Delicious, quick pancakes for the starving student . . .

I'm getting really good at eating on a shoestring. For one thing, I'm just trying to reduce my overall consumption of food. And hiding out at home much of the week helps too, because it's much easier to save money when you're cooking. I also am falling back on some basic, simple foods. Happily, the garden is providing just enough to give a little green here and there. This diet isn't sustainable in the long-term for optimal health, but it's not too bad for the moment.

One of my new rediscoveries is pancakes! They're so good, filling and warm. . . I have adapted this recipe, using reconstituted powdered milk, and making a few other small modifications, to excellent effects:

1 cup flour
2 1/4 tsp baking powder
1 T brown or white sugar
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cups reconstituted powdered milk
1 egg
2 tablespoons melted butter
splash vanilla
frozen blueberries

Combine dry ingredients in one bowl. Beat egg, vanilla, and butter into reconstituted milk. Pour wet ingredients into the dry, and stir until combined. Add blueberries. The batter will be very thick. Don't worry. It will make outstanding, fluffy, delicious pancakes. Pour in 1/3-cup-sized dollops into an iron skillet hot with melted butter. Serve with maple syrup or eat all by themselves. Cheap, fast, easy, and delicious. For me, this makes enough for one nice filling short stack to eat while hot and another small stack to put in the fridge for later after hours of reading and studying.

$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!)