Cinnamon Roll Disaster

Just in case you were wondering if every culinary effort at the Miles house turns out well, the answer is "No!" Here you see the result of my first experiment with making cinnamon rolls. I thought about taking a picture of what they looked like straight out of the oven but I just wasn't brave enough to do it. I was also a little concerned for the grackles, but have not found any lying dead around the yard. They must have strong constitutions. This one does have an expression that looks something like "I'm going to find who did this and peck his eyes out."

So what happened? Well, surprisingly few cinnamon roll recipes are to be found in baking books. Cooks Illustrated did have one, but it sounded like one of their wacko we're better than everyone else because we're different affairs. I skipped it and went for my mom's old Betty Crocker recipe. I mean BC couldn't possibly let me down. Right? Wrong! The cooking time was WAY too long, and like an idiot I wasn't keeping a close enough eye on what was going on in the oven. And yes, I used an oven thermometer and had the oven pegged at 375 following the directions. The BC icing recipe is also way wrong, basically resulting in confectionary sugar concrete.

What to do? A trip to the library, where I found two books whose cinnamon roll recipes seemed like winners. My second attempt is from Abigail Johnson Dodge's The Weekend Baker, and the result was superb. :-) Abigail knows a thing or two about mixing up icing, as well. Heavy cream makes a much richer icing than milk! I haven't tried recipe number 2, yet, but will definitely give it a go. It's a potato dough approach and calls for Irish Cream liquor in the icing. Anyway, this is one of the Dodge cinnamon rolls. The grackles won't be getting any of these...

Easter Sunday

Elly, Basie, and I had a wonderful Easter Sunday. A few weeks ago I put up a new Spiral Feeder from backyard bird and the finches just love it. It's about 3 feet tall. They really like being able to slip along the spiral perches from hole to hole. So much so that our older finch feeder, with individual perches, only serves as a backup feeder now -- the birds spend 90% of their time on the new one. I took this picture Sunday afternoon.

We decided to spend the day at home (a typical holiday choice for us) cooking a multi-course dinner. Elly had the clever idea to listen to choral masses. We have a good-sized collection of classical CDs, both instrumental and vocal, but haven't listened to them much over the past few years. We listened to three Tallis Scholars CDs -- Palestrina Masses, Allegri Miserere, and a Josquin CD with Missa Pange lingua and Missa La sol fa re mi. We also listened to Dvorak's Stabat Mater.

Basie seemed to think it was good napping background music.


I started off making biscuits, following a recipe from the Cook's Illustrated Baking book. These turned out marvelously. I won't tell how many Elly ate. My first adventure in making biscuits.


Elly made a Gruyere and leek tart, combining multiple recipes, which turned out quite nicely.


And also a puff pastry with an asparagus and shitaki mushroom filling that was another triumph.


I took charge of dessert, making a parfait with layers of strawberries, lemon mousse, and white chocolate mousse. I used some more of the lemons from Dick Harshaw's yard in Phoenix.


Here is one of the parfaits. They weren't quite a photogenic as the Bon Apetite version, but they were delicious.


We enjoyed a terrific bottle of 2005 Treana Red supplied by my sister and brother-in-law (Karen and Tom) with our dinner and ate leftovers for days.

Back from Arizona

Questions have been raised, both on and off my blog, as to why it has been so long since my last post. A major reason is that I took a trip to Arizona last week to do some astronomy with friends in the Saguaro Astronomy Club. We observed from a site in the Sonora Desert. It was a great week! I put 3,029 miles on the RV. Lots of pictures in my Picasa album from the trip.

Harris's Sparrow

Elly and I added another bird to our backyard bird list yesterday -- a Harris's Sparrow. We're now up to 45 birds identified from our backyard. Harris's sparrows are not uncommon in our region, but we have not seen one in our yard before. In fact, this is the first Harris's Sparrow either one of us has identified.

I wasn't able to get a picture of the bird, but will be keeping a close eye on our yard for photo opportunities. I did find a picture on the web that is similar to the bird we saw. Our visitor had a strikingly jet-black cap and throat. In full breeding plumage, which appears by the end of April, adult males sport gray cheeks and a decidedly pink bill.

These are our largest sparrows, slightly bigger than white-crowned sparrows, with whom they are frequently seen. We had a goodly number of white-crowned sparrows last April, though we haven't seen any yet this spring. Here is a picture I took last spring of a white-crowned sparrow.


We also spotted two female redwinged blackbirds this morning -- the first we have seen this spring. Adult male redwinged blackbirds arrive four to six weeks before the females. While the adult males are unmistakable with their deep black plumage and red and yellow epaulets, the females look more like overgrown sparrows.


The bird on the upper left is a house sparrow (not a true sparrow, at all, but an invasive English species). The bird in the upper middle and the one on the far right are female redwinged blackbirds, which gives a good size comparison with a typical sparrow-like bird. The bird in the lower center is a young male redwing. His shoulder markings are just coming in and he still has some brown on his back. Juvenile males look like over-sized female redwings. It is hard to see in this image, because of the angle, but the young male is significantly larger than the females.

Impulse Book Purchase

It's windy in Kansas City this morning, though the stiff breeze doesn't seem to bother these red winged-blackbirds. Robins aren't the true harbinger of spring, as some people suppose. They actually remain with us the year round. But, not so with red winged-blackbirds. Their arrival really does signal that spring is near.

One of my New Year resolutions is to avoid impulse book purchases, and I have done fairly well in that regard. But, I could not resist Charles Tunnicliffe's A Sketchbook of Birds when I saw it in a window display at Spivey's a few days ago.



I also ordered Suzanne Dunaway's No Need to Knead from Chequamegon Books in Wisconsin yesterday. This was not an impulse purchase. I found Dunaway's book at the public library and have been going nuts baking bread recipes from it. They're nothing short of wonderful. Only a few copies are available on Abebooks.com -- a sure sign of limited supply. But Elly, munching a slice of Rosemary Filoncino, dipped in rosemary olive oil (both recipes from No Need to Knead), agreed the book is well worth $65. We have had the pleasure to correspond with Ms. Dunaway, who is as charming as her book suggests, and have learned that a reprint from 10 Speed Press may be a possibility. Here is a picture of the filoncino loaves, baked in a baguette pan added to our cooking arsenal after I read about them in Ms. Dunaway's book.



I also had the good fortune to come across the March/April edition of Greenability magazine (Living well, by living green in Kansas City) yesterday. It is actually published by a neighbor of ours. This is an outstanding local resource for eco-friendly lifestyles. Elly and I are now subscribers.

Snow Day

The weather forecast called for maybe an inch of snow. Instead, we got a good six inches on Saturday, which was a great way to end out the month of February. Nothing is more fun and relaxing than to spend a snowy day in the kitchen, reading, cooking, watching birds, and, now, thanks to the new addition to our family, watching Basie play in the snow.




Basie loves snow, which isn't a big surprise. He loves to play in the backyard, loves cold weather, and loves to explore. He is 11 weeks old now and growing fast.


My two new journals -- the green one is for birdwatching and the tan one is my kitchen journal. Among other things, this is great for remembering what cookbook a particularly good recipe came from.


Elly was busy making a Cauliflower Cheese Pie from Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook. We substitute a regular pie crust for the grated potato crust called for in the original recipe. This is awesome with white cheddar cheese, BTW.


I've been on something of a baking binge since trying a Ciabatta recipe in the March/April 2009 Cooks Illustrated which turned out marvelously. Then I came across Suzanne Dunaway's No Need to Knead cookbook at the library. This is one cookbook that seriously needs a second edition. It was published in 1999 and is not readily available on the used book market. It is one of the best cookbooks I have found, even including original watercolor illustrations by Dunaway. I made Apricot Focaccia following her recipe exactly and the result was divine. Easy too. It is suprising what great bread you can make without kneading. Seriously. If you are interested in baking at all and can find a copy of Dunaway's book at your local library, do yourself a favor and check it out.

Some more birds. I can't seem to stop snapping pictures of birds in our backyard. Believe me this is a tiny sample of my total image haul. :-)


Lots of activity at the niger feeder. Goldfinches give larger birds like Grackles a very wide birth, but they aren't afraid to mix it up with birds their own size like house finches and juncos.



The quintessential snow birds in our backyard are cardials and dark-eyed juncos. These are a couple of nice junco pictures. They stay with us from October through April, traveling north into Canada to breed and next in the spring and summer.


Bluejays simply can't resist peanuts in the shell, even if they have to do a little snow removal to uncover them.


Starlings are widely reviled by birders because they are an invasive species and force out many lovely native birds. Well, at least in urban areas. I have to confess that I enjoy watching the. They are handsome, fiesty, and often hilarious.

Here are a couple more pictures of Basie, for his many blog-stalking fans...


Playing in the snow can wear a puppy out!

Another Slow Idea

The March 2009 National Geographic magazine includes an article on reducing energy consumption at home, which I read yesterday afternoon. One of the suggestions was to turn off your computer when you aren't using it. In fact, turn off any electrical appliance you are not using, including chargers. I thought, sure, why not? So I turned off our computer and then, for good measure, went into our TV room and turned off the power center for the room, which includes our cable modem and wireless network hub.

I decided I would only turn them on when either Elly or I wanted to use the computer.

Three or four times today I thought, I'll go check my email, or I'll look something up on the Internet, and then each time it occurred to me the whole schmear was turned off so I skipped it. And then it dawned on me, Hey! This isn't such a bad thing!

In addition to saving energy, it also reduces distraction. I mean, leaving your computer on all the time isn't quite the same thing as running your television for background noise (you know who you are), but it makes it WAY too simple (tempting) to drop anything you are doing to just have a quick peek at something on the computer. We all know what happens next: two hours later you are wondering where all the time went. Instead of leaving the computer on, why not decide exactly when, and how much time you will spend on the computer, blocking out a specific period for computer stuff, and then leave it turned off and don't use it any other time of the day?

I certainly liked what happened today. I'm going to keep this up for a while and see how it goes.

BTW, one afternoon Elly and I spent some time mulling over what things make life more hectic. We easily came up with a list of four items, and then spent the rest of our time pondering how and why they have the effect they do. These are, in no particular order:

• Cell phones


• Television


• Cars


• Personal computers

The argument here isn't to do with out these things -- we're not Luddites -- but to manage them to improve the quality of our lives instead of running us ragged.

We turned off broadcast television years ago. We still watch movies and serial programming, but only what is available on DVD (through Netflix), with VERY rare exceptions like Presidential elections. No broadcast TV, cable, or dish. The result has been wonderful. It was not a difficult transition at all, and it removed perhaps the major source of stress from our lives.

Cars have a similar, though perhaps less insidious effect, as computers. It is simply too easy to hop in the car and spend your day running around. When was the last time you had a "car-free" day. That is, when you did not get in a car at all for a 24 hour period? Staying home is a great way to slow down and enjoy life more. And save money and the environment at the same time too. It takes a little planning, but not that much.

Thoughts about these four technologies will be regular features in my slowing down posts.