Mushroom pasta (with liver and onions)

Around here, we love liver and onions. Love.

We also like leftovers a lot. Obviously, leftovers are good for me because I can make a really quick meal. But they're also a great way to make a completely different meal with less fuss than starting completely from scratch. A roast might come back as a cold sandwich. Or even a stew. Or fajitas. Or a soup.

Sometimes a main dish is re-worked to become an appetizer or a side dish. And sometimes the second-day meal is something we look forward to the most.

Unfortunately, leftover liver and onions aren't the easiest things do deal with. Overcooked liver isn't a good thing - it gets tough - and if you've cooked the liver once, reheating can be risky.

I've made liver pate with cooked liver, and that's fine. But there's only so much pate I want to eat.

So, what can be made from a slightly larger amount of liver and onions? When it's not enough for a full meal, but too much for a nibble?

A little brainstorming led me to pasta. Some time ago, I made a pasta dish that included chicken livers and onions, so I figured I could make my liver and onions work in a similar recipe.

Here's how I made it

It was pretty simple. I cooked some mushroom pasta until nicely al dente and cut the liver into bite-size pieces and set that aside on the counter while I did everything else. I wanted it to come up to

I lobbed a lump of butter into a skillet and cooked it until it started to brown. I added the cooked pasta along with some of the cooking water, which made sort of a sauce. I added salt, pepper, and some ground sage. I added a splash or two of white wine.

I tossed that around to coat the pasta, and then added the liver and onions and gave it one more stir and toss before I served it. The point was to get the liver warmed up without letting it cook any further.

If I was going to do this again, I'd start with some fresh mushrooms and saute those in the butter to add an extra flavor and texture to the dish. A bit of sour cream or creme fraiche to make a creamy sauce would be interesting, too.

Obviously, if you don't like liver to begin with, this won't be your thing. But then again, if you don't like liver, you're never going to have any leftover liver and onions, are you?

I've made similar dishes using leftover steak or roast beef, letting it cook just long enough to take the chill off, without cooking any further.

So tell me, what's YOUR most creative use for leftovers?

Bread Mix vs. Mixed Bread

I saw an ad for a new bread mix from Fleischmann's and I was compelled to give it a try. I really don't know why. I mean, I make bread all the time. I don't need a mix. But something about the ad I saw made me want to check this one out.

So I picked up a box for $2.99. The total weight was 14 ounces, and there were three packages - one with the flour mix, a standard packet of rapid rise yeast, and 1-teaspoon-packet of sugar. I didn't measure or weigh the flour, but based on the total  weight of all the contents it would have been about 3 cups.

I followed the instructions as though I didn't know how to make bread.

Directions were pretty simple - mix the yeast with very warm water, let it sit for a few minutes, then add the flour and mix it in. That's where I ran into a little trouble. The instructions said to stir until the dough came together in a ball.

Well, actually, the instruction about "very warm" water was also problematic. I know a lot of people who have murdered whole civilizations of yeast by reading "very warm" and then using the hottest water they can get from their tap.

Your body temp is about 99 degrees if you're average and healthy. If you stick your finger in 99-degree water, it doesn't really feel hot or cold. At about 110 degrees, it's comfortably warm. You could put your hand in it and leave it there. At 120 degrees it's very warm verging on hot. It's also verging on yeasticide. The hot water from my kitchen faucet goes up to at least 140 degrees, which is hotter than you'd want to put your hand into.

The lesson here: shoot for a little less than "very warm" and your yeast will be just fine. If you shoot past that very warm state, you risk killing the yeast.

Back to the stirring, though. I have to say that stirring bread dough with a spoon isn't all that easy. It would have been easier to dump the dough onto the counter and knead it. I mean, even if you don't know how to knead, mushing it around a bit would probably have been more effective than trying to stir it.

The next step was to put the dough on a greased pan and then form it into a round or oval. Again, it would have been easier to form the dough into a ball and then put it on the pan. But whatever. I followed directions and made sort of a lumpy round loaf.

The loaf rose for a short time, as instructed, then went into the oven. Easy enough.

The resulting bread wasn't awful, but it wasn't stellar, either. It was a little sweeter than I prefer, no doubt due to the added sugar and malted barley flour in the mix. It was also a little bit dense.

That denseness could be fixed by letting the dough rise a little longer and relying on the feel of the dough rather than relying on the clock. The sweetness - well, that's just the type of bread it is. Not really my cup of tea for an everyday bread, but some folks might enjoy the sweetness.

My biggest objection, really, is the price. If you're going to bake bread once a year, it's probably fine to buy a mix like this. But if you want to make bread more often, a jar of yeast and a bag of flour doesn't cost all that much.

And another slight objection is the instructions. This could have been a better loaf, structurally, with a slight change in the directions. If the whole idea was to make a bread that wasn't kneaded (I'm guessing because that would be hard to describe on the box) the dough could have been folded a few times. And shaping it first, then moving it to the pan, makes more sense to me.

But then I had another idea.

I decided to make a similar bread without the mix. I used Red Star Platinum yeast. Not because I wanted to use a competing brand, but because it's what I happened to have in a packet. I also changed the "stir with a spoon" instruction to something that is easy to do and easy to explain, and I changed the rising instruction to something that works better.

Still the same basic game plan and something that would have worked on the box instructions just as well as what was there.

I know one if the objections to making bread (unless you plan on doing it often) is that most recipes call for bread flour. So I made this one with all purpose flour. I also didn't use all the additional ingredients that were listed on the package - no malted barley flour, no gluten, no nothing. Just plain old unbleached white flour.

Like this.

1-Hour(ish) Bread

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup warm (not hot) water
1 tablespoon sugar
1 package Red Star Platinum yeast*
3 cups (13 1/2 ounces) all purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt

Drizzle the olive oil on a baking sheet and preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Combine the water, sugar and yeast in a medium bowl. Stir and let it sit for a few minutes until the mixture is foaming.

Add the flour and salt. stir until you have a dough. There might be dry spots, but that's fine.

Dig your hands in, and form the dough into a ball.

Now it's time to do what I've dubbed "air kneading."

Pick up the dough, hold an edge in each hand, and pull to stretch it. At this point, it's not going to be very stretchy - it will tear more than stretch, but that's okay, just pull it a few inches. Fold the dough in half, turn it 90 degrees, and stretch it again. Keep stretching and folding until the dough begins to get smoother and stretchy. You can keep going as long as you like, to develop the gluten, but for this recipe it's fine once it smooths out.

Form the dough into a ball and place it on the baking sheet.

Cover the dough with plastic wrap and set aside until the dough rises, feels sort of puffy, and if you gently press a fingertip into the side of the dough, the indent remains or it comes back very slowly.

Depending on how warm your kitchen is, this can take anywhere from 30-45 minutes. Remove the plastic wrap.

With a sharp knife, slash the dough as desired, and bake at 400 degrees for 20-25 minutes until the dough is nicely browned and it sounds hollow when you thump it.

Let the dough cool completely on a rack before slicing.

Resolving Issues with #SocialPower

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Social Power. All opinions are 100% mine.

Social networking has great power - but sometimes it has no teeth.

There's a new concept that might change that, and it's called Social Power. The idea is that you can post an issue that you're passionate about, and if 1000 people agree that your issue is important, Social Power will work to resolve the issue.

Here's how it works:

I think this is could be a game-changer for bloggers. I see the same issues raised in the blogging community over and over. But since it's one blogger at a time, the issues never get enough traction to get the attention of the entities who could help to solve the problems.

Most of these things aren't interesting to our readers. They aren't important to our readers. So we talk amongst ourselves - and maybe there are a lot of us talking - but we don't have the influence or the resources or the knowledge to get our problems solved. And we don't all have the same concerns at the same time.

But on Social Power, everyone doesn't need to get onboard at the same time. Those 1000 people agreeing don't have to band together. They don't need to do anything except agree that there is a problem. They don't need to write emails, send letters, or congregate in one place. They can make a difference simply by agreeing that a problem exists.

Just to see how this works, I created my own issue on Social Power about copyright violations on Facebook. Recently it's become a big issue in the food blogging community. It's not an unsolveable problem, but individual bloggers don't have a lot of influence when knocking on Facebook's door.

Perhaps Social Power is the answer. At least it's worth a try.

But it's not all about bloggers and our problems. Not at all. The issues posted so far range from local issues about public transportation, to getting certain fast-food restaurants to deliver, to addressing expired foods at grocery stores. Anyone can post an issue and try to drum up support.

Maybe you care about copyright violations on Facebook, or maybe you don't, but if you enjoy the blogs you read and you'd like to see your favorite bloggers spending productive time creating recipes, taking photos, and writing new posts instead of filing DMCA forms on Facebook, then "like" my issue and let's see if we can get this resolved.

We don't want to stop people from sharing our recipes on Facebook, we just want people to share in a way that's legal. And polite. And that benefits everyone involved.

And while you're over at Social Power, take a look at the other issues. Like the ones you support, or create your own issue. We've all got gripes. Maybe yours will be the first one that gets solved.

We all have issues. Some of us have subscriptions.

Let's give social networking some teeth, and see what can get done.