I ended up taking a little hiatus from making sourdough bread. I’ve been working on feeding my starter to make it happy again. This is my first successful little loaf in a while, and it was sooo good. We tried this recipe, which was enough resting and rising time to give a good sourdough taste, but it was low maintenance enough that we didn’t need to check on it all day.
Today is already full of good things. I found one of my favorite breads at the store, and had some toast for breakfast. I also made some oatmeal raisin cookies last night, so maybe I’m just really into raisins and cinnamon at the moment.
And look who I found in the garden this morning- a blooming wildflower. I planted wildflower seeds last fall, and they are finally starting to believe its time to bloom.
Hope your day is full of warm toast and sunny flowers!
We made French bread for dinner yesterday. We cut into it while it was still too steaming warm, and added some homemade garlic butter to the top. Then we ate too much. May all your homes smell like fresh baked bread.
I’ve been wanting to try a cloche bread baker, and lucky me, I happened to get one for Christmas! I tried it out on New Years Eve, and it tasted great, except I didn’t oil and cornmeal the bottom enough. So the crusty bottom stuck to the baker. Never ones to be defeated by kitchen gadgets, we decided to make french toast out of hacked up bread, as the saying goes.
We munched on a loaf of pumpkin bread all weekend. It made the house smell like a holiday. We also spent a lot of weekend time simmering chili, eating cookie dough, and watching football. What have you been up to?
Focaccia is fun to make, because you get to poke it and make the little dimples all over. Its also super delicious from the oven. Soft but a little crispy around the edges from the oil. We have a ton of rosemary growing, so I was able to use very fresh herbs. I based mine on this recipe.
Our living room gets a lot of afternoon summer sun, so its the preferred dough rising area, but its been cloudy lately. So I tucked the dough into the blankets to rise.
I think that the herbs we grow smell the best, but I’m extremely biased. I want to try to make a wreath with all our sage soon.
And here we have the final product. I want to start a petition that the fat chunks of pepper is the only pepper allowed. Its my favorite.
We’ve been testing different sourdough biscuit recipes. I wake up a tiny bit earlier, so I’ll have time to mix up a batch after our morning run. This part is crucial for controlling leftovers. No one in the office will turn down a warm, homemade biscuit first thing in the morning.
Our favorite biscuits are the super flaky ones, but we are still perfecting our ideal recipe. In the meantime, we need to stock up on more jam!
This is a walnut bread. It always happens that we run out of honey when making bread. In my head, molasses is also a sticky sweet substance, so I usually top it off with that.
I was super impressed with how well it puffed up. Its proofing box magic.
These turned out a little blurry, but it looks like a legit slice of bread! With the little ridge on top and everything. Just like the professionals.
And then we made some super awesome grilled cheeses!
You know that cinnamon swirl bread with the raisins? I love that stuff. This is a little bit like a sourdough version of that. The dough has raisins and walnuts, then it is cinnamon-rolled up, and baked into bread.
The cinnamon-rolling process. I can’t resist a little taste of the cinnamon sugar.
In my head sometimes I’m like- this bread has to sit here for 30 minutes, so I might as well keep busy and make something else while I wait. Then all the sudden I am taking cookies out of the oven and trying to do 6 things at once while making a huge mess.
Can you see the swirl??
One of our favorite dinners is bread and cheese. Now that we are planning a hypothetical backpacking trip, and going for daily runs to get in proper shape, its like we have to carb load to make it through the day.
I tried something new this week. Brioche, which is fancy, buttery bread. I used this recipe, but I ended up using almost 2 cups of flour. FYI just in case you want to try it! It made one perfect, golden loaf of bread.
guy and his girl 