It’s a rainy afternoon from where I’m writing. It’s only eight degrees outside but I’m determined to think of summer. What better lunch, then, than a tomato salad?
Here is my tomato. It’s had a hard life being imported from somewhere into my refrigerator, but I’m not a snob when it comes to aesthetics. Of course, this would be a different post altogether if I had my mother’s multicoloured heritage tomatoes at hand. But we make do with what we can.
Let me take this opportunity to introduce to you a tiny piece of steel that makes eating tomatoes so much easier: the tomato huller. 
Rather than simply slicing off the top of the tomato and discarding it, or using a knife to cut into the top and leaving a tomato slice that looks like a victim of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this little tool quickly and neatly removes the tough bits of tomato attaching the stem to the flesh without wasting all that tomato-y goodness.
So first you remove the stem. Just pop that sucker right off.
Then take the huller and dig the little spokes into the area around the stem-hole.
Ease the huller around the edge of the stem-hole and work it underneath, like an ice cream scoop.
Then just scoop away the icky parts. Tada.
Makes it easy to slice up your tomato, lay it, salted and peppered, on a plate with some fresh basil leaves, and drizzle it with a smidgen of vintage balsamic vinegar (because we all know how much I love vinegar).
You can see how that lovely top slice didn’t go to waste.
I grated a wee bit of asiago cheese on top and ate it with a roll (which I baked myself!) to sop up the juices. Mmm.
After some successes with Peter Reinhart’s 
Mix ’em up, for about a minute. If your spoon gets too doughy, dip it in warm water.
Now move onto a lightly floured surface.
Knead the dough for another minute, pushing and folding it together.
Roll it up.
Seal the seam by pinching it. Then rock the dough back and forth until you have your desired loaf size.
My bâtards still look demented.
I wanted to do more with my loaves, so after leaving the bâtards for five minutes to sit, I took two of them to make épis (wheat stalks).
Make a crease along the middle.
Fold the front of the dough towards the centre. Use a wet finger to kind of glue it down.
Fold the back of the dough over as well and seal by pinching.
Rock the dough back and forth until you have created the desired length. Use more pressure towards the ends so that they are tapered. These baguettes are the first stage of the épis. Place your dough in proofing cloths sprayed with oil and dusted with flour, or on parchment paper dusted with semolina or cornmeal.
Proofing
To make the épis, take your long baguettes and a pair of scissors. About 2 1/2 inches from one end, cut almost all the way through the dough (like 95%) at a 45° angle. Pull the cut section of dough to one side. Repeat the cut a further 2 1/2 inches in, and pull that cut dough to the opposite side. Repeat down the length of the loaf.
My first one turned out kind of funny, but I got the hang of it by the second one.
Transfer the dough to the oven, and pour one cup of water into the steam pan before reducing the heat to 450°F.
The bâtards came out demented, as expected, but the épis both looked fantastic.
We took ours on the road for a Victoria Day luncheon with KK and IP. Very popular.
At least that’s what the recipe says. A recipe for a sammy. Don’t that just beat all … Nevertheless this is super easy and super awesome and it serves two, for a romantically messy meal you can eat with your fingers.
First, slice up a tomato, half an 
Heat one tablespoon olive oil in a large pan and slip in the breast pieces, cooking them on both sides for a few minutes until brown and cooked through. Sprinkle them with some lemon juice and take them out of the pan. Put ’em on a plate or something.
When you take the bread out of the pan, rub the cut side with a garlic clove, cut in half, then generously spread all the pieces with mayonnaise. 
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a pound cake. Nothing.
I have this recipe written in the beginning of my magic book. From my handwriting I would guess I was about nine when I wrote it. My mother gave me the recipe, and she told me that traditionally, one would use a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs, and a pound of flour, and that’s what made it a pound cake.
I am heavily into reading the international culinary exploits of Sasha at 
Take yourself 2 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast, 4 1/2 cups unbleached flour, 1/4 cup dry milk powder (a handy thing to keep around the house), 1/3 cup sugar, 1 cup coconut milk (warmed, to help activate the yeast), 3 tablespoons honey, 3 tablespoons softened butter, 1/3 cup vegetable oil, and 3 eggs. Chuck those in the bowl of your mixer in the order given.
Sasha says the dough is enough to fit in one Pullman-sized loaf pan or two regular bread pans. Pop your dough in an oiled pan or two and leave it to rise for another 30 minutes and preheat your oven to 350°F.
My loaf didn’t brown, but I’m not offended. My oven isn’t the kind of oven that browns things. I also failed to get either loaf out of the pan in one piece.
There are so, so very many bananas in my freezer. I swear that the Pie doesn’t eat the fresh bananas simply so I will chuck them in the freezer in anticipation of me having a banana bread fest. He loves banana bread. More than he loves me. Honest.
The Pie, having nothing to keep him occupied, decided to help me today. He has never made banana bread before. He absolutely refused to touch the bananas in their black skins. He promised me he would do all the raw chicken touching for the rest of our lives if I would do the banana stuff. I’m okay with that.
Pour this into the banana mixture and mush it in with a fork until the bananas are all separated into small pieces. The Pie helped me with this part, but under duress. Set them aside for the nonce.
In a large bowl, beat together 2 eggs, 1 cup room temperature butter (that’s half of one of those 1-pound blocks), and 1 1/3 cups granulated sugar until fluffy.
The mixture should look slightly curdled at this point, and weird tendrils of banana fibre will stick to your mixing utensil and may gross you out. The Pie said, at this point, “This – making banana bread for the first time – is kind of like seeing a woman give birth. It’s something that you can’t un-see, and it will always affect how you see it in the future.”
Fold in your flour mixture, a little at a time. If you want to put in chocolate chips or walnuts or whatever, now is the time to do so. The Pie is a purist, however, so we have ours plain.
If you are following my lead and doing more than two loaves, do all your batches separately (in case of measuring mistakes) and don’t mix your wet and dry ingredients together in the other batches until you are ready to bake them. Don’t want no chemical reactions to start too early.
Divide your batter between two greased loaf pans and smooth the tops. I’ve been having trouble getting my extra-crumbly loaf out of the pan in one piece, so this time I decided to line them with parchment paper to ease the passage. It was an experiment that worked out really well because it was a snap to use the edges of the paper to lift out the cooked loaves. Then I just peeled off the paper and left the loaf on the rack to cool.
This is the first recipe in Peter Reinhart’s 
Combine, in a mixing bowl or in the bowl of your mixer, 5 1/3 cups unbleached bread flour, 2 teaspoons table salt or 1 tablespoon kosher salt, 2 teaspoons instant yeast, and 2 1/4 cups lukewarm water. Kosher salt doesn’t have any anti-clumping agents in it, so it is quite different in consistency and size from table salt or even sea salt. Also, Mr. Reinhart recommends using instant yeast because then you get the fermenting action started right away.
After the third rest you can see that it’s already significantly larger than it used to be. I also felt some bubbles in the dough that indicated the fermentation process had already begun. I hoped that popping them in the course of my machinations wasn’t to the bread’s detriment.
After the final stretch I tucked the dough into a ball and put it in a larger, lightly oiled bowl.
This recipe makes 2 large loaves, 4-6 smaller loaves, or 24 rolls. I’ve decided to make two of the three, see what comes out the best. Don’t want to get over-ambitious here.
So I divided my dough in half. One half will become a round loaf called a boule (‘ball’). The other half will become 2 baguette-style torpedoes (or bâtards, haha, bâtards).
I used a sharp serrated knife to divide the dough, but you can use a 
The trick to getting a crusty loaf is in maintaining the surface tension, so you want to pinch the bubbles you see on the surface to pop them, and be gentle in your stretching.
Prepare a bowl or proofing basket. I don’t have the basket so I took a bowl and lined it with a linen couche or proofing cloth. For me, this is an old linen tablecloth that became too stained for company, torn into sections. Spray the cloth in the bowl with oil and dust it with flour.
Baking
You take your recipe for 
Spray a pizza pan and flatten your dough a little bit onto the pan. Let it rise for another 20 minutes or so on the pan, then flatten it outwards so it fills the whole pan.
