinary Meal - Margaret Visser
• Mudhouse Sabbath - Lauren F. Winner
• The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating (also published as Plenty) - Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon
• The Botany of Desire - Michael Pollan
• The Hungry Soul - Leon Kass
• The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael PollanThe Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America - Harvey Levenstein
• The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners - Margaret Visser
• The Supper of the Lamb - Robert Farrar Capon
• The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (3rd ed.) - Wendell Berry

Food Course: Final Day

Our final day on the food course was a flurry of activity as we prepared to leave, packing and cleaning and scurrying to take final notes from books we wouldn't be able to access easily as we went our separate ways. We had a brief class time where Emily had an opportunity to share about her choice to be a vegetarian, and Loren shared some thoughts and quotes about the communion meal.

The highlight of the day was the outdoor banquet of left-overs from the week, which we began with a simple and informal communion meal. It was a joyful revisit of our previous meals and an opportunity to thank Loren and Mary Ruth with some gifts (a cut-paper picture with an uncanny familial resemblance, and a wood-turned arbutus bowl), and Sarah for her TA work (chocolates). We were all blessed to receive a copy of our very own 'Galiano Cookbook', a collection of recipes used on the course. Then, with tummies full of pie and plenty for our minds to mull over, we packed ourselves off to the ferry and our various homes.

Loren and Mary Ruth celebrated their hard work (and our departure) with a meal at their local French restaurant, and were pleasantly surprised to discover we had all chipped in to pay for their meal!

Pictures from the Talent Sharing

Food Course: Taste and See

Our class was really a book discussion on May 15. Our reading assignment was "the WHOLE book if possible"... that is, "The Supper of the Lamb" by Robert Farrar Capon. I had read this book for the Christian Thought & Culture class last year, so this was a pleasant refresher for me.

Capon focusses on the need to be mindful of the world we live in, in order to appreciate God's goodness more fully. He sees our role in the world as priests; making meaning in our actions, living in a posture of thanksgiving to God, paying attention to things for their own sake and appreciating and using them at their best. Our discussion ranged far and wide, bringing together many strands of our previous classes.

The whole book is quotable, so here are some of my favourites that the class picked:
“… let us eat. Festally, first of all, for life without occasions is not worth living. But ferially, too, for life is so much more than occasions, and its grand ordinariness must never go unsavored” (p.18).
“Against all that propaganda for fancy eating and plain cooking, I hope to persuade you to cook fancy and just plain eat" (p.144).
"Man's real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God's image for nothing" (p.18).

In the afternoon, we had a visit from a friend and farm meighbour of the Wilkinsons, Sherri Koster. Sherri is a clinical counsellor, and we had a helpful Q&A time with her about food disorders from a medical (and Christian) point of view.

Our final mindful meal was centred on a Turkish theme:

We ate appetizers with headscarves on, before Debbie read a New Testament passage about our freedom in Christ. We were then invited to either remove our headscarves, or to eat with them on, in solidarity with persecuted Christians around the world.
Olives, Hummus, and Pita Bread

Roast Lamb, Kabouli Palau, Eggplant Bake, Greek Salad (accompanied by raki/ouzo... much better with water!)

Halva, and Turkish Apricots Afterwards, Ben set up a houka for some to smoke...

and some of us just enjoyed the turkish coffee...or giggled our way through some belly dancing!

The night ended with a little talent sharing... poetry, banjo, piano, story reading... and an impromptu campfire on the beach.