I’ve been thinking about bread a lot recently.
For what might be my 1st recipe-a-month, I made bread. Crescent rolls. Al said they made poppin’ dough crescents and Jasper liked them, so I thought I’d try to make a homemade version. Plus we were having leftover chicken divan and I wanted a side bread that wasn’t the butter swim biscuits I made to go with it the first time around. Like I told Emma, they’re good, not the special rolls you might make for Thanksgiving or some special occasion, but good. You can click the picture or use this link for the recipe.
More bread – Al & Jasper at the bagel store, a week ago Saturday.
Bagel boys, tho that’s a breadstick!
This Sunday I made Sarah Kieffer’s apple cider pull apart bread and it’s delicious, except I started too late, and we had to have brunch in courses. Mains already late at 1:15 or so, then the second course, the bread, at 2:00. The main was going to be a tart I read about on Insta, with greens and leeks (because I have some leek confit that I thawed for the Easter tart that needs to be used) and potatoes and I was going to put in dill Havarti instead of making the garlic cream – but again, would’ve taken too long, so I made fried potatoes with mushrooms and spinach and eggs cooked on top. Which of course required bread, see below.
Last Sunday we went to Chicago for the last opera of the season.
We had donuts and an egg and cheese sandwich at the Do-rite in the Sears Tower for breakfast in Chicago and I had toast and leftover broccoli soup for dinner when we got home. Bread.
This Saturday was the first outdoor Farmers Market. I worked at the info booth and sold the Cookbook, and learned how to do EBT/Snap transactions. Then I had to go to campus to help close up the book sale. We made a bit less than the last sale but not as much less as maybe it could have been considering we’d had a lull in donations and only 450 boxes of books to sell instead of the usual 600. So still on the busy side, and two volunteer obligations in one day.
We had breakfast for dinner, scrambled eggs with fried ham, and toast and fried potatoes leftover from I can’t actually remember when, reheated. Kind of inspired by Hailee Catalano fried mortadella eggs and bread. Then we went to the Madison Symphony, Verdi’s Requiem. Lugubrious.
This is when bread stress set in, like there’s nothing in the house and I don’t have time to bake more and I haven’t been anywhere where I can buy bread that I like …. Breakfast for dinner requires bread, underscored by Sunday morning’s late late brunch in courses, although the cider bread’s delicious. We’ve been surviving on loaves from the freezer. I got out the last half of the new recipe sourdough I’ve been baking that’s got some honey in it, and is so good and fluffy. We had some of it as fried garlic bread with pasta one night, the fried garlic bread also kind of inspired by Hailee come to think of it, and this Australian recipe (the garlic butter’s really good, too, I have a little dish of it in the fridge and cooked mushrooms in it). We finished the fluffy loaf for the breakfast for dinner Saturday night. By the late brunch we were down to whole wheat rolls or bagels as the bread choice, and the look on Mark’s face told me that was OK, but really not sufficient. The problem is I keep rehearsing the timings for a sourdough feed & rise & bake and realizing that all the volunteer commitments would have me having to leave the house when bread needed something.
I’ve got my sourdough going now; trying out making a fluffy batch starting in the morning and doing it’s 8-hour rise all day instead of overnight, bake in the evening. There’s still is a half a loaf of whole wheat sourdough in the freezer, which is comforting, but I know that’s not a as well-liked by rest of fam as the fluffy stuff is.
I bought 3 pears and split one with Jasper on Wednesday. He liked it. I stuck this one in the fridge and forgot about it and by Saturday it didn’t look so good on the outside and a little funny around the core too. But it was surprisingly firm and sweet and good with a bagel (more bread) and goat cheese and honey.
My chronology for this post is all outta whack, going back and forth from this Sundays and last Saturdays, but I have to say a few words about eclipse Monday. The 8th. We watched from a local park and got colander crescents.
I think it’s time to end with some Jasper photos and call it a night. These are from last Wednesday (ha).
