Quarantine Culinary Casualties

Cafe Society
1

Almost an alliteration!

We all know how all the flour vanished, almost as quickly as the TP and bottled water.

Baking cookies with the housebound kids is entertaining, and you can double the recipe for math problems. But how many cookies can everybody eat?

Because of Mr VOW’s new no-salt dietary restrictionsm I can’t use processed food, mixes, convenience foods, etc. The other night, I wanted to make Shepherd’s Pie, but hey, couldn’t use good old cream of mushroom soup!

Fortunately, I had laid in a supply of no salt chicken broth and no salt beef broth. I made a roux of unsalted real butter and Wondra, then used the NS beef broth.

Oh, the Shepherd’s Pie was delightful!

However, I used the last of the Wondra. When I went online to buy more, Wondra seemed to have vanished from the Internet! Acckkk!:eek:

Two days later, the Amazon home page featured Wondra, so I immediately bought four cans.

So, just for the Hell of it, I checked out bread machines. Holy shit!

IF you can find a bread machine, they are going for $300-$400! My fave brand, Zojirushi, those machines are $500 and up!

I saw a machine, no brand, reasonably priced from a third party. Heh. It was 220v.
~VOW

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~VOW, what is this ‘Wondra’ you’re touting?
I must know.

b.

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It’s a make of flour (under the Gold Medal brand) that is not so much powdery as it is like a very, very fine sand. It’s got a grain that is something like a very fine semolina. It’s good for thickening things without having to make a slurry first. You can just dump the Wondra in there, mix it up, and it thickens without clumping up. It’s also very good for making Czech bread dumplings.

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Wondra is a finely milled wheat flour, designed to mix more quickly and with fewer lumps than regular wheat flour.

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My question more centres on, why would you put cream of mushroom soup in shepherd’s pie?

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It’s a working mommy hack. I have a bunch of recipes that call for cream of whatever soup.

Since I haven’t been a working mommy in a hundred years or so, I need to forget that cream of whatever soup exists.
~VOW

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They do make low-salt cream soups, FYI for future reference.

If thrift stores are still open in your area, trust me, bread machines are a dime a dozen. You might even put out a request on your local Craigslist or other buy/sell/trade website, and be besieged with offers to sell or even give you theirs.

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In the grocery store, right next to the bags and sacks of flour, there are bright blue cans–a little bit smaller than those green parm cheese cans.

It is indeed a product of General Mills, the makers of Gold Medal flour.

I describe it as “instant flour.” I’m not brave enough to sprinkle it into liquid, but supposedly you can. I either make a traditional roux, or I mix a slurry of cold water with flour and stir that into broth.

Alton Brown of Food Network fame, explains that the starch granules are pre-gelatinized, making the flour easier to dissolve.

Call it whatever you want. I call it a miracle. I have enough lumpy gravy in my history that I’d rather grab a can of Wondra and guarantee edible results.

It’s 100% real flour. No artificial tastes to worry about. And it worth every penny.
~VOW

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Well, then I’ll try it. I’m game. (:))

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You’ll love it, I promise!

And who knows? Big Wrek might have bought a pallet or two of Wondra when he was hoarding, I mean, “stocking up.”:smiley:
~VOW

11

I just sieved barley from lentils :smack:
I decided I wanted to make one of my favorites, while it is still fairly cool out . Beef,bean, and barley stew. While I was getting the beans to start soaking overnight, I checked on the barley I knew was there. except it wasn’t. Either I misremembered, or misplaced, but current reality I didn’t want to go out for just barley.

I do have some barley though. I make a mix of 50/50 pearl barley and lentils that both take 45 minutes to cook. And the “quick rice” setting on my setting on my rice cooker takes 45 minutes. So it is a no effort side I keep mixed and ready.

I considered my options:

  1. Leave out the barley. Very disappointing
  2. Put the mix in and end up with lentil in addition the beans I had already begun to soak. Weird, too legumey by the time I get it barleyey enough…
  3. Separate the lentils out of the mix.

I actually considered tweezering them one-by-one but it is only day 4 of confinement, not that bored yet.
Fortunately I noticed my old plastic colander has holes on the flat part just about lentil sized. Eureka!, it mostly worked. The holes on the sides are bigger so I had to do sieve small amounts at a time. It took 15 minutes and 3 passes to get to a result I estimate to be 96% barley, which is good enough.

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We’re making chicken and dumplings tonight. As I didn’t trust the girls with my dumplings I sat and made them.
It’s a crap shoot how they’ll turn out. The head chef (Mid-daughter) cam be contrary at times…
She’s got the broth boiling now. I told her to turn it down. It just takes a few minutes for the dumplings to cook.

Crossed fingers. :smack:

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Ouch, undercooked dumplings. Mine take at least 15 minutes in the broth, and they taste better if they stand in that delicious, delicious, chicken/vegetable soup.

1 cup flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp fresh ground black pepper
1/3 cup whole milk
1 beaten egg
2 tblsp minced fresh parsley

Beat together and let the dough sit for an hour. Drop into the soup by teaspoons.

How do you make YOURS?

(The Ukulele Lady wants me to make a gallon of chicken soup tomorrow so if th’ Coronavirus gits us, we’ll have something ready to eat. She specified ditalini or orzo or some other small pasta, but I want to talk her into dumplings.)

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Or, you know, just buy a whisk.

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I texted my brother a profanity laced rant last week because the dried-beans aisle was cleaned out, and maybe I don’t have much in my life, but by God I cook with dried beans a couple of times a week, and if some panic-hoarding fools are gonna buy up all my staple products I’m ready to throw down, those mofos don’t even know what to do with lentils.

The lentils were back this week, and I was much calmer.

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It’s not so much the whisk that matters. If you know how to do a proper slurry or a roux, you’re fine. Where you get into trouble is if you start trying to dump flour into hot liquid. With normal flour, you’re going to clump, no matter how much you whisk. With Wondra, you can get away with it. I very rarely have Wondra around (I do happen to have it now, though, as I was making Czech dumplings.) If you just do a normal slurry with cold water and flour, you shouldn’t get clumping. Same if you do a roux with fat. I don’t even use a whisk, just a regular fork for this sort of stuff.

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I’ve never used a bread machine – it s so much more fun to knead the dough by hand. And cheaper.

18

ARGHHHH now my oven lamp burned out apparently.In my cold house, I’m not sure If I’m gonna be able to get my sourdough bread to rise in time to bake to go with the stew. I put 2 gallons of the hottest tap water I have in the oven with the bread, hopefully to radiate some heat in there.

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Why not turn on the oven briefly?

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I considered that, but decided the water as a thermal battery would work better. I’m afraid of the window between getting the air warm enough to actually do something but not killing the yeast.