(Cross-posted on The Martys)

Yesterday ended up as bread baking day. It was mostly inadvertent. I had decided to do a nice fat sourdough for Thursday night dinner, so I needed to prep with starter the night before. I had found this recipe, and felt I had to try it out. After all, it was the BEST and the EASIEST! It should be low effort and wonderful.

I should have paid more attention when the writer said that was the name of the recipe from the book, and that he didn’t agree. The bread had three stages of rising. It was my first that I’ve ever created a sponge for, and now I know that if I make a sponge, I really need to use a mixer and dough hooks instead of using my hands. Without the extra flour of a real dough, the amount that sticks to your hands while trying to mix is repulsive — it’s like having a pair of sticky gloves on.

Once you finally got all of the way through the rising stages, you then have to heat a bread (or in my case, pizza stone), create a steam bath, and all of these other ridiculous levels of baking heat (starting at 500 and working your way down as the bread cooks). 500 degrees, I realized, is the temperature at which my over starts to smoke, regardless of how clean it is. I assume it has something to do with being an old gas stove. Not a lot of smoke, but enough to set off a fire alarm and make me extremely uncomfortable.

Point being, this bread required a lot of nursing and watching over, something I do not approve of in an allegedly “easy” bread. It was ok taste-wise, although not very sour. It tasted like normal white bread. It had a very hard crust, and a dense crumb, but not as dense as my past efforts, so if nothing else, I think I’m finally getting better at kneading and coaxing bread to rise.

One way that I get bread to rise better is to have the oven on at at least 300 during the process, to combat drafts in the kitchen (the magic of a nearly century-old house). Since I had the oven on anyway, I decided to try out this quick recipe for oatmeal bread. Now that was simple, low effort, and oh, so tasty. Plus, with a majority of your dry goods being oatmeal or wheat flour, not that bad for you, either.

I ended up with two loaves of 8×4 bread. I may consider next time making one large loaf, but this allowed me to give a loaf to a friend as well (or you can always freeze your spare for later). The bread is hearty, slightly sweet, and, to Vi, delicious when toasted and a layer of nutella on top.

This is likely to become a new favorite recipe for the house.

I never really understood the whole wine-food pairing concept.  I could never remember what went with what and why.  Pork tenderloin with a Pinot Gris? OK, if you say so, even after a full semester of wine, I never picked it up.

The only rule I could remember is that you always want to pair fish with a white wine, never red.  I think that’s because the thought of red wine and a nice monkfish fillet makes me throw up a little in my mouth.  And now scientists have uncovered the reason for this revulsion: iron.

They started their exploration of what was behind the strange aftertaste by asking seven experienced wine tasters to sample red wines and white wines while eating scallops. The panellists were instructed to rate the presence of any fishy aftertaste on a scale of zero to four, with zero indicating no such aftertaste and four indicating an extremely strong one. Over the course of four sessions, they were presented with a grand total of 38 red wines, 26 white ones, 2 sherries, a dessert wine, a port and a Madeira. The drinks were offered in random order, in coded glasses. What Mr Tamura and his colleagues found was that the wines rated with the strongest fishy aftertastes were those with high levels of iron.

So there you have it folks, mystery solved.  Never put iron flakes in your fish dish.  Now you know.

Kelloggs took superfluous marketing claims to a whole new level with it’s recent claims that Cocoa Krispies, a cereal that boasts 11 grams of sugar in a single potion of 31 grams - yes, ONE THIRD of the cereal is pure sugar,  “Now helps support your kid’s Immunity” in huge type splashed across the front of the cereal box.

The city of San Francisco sent a letter of concerns to both Kellogg and the FDA, questioning whether the claims go too far and outwardly misleading to parents with H1N1 concerns.  The Rudd Center pointedly noted:

Of all claims on cereal boxes, “this one belongs in the hall of fame,” says Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. “By their logic, you can spray vitamins on a pile of leaves, and it will boost immunity.”

No sooner did Smart Choices fade from prominence, Big Food came up with something equally devious and absurd.  Food labeling lies - its like playing wack-a-mole at the grocery store.