Mike’s Simple Onion Focaccia

I’ve been wanting to expand my repertoire of yeast recipes beyond cinnamon rolls for some time now, and the receipt of two bread and baking cookbooks (The Bread Bible and King Arthur’s Flour Baker’s Companion) for Christmas has already motivated me to try a couple of different recipes.

The cinnamon chip bread, while simple to make, and tasty, suffered from my lack of cinnamon chips, so I decided not to post a recipe that hadn’t realized its full potential. Still, the recipe basically worked, and among other things I learned first hand the need to slit the loaf before baking!

On the other hand, this thin, flavorful flatbread recipe worked very well, so as Julia would say, “bon appetit’!”

Ingredients

1 cup water, warm
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 cups flour
2 teaspoons salt (seems a bit high; I used 1.5 tsp)
5 teaspoons italian seasoning, heaping (Penzeys Buttermilk spice mix works great!)
2 teaspoons active dry yeast

Preparation

Place all of the ingredients into the pan of your bread machine. Program for Dough or Manual, and press Start.

At the end of the cycle, remove the dough from the machine and punch it down. Roll it out to form a rectangle, and transfer it to a cookie sheet, 10 x 15-inch to 12 x 18-inch. Pat the dough into the pan. Make indentations in the dough with your fingertips, about an inch apart, and drizzle sparingly with olive oil.

Focaccia may be topped with a variety of ingredients, including browned onions, fresh garlic, goat cheese, pesto, fresh sage and bacon, potatoes and rosemary, sun-dried tomatoes, Gorgonzola cheese, olives, or any combination of those or other ingredients of your choice.

I used a combination of:

1/2 onion, diced and sauteed till nicely browned and carmelized
1 clove minced garlic
1 tsp red pepper flakes
2 tsp sesame seeds
1/4 tsp fresh rosemary

Sautee together all ingredients except the rosemary. Sprinkle the rosemary over the top of the bread. Spread the onion mixture over the focaccia. Grate parmesan cheese over the onion mixture and finish with a bit of sea salt if desired.

Let the focaccia rise for half an hour to an hour. This will make a lighter bread. Bake the focaccia in the preheated 450

If this tree looks familiar (to my family), it’s because it was at Grandma Thora’s for as long as I can remember. We sure had some special times at Grandma’s on Christmas Eve, didn’t we?

When I was a kid I didn’t care about things like this, but now I’m proud to the one who was blessed to receive this family heirloom.

Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, I can even share it worldwide.

While cleaning out my inbox I came across a message that prompted me to action.

It seems that famed bluegrass musician Tut Taylor has around 500 cassette and reel to reel tapes that he wants to sell for $15,000. A group of bluegrass enthusiasts have formed the Steam Powered Preservation Society which is currently attempting to raise the necessary funds to purchase this music. The music will then be freely disseminated to the music trading community.

In their words:

The Steam Powered Preservation Society (SPPS) is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of our musical heritage. The current mission of the SPPS is to is to purchase and preserve a large number of archival tapes of significant historical value, and to make them available for educational use. The tapes in question are known as “The Tut Tapes” and consist of over 500 reel to reel and cassette tapes of Tut Taylor and various legendary figures in the American music scene.

Figuring every little bit helps, I made a nominal donation to the cause and encourage others who want to help preserve this great music to do the same.

(I made this one from memory tonight, though I did double-check the recipe before posting!)

Ingredients

1 Lb spaghetti

1/2 pound pancetta (one thick slice)

3-4 Tbs extra virgin olive oil

2-3 cloves crushed garlic

1/2 C white wine

2 eggs

2-3 Tbs milk (traditionalists will want to ignore the milk)

2/3 C grated Parmesan cheese

1/4 C grated Romano cheese

2 Tbs minced parsley

Preparation

Sautee the garlic in the olive oil until it turns a nice light golden brown; discard.

Cut pancetta into small cubes and cook it in the previously prepared olive oil until the fat on the bacon starts “crisping”; add the wine, and if lucky, you’ll have a slightly flamacious moment. Set aside.

In a bowl large enough to hold the cooked spaghetti, lightly beat the eggs and milk together.

Add cheeses and parsley to egg mixture and mix together.

Cook spaghetti, and heat the pancetta and olive oil.

Mix together spaghetti and egg/cheese mixture (the egg should be entirely cooked by the hot pasta) and then mix in the hot pancetta/oil mixture. Salt and pepper to taste.

Inspired by and based on Marcella Hazan’s recipe.

I joined the ranks of firebird and thunderbird users today. So far, firebird hasn’t had any problems rendering the sites I’ve visited, and setting up thunderbird to access my imap mail account was very easy (since both are based on mozilla the dialog boxes, etc. are very familiar).

What’s interesting is how and why I finally ended up trying these alternative web and mail clients; I’ve been thinking about trying them for some time now, but was never sufficiently motivated before today. Though both are somewhat immature (neither has reached version 1.0 yet) they already have a reputation for being faster and smaller than mozilla.

It started with my new external hard-drive, built using a Maxtor 250Gb drive and a Macally firewire/usb combo enclosure. The drive was to serve at least two purposes, providing portable, external backup storage for my image and music files and also to serve as the primary drive for my powerbook when I’m not traveling (’cause it’s faster than the internal drive).

Technical sidebar: to facilitate sharing between the Mac and PC worlds I originally intended to format one of the partitions on the disk using FAT32. Research indicated that one can’t have both Mac and PC compatible partitions on the same drive, so I faced a tough decision. Since I am using the Mac as my primary computer these days, and don’t see that changing, I decided to go with the full Mac solution. I configured a Mac boot partition, Mac data partition and in the end I threw in a 20Gb test partition. Also, there exists an apparent solution for reading Mac-centric drives on a PC, should that become necessary.

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything over from the internal drive to the firewire connected external drive. After booting from the external drive all seemed to work well except mozilla wouldn’t start. After some troubleshooting I realized it was the profile I was using, and even after ensuring the bits had been copied cleanly I found I simply couldn’t use that profile when booted from the external drive. It did work fine when booted from the internal drive. A rather confusing problem, with no obvious resolution …

Well, I figured, it’s a mozilla bug, and not easily resolved, so I’ll salvage the bookmarks and create a new, clean profile. And I probably will create that new mozilla profile, but only when something drives me away from using the firebird/thunderbird combo. Once I realized I had to reconfigure my mail and web clients, it was a simple decision to do so using the latest clients, firebird and thunderbird, and they work well enough that it may be some time before I need to configure mozilla again!