Panettone, 2010

Time for panettone again!  One of my favorite Christmas traditions; every year I try to see if I can improve it.  This year, I found a recipe on Epicurious; it's from Gourmet in December 2006 (here).  However, I only use the recipe as a general idea; I already have some of my own techniques that I use.  So here's the basic recipe as I followed it this year:

Fruit
  -1/4 cup Grand Marnier
  -1 cup candied fruit
  -1/2 cup golden raisins

Starter
  -3/4 cup warm milk
  -2 tsp yeast
  -1 1/2 cups flour

Dough
  -1 tsp yeast
  -3 eggs, room temperature
  -2/3 cup sugar
  -1 tsp salt
  -3 1/2 cups flour (give or take)
  -1 stick butter, cut into tablespoons
  -1/4 cup pecans, broken into pieces
  -1 egg, beaten

First macerate the fruit:  mix the Grand Marnier, candied fruit and raisins and let stand in a small bowl.

Next prepare the starter. Soften the yeast in the milk.  Mix the flour in until it is all well hydrated.  Cover with plastic wrap and let stand until at least double (1 hour) or as long as 12 hours.  Don't worry if it falls, all will be well.

Fruit and starter

Make the dough.  Strain the fruit and mix the Grand Marnier into the starter in the bowl of a mixer.  Add the yeast and let it hydrate.  Add the eggs, salt and sugar and start the mixer with the dough hook.  Add the flour 1/2 cup at a time and let the mixer incorporate it.  The dough will be quite stick and soft; don't be tempted to add too much flour.  Let mix on medium speed for about 5 minutes and then begin incorporating the butter one or two tablespoons at a time.  The dough will seem to fall apart, but keep mixing.  You can add more flour a tablespoon at a time to bring it all together.   Once the butter is incorporated, let it mix for another couple of minutes.  Then add the fruit mixture and pecans.  Continue mixing until it all comes together.  Shape into a ball and place in a large bowl, covered with plastic wrap to rise.

Finished dough

It was relatively cool in the house last night, so I let the dough rise for several hours, until it had well doubled.  Depending upon how warm, this could take anywhere from 2 - 6 hours.  For me it was about five last night.

From there, I shaped it:  I divided the dough in half and then make one big boule and four smaller ones.  The big one, I put in a paper panettone liner that I had bought from a bake shop.  (I used to just place it on a cookie sheet on parchment; this works fine if you don't have the paper.)  The smaller ones I placed in a set of large muffin tins that I had sprayed with non-stick spray.  (They rose so much I could have made them smaller and used all six muffin tins if I had wanted).   Then I covered them with a towel and let them rise again, another 3+ hours.

I got up around 5:30 and heated the oven to 375.  Once it was preheated, I cracked one egg, beat it and used it as a wash all over the tops of the by now well risen boules.  I placed them in the middle of the oven and let them go.  The smaller ones were done in about 30 minutes; you can tell by how brown they are on top.  (You can also use an instant read thermometer to check for an internal temperature of 180 - 190 degrees.)  The larger one took another 10 minutes.  Here are the final results:

Finished loaves

Yum!

I was very happy with the final results.  This proved to be a moist and relatively light bread.

Rebuilding My Montero Engine (continued)

10/31/10

10.   Remove the drive belts

AC belt is easy; loosen the tensioner and it comes right off.  Power steering belt is harder.  There is no tensioner and the driveshaft end is buried behind the AC pulley.  You can loosen the PS pump and move it, but I needed a second set of hands to turn the crankshaft pulley with a big socket wrench and rotate the belt off while I pushed the PS pump as close to the crankshaft as possible.

The alternator/fan belt is also easy.  The tensioner pulley (on top) loosens and then you crank it out to free the belt and take the belt off.

11.  Remove AC bracket.

The AC bracket holds the compressor in place.  Removing a few bolts allows you to take the compressor free of the bracket.  I didn't drain the AC system, so I just left the compressor connected and pushed it out of the way.  I see no reason to mess with it further; it seems like it should be easy to keep out of the way when removing the engine and then I'll just reconnect it when done.  The bracket is held on by several long bolts.  It was a bit difficult to get to a couple of them, but with a little effort I managed to remove them all and take the bracket off.  The tensioner is mounted directly on the bracket as well.  There is also a ground strap attached at the AC bracket, so it came off too.

Next I removed the fan pulley and the plate upon which it is mounted.  This is sort of odd shaped and held on by a bunch of different sized and length bolts; I hope I can remember what goes where when it's time to put it back on!  I did gather up the related bolts into plastic bags and mark them carefully (i.e. Power Steering, Fan Pulley and AC).

12.  Remove the alternator.  This is very simple at this point in time.  It's only held on by a couple of bolts/nuts and comes right off.

13.  Remove and drain the oil cooler radiator.  This isn't necessary strictly speaking.  But it occurred to me that it will still be holding some of the old oil.  So I removed it and let it drain for a while.  The only hard part is getting a wrench on the 23mm bolts that hold the lines on. But, having replaced the lines several years ago, I had a box-end wrench on hand, so it was easy to get it off.

Oil cooler, front and center

14.  Disconnect from the engine:

    * The oil cooler lines.  These are the other ends of the lines mentioned above (in 13).  They also have 23mm banjo bolts holding them on.

    * Ground strap, passenger side.

    * Heater core hoses.  These were hard, as usual.  But I was able to detach them from the firewall side if not the engine.  They'll just come out with the engine where I can remove them more easily.  I'll probably be replacing them in the end anyway.

    * Fuel lines.  The fuel pressure was relieved at the beginning, so these came right off.  Only a small amount of fuel was left to leak out.

At this point, the engine is completely disconnected from the vehicle with the following exceptions:

  1.  The engine mounts;

  2.  The transmission bell-housing to engine bolts;

  3.  The exhaust system

The first two will remain attached until I'm actually ready to pull the engine.  The exhaust system will be the next thing to detach, but this will take some work.  The exhaust manifolds are mounted to the exhaust pipes with 19mm bolts that require a socket deeper than anything I have.  And they are well buried between the engine, transmission, and other things and won't be easy to get at.  That will be my next major task.

Engine, disconnected

Rebuilding My Montero Engine

Rebuilding my Montero engine

10/29/10

Camping in Arkansas, June 2006

One other hobby that I have is working on cars. I'm not particularly adept, but it is something that I like and I've learned quite a bit through the years (mostly from all of the mistakes I've made, of course). My latest, and by far biggest, project is to pull and rebuild the engine of my beloved 1990 Mitsubishi Montero. I've had this car since it was new, driven pretty much every mile on it over the last 20 years. It's been our camping car and a family car for most of that time as well as my general commuting car.   For some reason (my inattention most likely) it's been running low oil pressure for the last five years or so. Finally last April, it gave out and either blew a head gasket or cracked a head and I had to stop driving it.

The vehicle is a 1990 Mitsubishi Montero 4-door, 4WD.  It has a 3.0L V6 SOHC engine with electronic fuel injection.  This is referred to as the 6G72, or the "S" (VIN code) engine.  It was used in a variety of Mitsubishi, Dodge and Chrysler applications from 1989 to 1994.

I spent time researching buying rebuilt or used engines.  Both are expensive and perhaps a bit of a risk, plus the fact that you have a left over engine to deal with when you're finished.  So in the end decided that I would first try pulling the engine and putting it on a stand and see if I could rebuild it. I'm pretty sure that it needs new bearings around the crankshaft; I'm hoping that it's just the head gasket that's blown and not a warped or cracked head, but I guess I'll find that out when I get a closer look at it.

So, having made my decision, last Friday (10/29/10) I set out on my quest. I'm assuming that this may take a couple of months, especially since I have no idea what I'm getting myself into once the engine is out of the car and sitting on a stand in my garage. But, unperturbed, I took my Chilton's manual and Mitsubishi service manual and got started.

For starters, here's what the engine looks like when you open the hood:

The general procedure that I used is as follows:

1. Relieve fuel line pressure.

Accessing the fuel pump throug the rear compartment 

The book makes this sound simple, just disconnect the fuel pump electrical connector, and then run the engine until it stalls. But where is this electrical connector? Both books give the simple explanation that it's on the "rear side of the fuel tank", but nothing obvious could be spotted in looking at the tank. But they also both show pictures of what it looks like, but once again, no indication of *where* you have to look to see this view. Hmmmm.  Finally, in a fit of desperation (genius?) I had the bright idea to pull back the carpet in the rear compartment of the truck, and sure enough there is a hatch in there held down by several 14mm bolts. Once I opened that, I saw exactly what the sketches in the books showed and was able to disconnect the electrical connector. At this point, the car wouldn't even start, so I assumed that after a few tries the fuel line pressure was relieved and headed on to step 2.

2. Disconnect the battery negative cable. Simple enough.

Now I headed to the engine compartment. The instructions say to remove the hood. but I decided to leave this until I needed to do it. It's likely to be a week or two before I'm ready to actually pull the engine, and in the meantime the hood will continue to provide protection in case of any inclement weather (the car will be outside during this entire process). Besides, I'll need a second set of hands to remove it, and it isn't really necessary for me to do most of the other work I have to do anyway, so I'll just wait.

3. Remove air cleaner assembly.

I took the whole thing out, starting at the very front of the engine compartment and ending at the plenum. There were several 10mm bolts holding it in, but it was easy.

4. Drain coolant and remove radiator.

I opened the draincock on the radiator and let the coolant drain (into a bucket to be recycled, of course). Once it had drained completely, I removed the upper and lower radiator hoses, detached the fan shroud and then the fan itself and removed them both, and then pulled the radiator. Eventually I'll take it to a shop to have it flow tested and then refurbished if necessary, but from the outside it looks to be in fine shape.

10/30/10

Commencing on Saturday morning, I continued to take things apart.

5. Remove the plug wires.

Easy enough. Here's a picture of the engine at this point with the air intake, radiator, fan and shroud and plug wires gone.

6. I started marking all vaccuum hoses and electrical connectors in preparation for disconnecting them.

There are a lot of electrical connectors. Mostly they are different shapes and sizes, so they should be easy to differentiate on the way back, but still... I make a rough sketch of the engine and numbered them all. Then I numbered them in the engine with masking tape and started disconnecting them. This is always a bit disconcerting: the plastic on these things is old and after 20 years of the heat in the engine compartment, some of them are pretty brittle. Still only one or two cracked as I pulled them off, so I think that I shouldn't have any trouble putting them back on.

The vaccuum hoses on the other hand are easy and there are only a few of them anyway. But still I drew them on the diagram and numbered them.

7. Remove ignition coil with bracket.

This is easy. Once it's disconnected electrically and the plug wires are gone, it's just a couple of bolts and off it comes.

8. Remove plenum.

This is a bit more work. The plenum is connected in a variety of ways. The throttle linkage cable has to come off. There are two coolant hoses that feed coolant into and out of the plenum. There are a couple of vaccuum hoses. Also the oil filler tube is attached to it. And after all that, there are the mounting bolts themselves. There are a total of eleven on this plenum. Eight that hold it directly onto the intake manifold and then three more that mount it onto brackets out on the cylinder head (driver's side). The eight are hard to see (maybe having the hood off here would help), but they're easy to get to and loosen once you find them. Oh and note that two of them are actually nuts, the mounting bolts sticking up from the intake manifold. Once all of the bolts are off, the plenum comes easily. If it doesn't lift right off, then you haven't gotten all of the bolts yet...

(I'd scan and show you my sketches here, but they are so absolutely pathetic as to be of no value to anyone but me. Thank god for digital cameras...)  The following pictures show the plenum (note the eight holes for the bolts across the center) and the intake manifold sans it.  You can see the matching holes/bolts along the manifold.

Intake plenum

Intake manifold sans plenum

9. Drain engine oil and remove oil filter.

This is standard practice. Oh, and I guess that I should mention that the skid plates are already off. They had been off for a long time, but at this point you would want to take them off anyway. And, as always, be sure to dispose of oil properly (and the filter too!)

Apple Pie

My new recipe for this week is a Skillet Apple Pie. I live apple pie in the in the fall; in many ways it *is* fall to me. The combination of baking butter, apples, cinnamon, crust: when it all comes together, especially on a cool night with the windows open it just defines the feeling, the sense of leaving summer behind and looking forward to colder weather to come.

I picked this recipe out because I wanted to make my first apple pie, but was intrigued by the possibility of not having to do all of the work required around making two crusts and then running the oven for an hour an a half to bake the thing. It's out of Cooks Illustrated (Number 94, September and October 2008). The recipe speeds the process of making the pie by sweating the apples in butter on the stovetop to cook them down. Once they've been cooked down a bit (I think I cooked them for about 10 minutes) you add some additional liquid ingredients (maple syrup, apple cider + cornstarch) stir and let them cool for a bit. Then you put the crust on top and bake the whole thing in the oven.

This is really a pandowdy and not a true pie, but for the first pie of the season, it seemed like it was worth the effort. (A pandowdy is a fruit dessert where the fruit is cooked on the stovetop, a crust is rolled out and placed over the cooked fruit and then cut strategically to allow steam to escape and juice to come through and then the whole thing is baked in the oven to brown the crust.)

I chose to use my cast iron skillet (10 inch) because it can do the stovetop->oven so perfectly. Have I said how much I love my cast iron? I get so much use out of these pans, it's hard to not consider them the most perfect pan ever created for the kitchen. I live my All Clad, it's great too, but if I could only choose one pan for the rest of my life, I would go with my cast iron every time.

The details of the recipe are here:

Crust

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon table salt

2 tablespoons shortening (chilled)

6 tablespoons cold, unsalted butter, cut into 1/4 inch pieces

3-4 tablespoons ice water

Filling

1/2 cup apple cider

1/3 cup maple syrup

2 tablespoons lemon juice

2 teaspoons cornstarch

2 1/2 pounds sweet and tart apples (about medium), peeled, cored, and cut into 1/2 inche wedges

The crust comes first. The recipe says to use a food processor, which I'm sure is more convenient, but I don't own one. So I did it the old-fashioned way, the same way I've made my pastry crusts for the last 30 years now. I mixed the flour, sugar and salt together and then cut the buttter and shortening into it until I got the "coarse crumb" texture. Then I added the water, starting with 3 Tbs. I think that this was perhaps a bit too much, because the dough was a bit sticky. But since I didn't want to over mix it and I knew that I didn't have to do a lot with it (it just goes on top) I let it be. I wrapped the dough in a ziploc bag and put it in the fridge for about an hour.

I used Golden Delicious apples. That was what I had, but I've found for these sorts of baked apple recipes they are my favorites. Somtimes I like to use a red apple to provide more contrast (Jonathans are my very favorite red for baking, though Winesaps are good too) but Goldens by themselves provide just the right amount of sweet, crunch and tang all by themselves for most baking recipes.

So I cored and peeled the apples and cut them into moderately thin slices (about six per half apple). Melt the butter in the frying pan and then the apples go in. I added a pinch of kosher salt here even though the recipe doesn't call for it. I believe that salt is an intricate ingredient in most everything, but especially in these sorts of sweet dishes; it really brings out the flavor if it's used correctly. The goal here is to sweat the apples, not to saute them. The heat is low, and you're just cooking the apples down, breaking down the internal cell structure to release all of the flavor. You don't want to cook them hot because the sugar that they release will burn and ruin the whole thing.

Preheat the oven to 500°

Once the apples were sweating, I mixed up the liquid ingredients. Basically you just mix the cider, syrup, lemon juice and cornstarch with a whisk and hold them. I didn't have any cider, which I'm sure would have added to the flavor, but I just used 1/3 cup water instead.

After the apples had sweated pretty well (it took about 10 minutes to get to the texture I wanted) I turned off the heat, added the wet ingredients, mixed them and set the whole frying pan aside to focus on the crust.

I rolled the crust out; I was right to think that the dough was too sticky. But between the cold dough and using enough flour, I managed to roll it out to about 10 inches round.

Next is to get the crust on top of the frying pan. I liberally floured the top of the rolled crust and rolled it around my rolling pin. Then I moved it over the frying pan and unrolled it. The recipe says to cut the crust to allow steam to escape and to provide some area for the liquid to bubble up from below. The recommended cut is to cut in half, all the way across one way and then in thirds all the way across the other way (perpendicular).

Next into the oven, and then the fun begins. The smell of apple pie baking is somethin all of its own, the mingling of the apple, cinnamon, caramelizing sugar and pastry smells all mingling into a wonderful mix this is a true snapshot of fall, especially on a cool night with the windows open.

Then, after about 20 minutes, it's done. You can tell by watching the crust till it gets that perfect golden-brown color. Take it out, set it on a cooling rack and give it some time to set and solidify a bit. I'm sure it's good with ice cream or whipped cream or whatever, but to me a true apple pie needs absolutely nothing. And I wasn't disappointed by this one. It was divine, and given how little work it actually took, I was in heaven. At least for a little while.

Shortbread Cookies

New goal for the fall: bake at least one new recipe each week. Try to write about it...

It's so nice that the hottest summer in Austin's history has finally come to a close. I guess it says something about how hot the summer was to have a day like today, where it's a mere 90 degrees and have it feel so nice.

Anyway, now that the summer is over, and we don't have to worry about paying for AC to fight off those 107 degree afternoon temperatures, I can finally use the oven again. I've already baked bread twice in the last week, which is such a joy. Though one good side effect of three months forced abstinence from homecmade bread, is that you realize how great it really is, and you just how much you really did miss it.

Today's new recipe is going to be shortbread cookies. I happened to catch the "Everyday Baking" show on PBS yesterday afternoon and this is one of the things that they were making. Now ordinary shortbreads are good, but what really caught my attention was when they used the plain shortbread dough to make cranberry-orange cookies by adding orange zest and dried cranberries. That sounds good and it sounds like fall. Oh, and Patty is crazy for cranberries, so

that will win me some brownie points too ;-)

The recipe turns out to be really easy. You can see it yourself here:

http://www.pbs.org/everydayfood/baking/recipes/icebox_shortbread.html

it's your basic shortbread cookie recipe:

1 cup butter (room temperature)

1 cup confectioners sugar

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp salt

2 cups flour

You mix the first three ingredients until they're combined and form a dough. Then you mix in the flour just to get a good dough. You definitely don't want to overmix on the flour because you want cumbly shortbread and if you mix too much on the flour it will make them tough.

After that, I divided the dough in half. One half I left plain, the other I mixed in about 1/2 cup cranberries and the zest of once orange. Then you take each half and roll it into a log using wax paper. It's sitting in the refrigerator now cooling; I'll do the baking here in a while after it's gotten

nice and firm.

--- Later ----

Wow, these turned out excellent! Even better than I had hoped/expected. Much better.

They were really easy to make; you just unwrapped the wax paper and cut the log into slices on a cutting board. About 3/8 inch thick I would say was perfect. From there, it was easy to just lay them on a cookie sheet and pop them into the 350° oven. In my oven, it took about 20 - 25 minutes; I like them with just a little bit of brown on them (I think it gives them more flavor). I'm attaching

some pictures.

And the flavor, wow! Especially the ones with the orange zest in them. The flavor really came through. The cranberries were an excellent complement, providing some texture that you don't get from the cookies themselves. I think

that adding some pecans might make them even better.

And the plain ones were great too. The flavor and texture of the baked cookies is really, really good.

Rating: ****

Difficulty: easy

Training in the Austin Summer

It's not even quite the end of July yet and already we've had something like 40 100+ degree days this summer. I've been in Austin for 20 years now, and this is, hands down, the hottes summer I've lived through yet. And we haven't even gotten to August yet.

I have to admit, that I came out of the Chicago Marathon in the fall kind of worn out. I didn't feel like I really recovered my running speed until recently. And even then, I'm not sure if speed is the right word or not. I'd like to think that there's still room to get faster, but at some point I'll have to accept that all I can do is to try to stave off getting slower. I hope I'm not there yet, but I can't tell for sure.

Anyway, training through the Austin summer is always a tough thing and this summer is the hardest one yet. I gave up running at lunch back in June. The real heat started sometime around the middle of that month, and so I started running exclusively in the mornings. However, I was still swimming at the UT Swim Center three or four days a week, so that limited the time I could focus on running. Once the Swim Center closed (it closes every August for maintenance) I was better able to set my schedule to run regularly in the morning. They closed it early this year, so I have had the last couple of weeks and have up until after Labor day to train on my own.

My general schedule has been run: Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday; swim Wednesday and Friday mornings; bike on Saturday if I can. Monday is nominally a swimming day, but I usually end up laying in bed thinking, "I need a day off..."

I feel like my running fitness has been finally coming back to me. I try to do hard intervals or tempo for my Tuesday/Thursday runs and then run long with the guys on Sunday. I should do a race at some point to see if I can gauge my running fitness, but then again every time I think about running a race in 80+ degrees with lots of humidity, I think again. Especially if I'm paying to run ;-) I can suffer like that for free, so maybe the races will have to wait until September or October when we (maybe?) start to see some cooler weather.

Black CD player

I had to grab a cd player to put in my room this evening. I got the old black one from the guest bedroom. Now I'm sitting here listening to my Loreena McKennett "Nights from the Alhambra" CD. But as I put the cd in and started to turn it on, something took me back...

I didn't know that a piece of plastic and electronics could hold a key to my past like this, but as I turned it on, I was almost magically transported back in time, way back to an earlier version of myself, circa 1991 - 1994, driving on those dark roads out 2222 to 360 and then up Shepherd's Mountain again. Back to sit in my dark office, in the dark quiet high-tech interior of my Tivoli office. Hacking away at some sort of code or build in the dark, listening to Pink Floyd, Tish Hinojosa or Todd Rundgren while I tried to help make a crazy dream of success around distributed systems management company come true.

I don't know exactly what it was about flipping the switch past FM and AM and then to CD, or perhaps the little high-pitched almost screech that the cd makes as it starts to turn, but it was an immediate feeling, "I've been here before; I can smell the carpet and the office furniture, I can see the world in it's sleeping darkness outside of the window in front of me as I stare at the bright-lit text on the screen in front of me."

I remember that feeling, being outside in the summer air and staring up at the stars outside of the Shepherd's Mountain building. I would usually head back to the office around 10:00, after getting Kelson down to sleep and telling Patty goodnight. Then it was work alone and in the dark until one, two, three or sometimes even later. Sometimes I listened to Larry Monroe on KUT; on Saturdays it used to be Howie Ritchey's "Alternative Wave" (after "The Hearts of Space" finished at midnight) in a KUT program schedule that is at least 17 years gone...

I remember best Pink Floyd's "The Division Bell," Tish Hinojosa's "Aquella Noche," and Todd Rundgren's "Second Wind." Those CDs carried me through the pain of my part of delivering 2.0:

if I have to be alone
then I should make my mind serene
after all you're born alone, you die alone
you might as well spend every moment in between alone

I can remember those nights with my mind, and I do from time to time. But the more visceral level of memory is locked up in those feelings, the memories of the smell, the night air, the darkness, the sense of loneliness that remains in me forever, just looking for a key to unlock and let it out. A black Sharp CD player is just such a key.