Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [14]
Cost comparison: Homemade: $0.22 per tablespoon. Store-bought: $0.20 per tablespoon.
2 cups hazelnuts (about 9 ounces)
¾ cup cocoa powder
1¼ cups confectioners’ sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
⅛ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ cup neutral vegetable oil, plus more as needed
BUYING NUTS
The plastic sacks of nuts from the baking section of a big-box supermarket cost more—often a few dollars per pound more—than nuts you scoop from the bins at a health food store, a co-op, or even the very same big-box supermarket. Moreover, if you buy your nuts chopped, you may pay half again as much for the same variety of nut. Diamond chopped walnuts: $0.71 per ounce. Diamond walnut pieces: $0.50 per ounce. Whole Foods bulk walnuts: $0.37 per ounce. So learn to chop nuts and buy them from the bulk bin—but don’t buy too many. If you store nuts in a tightly sealed container in the freezer they should keep for many months, but even there they eventually become rancid. You can taste it immediately when nuts have turned. Throw them out, because baking them or turning them into butter isn’t going to bring them back to life. It’s tempting to hoard nuts, like a chipmunk, but it’s also a mistake.
1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Spread the hazelnuts on a cookie sheet and toast for 10 minutes until they begin to darken. Transfer to a clean, damp dish towel and rub until the skins loosen. Don’t worry about getting all the skins off; you never will.
3. In a blender or food processor, grind the hazelnuts into a butter. This takes about 5 minutes—don’t stop when the hazelnuts are merely ground up; you want them shiny and pourable.
4. When the hazelnuts are liquefied, add the remaining ingredients and grind until you have a mixture with the consistency of peanut butter, pausing once or twice to scrape down the sides of the bowl. If it seems too dry, add a bit more oil.
5. Refrigerate in a covered container until needed. It lasts indefinitely, though you need to bring it to room temperature before you can spread it, which is actually the only drawback to this recipe. When people want Nutella, they want it now.
Makes 2 cups
CHAPTER 2
EGGS
It was spring break and the children and I were home and bored. One sunny morning, we drove up to a feed store in rural Sonoma County just to check out the day-old chicks. This was a little like dropping by See’s just to see if the chocolates look good. The only real surprise was that we didn’t also come home with ducklings, which were even cuter than the chicks. But I was not ready to install a pond. Yet.
My mother called just as we were walking in the door with our box of cheeping chicks.
“Do you hear that?” I asked.
“No!” she said. “You didn’t!”
“We did!”
“So you got Mark to agree?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“Oh, dear,” she said. “Well, you’re an original.”
Actually, I was a cliché. In 2009, it seemed that everyone was getting chickens, citing sustainability and the economy. In the lower part of our hilly yard we had a derelict playhouse, creaking of floor and leaking of roof, that could easily be converted into a poultry shelter. This seemed like a clever way to stick it to the economy that didn’t need me anymore. Take that, Big Egg. The six (supposedly) female chicks we brought home that day were Buff Orpingtons, a British bird that begins life resembling a marshmallow Peep and matures into a voluptuous hen with a raspberry-red comb and apricot-colored feathers. We bought a sack of pine shavings for bedding, a plastic feeder, and some chick feed that looked exactly like kitty litter, and set the babies up in a cage on the floor with a lightbulb for heat. They huddled under the lightbulb, every few minutes falling asleep en masse and toppling over.
My brother-in-law, Michael, broke the news to Mark. As reported to me later, their conversation went something like this:
Michael: “Hey, dude, congratulations.”
Mark: “For what?”
Michael: “The chickens!”
Mark: “What?”
Michael: “I heard you got these