Home Cooking and The Great Ulu Project

When you have uku (Hawaiian for plenty) ulu (breadfruit) then you make flour!   That way the useful season gets extended further into the year.  Currently researching the best recipes for it.  No gluten, so you have to move on from there. I don't normally do gluten free cooking.  So, I've found one solution is to incorporate some Semolina flour!  My banana-chocolate brownies came out well.  With a mix of AP flour and ulu flour half-half.  The focaccia not so well.  It needed more water as I found the ulu flour absorbs more.

Which brings me to the book: Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, various essays, which I've been reading in a sort of haphazard way.  There's her Cold Roast Chicken recipe with buckwheat noodles.  And that inspired the next step.  Make noodles.

Meanwhile, a short review on the subject of that book:

From the Publishers: "Weaving together memories, recipes, and wild tales of years spent in the kitchen, Home Cooking is Laurie Colwin's manifesto on the joys of sharing food and entertaining. From the humble hot-plate of her one-room apartment to the crowded kitchens of bustling parties, Colwin regales us with tales of meals gone both magnificently well and disastrously wrong."

Love and Saffron with Ulu and Deconstructed Kebabs

We at Cook the Books Club are currently reading Love & Saffron, by Kim Fay,  this round hosted by Deb of Kahakai Kitchen.  It's sub-titled A Novel of Friendship, Food and Love, and truly is.  A series of letters written between two women who come to know one another well, beyond which it becomes a friendship that deeply affects their lives and those they love.  It was also a reminder of the friendships in my own life, those I communicate with daily.  Particularly a good friend of many years, just recently more closely reconnected with.  We now email back and forth about what we're cooking, planting, research of the various aspects of it all, and food we're experimenting with; occasionally visiting local farmers markets, and sharing meals.  Lately the experimentation has been ways of utilizing breadfruit (ulu), including making flour.  (A post on that to come.)