I decided to create a new website where Chris and I can keep a daily log of our garden. We have plans for winter gardening this year too, so this should be helpful. If you’re interested in keeping up-to-date on our home organic gardening, visit www.vegarden.com.
Well, it seems that I finally have perfected my method of pita-making. I’ve had a hard time perfecting other bread recipes, but pitas always seem to work for me! So, here’s what I know now about “what makes a pita a pita.”
The first thing to understand about pita is why a flat pice of bread gets a pocket in the middle of it when you bake it. The answer: when you place moist dough in a very hot oven, the moisture in the dough turns to gas, pushes the dough out, and forms a pocket.
Homemade Pita:
- 1 1/2 cup water
- 3 Tbsp. sunflower oil
- 3 3/4 cup flour
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1 1/2 Tbsp. yeast
- 1 1/2 Tbsp. sugar
I should admit: I cheated and used a bread machine for the first part of the kneading process. But, since I got a bread machine, I’ve been cheating away the first 10 minutes of bread-making anyway..
So, the first step in making pita bread is having a dough that is not too dry. In past biscuit-making adventures, I’ve encountered a lot of dough that seemed very sticky. My initial response to sticky dough was to simply add more flour – not so! If you can’t work with the wet dough, then just get your hands wet as well. The dough won’t stick to your hands, and as long as you put enough flour on the surface you plan to set the dough on, you’ll be just fine. (By the way, this “moist dough” theory seems to apply to a lot of artisan breads as well).
This recipe makes 8-12 pockets, depending on how big you want them to be. As soon as you mix the dough together, cut it into 8-12 pieces (a pizza cutter works well), and then roll each pice into a round ball. Put all the balls together (not touching) on a well-floured surface, and cover with a damp dish towel. Let them sit for 30 minutes.
Roll out the balls into discs – they should be about the width of a yard stick. Place the discs onto baking sheets.
The next step: make sure that you have a HOT OVEN. The oven needs to be pre-heated to 500ºF, and every time you take cooked pita out of the oven, let the oven heat up for another minute or two before putting another sheet in. Also, I have found that it’s best to cook pita on the bottom-most rack and only cook ONE SHEET of pita breads at a time.
If the oven is hot enough and your dough is moist enough, your pitas should puff up in the oven. Don’t let them cook too long – 5-7 minutes is long enough. If they start to turn brown on the top, take them out! Over-cooked pitas will crack and fall apart.
Let the pitas cool until you can touch them, and then put them into a paper bag, sealed tightly, adding each batch of pitas as you cook them. Let the pitas cool off in the bag – they will deflate, forming a flat bread with a pocket inside. Stuff, eat, yum.
Chris and I went to the cities last weekend to visit our mothers on Mother’s Day. Unfortunately, the weather was quite drab, but it was a fine weekend. As always, I spent way too much money… but I did have a gift certificate that helped me purchase a food saver, and I got a free bag of dog food.
Chris’s dad had a bunch of morel mushrooms growing in his back yard! Chris brouht some home with him, and we ate them with penne on Sunday night – pretty good, but not incredibly flavorful. I don’t think I’d fork over the money to actually buy them. Inspired by Chris’s findings, I decided to scour my parents’ back yard for mushrooms as well – I found some giant, delicious-looking mushrooms growing on a stump, so I brought some back here with me. We were not able to definitely identify them using my mushroom book, so we decided not to eat them. I have seen references to a book called “Minnesota Mushrooms,” but I have never actually been able to locate a copy of it. I think it’s pretty old though, so someone should work on a new edition.
“Oh, you’re a vegan? Well, then, what do you eat?”
Please, please if you consume sentient beings or by-products of sentient beings without their permission, never – I repeat, never – ask this question of someone who chooses not to.
What do you eat? Are you sure you’re getting enough protein in your diet? (Are you sure you aren’t getting too much?) Do you know if you are getting the right amount of B12 in your diet? Do you think I have a harder time finding sources of nutrients than a six-ton elephant has? Are edible plant foods very hard to come by? Am I underweight? Overweight? Sickly? Do you know how many years it’s been since I’ve considered putting something that wasn’t grown from the earth in my stomach?
Oh, yes – and my dogs are vegans too. And for the past year, I have actually noticed that they are healtier than they used to be. Especially Puck – my special-needs boxer with allergies to things I probably haven’t heard of. Happy, lucky, vegan boys.
My house smells like lavender! I pulverized some lavender flowers in my food processor, added some baking soda, and sprinkled it all over the carpet. I haven’t vacuumed it up yet, but the house already smells so much better than it did before. I am working on migrating away from cleaning products that contain ammonia, bleach, and other chemicals. Nigel has had really bad goopy eyes recently, and I think it may be partly because of cleaning agents. A few weeks ago, I made some laundry detergent out of homemade soap, so hopefully using that along with chemical-free cleaners will help out his eyes.
My parents got me a food dehydrator for my birthday last week! It’s super neat – nine trays and temperature-controlled dehydrating. Chris and I made buckwheat pizza crust and flax crackers, which are currently dehydrating. Chris gave me a Raw Food (Un)Cookbook, which is where we got the recipes from. The two will go very nicely together, and I’m excited for this summer when we will have lots of vegetables to experiment with.
I’ve been pretty discouraged about houseplants recently. Last summer, I brought all of my houseplants outside, where they did very well until it was time to come in for the fall. I thought it was about time to give up on houseplants.
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Then I learned about papaya. I saw a papaya tree when I visited the Como Park Conservatory last June, and since then I’ve had a desire in the back of my consciousness to grow a papaya tree – mostly just because I really like the look of them. They have neat spikey leaves, which grow like palm leaves do: the leaves cluster just at the top of the tree, and the whole trunk is scarred from fallen leaves. A few week ago, I randomly decided to search the Internet for growing papayas inside. I was completely amazed at what I found. There were many forums with people discussing growing their papayas indoors in New York, people asking for help because their seven-month-old tree hadn’t started flowering yet, and pictures after pictures of 8-month to year-old papaya trees loaded with fruit – many of which were grown inside. Here’s an underneath shot of a one-year-old papaya tree. There are a lot of people who buy a papaya from the grocery store, throw the seeds in a pot, and (seriously) watch their papaya grow to more than a meter high in 8 months, start flowering, and produce fruit.
I just couldn’t resist. I had Chris pick up two papayas in the Cities when he was there a couple of weeks ago. I’m fairly certain (after a lot of picture-browsing and reading) that I’ve planted seeds from a Meridol Papaya and a Solo Sunrise Papaya. If they grow (they haven’t, yet), then I guess it’s possible I’ll have some papaya fruit as early as November. But even if they don’t fruit, I’ll be happy enough if I can just get them to produce some pretty leaves. These things grow super fast.
