Whole Wheat French Bread

Artist's depiction: The French Revolution

The French have given us a great many things over the years. Canning, the guillotine, cartoon skunks that borderline sexually assault cats. The list goes on and on. But as much as we in our modern society enjoy of all of these French wonders (like eating snails, and defending the eating of snails), none of them are quite as iconic and delicious as french bread. Which makes sense. What's not to love? It's a stick of delicious crusty bread that you can choose to eat immediately, save for later, or brandish as a weapon. That's pretty much the American dream right there. Which makes this the second time that the French have helped facilitate it, and this time Benjamin Franklin didn't even need to get syphilis.

Ingredients:

3 cups Whole Wheat Flour
1.25 cups Warm Water (Most internet sources say your warm water should be about 110 degrees. That's great if you want to set up a candy thermometer in a pot of water and cook it while meticulously watching it to make sure you reach your ideal temperature. Or you could use hot water from the faucet, which on average is between 105 and 115 degrees. Your call)
1 TBSP Honey
1/4 oz. Active Dry Yeast (That's one packet. Or about 2.25 teaspoons for the packetless among you)
Salt
Oil
Corn Meal
More flour. All the flour.
An optional Egg White

So, at this point we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that this is indeed a whole wheat recipe. *Gasp. I know. Sure, the name of the post could have warned you about this and saved you some shock, but let's not get bogged down on who should have read what and when. The fact is that while modern french bread is probably rooted in Napoleon's regulation of the baking industry, the reason that he did that was to prevent the dissatisfaction the lower classes previously had about being not being allowed white flour. Also I have a giant bag of whole wheat flour I need to use up. So shut it. Anyway, stir together your yeast, water, and honey, and let them sit together for about 10 minutes. When you come back to check on them, they should be kind of frothy. It's actually pretty cool to watch this happen, but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you have better things to do for 10 minutes than watch a bunch of yeast belching. Most (Seemingly all) online recipes use the exact same phrase for the next part. "In a stand mixer with a dough hook attachment..." Yeah, we're not doing that. You know what they had before stand mixers? Hands. That's what. You know what they had before "dough hook attachments?" Big wooden spoons that they also used to hit slackers with. It was a magical time. Once you're done fantasizing about all of the people you'd hit with a wooden spoon if it was socially acceptable, stir two big pinches of salt into your gassy yeast, followed by your 3 cups of flour. Stir the crap out of it until it forms into a dough that doesn't cling to the sides of your bowl. If you need to, add more flour to achieve this.

Best served as far away from people eating snails as possible

Now you need to knead your dough (That sentence was even more ridiculous before revisions). Flour some flat surface in your home that you don't mind getting covered in flour, and plop your dough ball down on it. Press it down, stretch it, and fold it in half. Repeat, adding more flour as necessary, for about 8 minutes, or until your hand starts to hurt and your brain goes numb. Throw it in a greased up bowl and store it in a warm place so the dough can rise. Give it at least an hour for this, then punch it down so that it doesn't get snooty from all of the gas it created (a lot of the issues that people have with the French comes from them having not been properly punched down) and form it into a log. Throw some corn meal down on a baking pan and plop your dough log onto it. If you want to get fancy, take a sharp knife and slice the top of it diagonally 3 or four times (evenly spaced out). Let it sit for about 10 more minutes to puff up a little bit more before throwing it in the oven. If you want to get even fancier, brush some egg white over the top of the dough. In any case, after your 10 minutes, throw that sucker in a 375 degree oven for about 30 minutes. If you want to get your bread extra crusty, throw a couple ice cubes in the oven right before you close it. They say that when french bread is done it should sound hollow. I don't know if that's true, but I do know that if you grab bread out of a 375 degree oven to see how it "sounds," you'll probably burn your hands and/or ears. Happy baking!

Stuffing Muffins

It doesn't matter if you know the muffin man. It matters
that he knows himself.

Thanksgiving times are upon us, which means that it's time to break out the most treasured of all holiday traditions: lying to each other about how good the food is. Because let's be honest here. A lot of classic Thanksgiving food is somewhere between unimpressive and super gross. You've got marshmallows melted on to overcooked yams, green bean casserole that pretty much comes out of a can, and usually some stuffing that amounts to dried out crusty bits of bread loosely held together by a mass of onions and disappointment. Which is a shame, because it really isn't that hard to make some delicious stuffing. And I should know, because I made some this morning. The whole process took about 45 minutes from start to finish, and at no point did I feel like my mouth had turned into a desert fortress from which escape is impossible, which isn't always the case with stuffing. Making it into individual muffins is a fun twist that makes everything self-contained and helps ensure that everybody actually gets some. Also it'll help you deceive your friends and family into thinking that you're creative and whimsical.

Ingredients:

Approx. 8 Cups of Bread (You've got some decent leeway here. Use something hearty, but really whatever bread makes you happy. Tear it into chunks, throw 8 cups of them in there, and be merry)
2 Eggs 
4 Crimini Mushrooms
3 ribs Celery
1 standard-issue Onion
1.5 TBSP chopped Parsley
2 tsp rubbed Sage
1 tsp dried Thyme
1/4 tsp Black Pepper
Salt 
Oil
Water

The first thing you're gonna need to do is learn to ignore people. Because undoubtedly there are already people constructing angrily worded letters about how stuffing is only "real" if it's stuffed into a turkey, and that otherwise you should call it "dressing." It's easy to get angry or annoyed with these people, but remember that they serve an important role in the evolution of our species. Without having obviously terrible people to be a focus for our communal rage and disgust, those feelings would fester and eventually turn into something negative, like dysentery or a world war. Once you've blocked out the voices, it's time to grab your bread. A lot of stuffing recipes start off by having you toast the bread to dry it out. We're not doing that. We're doing the opposite of that. Moisten your bread with a little bit of water until it starts sticking together just a little bit, and set it aside. You don't want it to be soaked and gloppy, so be careful with it.

Just look at those things. I can practically hear a drunk uncle
ruining a pleasant family moment already.

Now dice your onion and sauté it over medium heat along with an average sized human's pinch of salt. Let it cook down for about a minute. You can use that minute to chop up your celery, because now it's time to add it in with the onions and cook them for another 2-3 minutes. Then choppity chop up your mushrooms and add them in along with your thyme, black pepper, and another pinch of salt. It should take about 2 minutes for some of the moisture to cook out of the mushrooms and for the whole thing to start smelling crazy good. Take your vegetable mixture and stir it into your bread along with your parsley, eggs, and one final pinch of salt. Buy or steal a standard muffin pan and grease up the cups before filling them with your bread and vegetable mixture. Pack it in there and try to overstuff them a little bit if you can (you can). Throw those suckers into a 375 degree oven and let them cook for 15-20 minutes, until they start to get a little crispy on top and your entire home smells like condensed holiday awesomeness. Then take them out of the oven, take them out of the pan, and serve them. Or make them ahead of time in which case wait until your actual meal, heat them up, and then serve them. Bonus points if you don't make up an obnoxious cutesy name for them like "stuffins." Happy holidays!

Rosemary Roasted Potatoes

Rosemary, taking a selfie with some potatoes

So it's official. It's getting dark early, the air is getting colder, and people have begun to talk about "the holiday season." It's truly the end of times. All that we can do now is wait it out until the sun stops ignoring us and starts being cool again. You know, for about a week until the unbearable heat and humidity of summer. But that's a problem for future us, and those jerks probably have it coming, so let's focus on what's important: making a good all-purpose side dish that's tasty and hearty enough to satisfy us while we're huddling for protection from the cold and darkness outside. Which means delicious potatoes, at least to me. A lot of historians believe that if this technology had fallen into the hands of Ivan The Terrible, we'd all be speaking Russian right now. Or whatever proto-Russian they spoke back in the 16th century. So use with caution.

Ingredients:

2 lb. Potatoes (I don't know if you've noticed, but there are a lot of different kinds of potatoes, with more mutant varieties popping up in stores every week. Potato farmers need to just stop and get a life. Anyhow, any potato with a thin skin like red or white potatoes should be fine)
4 Cloves Garlic
3 TBSP Olive Oil
1.5 TBSP Chopped Rosemary (Don't buy chopped Rosemary. That's not even a thing. Buy Rosemary, chop it, and once it's chopped measure out one and a half tablespoons)
1/4 tsp Black Pepper
Salt

So full disclosure: this recipe is going to take almost an hour and a half to make from start to finish. If you don't have that kind of time, just get a store-bought can of potatoes and eat them cold while thinking about how incredibly important the things you've chosen to spend your time on are. Everybody else is gonna start by choppity-chop-chopping their garlic and rosemary down to size, which seriously represents like 50% of the work involved in this recipe. Throw your tiny bits of garlic and rosemary into a ziploc bag (Sorry, I forgot to act like Chopped and pretend that brand-names don't exist. Put them into a resealable zip-top storage bag) along with your oil, pepper, and salt. How much salt? Well, potatoes tend to need a lot of salt to taste like anything at all, so don't be stingy. I'd say throw in two large person's pinches of salt. For the frantic measurers out there, about 1.5 teaspoons. Chop your potatoes into wedges (Pro-tip: if they're all about the same size, they'll all cook in the same amount of time. If they're not, your life will be full of regret and sadness), and throw them in there as well.

If you're snowed in, just make these potatoes. Neighbors will
smell them, and dig through the snow to get to deliciousness.

Tradition says that you mix all these things together in a bowl, not a bag. But one of the oldest traditions is to not eat if your food can outrun you, so maybe let's use our brains instead of blindly following what people tell us to do. Seal up your bag and shake around the contents until everything's mixed together and the potatoes are thoroughly coated. Then spread them out onto a sheet pan in as close to a single layer as you can manage, and throw that sucker in a 400 degree oven for about an hour. Check on your potatoes every 20 minutes or so to stir, mix, and otherwise wangjangle them, which will help them brown evenly. Once they start looking crisp and golden and just kind of awesome, take them out. Serve them immediately, by which I mean eat them in your home while taunting the wild bears that are now roaming through your snow-encrusted neighborhood. Good luck out there, and remember that in no way by suggesting that you taunt bears am I trying to ensure that there are more scarce resources left for me. See you next week, possibly!

Artist's Rendition: January