Upside-Down Pear

I’ve had a cup and a half of mashed bourbon sweet potatoes sitting in my fridge since Monday-ish, and today I got around to using them.  There are lots of options for using up mashed sweet potatoes — you can usually sub them one-for-one in recipes calling for mashed pumpkin, butternut squash, or bananas, for example.

I found a recipe for molasses pumpkin bread, changed it around to suit myself, and made it.  Mmmmm.

Ingredients
Dry
* 1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
* 1 tablespoon cinnamon (true cinnamon, if you have it)
* 1 1/2 teaspoon ginger
* 1 tsp five-spice powder
* 3/4 teaspoon nutmeg
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 3/4 teaspoon salt
* 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/8 teaspoon black pepper

Wet
* 6 tablespoons softened unsalted butter
* 2/3 cup blackstrap molasses
* 2 eggs
* 1 1/2 cup mashed sweet potatoes (leftover is fine, even if pretty heavily spiced)
* 1/4 cup milk
* 3/4 teaspoon vanilla

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350F, and grease a 9×5 loaf pan.

Whisk together the first 8 ingredients.

In a separate bowl (preferably in a stand mixer), beat the butter for a minute or so, then gradually beat in the molasses.  Because blackstrap molasses is so dark, it won’t lighten like brown sugar or lighter molasses does, so keep an eye on it and beat in the eggs, one at a time, when the butter and molasses look well-blended.

Beat in the sweet potatoes, milk, and vanilla.

Add in the flour mixture and stir until just combined (by hand is better than in the mixer).

Pour batter into prepared loaf pan and bake for about 1 hour.  (Always check center with a skewer or clean knife before removing from oven!)

Cool 5 minutes in pan, then run a knife blade around the edges and unmold.  Place on wire rack to cool the rest of the way.

Nat claims that this combines the best aspects of pumpkin pie with the best aspects of gingerbread.  I think it’s not quite right, yet.  I’m toying with the idea of upping the spice levels next time, or possibly modifying Ray’s Wicked Gingerbread into a sweet potato recipe. Just in case I end up with leftover sweet potatoes again, you know?

This summer, what with one thing and another, I neglected Eduardo.  This past Sunday, I pulled him out of the fridge to prepare for Thanksgiving baking, and discovered that he was dead.

Fortunately, it was Sunday — so I had plenty of time to prepare another starter.  Nat and I floated a few names for it, including “Edgar Allen Dough”, but in the end, we went with “Fernando”.  (Nat knew a llama by this name as a child, so Fernando the Starter is named after Fernando the Llama.)

Eduardo had a rich sourdough flavor, gathered over the years, that Fernando — young as yet — cannot match.  But the first loaves from Fernando are tender and delicious, sweet with promise.

We spent a good while this morning whining about how we didn’t want any of the breakfasts we could make, and then it was 11:30, and finally, we made brunch sandwiches.

1 long or 2 short ciabatta rolls, or other good sandwich bread

4 strips bacon

6 spears asparagus, tough end snapped off, cut lengthwise in half

2 eggs

1 clove garlic, peeled & cut in half

1 pat butterYou will need two pans for this - one for the bacon and eggs, and one for the bread and asparagus.

Because it’s too hot to bake, we bought our rolls at Whole Foods.  Their rolls are longish, so we cut them in half and use each half for one sandwich.  Whatever bread you use, you want 2 sandwiches worth.

Toast the bread lightly, then rub the sides that will be inside the sandwich with garlic.

While the bread is toasting, fry bacon strips until crisp over medium heat. Pour off most of the fat.

In the other pan,  melt the butter and put the garlic-rubbed bread garlic-side down in pan.

Cook eggs in bacon grease. Nat had his over-easy; I had mine fried hard.

Remove buttery-toasted rolls; put garlic and asparagus in pan and cook until asparagus is bright green and slightly soft.

Arrange bacon, eggs, and asparagus on bread.  (Discard garlic.)

Eat. Yum.

Some mornings, Nat and I stop at Il Piccolo Forno in the Strip District, and grab a cold slice of pizza for breakfast. One of our favorites is onion and bleu cheese.

Like brik, their pizza is something we really wanted to have at home. I had a good crust recipe, but it was not right for this - I needed a thin, Neapolitan-style crust. Luckily for Christmas I had given Nat a copy of Nick Malgieri’s How to Bake : Complete Guide to Perfect Cakes, Cookies, Pies, Tarts, Breads, Pizzas, Muffins, and it contained just what I was looking for.

The particular recipe is available online, poorly formatted. Please note, the proportions in the half recipe are slightly different. Really, what you want is to buy the book - it’s useful in all kinds of ways, not just for producing perfect Neapolitan crusts. (I will note that I think Malgieri sometimes orders steps in a suboptimal way, so it pays more than usual to read the whole thing through and reorder. For example, he says to start proofing the yeast in this recipe after mixing together the flour and salt; I did it before, so that by the time I had the mix ready, the yeast was done proofing.)

To the list of toppings, we added a handful of crumbled gorgonzola and a handful of mozzarella per pizza, very thin sliced onions, and some sliced capicola.

Because of the additional toppings, and the peculiarities of our oven, it took about 45 minutes to cook ours to perfect crusty doneness. We ate one piping hot, with cold beer to help it along, and cooled the second on a rack, so that the crust wouldn’t get soggy. It is slated for tomorrow’s breakfast - perfect, as Il Piccolo Forno is closed on Mondays.

I’ve mentioned my sourdough starter, the whimsically-named Eduardo, before. I have some friends who find Eduardo strange, a disturbance, an oddity: this living thing I keep in my fridge and occasionally turn into food. It’s macabre, or scary, or - what if it goes bad?

In a way I can see their point, especially when I’ve failed to pay attention for a while and Eduardo’s gone all gray and watery on top. (Heh. Oops.) After all, what is scarier than the possibility of your food developing its own civilization? Aside from Pauly Shore movies, that is. Still, I’m more inclined to mail packets of dried starter off to friends than I am to be alarmist about Eduardo taking a turn for the Blob.

Mostly, he’s just all-purpose flour and water. He’s had other things in there: grapes, steel-cut oats, various flours, some whole grains. I like to experiment, and I wanted to see what I got when I experimented with starter. Not much interesting, as it turns out, though I’ll probably try grapes again at some point - gave the bread a lovely winey tasty.

He just is, this collection of feeding yeasts; this thing that turns out bread after bread and in-between times goes dormant in my fridge or bubbles on a warm radiator. He’s almost like another pet - ugly, but with a good smell and a tractable personality.

…and it’s the sandwich for its time and place.

I don’t have my mother’s recipe for Rosemary Olive Bread, but the other day I was jonesing and went on a Quest. I found a substantially similar recipe and went to work. Sourdough breads are easier for me to make than for my mother, since I maintain a starter (which I have named Eduardo); the starter means that all I have to do is warm it up rather than fermenting one for three days.

The recipe makes two large loaves; I decided to make one loaf and then a set of rolls. The rolls don’t need to cook quite as long, and they came out round and soft with a perfect, just-crusty-enough crust.

We ate some of them with spicy shrimp, and saved the rest for later.

Today, after gardening, I came in hungry. The rolls, wrapped in a clean cloth, tempted me from the kitchen table. I sliced one in half and put it in the toaster; found mayonnaise and stone-ground mustard, soppressata and Ossau-Iraty. When the roll tumbled out, crisp and hot, I layered on the ingredients: mustard on one side, mayo on the other, cheese on the mustard, soppressata on the mayo - put it together, and sliced it in half.

It looked perfect on the plate; olives peeping from the bread, warm fragrance rising, cheese softening against the hot bread. I almost couldn’t bear to eat it, but I did: it was perfect in the mouth as well.