Delicious home made garlic salt

I made some garlic salt a few years ago and ran out a couple of months ago. It is really easy to make and so handy. Yes, you can peel a garlic clove every time you want to use some garlic or you can buy pre-peeled garlic or you can buy garlic salt. Nothing holds a candle to home made garlic salt, ahem, in my opinion. Here are 2 different batches of garlic salt and the larger jar holds celery salt. You can see that the smaller jars are different colors. The jar on the left is air dried garlic salt. It wasn't hot enough when I made the middle batch of garlic salt so I put it in the oven on low to hurry up the process and it dried out but got a little yellow. I messed up with the celery salt as it should be made with celery seed not celery stalks. I'm going to keep adding dried celery leaves to the jar as I get them. Maybe I will make a spice mix with it. Oh, and I didn't have jar rings to put on but make sure you do especially if your going to shake the finished salt occasionally to prevent clumping.

You only need 2 ingredients to make garlic salt, fresh garlic and salt. The ratio I used was 2 full heads to one unit salt container. I used regular iodized salt. I have also used sea salt. Iodized salt contains anti-caking ingredients where kosher and sea salt don't. If you use the kosher or sea salt, try to find fine salt. As the garlic salt dries, the salt crystals grow. If the salt grains are large to start with, they get even larger. If they do, you may need to put the garlic salt into a salt grinder or back into the food processor to grind down the salt. It won't fit in a regular salt shaker. I use a pinch when cooking scrambled eggs. Somehow, the larger the salt grains, the larger the pinch, so for those on salt restricted diets, you are forewarned, use small grain salt. This is all I used. My trusty old Cuisinart. If you don't have one just put the garlic through a press or chop it up fine. You only need 2 ingredients to make garlic salt. Fresh garlic and salt. I use the ratio of 2 full heads of garlic per full container of salt. The hardest part of making the garlic salt is peeling the cloves of 2 heads of garlic.

You can see that the crystals can get quite large. If you put it back in the Cuisinart to grind down, let it sit awhile as it makes a powdery cloud of garlic dust. I love to put garlic salt on my meat and in my scrambled eggs just a dash! It's really addicting!

As is my home made granola! Made with fresh picked and air dried blueberries! I have some refinements to make to the recipe before I post it, though. I had such trouble writing this post and arranging the photos (well, I couldn't see some of the photos or get them separated to write comments). I wish Google and Apple would get along better. Anyway, enjoy!

Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day

I've been wanting to make bread all summer long, except that it has been too hot to even think of heating the oven long enough to bake bread. I have managed to go the entire summer without turning on the air conditioning (yay, utility bill) by opening up the windows after the temperature has cooled off. So last night, all the stars came together, (weather cool, boule made, sufficient time) and I baked my first loaf. Ta da! Here it is. I made it with an all purpose, unbleached whole grain flour courtesy of my sister and Costco. It was chewy and flavorful and crusty after baking on a pizza stone. I also got the pizza peel this weekend in San Francisco at Sur La Table and seasoned it up with mineral oil so it slid right off the peel (use the edible mineral oil for constipation found in the pharmacy section of the grocery store, don't use a cooking oil).

I suppose that if I lived in Europe, I would not be compelled to bake my own bread but I don't think that the Europeans would tolerate the current list of ingredients now in bread. The last couple of times that I opened a package of bread, it didn't smell like bread but slightly like the chemical aisle in the hardware store where all the pesticides are sold. Particularly repulsive are the hot dog and hamburger buns. When we looked up the ingredients on Wikipedia, I was taken aback by the fact that one of the preservatives is used as a foaming agent in plastic. Of course, the article goes on to say that all of the gas is burned off in the baking process. Is that why it smells so bad? Even the artisan bread at the local grocery store has a list of ingredients longer than I want. Here is what I want my ingredient list for bread to say: flour, salt, yeast and water. Okay maybe some flavorings but certainly not any combination of this list of additives. I am willing to live with the fact that bread made without additives will not last 2 weeks in a plastic bag but I'm thinking that the stores need the longer shelf life since customers are buying/wasting as much food in the past.

So, while my sister has been making bread with an Italian sourdough starter from Ishcia which I plan to bake with next time, I opted for the basic recipe in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I've ordered the book from Amazon but in the meantime, the basic recipe was in an article in Mother Earth News. Can't wait to make focaccia, pizza and hamburger buns!

Saturday Still Life

Bouquets of flowers from the garden.

A mixed bouquet of hydrangeas, calla lillies and aglaia daisies.

These are cone flowers otherwise known as echinaceas from my garden.

I couldn't decide which photo I liked better. Plus, I just love these flowers.

Some more flowers and greenery from my garden as well as the first squash minus what has been already eaten (I did try some batter fried zucchini blossoms stuffed with mozzarella cheese with little zucchinis attached this afternoon-delicious!) . We also made some frutti di bosco jam as well as some pickled beets. I was lucky enough to find golden and chioggia beets at the farmers market on Saturday.

Chocolate croissants

For a while, my sister and I were on a mission to find decent croissants somewhere in a 200-mile radius of where we live here in California. They were just too hard to make and didn't turn out like the real (code: like they taste in France) croissants. We went to bakeries in Pleasanton, Walnut Creek, San Francisco and even incorporated bakeries into a trip we took to Los Angeles to see the King Tut Exhibit a few years back. Then we gave up. Because, a) we were puttin' on weight going to all those bakeries and b) the croissants just weren't even close to what real croissants are supposed to taste like. Oh yeah, and we even lowered our standards. But, we had to draw the line somewhere. Croissants should be flaky and not like bread. But low and behold, one day I received a mail circular from Trader Joe's advertising frozen chocolate croissants.

There is only on catch. They must proof or rise for 9 hours. Which means before you go to bed if you want to have fresh croissants in the morning. They look like this in the evening.

Then they look like this the next morning. Brush on a little egg wash.

Then voila. Chocolate croissants. Okay, they are not exactly like french croissants but its been awhile since I've been there but it is the closest I'm getting to a real croissant until I do.

And, don't even get me started on what real Danish pastry tastes like.