I’m nothing if not curious and tight-fisted.

For a couple of years at the start of my cooking career, I made mediocre bread from Mollie Katzen’s book, The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. It starts with a sponge, which is a mixture of yeast, water and flour that bubbles into a puffy foam. Then you mix that puffy foam with 1 cup of liquid and 3 cups of flour and the other ingredients, like flour, sugar, eggs or butter and it puffs up the whole mixture.

Sponge is an old-world way to bake, and presumes you’re skimping on yeast. It just takes a little yeast, less than a spoonful, to make a sponge. The yeast cells multiply in the flour-water mixture, creating more yeast and a greater volume. You can save a little of the sponge from one baking session to another so you always have yeast on hand. Bread was raised that way for hundreds of years until someone figured out how to make active dry yeast.

Unfortunately, it makes dry bread. To me, anyway. Since I didn’t know there was a way to fix that problem, I just kept making dry bread. After all, that’s what butter and cheese are for — making dry bread edible. Katzen came through town on a tour to promote the 20th anniversary of the Moosewood Cookbook, I told  her about my dry results. She said I wasn’t the first person to tell her that.

Looking back, it’s possible that any number of other things were going wrong — sorry Mollie! — but when I switched cookbooks, the breads undeniably turned out better.  The Joy of Cooking has good basic bread recipes, and James Beard’s bread recipes are just about my favorite. When I want to make something Southern or colonial, I use Bill Neal’s Biscuits, Spoonbread and Sweet Potato Pie. It’s the book I used for making the anadama bread.

The English muffins were made from Beatrice Ojakangas’s Great Whole Grain Breads, about which I’ve gushed many times. Nearly every recipe in it gives great results, which is really kind of a feat, since she’s working with dozens of cultures and dozens of different flours, bread shapes, rising and baking techniques.The book hasbeen in andout of print twice, and is now back in print. If you’ve ever published a book, you knowhow easy it is to get lost in the crowd, and how good the book has to be to get back into print, twice.

But I digress. Some time between the anadama bread and the English muffins, the kilo bag of SAF Instant yeast sort of lost its fizz. I never pay attention to expiration dates, especially on yeast. Because archaeologists, like, find yeast in the pharoahs’ tombs that can still be used to make beer. So I didn’t hesitate to buy the kilo of yeast in mid-2006. I really like SAFG yeast — it powers dough mightily upward, smells better than other yeasts and gives that nice smell to the bread.

Then the amount of baking in my house slowed greatly for work and dietary reasons.

When I cracked open the yeast again for English muffins in the fall of 2008, Inoticed that most of it didn’t “bloom” in warm water. So I tried again, using warmer water and setting the bowl on a warm stove. A little more bloomed. But then the dough didn’t rise well — after 3 hours it still hadn’t doubled. I used it for English muffins, so that worked well.

But I’m still left with about a pound of lame yeast. WTF? What to do with lame yeast? Anyone else ever have this problem?

It was a good party season f0r homemade baked goods: this year I discovered some great cookies. This is our cookie tray from last night’s party.

Starting at the top and moving clockwise: lemon-butter wreaths from our cookie gun; Maida Heatter’s Chocolate Cracks; black walnut bars made with black walnuts from our yard; shortbread with a caramel-pecan top layer; lemon-glazed persimmon bars; jubilee wafers.

We learned a new way to “frost” the chocolate cracks, which by themselves aren’t so Christmasy, but they’re really chewy and fudgey, so you want to invite them to the party.  We add peppermint extract and frost them with Shirley Corriher’s technique: roll the dough balls in granulated sugar first, then in powdered sugar. The granulated sugar layer prevents the moisture in the cookie from wetting the powdered sugar, so the cookies stay frosty-looking.

I only make black walnut bars every couple of years. Black walnuts, they’re a lot of work. You have to gather them in either a basket (that you never want to use again for anything else) or a paper bag. Let them sit in the basement until the hulls soften and turn dark brown (and the bottom of the bag disintegrates). Pour  them onto the driveway in the tracks of the car tires. Run over them to remove the hulls. Wear gloves to pick them up and wipe them off, or even rinse them off. Back in the basket to dry. Crack with a heavy rock. Pick meticulously. One hour of picking will give you about 1 cup of nuts. Hardly anyone sells black walnuts — they’re a pain and they don’t keep well — so if you want them, you do them yourself. Their dark, almost fermented flavor is ideal for adding to a toffee cookie bar.

Lemon-glazed persimmon bars: I’ve looked for years for something to do with the persimmons that are abundant most years in the yard. In the past, I sometimes made persimmon pudding, which is a pudding in the English sense of something baked and of a soft, spoonable texture. The bars are easier to eat, to transport and to serve. They are nicely spiced, and dates add some extra chew. The recipe is from Epicurious and I love it so much I wish I could move to a persimmon island and eat them full-time.  A photo of persimmon puree.

Jubilee wafers came from the 1973 Joy of Cooking. I wanted a refrigerator dough that I could make in advance, then shape and decorate later. I’ve made every roll cookie in the Joy, I thought, but somehow I overlooked Jubilee wafers.  Jubilee wafers call for a lot of honey, a lot of spice, and half a cup of bourbon. Jubilee, I’ll say. They were also supposed to have nuts and fruit, but I left those out. It’s a chewy, spicy cookie with a little touch of jubilee. A keeper.

Not on the tray were Jennifer’s little miniature gingerbreads, made from a great Williams Sonoma Thanksgiving cookbook recipe. Good molasses flavor, lighter texture than most gingerbreads, with a little orange flavor. And Ashley’s layered stacks of sugar cookie alternating with jam. They looked like accordions, sort of, and I admired all the work that went into them, and how good they were.

I live on the same street where I grew up. Different house, other end of the street, and 30 years later, but same street.

It’s one of those epic streets: hidden in plain sight near two excellent schools, close enough to shopping but not close enough to be part of the gridlock at holidays, a great sledding hill, spectacular autumn foliage, older houses, nice but not flashy, not too distant from downtown. Some of the neighbors have been here  more than 30 years.

My three-doors-down neighbor here is … my backyard neighbor from back then. Andrew and his brothers were friends of my brothers. Our back yards adjoined and our doors were always open. They were great neighbors then, and they’re great neighbors now.

The lady of the house, Andrew’s mother, was from the Northeast US originally, and when I was visiting one day, she was baking blueberry buckle. This was the 1970s, and I was maybe 12 years old and had never eaten a fresh blueberry, so it seemed like the most exotic food ever. I went home and asked my mom to make a blueberry buckle. She called the neighbor and got the recipe.

A lot changed after that.  My parents’ marriage ended and my mom’s life went into a slow-mo trainwreck that scattered her possessions across several states. My neighbor married someone very nice, and after 20 years, moved into the house 3 doors down from mine. His wife and I have become close enough friends that we swap gifts often.

I recently found the original recipe card of the Blueberry Buckle recipe, written in my deceased mother’s hand. I’m giving her the card (or a really good copy of it — I can’t decide) for Christmas.

When I look at it, I think of a time when we were all happy. It isn’t just a piece of paper to me — it’s an artifact from a long, shared past. Besides the associations, there’s the intimacy of a handwritten recipe in this day of recipes printed from the Internet and torn from magazines.  And if none of that meant anythingto my friends, it’s still her mother-in-law’s recipe, and makes a really good Blueberry Buckle.

I’ve written before about Beatrice Ojakangas’ Great Whole Grain Breads, which has been my best baking buddy for more than 15 years. We’re like an old couple that know each other well: I know that when I prepare a recipe, my dough will require about 20 percent more flour (or less liquid) than the recipe calls for. Her standard formula is between 2 and 3 cups of flour per 1 cup of  lquid. At that ratio, my dough is very sticky, almost like batter.

Ojakangas lives somewhere in the great northern Midwest, where flour is grown and processed, so I’ve thought maybe her flour is fresher than mine and absorbs less water.  But it was this way even in England, where food is fresher and more local.

At the last IACP conference, Shirley Corriher and Harold McGee held an open question and answer session. I submitted my question about the recipes being so consistently different from my experience, and it was selected for answering. I wasn’t present at the session– a colleague of mine attended that session  while I attended another – but the answer was that it must be the age of the flour or the formulation.

Flour formulation does make a difference in bread texture. There are  hard wheat flours (better for pasta and sturdy peasanty breads) and soft wheat flours (better for biscuits and cakes) and mixtures of the two, such as all-purpose flour. Non-wheat flours are a whole other ball game.

Even within wheat flour, there are a couple dozen grades of flour, based on color and texture, and different processes, too, like stone-grinding, which supposedly grinds the grains without  … I don’t know, exactly. Something bad. I heard a couple of years back about a process that shatters whole grains rather than grinds them and is supposed to be better.

At every step, processing differences yield a slightly different result. White Lily flour is (or was, anyway, before the company was sold) so fluffy and velvety because chlorine bleach was used for bleaching it, and the chlorine broke down a cell wall in the starch so the contents — pure wheat starch — could spill out.

You could bake a dozen loaves of bread with a dozen different types of flour and get as many results. I find that I get consistently superior results by sticking with Harvest King flour. It has every attribute to make it the right tool for the job: the right wheat mix, extra gluten.

Speaking less scientifically and more poetically, I love everything about Harvest King: the fresh, wholesome, wheaty smell, the serious but attractive packaging, its position on the bottom supermarket shelf, where the cognoscenti seek it out. I love having it in the cabinet, like guys love having a coping saw or other specialized tool.

Dough made with Harvest King is gluten-y and springy and powers upward in the oven. And it turns out the best damn bread, light and chewy, whatever recipe you use.
I get great results from it, but still with the ratio problem. I still don’t see how formulation could account for a 20 percent variation in a liquid-to-flour ratio. If you have an answer, I’d be curious to hear about it.

I have a recipe habit. They come and go on stray bits of paper, or lurk in electronic files buried in electronic folders. I try to post them either here or on Recipezaar.com so I can find them later.

I didn’t act fast enough with this wonderful apple recipe in time, and now it’s lost. Also, I have no idea where it came from. But I do remember the name: Countess Tolstoy’s Apple Charlotte. It had a slight orange and lemon flavor, a good meringue, and as good as it was  hot, it was even better chilled.

Once I’d come across the picture, snapped in August at the beginning of apple season, the first place I looked for the recipe was Please to the Table, because it’s a comprehensive Russian cookbook, and, you know, Countess Tolstoy and all. And any excuse to open Please to the Table, which I think is the finest Russian cookbook in print. Only I don’t think it’s in print any longer — it dates from the early 1990s. It collected thousands of recipes from the old Soviet Union, from the skyscrapers of Moscow to the yurts of Mongolia. I put a link there to the book on Alibris.com.

Countess Tolstoy is not on recipezaar.com, in my accordion file of dessert recipes, or lurking in the guts of the computer. (But I did find a fantastic buttermilk syrup recipe that I’d been hunting for ages). It’s just gone. It helps to think of recipes as fun people you meet at parties, or one-night stands: a lovely thing never to be repeated.

It may bob to the surface one day. Or if you know the recipe for Countess Tolstoy’s Apple Charlotte, chime in.

And come to think of it, was she was really even a countess?

For everyday miracles, nothing can match homemade bread. A little flour, water, salt and yeast transform into a a loaf of springy, warm, edible food. A miracle every time. It’s like watching a great movie: you know how it ends, but you enjoy it so much anyway.

For about 15 years, my favorite book has been Great Whole Grain Breads by Beatrice Ojakangas. Of the 200-odd recipes, I’ve prepared maybe half of them. For ten ears until 2007, I baked a loaf almost every week.

And that’s partly because of dough hooks. I wouldn’t have done it without dough hooks. The directions “Knead for 10 minutes until smooth and elastic”? Might as well be in Norwegian for all I follow them. I just put it in the bowl and let the dough hooks do the rest.

This oat and wheat loaf has been my workhorse because it has all the qualities you could ask for in a loaf of homemade bread. It’s easy to mix, hard to mess up, and the recipe doubles perfectly. The bread is multigrain and also tastes great, the loaves keep well, freeze well and when it goes slightly stale, it makes great toast.

Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Bread

2/3 cup rolled oats

2 cups boiling water

1/2 cup nonfat dry milk

1/4 to 1/2 cup packed brown sugar (more if you’re a sweet tooth, less if you’re not)

1/4 cup butter or vegetable oil

1 teaspoon salt

1 package (2 teaspoons) yeast

1/4 cup warm water

1 teaspoon sugar

6 cups flour, white or a combination of white and whole wheat

Combine the oats and water in a large bowl. Add the milk, sugar, butter and salt and cool for about 20 minutes until you can hold your finger in the mixture for a count of 20.

Combine the water and yeast and let stand until foamy. Add to the oat mixture, then stir in 5 to 5  1/2 cups of the flour to make a stiff dough. Knead or use dough hooks, adding remainingflour as needed to make a soft but not sticky dough. Knead 5 minutes with dough hooks until bread is smooth and satiny.

Shape the dough into aball and place in a greased bowl. Spray the top with cooking spray. Cover with a clean kitchen towel and set aside to let rise until nearly doubled, about 1 hour. Punch down the dough, divide into two and shape into loaves or rounds. Put into two greased loaf pans. Cover and let rise until puffy, a bout 45 minutes. Bake at 375 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes. Remove from pans immediately and cool completely. Makes 2 loaves.

About 12 years ago I wrote a story for the Nashville Banner on Nancy Johnson of White House Tennessee, who seemed at the time to be the winningest-ever state fair entrant.

In 1991 she entered 23 categories of pickles, preserves and baked goods, winning 13 of them. In 1992 she entered 34 categories and won 25 prizes, which she called “a good year.” In about 1997, she won $300 in prize money: $125 from Pillsbury’s pie contest and the rest from competitions that paid from $3 to $15. Do the math: that’s a lot of winning. Her biggest year was ‘75, when bumper crops in the garden let her enter 30 canned goods, along with nine baked goods. She won almost every category.

She was a great interviewee and a fascinating cook with a sure eye for a winning recipe. Everything she made, from biscuits to salsa, was first-rate. I still haveand use three of her recipes. One is a two-alarm, very limey salsa that stands up well to canning. The second is a matchless blueberry muffin with a butter-and-sugar-dipped top. And the third is the best damn apple pie you’ve ever had, I don’t care who you are. It’s won prizes from Tennessee to England to California.

This year I made Nancy Johnson’s Apple Orange Pie for the family Labor Day/August birthdays gathering. I used an apple I don’t see often, Wolf River, which I only ever find at the Howells’ stands in Green Hills. Wolf River is an early apple from South Carolina. I really love the flavor. It’s slightly flattened like York apple. This year they were a little underripe. I’ve never cooked with Wolf River apples before, only eaten them fresh. Fortunately, they cooked really well, holding their shape and texture and developing a nice flavor.

I always make the same pie pastry — 10 tablespoons of butter and shortening, 2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 4 tablespoons ice water — but this time I used too much shortening and the crust was very soft. You can see on the finished pie where it settled around individual pieces of apple, rather than acting as a lid. When cut, the pieces didn’t hold their shape — they were more like a cobbler. But it was still the best apple pie, I don’t care who you are.

I’ve been thinking about Nancy a lot lately, so when I go to the fair, I’ll have to stop at the baked goods and pickles to see whether she entered anything.

State Fair Winning Apple Orange Pie

4 tablespoons butter

1 tablespoons flour

1/2 teaspoon apple pie spice (or cinnamon)

1 cup sugar

3/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice

3 or 4 large cooking apples

1 (2-crust) pie pastry

1 egg white, beaten with 2 teaspoons water

Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium low heat. Stir in the flour and the spice, Add the sugar and juice. Bring to a boil, remove from the heat and set aside. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Peel and grate or chop the apples.

Arrange the pastry in a pie plate. Spoon the apples into the pastry. Pour the butter mixture over the apples. Top with the remaining crust, sealing the edges. Brush with the egg white mixture. Cut steam vents. Bake for 45 minutes. Makes 8 servings.

Not in a long time have I done so much cooking and had so little to show for it as last night. You know the feeling?

It was just a tuna loin and my neighbor’s Watermelon Curry Sauce. On the table in 20 minutes, right? I’ll start it around 6, we’ll eat around 6:30, right? What can possibly go wrong?

By 8, I’d cooked almost everything in the kitchen except for the entree. Instant pudding for dessert. Torta Freddo Gianduia for a more elaborate dessert because, dear friends, you understand, I was desperate for chocolate. Edamame. Cumin-lime slaw. Watermelon Curry Sauce. A hot dog. A baked potato. Carrot sticks.

But not the tuna loin. Because, you see, it was an eye of round that looked like a tuna loin masquerading as an eye of round. It started life as an eye of round from K&S Market. It had been in the freezer for two months and I had forgotten what it was. It had a seafood label. It looked like a big tuna loin. At $7, it seemed a little cheap for tuna loin, but then, K&S has 1 pound of picked lump crabmeat for $10, so why not a $7 tuna loin?

It thawed slowly in the meat drawer, becoming nicely translucent with a promising rich red texture. My neighbor shared a watermelon curry sauce she stumbled across in Belize this year.

I was about 1 hour into cooking at this point, and had made just about everything else. I had a sit-down for a while. Then I fed Sweet Cheeks (it was pretty late by this time) and my other neighbor dropped by during her evening walk. The tuna was at room temperature, so I unwrapped it and prepared to cut it into steaks.

I haven’t seen a tuna with this much blood, I thought. And then the last wrapping came off and the impostor was unmasked: a beef eye of round. Big Fella offered to go purchase an entree. As you can imagine, he was ready to eat, and despite all the cooking, there was still not one damn thing for grown-ups to eat except a few stray edamame.

Fortunately a pound of thawed squid tubes was in the meat drawer. Squid tubes in the fridge doesn’t really register on the strange-meter in my kitchen, but my neighbor almost fell off the stool. (Note to self when among earthlings: Squid = not normal).

We made lime-garlic broiled squid. It was fine but not a good pairing for the Watermelon Curry Sauce, which made me sad. But there’s always a next time, another tilapia or tuna. And fortunately there was Torta Freddo Gianduia to redeem what was left of the day.

Watemelon Curry Sauce
My neighbor never makes it the same way twice and never uses a recipe, so I’m giving the amounts that worked for me.
3 to 5 cups chopped watermelon
1 teaspoon yellow curry powder
2 tablespoons butter
Puree the watermelon and pour it into a saucepan. Simmer until it is somewhat reduced, about 15 minues. Strain it into a bowl. It will be clear and smell like cooked cucumbers at this point, but have faith. Discard the solids. Clean the pan. Return the watermelon juice to the pan. Simmer until reduced and thickened somewhat. Add the curry powder and mix well. Add the butter and simmer until thick. Makes enough for two tuna steaks.

Torta Freddo Gianduia
This recipe has been in my “to try” notebook for years and years until now. It came from the Simple Cooking newsletter in the mid-1990s. It’s really just nuts and cookies folded into fudge and I imagine a PMS-y Italian cook made it up.

2 1/2 ounces (squares) unsweetened chocolate
1 large egg
1 egg yolk
1/2 cup sugar
Pinch of salt
5 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup toasted skinned hazelnuts
4 ounces crushed Danish butter cookies
Grate or chop the chocolate. Combine the egg, yolk, sugar and salt in a mixer or food processor. Beat for about 5 minutes. Stir in the chocolate.
Melt the butter in the top of a double boiler set over simmering water. When it’s all melted, Remove the top of the double boiler. Beat in the chocolate mixture. Return the top of the boiler. Cook the mixture over simmering water, stirring occasionally, until it is thick enough that a spoon dragged through it leaves a trail that lasts for several seconds. Remove the whole thing from the heat. Fold the nuts and cookies into the chocolate. Pour into a springform pan or tart pan with a removable bottom. Refrigerate for 1 hour to firm up. Cut into thin wedges. Makes 6 to 8 servings.

I love a clean house as much as anyone. But I don’t love cleaning. It’s like the old Phyllis Diller joke: I hate housecleaning. You vacuum, you dust. And then six months later, you have to do it all again.

(Really, our problem is clutter and started-but-not-finished projects. But those are problems for another blogger to address.)

Because of this personal deficiency, which we might term “laziness,” there are lots of house rules. No food or drink outside the kitchen unless it’s Family Movie Night. Pick up what you set down. Clean up after your projects. No more than 3 pairs of shoes per person on the floor of any given room. No rocks/dirt/bugs, no matter how interesting, may be brought inside. Wetting a big pile of tissues and squeezing them into a wad, then stuffing the wad into a glass of water to see how much more it will absorb — no ma’am, absolutely not. And on and on with the rules — every mom has them. They only halfway work.

I’ve made Strawberry Bars a dozen or more times, yet this time I somehow skipped a step, which was melting the butter for the crumble mixture. It didn’t hold together well and make a compact top layer.

So even though everyone followed the rule with these way too crumb-y Strawberry Bars, the crumbs went everywhere. It was probably time to vacuum anyway. Still, we took the second half of the batch to a neighbor’s outdoor party. I mean, the bars were good, but I wasn’t about to vacuum again.

Do you go through phases with magazines? I bet I’ve subscribed and unsubscribed to Outside, Esquire and Gourmet three times each. After a few years, the tone and approach seem homogenous and I look for a new perspective. There have been similar phases with Cook’s Illustrated, Food & Wine, and Cooking Light.

At this moment, I’m in love with Saveur for its narrative and its focus on a cuisine embedded in a culture, and Fine Cooking for its attention to detail (and also the occasional assignment they throw my way). I love this month’s feature on burgers — every mag has a burger feature this summer, but none has as good a burger as Fine Cooking’s Mexican Black Bean Burger with Tomatillo & Avocado Salsa. My burger turned out identical to the magazine’s, except their photo was in focus and mine was not.

I learn something in every issue, which isn’t true for every culinary magazine. There was a taste test of olive oils grouped by flavor profile, which is a great idea, since I enjoy some types of olive oil and dislike others. I learned why the edges of microwaved foods get so hot while the center is cold. Discovered that “sushi grade” fish isn’t a real designation, just a marketing term. Learned how to make my own seasoned rice vinegar — it always seemed as if it would be simple, and it is.

Our plum tree bears plums every few years, and they’re too tart to enjoy fresh. When you look around for plum recipes, you get pretty much the same five cakes, a tart, and an ice cream recipe. But FC offered recipes with updated flavors and techniques like caramelized plums atop cinnamon-walnut shortcakes; a plum tart in a lemon shortbread crust, and Plum Coffeecake with Brown Sugar & Cardamom Streusel, which I made last weekend.

On newsstands this week is the September issue, including a test of grill woks, 19 of which shared our house for several weeks this spring.