A three-attachment weekend

Over the weekend, I made:
Really fucking good plain ol' white bread - subbing local honey for sugar.
Lemon bars - with Meyer lemons I brought back from my parents' yard.
Butternut squash and apple soup - with more local veggies!
Lemon, cream and pepper pasta sauce - with more of those same lemons and Hudson Valley Fresh cream.

I used all three attachments that came with my stand mixer, and the immersion blender.

That was a tasty weekend.

(I also pulled up all but three plants in my little garden - the bok choy is hardy as hell and still going. It was such a bummer to pull up the tomatoes. Maybe they'll do better next year.)

BADD (bread attention deficit disorder)

Oops, I did it again.

See, we were only going to go to the grocery store, and I had a list, so it should have been an hour at the most... The dough had only risen for about two hours before, so I figured that if it was rising in the loaf pan for more than the planned 45 minutes, it'd be okay.

And it did turn out okay, after I punched the billowing mass back into the pan and baked it.

B got home from work and we turned around and headed to the store. But we were both hungry, and I had a menu from a Greek place in the car. Hannaford's can't hold a candle to gyros, pastichio and milkshakes. (Even though we only ate the gyros - he opted for Marathon beer, I got water, and the pastichio is sitting in the fridge, still untouched 24 hours later.) Plus, going shopping with a hungry boyfriend is a recipe for spending $200 on organic junk food. My least favorite thing to hear while shopping: "Ooh, this might be good." (Thing is, though, he's usually right.)

So the dough rose for at least another two hours. Maybe three? As pretty much anyone who knows me will attest, I'm not so good with those clock things. This has to be the most forgiving bread recipe EVER. See?


First stage of rising. That's a lot of flour, and my dough is always gummy. Oh well.


Not sure why I didn't take a picture immediately before this, when the dough had spilled over the pan's edges.


See? it turned out fine. And it was delicious with eggs this morning.

Alien bread

There's flour all over the kitchen.
There's flour all over me.
The apartment smells like stale beer.
(I think it's the yeast, but it could be stale beer.)
The dough is rising.

This is the fourth time I've attempted to make my BFF Jenessa's vegan bread, and I swear it turns out different every time.

Maybe it's because I'm not the most attentive dough-watcher. ...Maybe.
Last time, I let it rise about two and half hours, until it was doubled. Then the boyfriend and I wanted to go do something else, so I stuffed it into a loaf pan, beat it down, wrapped it in plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge.

We have refrigerators to inhibit growth of cultures such as yeast, right??? Well, we got home from wherever pretty late, too late to bake the bread. I peeked into the fridge and was confronted by an angry, amoeba-"shaped" tan mass that threatened to hold the sprouts (don't laugh at me because I ♥ sprouts) hostage. The sprouts will never forgive me, because I shut the door, went to bed, and tried not to have nightmares about that horrific scene.

I had to work the next day, so I punched the dough back into the loaf pan, re-Saran-wrapped it, threw it back in the fridge, and walked away. Again. With the lives of at least a few different kinds of produce at stake.

I checked it again when I got home sometime after 1 a.m.
It had exploded. Again.
I went to bed. Again.

I probably should have known better, and just thrown it out, but I'm always game for a bit of a science experiment. So I baked it the next day. Needless to say, it was not as tasty as the first three loaves (the first time, I split the dough into two loaves like BFF says; second time, baked it all in one and it was great), but it looked amazing! This was the Sears Willis Tower of bread tops. Too bad that when I took it out of the oven, even after tapping it for that lovely hollow sound, much of the interior was doughy and gross.

I still ate the crusty parts.

Here's hoping the current loaf comes out better...