Whole Wheat Bread (with a touch of peanut butter)

Quite a while back I received a Panasonic bread machine for review, and I've been working on some recipes for it.

The biggest difference with using the bread machine, for me, is that when I'm using a stand mixer or kneading by hand I can adjust amounts as I go. If the dough is too wet or too dry, I can fix that.

But with a bread machine, you're supposed to measure everything, put it in the machine, slam the lid shut, and let it go.

Oh, sure, you can open the lid and make minor adjustments if you absolutely have to, but the ONE time I tried to add more flour to a dough that was obviously too wet, the machine unceremoniously threw the flour in my face. Oops.

You can slow down or stop a stand mixer to do a little hand mixing, but a bread machine has to run though its program. You can't pause it. If you stop it, you have to start from the beginning, which is probably not what you want to do. So I tried to add flour to my wet dough, and when the mixing paddle swung around, there was flour flying.

Really, it's smarter to design recipes outside the bread machine and adapt them to work in the machine later.

Of course, you can use this same formula and do your kneading by hand or with a stand mixer. Or, let the machine do the work, then take the dough out, shape it, let it rise the last time, and bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes.

This recipe uses one of my favorite ingredients - peanut butter. But unlike my peanut butter bread recipe that uses a LOT of peanut butter, this one uses just a little. The bread smells nutty, but the flavor is much more subtle. More a compliment to the nuttiness of the whole wheat flour than a punch-in-the-face flavor. And even though there's a significant amount of whole wheat flour, the bread is soft.

Whole Wheat (and peanut butter) Bread Machine Loaf

1 teaspoon instant yeast
1 tablespoon sugar
2 cups (9 ounces) whole wheat flour
1 cup (4 1/2 ounces) bread flour
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons peanut butter
1 egg, plus water to equal 1 1/4 cups of liquid

Place all the ingredients into your bread machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer. If there are settings for the crust, choose light rather than dark.

Bake using standard bread settings - not special sweet dough or other custom settings.

When the bread is done, remove it from the machine and let it cool completely on a rack before slicing.

This has been submitted to Yeastspotting. Do you like yeast breads? Go there for more!

Avocado Ice Cream

Clockwise from top: Hass, Pinkerton, Bacon, and Fuerte.

I've been eating a lot of avocados lately. A lot.

You see, Virtual Potluck hooked up with SoCal Avocados and they sent each of us a free box of avocados. "What's the big deal?" you might ask, since avocados are easy to get at any grocery store.

Well, sort of true, You can buy avocados at the grocery store. Usually Hass avocados. But SoCal sells a lot of different varieties of avocados  In my box, I got four different kinds. One was the very familiar Hass avocado. Three were strangers.

See how smooth this one is? No bumps.

When the avocados arrived, they were rock-hard. You see, avocados don't start ripening until they're picked. and from what I understand, SoCal (a small family operation) picks and ships right away so your little green friends will survive the trauma of shipping unscathed, and will ripen nicely on your counter.

Need them to ripen sooner? The information that came with the avocado had instructions on how to hasten ripening, as well as information about storage. And there's even more avocado info on the company website. And pretty pictures.

Have you ever cut an avocado open and found brown stringy things in the flesh? Not a single one of the avocados I got had that problem. Not one.

Even the last two avocados that I let get a little riper than I planned on were beautiful inside. Pretty things, and yummy. Did I mention that?

It's not a lighting effect. The inside colors are different.

Besides the Hass, I got Pinkertons, which were larger than the Hass with rough skins, but unlike the Hass, the skins didn't turn black when they were ripe.

Bacon and Fuerte were both smooth-skinned avocados and both stayed green as they ripened. The Bacons were larger and had the mildest flavor of all of them. The Fuerte were much richer in flavor.

It was pretty interesting to try different types of avocados, and trying to figure out which was what. The differences right off the bat were rough vs. smooth skins, and egg-shaped vs. pear-shaped.

Once they ripened, there were more differences, like the darker skin on the Hass. The interior colors were different, too. Some had much larger seeds, and even the color of the seeds was different.

I'm so used to seeing just one - or rarely two - kinds of avocados at the store, I never thought about different varieties and how some might be better suited to particular recipes - like some apples are better for pie and some are better for applesauce. Getting a chance to try these different types of avocados was very very cool.

Since I had so many avocados to work with, I learned a few tricks, like using a vacuum-sealer to keep the cut avocados from turning brown. For some reason, I never thought of freezing them, but now I've got several packages of vacuum-sealed avocado in the freezer.

Speaking of the freezer, I made avocado ice cream. It's sounds a little weird, but it's really good.

Avocado Ice Cream

1 cup avocado meat
1 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk
1/4 cup Meyer lemon juice
1 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon salt

Combine all the ingredients in your blender and blend until smooth. Or, if you prefer, you can use a stick blender. Refrigerate the mixture until it is well-chilled. Overnight is great.

Churn the mixture according to the instructions that came with your ice cream maker. Transfer to a storage container and store in the freezer.

About SoCal Avocados

I had never heard of SoCal Avocados before we got this project, but I have a feeling they'll be hearing from me again. they've got quite a few other types of avocados that sound interesting, and they're not all available all the time. The avocado of the month club is tempting, too.

Maybe you'd like to try some. I can hook you up. One lucky reader here will get a shipment of avocados from SoCal Avocados - 12 avocados of whichever types are in season. Pretty sweet deal, and it's easy to enter.

Oh, but that's not all! The OTHER Virtual Potluck bloggers also have recipes for you. And if you don't win here, you might win there. Yup, we're all giving away avocados! It's a veritable bounty of alligator pears! For the complete list of participating bloggers, visit Milisa at Miss in the Kitchen.

Contest is CLOSED. The winner is Poodle_power!

Mandatory entry:
Visit SoCal Avocados' website and leave a comment here telling me which type of avocado you would like to try.

Bonus entries (optional):

• Tweet a link to this contest, and come back here and tell me that you tweeted.
• Like SoCal Avocdos on Facebook and come back here and tell me you liked them.
• Follow SoCal Avocados on  Twitter and come back her and tell me that you followed them.
• Subscribe to SoCal Avocados' emails and come back here and tell me that you subscribed.

And that's it. One mandatory entry and four more optional bonus entries, for a total of five possible entries per person. Contest starts as soon as this post goes up and ends on Saturday February 25 at midnight, mountain time. Good luck!

Tart Cherry Cordial - Pie in a glass!

When I saw that this month's Kitchen Play contest was sponsored by the Cherry Marketing Institute, I thought that was pretty cool. From the time I was a little kid, cherries were one of my favorite foods.

Back in those days, my mom and I would walk to a vegetable truck to buy fresh produce in the summer. There were no farmer's markets in our area at the time, and no nearby farms, so that vegetable truck was our only alternative to the grocery store.

When cherries were in season, sometimes my mom would buy a quarter- or half-pound of cherries from the truck, and I'd nibble on them as we walked. Most of the time the bag was empty by the time we got home.

So of course I wanted to create a recipe with cherries.

The very first recipe on the menu was a tart cherry soup. Okay, I have tart cherries in the freezer. The recipe called for wine. Well, hmmmm ...

And it was served in a glass. Double hmmmm

Part of the deal with the Kitchen Play recipes is that we can adapt and revise recipes. I adapted that recipe all the way from tart cherry soup to a tart cherry beverage. Yes, another "infused booze."

Tart Cherry Pie Liqueur

1/2 pound sour pie cherries
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
Vodka, as needed

Put the cherries, sugar, and water into a 1-quart container. Top off with vodka to fill the container. Shake to combine and to dissolve the sugar.

Let the infusion steep for several weeks, shaking daily - or whenever you think of it.

After a minimum of two weeks - longer if you have time - strain the cherries out of the mixture, then strain the liquid through a coffee strainer to remove any small bits or sediment. Transfer to a container for storage.