If your popover fails, it still makes a delicious hockey puck. I also love popovers because they are relatively quick to throw together (about an hour to mix and bake), use 4 basic ingredients (milk, butter, flour, eggs), and are mostly healthy: they won’t induce the same carb coma as pancakes and have fairly little butter baked in (so you can spread a lot on top).

I have made both a ton of popovers and a ton of hockey pucks, so this is my fairly fool-proof method for making the former, not the latter.

Ingredients

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour (or 3/4 C white whole wheat flour + 1/4 C All Purpose White Flour; I have not managed to get consistent results with 100% white whole wheat)

1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs (room temperature)
1 cup milk (room temperature)
1 tablespoon melted butter, + more for greasing

Steps

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

If you forget to set out the eggs and milk, do this: put the milk and eggs in a pyrex measuring bowl in the oven while the oven preheats; be sure to check it after ~5 minutes (you just want to bring it to room temperature or a little warmer; if it gets too hot, when you mix in the flour the starch will get activated and it’ll be gross).

Put a muffin tin in the oven while preheating (you want it hot). Some people also brown a little bit of butter in the bottom of each well (this recipe makes 8 popovers if you’re using a normal-sized muffin tin). I don’t usually do this—I just rub a stick of butter around after the tin is preheated (about 5 min)

Whisk the eggs, milk and melted butter. All the recipes I’ve read warn of overmixing: get a little air in, but no need to beat for more than 30 seconds or so.

Add the flour and salt and whisk about 15 seconds longer. You should see a bunch of little air bubbles.

Take the preheated muffin cups out of the oven; if you browned the butter in the oven, give it a swirl to grease up the sides; otherwise grease it up with a stick of butter. Fill each well in the tin about 1/2 to 3/4 of the way full (I’m able to get 8 of them out of this recipe).

Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes (don’t open the oven!), then turn down to 350 degrees (still don’t open the oven!) and bake 25 minutes more. Open the oven (finally!), poke a quick hole in the top of each with a knife, and let them bake about 5 minutes more.

Take them out of the oven and eat.

Key takeaways:

• You need room-temperature ingredients
• Pre-heat the muffin tin
• Have a hot oven
• Don’t open the oven until the very end. This sucks because if the popovers fail, they fail in the first 10 minutes of baking; but you won’t find out till 30 minutes later (if you open the door mid-bake, they might fall, which isn’t as bad, but not quite as impressive).

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Last weekend I visited Hudson, NY for the Prometheus Radio Project’s first full-power radio barnraising. I spent Saturday morning volunteering in the kitchen: despite all of the consensus-process workshops offered at the barnraising, the kitchen ran as an autocracy. Lunch remained delicious.

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Egg Substitute: Use an amount of water equal to an egg (maybe ~1/4 cup) and mix in tablespoon of ground flax-seed

Best Oil: Coconut Oil is the best oil to use for moistness and tastiness. Of course, it’s really bad for you, but who cares.

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When pan-frying or oven-frying potatoes, put on salt at the end. Salt will draw out moisture during cooking and keep the potatoes from crisping.

- from Eric Martin while he was cooking delicious breakfast-potatoes.

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1. Mix flour and egg, adding water until flour is just moistened and sticks together
2. Let rest for 5 minutes
3. Knead the dough for 2 minutes. Or you can do it for 10 minutes; more kneading means better developed gluten and a “smoother” noodle.
4. Let rest 10 minutes
5. Roll out or whatever

(adapted from a cooks.com recipe

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!(alignright)http://static.flickr.com/20/68517300_e2619db2fd_m.jpg!:href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/atomicworkshop/68517300/

This last Sunday, Jessica and I headed over to one of my coworker’s homes up in Sommerville to nosh on another turkey (squash lasagna for vegetarian Jessica), and all the fixins’ meal. It was delicious.

Danielle, the gracious host, had her dad over cooking the Turkey (20 lbs!) in a galvanized trash can. He’s a big Boy Scout and tells me he has lots of other tricks up his sleave. Judging from the moist and flavorful trash-can-turkey, I would go camping with him any day–or dinner–of the week.

The photo is a little weird; I was so preoccupied with stuffing my face I didn’t think until the end, Hey, why not take a picture?. Everyone was already making their way out the door.

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