Beacon Bites: Homespun Foods

Salami(I think?), provolone and caponata panini and carrot cake, Homespun Foods, 232 Main St., Beacon, NY; www.homespunfoods.com

Despite success with the vegan bread, I was having a really awful day, and wanted something kinda fancy-schmancy for lunch, with something sweet too. The awesome Japanese place doesn't take cards, and I didn't want to stop at the credit union for cash, so Homespun it was. This place is rockingly busy on the weekends due to its proximity to the art museum and inclusion in Beacon writeups in the Times, and usually a little sleepier on weekdays. Well, that'd been my prior experience. It was hopping at 2:30 on a Wednesday with about 20 women and four guys (but two, photographers, quickly left).

I've never had anything bad here, but nothing jumped out at me from today's specials. The salami, provolone and caponata panini sounded swell, and was a little cheaper than the consistently-to-die-for quiche. There are usually more desserts to choose from, too, but from today's choices of chocolate-enrobed brownie, carrot cake, and a poppyseed (probably lemon, too) bread pudding, I went with the carrot cake. The Mexican chocolate pudding, made with almond milk, sounded good but it looked like the pre-portioned servings were all in to-stay dishes, and I wanted to get back home to my puppy.

The panini was okay. It probably would have been better if I'd eaten it there, as the cheese got the way melted cheese gets when it cools for a bit. The caponata was different from any I'd had before, occasionally screaming "OLIVE! INCOMING!!" with each little green chunk. I don't really love salami, but I forgot that before I ordered it.

The carrot cake was interesting too - in a good way. The icing had a subtle citrus tang. A little nuttier than I like, but I know that's the breaks with carrot cake. The icing-cake ratio was a little high. I guess I wasn't expecting the layer of icing between cake layers. On the other hand, when the woman working asked which piece I wanted, I said "corner," so that'd explain the preponderance of icing as well.

I'd eat them both again, although I probably wouldn't order the sandwich again. But that's only because I know you can't go wrong with the quiche and its accompanying salad. There's a patio out back, and it'll be nice to sit out there the next time I'm not in a hurry. The service is always friendly, and usually efficient. I'll probably be back this weekend.

A note on Homespun's desserts: The Nutella-cherry bread pudding I made for New Year's was a ripoff of their chocolate-cherry bread pudding. I've also made my version of their caramel-apple BP. They've had ginger-pear BP too, and while it was good, I don't think I'll be trying to replicate it any time soon. Just Sunday, B and I had a lemon tart and chocolate espresso cookie. Next time I'll try to take pictures before Leo laps up the last crumbs (of everything but the chocolate, of course).

P.S. - This awesome plate was among kitchenesque Xmas gifts from B:
I love this plate for everything...

BADD (bread attention deficit disorder)

Oops, I did it again.

See, we were only going to go to the grocery store, and I had a list, so it should have been an hour at the most... The dough had only risen for about two hours before, so I figured that if it was rising in the loaf pan for more than the planned 45 minutes, it'd be okay.

And it did turn out okay, after I punched the billowing mass back into the pan and baked it.

B got home from work and we turned around and headed to the store. But we were both hungry, and I had a menu from a Greek place in the car. Hannaford's can't hold a candle to gyros, pastichio and milkshakes. (Even though we only ate the gyros - he opted for Marathon beer, I got water, and the pastichio is sitting in the fridge, still untouched 24 hours later.) Plus, going shopping with a hungry boyfriend is a recipe for spending $200 on organic junk food. My least favorite thing to hear while shopping: "Ooh, this might be good." (Thing is, though, he's usually right.)

So the dough rose for at least another two hours. Maybe three? As pretty much anyone who knows me will attest, I'm not so good with those clock things. This has to be the most forgiving bread recipe EVER. See?


First stage of rising. That's a lot of flour, and my dough is always gummy. Oh well.


Not sure why I didn't take a picture immediately before this, when the dough had spilled over the pan's edges.


See? it turned out fine. And it was delicious with eggs this morning.

Alien bread

There's flour all over the kitchen.
There's flour all over me.
The apartment smells like stale beer.
(I think it's the yeast, but it could be stale beer.)
The dough is rising.

This is the fourth time I've attempted to make my BFF Jenessa's vegan bread, and I swear it turns out different every time.

Maybe it's because I'm not the most attentive dough-watcher. ...Maybe.
Last time, I let it rise about two and half hours, until it was doubled. Then the boyfriend and I wanted to go do something else, so I stuffed it into a loaf pan, beat it down, wrapped it in plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge.

We have refrigerators to inhibit growth of cultures such as yeast, right??? Well, we got home from wherever pretty late, too late to bake the bread. I peeked into the fridge and was confronted by an angry, amoeba-"shaped" tan mass that threatened to hold the sprouts (don't laugh at me because I ♥ sprouts) hostage. The sprouts will never forgive me, because I shut the door, went to bed, and tried not to have nightmares about that horrific scene.

I had to work the next day, so I punched the dough back into the loaf pan, re-Saran-wrapped it, threw it back in the fridge, and walked away. Again. With the lives of at least a few different kinds of produce at stake.

I checked it again when I got home sometime after 1 a.m.
It had exploded. Again.
I went to bed. Again.

I probably should have known better, and just thrown it out, but I'm always game for a bit of a science experiment. So I baked it the next day. Needless to say, it was not as tasty as the first three loaves (the first time, I split the dough into two loaves like BFF says; second time, baked it all in one and it was great), but it looked amazing! This was the Sears Willis Tower of bread tops. Too bad that when I took it out of the oven, even after tapping it for that lovely hollow sound, much of the interior was doughy and gross.

I still ate the crusty parts.

Here's hoping the current loaf comes out better...

It's electric, pt. 2

this fascinated me
Originally uploaded by stephaniekg

The coffee grounds acted like this.

It's electric! (... boogie woogie woogie.)

Yesterday morning and today, I had chocolate cake (left over from B's birthday Monday) and black coffee for breakfast. Delicious. Of course, this is my weekend, so I'm not worried about the inevitable energy crash.

B, being the earlier-riser, had been the primary A.M. coffee-maker. He's mentioned it before, but not until my own recent forays into home coffee brewing have I noticed that the coffee grinder magnetizes the grounds.

Huh??

No, I'm not walking around the kitchen holding a magnet, but it seems as though when the receptacle for the grounds is pulled out of the grinder, and when the lid's removed, grounds splay out in patterns that look like the same ones metal filings make. Remember Wooly Willy? Where you drag the magnet-pen to make his beard and hair and mustache? Like that. It's kind of a pain to get coffee dust to behave.

Well, after much Googling and not-really-what-I-was-looking-for information about magnetic therapy, I found this in a review of a coffee grinder:

* Grounds receptacle builds up static charge. This is an amazing thing. I had no idea coffee beans could so convincingly mimic the properties of magnetized iron filaments, as they cling together in a lump on the wall of the plastic container. I am forever scraping them off into the coffee filter. Sometimes they take to flight, perhaps attracted by the magnetic force of the International Space Station, only to settle scatter-shot all over the counter.

Makes sense.

A review for another grinder claims that the slow bean-grinding speed doesn't magnetize the grounds. Yet another site is pro-grinder magnetization, but I can see why they'd want to conserve as much product as possible.

So now I know a little more about the science causing the Wooly Willy coffee grounds, but I'm still not sure what to do about it. I really like the grinder, and it was free. Funny thing: Until looking it up just now, I didn't know that it claimed to have an anti-static bean container.

More Googling yields this coffee-grinding nugget: The static charge can be created by the speed of the burrs when coupled with the wrong humidity and temperature.

Looks like plenty of other people have had this problem, as "static" is mentioned in more than a few coffee grinder reviews. I guess once this one dies, it'll be good to have a reference. Until then, it doesn't sound like there's a way to fix the current problem. Throwing some Downy in with the beans is not exactly appetizing.

OK, OK... this post totally doesn't count...

I really really realllllly meant to do a full post today. Except, see, the boyfriend took a snow day, and you know, really, I couldn't tell you the last time we had an entire day together. So we stayed away from the Interweb in general and walked and did groceries and laundry and cooked dinner. Is this what normal couples do? I'm sure we'd get sick of each other after, like, three days of this.

But - this is what I was talking about when I said the weird stuff came to me.

Or, as my friend S asked when I showed her this picture, "Why did you take a picture of turds?"

Recap

Danielle, aka Fran, gave "Moroccan wine" a thumbs-up.

What I made in SLC, except for the already-recapped Italian (photos here):

Cuban: Cornmeal-crusted whitefish with an almond-butter sauce, and a cinnamon-mango crisp. Caroline (aka Vera) came over and did accounting homework while she ate. This one was so easy - and it must have been good, too, because after this she brought her own Tupperware for leftovers. From this cookbook.

Indian: Chicken vindaloo. Really well-seasoned, with small amounts of many spices. Spicy, but not burn-your-mouth-for-days hot. There's a picture of it in an earlier post somewhere down there...

Thai: I made pad thai and a potato curry. They were delicious. The curry comes together really quickly, too, so I've made it a few times since. From this cookbook.

Mexican: This was so good!!! There was an almond mole, almendrado de pollo. I also made mexican rice because, well, it was easy and we needed something to put the mole on. I think both recipes were from Mark Bittman's book, which felt like cheating, but he seems pretty authentic. (E.g., in Asian recipes, he's not afraid to use plenty of fish sauce.)

Japanese: Teriyaki chicken (unlike any I'd had before), yakisoba noodles, and edamame. The chicken was coated in cornstarch before cooking it, which worked really well. Not a crunchy texture, but not soggy either. The sauce wasn't what I'd thought of as teriyaki - it wasn't sticky sweet like it as at most places.

Irish: I'll be honest, this was an easy pick, as I cooked on St. Patrick's Day. I made an Irish beef stew, and colcannon (mashed potatoes with leeks). Friends brought Guinness and beer.

Colombia: I found this cookbook at the library, and for that one book alone, I miss the SLC library a bunch. I haven't been to the little one here in this little town, but it'll be interesting to check out the breadth of their selection. I made fried bananas, coconut and black-eyed pea rice, and a stew with fish and plantains. The first two dishes were fantastic. The stew, well... I don't know if the plantains were extremely unripe, or if that's just how plantains are supposed to be in savory dishes. The fish kind of started to fall apart. On the off chance I were to make the stew again, I think I'd get riper plantains, and cook only add the fish when the rest of the stew is close to done. Maybe even fry it first for better texture? Anyway, I learned a lot with that one...

Last, but not least, Moroccan: I don't know how I decided on this one. It's entirely possible that I just picked up one of the prettier cookbooks on the shelf at the Trib and went for it. In this case, the book was Arabesque, and I could almost smell the spices when I opened it. I made harira, a traditional Moroccan stew, from the book, and a lentil, onion and rice "salad" from a recipe I found online. We had been getting wine from the same country as the dishes, but I couldn't find any wine from Morocco at the state store down the street. So I picked up one bottle from Spain, and another from South Africa, and decided to split the difference. (I didn't say the difference was split equally by geography!)

That turned out to be the final SLC cuisine night, because a week or maybe two later I was packed up and on the road to New York. Even in the new apartment, it's been hard to plan dinners like those because
1) I don't have friends to invite over to eat. There's me, B, and the puppy.
2) I work nights and weekends.
3) It's harder to find weird ethnic ingredients because this is a smallish city. What I should be doing is planning way ahead, so I could go down to the city on one day off and get ingredients, and on the second day off, cook my brains out.
That said, with No. 3, it's not as hard as I thought, and sometimes the weird stuff comes to you... More about that tomorrow. (Yes, tomorrow. Wednesday, January 28.)