Bread!

By


So for my birthday I got the book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, and so far I love it. Although I question Shawn's motives because I think it was just as much for him as it was for me. I make bread every week and have for a while now when I decided I could make better tasting bread that cost less and had less garbage added to it. I also make my own pizza dough, and we have tried to get a sourdough started and failed. So this book has been intriguing to me, and now I know why. If you buy the artisan bread at the grocery this book it is. You can make all kinds of wonderful different types of bread and it is super easy. So far I have used it for pizza crust (which is superb), we made a boule (again superb), and sticky buns that were out of this world. I cannot wait to try the brioche (very eggy and honey sweetened bread) and some of the other options. In a nutshell you make a very wet batch of dough, it rises at room temperature, you put it in the fridge, and cut off pieces for different things until you use it all. So here is our first pizza and first boule:

 They have a bunch of tasty looking treats on their website, I love it! Now I need a new baking stone, a pizza peel, and an oven thermometer...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Garden and Seedlings

By
Image
We have been getting the compost turned, giving the raised beds some extra composted manure and getting everything ready for the seedlings to go out. Hopefully this weekend we will have everything in the backyard garden and will only have the big garden left to work on. Our lettuces are ready, so our first salad from the garden is coming shortly...the kale and spinach have taken a beating though from the squirrels, for some reason they want to dig them up. I added a lovely aluminum pie plate on a stick to scare them a bit and it works until the plate gets free. I hate having what looks like junk hanging in my garden, but I also don't want the groundhog eating my lettuce and the squirrels digging up my other greens! The seedlings are holding on even though I have had some dampening off and the garlic spray seems to be helping some of them. I was glad that we put in grow lights for them because it has been so cloudy and rainy for the past couple weeks, although you can tell we had s
Read more

Adding Garden Soil to the New Garden

By
Image
The composted manure garden soil was delivered in the rain, and then the rain continued for a couple of days. That produced a soggy wet soil pile in the middle of our driveway. Saturday morning, the rain had stopped, and we were ready to lay down some cardboard and maybe some paper to kill whatever grass we were not able to destroy hand tilling it. The whole plan was a failure. The hand tilling we had done last week was nowhere near the kind of shape we needed it to be. It's funny to feel defeated so early in the process of anything you want to do, but there we were soaking wet topsoil covering our driveway and hand tilled slightly turned up grass in the backyard. We realized the mix we had bought was going to hold too much moisture and it would likely not work well for a garden if it was sitting on top of composting cardboard, this would have been the easy and quick answer to our garden dreams but we knew it had flaws already. We had to get a second opinion even though we knew w
Read more

Pest of the year so far goes to....

By
Well, a quick update on pests and the weather. Aphids are decreasing in numbers after hitting them with "Safer Soap" from Paris Farmers Union. An approved for organic garden option that appears to get approval from lots of people. Squirrels have been hiding out and not digging in the garden, probably due to the horrible weeks of rain. Which brings me to our worst "pest" so far, the rain! We lost our melons (there is still one pathetic looking vine, but I think it will not produce melons before it gets too late. We lost our kale, lettuce and spinach to the rain as well, just started getting yellow, it did not mature correctly and got bitter while still small. We tore it all up and stared new this weekend. Hopefully this will get us going into the next weather pattern ans we will get more sun and better looking crops. The tomatoes, basil, and peppers are looking a little weak as well, but the couple days of sun gave them a boost. Cabbages, broccoli, brussel sprout
Read more