I am such a good wife.*

*Or, Rye bread, at long last.

Since marriage I have tried to make the vast majority of our breads and baked goods at home. It's one part the love of baking, one part the superior quality one (usually) gets when making breads fresh, and one part utter sticker shock when I calculate the mark-up on any bread that is bought at the store (let alone at the artisan bakery of your choice).  In my baking "career" I have more or less successfully made white and whole wheat sandwich bread, bagels, ciabatta, rustic Italian bread, baguettes, challah, babka, yeast rolls, biscuits, flatbreads, quick breads, etc, etc. And it only took me four years to get around to making my husband's very favorite kind of bread. Yes. I am such a good wife.

M has suffered through bad outcomes of whole wheat bread experiments for as long as we've known each other. The current (mostly) whole wheat sandwich bread I make, tweaked from Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Everyday, is plenty acceptable to both of us for toast and sandwich purposes, and finally we enjoy a  bread that isn't bitter and/or dense as a brick; but it's still not something we'd jump at if we didn't know it was healthier, and therefore a better everyday choice, than white bread.

On a couple of occasions when M was uncomplainingly eating this or less successful bread experiments of mine, he mentioned casually but directly that rye was his favorite kind of bread. Hint, hint. I would nod, and make a mental note to look into that, but forget. Rye flour is expensive (comparatively) and hard to find (comparatively), and frankly since it's not my favorite kind of bread, and I'm the baker here, it has been shoved to the back burner time after time. (So now you know for sure I was being facetious about the good wife bit.)

Over Christmas vacation, making our usual rounds to all the NJ diners he grew up with, M would order rye toast with nearly every breakfast. I started to follow suit and realized, hey, this stuff wasn't bad. When we got back home I determined it was time to find and perfect a rye bread recipe so that my husband wouldn't have to keep hinting and waiting for another however many years. Now, a mere three months later, I have found a rye bread recipe (Baking Illustrated's Jewish deli rye bread), I have made it once with minimal modification (halved to make one "small" loaf for the first trial, and used whole grain rather than light or medium rye), and the verdict? I think it's pretty darn good. But I'm still waiting for the real judge to get home and try a slice.

Jewish deli rye bread. (By the way, does this look like a "small loaf" to you? It's not. That's what the recipe authors call it, but it is not. Fine by me.)

This same day (albeit before the bread had come out of the oven for tasting!) I ordered Baking Illustrated with an Amazon gift card from Christmas (appreciate my restraint--holding onto even part of an Amazon gift card for three months is possibly a record for me). I checked it out from the library a couple weeks ago and have made the snickerdoodles (good), peanut butter chocolate chip cookies (goooood), and now the rye bread (with modification noted above), and given those results plus a strong desire to make probably 95% of the rest of the recipes immediately, I figure I can get my money's worth out of this cookbook in no time. Besides, my only other true baking cookbook, King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking, was such a flop, I am sorry to say. (Maybe I will report more on that some time. I recently went through and marked about 5 more recipes to try, as sort of an ultimatum--- if they aren't worthwhile, out goes the book. I need the shelf space.) There are always cooking (and baking) blogs for finding new recipes, but they are never as thoroughly tested (or "guaranteed," if you will) as Cook's Illustrated's are, and the hour is quickly coming when I will have much less time and energy to devote to this or any other hobby. This is because we have a baby on the way, and I hear they are sort of demanding, particularly in the beginning... Check back in a year and this blog (if it's been updated at all) will be all about troubleshooting homemade baby food, and/or maternal diet fare for those postpartum months. Don't say I didn't warn you.

So... off to make some fried pickles for dinner. (Seriously. These. Will report back.)

well.

Time to show I haven't fully given up on littering the internet with my mesmerizing culinary writing. I've been cooking and baking quite a bit lately, and not unsuccessfully, but I just haven't had the motivation to blog about any of it.

Given our 70+ degree temperatures, I was going to make banana ice cream today, but after reading a Southern Living article yesterday about Pie Shop in Buckhead, I felt ambitious enough to answer my resultant craving for a good old-fashioned pie. Pie crust and I have a checkered past together, but unlike some other techniques that I have officially given up on (e.g. whipping egg whites, if you can believe it), I am actually improving with each attempt at rolling out pie dough, and so I continue to do it. I think what helps me most is using plenty of flour on the pin and the work surface---not letting it get to that frustrating point where it is sticking, and I add more flour, and it sticks anyway---and using lard as 1/4 of the fat (butter for the rest, of course). This makes a malleable, easy to work with and incredibly flaky crust every time, even though I probably overwork the dough a bit because I always misjudge if I've added enough water and push it around a lot to try and tell.

I made something inspired by a recipe I found in a Cooking Light back issue, black bottom banana cream pie. Unfortunately, my first time making this pie, I was trying to halve a crust recipe (I think Smitten Kitchen's all butter crust, which is quite good when made correctly) and forgot to halve the water. Don't ever add too much water to your pie crust. It is a fast and easy way to make it completely inedible. Anyway, we ate around the crust that time and M in particular loved the rest of it, so I wanted to make it again, crust and all.

I used a basic Gourmet pastry crust recipe, subbing my lard for the vegetable shortening and adding just a small amount of sugar (theirs had none). Instead of CL's weird cornstarch-cocoa powder mixture, I use ganache to provide the thin layer of dark chocolate at the bottom of the pie. I follow their vanilla custard/pudding recipe almost exactly, except I refuse to touch fat free cream cheese and used regular. Even though it's made with 1% milk, it is plenty rich and creamy and makes a great stand-alone vanilla pudding if you're looking for one. And that's really all there is to this pie. Thinly slice a couple of bananas and place however you want on top of the chilled ganache, then top with the custard. If desired you spread whipped cream all over the top of that (though I have to refrain, because the weirdo with whom I live happens not to love whipped cream), then top with chocolate shavings. Voila. Now I am fighting the urge to have pie for dinner.

Not going to win any beauty competitions, as usual...