$30 at the farmer's market in Southeast Michigan in early July gets you . . .

(From left to right) Green beans, two zucchini, snow peas, a bunch of radishes (with greens), a jar of local wildflower honey, a bunch of flowering bok choy, a quart of strawberries, "peaches" (that seem an awful lot like nectarines), a sweet potato, and a bunch of beets (with greens). All non-organic, needless to say, though they are local. Is it just me, or is it not as cheap as it seems it should be? Am I just spoiled as a Californian? Still, it's an incredible relief to have some local fresh vegetables and fruits even AVAILABLE. Even at this time of the year, most of the farmer's market was filled up with soap, sugar-sweet breads, and perennial plants. The local Michigan grain, even unground (before being ground into flour), is $2 a pound for wheat berry.

Oh, my GOD, this Michigan economy is going to kill me.

Unmanageable milk jugs: another reason to buy local milk you collect in your own glass bottle.

Eat the View -- Lawns to carrots and lettuce, please

One of my major aggravations about mainstream American culture is our obsession with large, bright green lawns. Being a Californian from an area where local foodie and restauranteur Alice Waters built a local organic gardening program in the schoolyard of a junior high school, where the local government offered financial support for a while to those replacing their lawn with drought-resistant native plants (in Oakland), and where the San Francisco City Hall is recruiting the community to plant vegetables on its grounds and monitoring the planting of "Victory Gardens" throughout the city, it's weird and unnerving to live now in a place where people ride back and forth every weekend on giant lawnmowers, and where I have to fight to keep my edible plants safe from the muscle men who the landlords pay to do "lawn and garden maintenance".

So, I'm excited by ideas of how to challenge the status quo on this particular issue. This is a really interesting one, and would be SO great if it were actually implemented. The concept is for the next president of the United States to reapportion the space of the White House lawn to be an organic victory garden. Take a look, and sign the petition!

Rye Crisps -- Variations on the rye theme

So today I tried a modified version of my quick rye bread recipe, which is proving absolutely outstanding. One potential benefit is that it's lower in gluten than the other version. Rye isn't gluten-free, so this isn't a gluten-free bread, but the other flours here are fine for gluten-free diets, so maybe this could be good for people who are looking to reduce their gluten consumption but can still have some in their breads. I'm only now learning a little bit about gluten sensitivities, since my sister, Ms Scrumptious, visited me a couple weeks ago.

Here's the ingredient list:

Quick Whole Grain Rye Bread:
* 2 cups organic nonfat milk
* 2 Tbsp. cider vinegar
* 4 Tbsp. unsulphured blackstrap molasses
* 3 cups rye flour
* 1 cup buckwheat flour
* 1/2 cup quinoa flour
* 1 cup rolled oats
* 2 tsp fennel seeds
* 3 tsp cumin seeds
* 2 tsp sesame seeds
* handful (about 1/2 cup) raw sunflower seeds
* 3 tsp. baking powder
* 1 tsp. baking soda
* 1 tsp sea salt

Directions:
Follow the basic directions I outlined before, including the salt and sesame and sunflower seeds with the dry ingredients.

Divide the dough in half when it is holding together nicely after kneading. This recipe makes two loaves.

For a rustic round loaf like the one above (gorgeous for little open-faced avocado sandwiches) follow the directions for shaping it in my original recipe. For delicious rye crisps, excellent for a Southern-European-style mezze with eggplant caviar, olives, salty Bulgarian feta cheese, etc., press the dough into a small rectangular loaf that is relatively flat, about an inch thick.


When the dough cools, you can slice it thinly, and toast it or bake it for lovely rye toasts for parties. Mmmm. I need to work on getting the sesame seeds to stick on top, though.

I baked the little guys for about 12 minutes on each side to yield right around 25 crispies that look quite a bit like thin biscotti, only they're savory.

Rye bread revisited

I have tried my hand again with the quick rye bread. This time I doubled the recipe, and upped the fennel and cumin seeds I used in the dough, skipped the sugar, and used just 2/3 the amount of molasses. It's lovely and still sweet without being overly so. I also sprinkled the top with coarse French sea salt, yielding a result that looks almost like a giant gingerbread cookie.

I think I'll add a little salt to the recipe next time I make it, perhaps 1/2-1 tsp in with the dry ingredients, especially if I don't use the coarse salt on top again.

I have to reiterate how delicious the bread is with fresh avocado. Now that I had a ripe one, I couldn't resist making a simple, delicious sandwich with just sliced avocado and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a turn of fresh-cracked black pepper.


Here it is in the oven. . .

Now that I knew how sticky the dough would be, I was prepared with extra flour, and the kneading went considerably more quickly than last time. I seriously got the loaf in the oven in right around 10 minutes. Not bad for lovely fresh-baked bread.

Farm Fresh Eggs

Ms Scrumptious has finally recounted the adventure of buying eggs in the country around here in Michigan, a story I've been meaning to tell for ages. It delights me every single time I pull off the road onto the gravel drive behind an old farmhouse, wave hi to the cats and dogs and horses, and help myself to the eggs offered in a mini-fridge on the honor system. Thanks for sharing the photos and the story, Ms Scrumptious! And thank you so much for the wonderful visit, too. :)

(This has been an In My Box/Kitchen Empress crossover post!)

Quick Rye Bread Recipe -- Easy step-by-step guide with photos

As I learned from Alton Brown recently in his episode on muffins, the term "quickbread" distinguishes this class of breads from those that rely on yeast for leavening, since quickbreads generally use baking soda or baking powder for leavening and therefore do not require rising time.

The quickbreads most of us are familiar with are the sweet, fruity ones, like muffins and banana bread. Somewhere I happened upon a recipe for rye quickbread in the past few days, though, so I felt inspired to try my hand at another type of whole-grain loaf that didn't depend on yeast. I was craving bread today and didn't want to wait several hours before I could eat it fresh from the oven, steaming and crusty and spread with fresh organic butter. As I am writing this post, I smell the sweet, delicious scent of molasses-rich rye bread baking in the oven, and I know this is going to be a winner.

This is a modified version of a recipe I found on the veggieboards (here). It yields a delicious result in just over an hour from start to finish: dense, moist, and sweet with molasses. I would recommend it especially for avocado sandwiches, as suggested by the original poster, to accompany fresh salad and soup, or perhaps as the sandwich bread for a simple ham & cheese. Umlud and I are probably just going to devour it plain with some sharp cheddar cheese. It bears a little resemblance to the flavor & texture of the yummy fresh-baked bread we used to get with salads at Intermezzo in Berkeley.

Hunks of cheddar cheese with delicious, wholesome molasses-rye bread. So hot from the oven, the steam blurred the photo. . . :)

Quick Rye Bread
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Baking time: 1 hour

Ingredients:

• 1 cup organic milk or soymilk
• 1-1.5 Tbsp. cider vinegar
• 1 Tbsp. organic brown sugar (optional; I think I'd omit.)
• 3 Tbsp. unsulphured molasses
• 1 1/2 cups rye flour
• 1/2 cup spelt flour
• 1/4 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup rolled oats
• 2 Tbsp. caraway seeds (I used 1/2 tsp fennel seeds and 1.5 tsp cumin seeds, since I didn't have caraway, yielding an Indian-spiced bread delicious with cheddar cheese)
• 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• additional whole wheat flour for kneading

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350ºF.
2. In a small bowl or glass measuring cup, sour the milk by adding in the vinegar, waiting a couple minutes, stirring, and adding a splash more of vinegar if necessary.The milk will be thick and a little chunky, sort of like yogurt or buttermilk.
   
3. Stir in the molasses and sugar, if desired. Set aside.
4. In a large bowl, combine the rye flour, all-purpose flour, oats, caraway seeds, baking powder, and baking soda. Add the milk mixture and stir well. Your dough will be rather sticky.
   
   Photos courtesy of Umlud, mostly.
   
5. Turn the dough onto a lightly floured bread board or countertop. A rubber spatula will help for scraping out stubbornly sticky dough.
6. Knead until the dough holds together (2 to 3 minutes).
7. If the dough remains very sticky, knead in a little more flour. Shape the dough into a round.
   As you'll see in this little video, courtesy of Umlud, the dough is really quite sticky. It would be handy to have extra flour at hand to bind all the dough together and remove it from your hands.
   
   
   
   
8. Place it on a lightly oiled baking sheet, and finish shaping as necessary, flattening and rounding until you have a satisfactory-looking rustic loaf. Bake until crusty and well browned (about 1 hour).