Baguette for an ill colleague

        I have not made baguettes for a while, especially since I have Celiac disease, I can't eat the bread I like to bake. However, I have a sick colleague at work - lung cancer, stage 4 and she has 5 months to live. When she first was diagnosed - pancreatic stage 1 (which led to the discovery of other cancers) - and I made her some bread because I really didn't know what else to do.
        I have made her my buttermilk honey bread (always a hit) a basic white bread from Amy's Bread book, and maple oatmeal honey bread from King Author's Flour Baking companion. But I have not made her baguettes yet, so that was Martin Luther King's project.

According to my daughters, the baguettes tasted great. I know she will appreciate hers.

If I think of another type of bread I have not made for her, I will make it and write about it here.

Peace and love to everyone.

Celiac Diagnosis

On October 14th, the Dr. confirmed that I had Celiac Disease, that gluten and wheat were not my friend and I needed to radically alter my diet. I had a colonoscopy and an endoscope done on October 1st to look for polyps - family history of them on my Dad's side was the reason for colonoscopy. I had blood tests done earlier that indicated I had Celiac Disease, but the only way to confirm the diagnosis was to have the endoscope, but you have to eat gluten in the weeks preceding the endoscope so your small intestine shows the damage the gluten is causing. I think it is a lousy system, but it is the standard operating procedure.

A couple things about the actual diagnosis. 1) The blood test diagnosis was left via a voice mail, which I would love to include if I could figure out how. 2) When I was done with the whole scope process, I am a bit groggy (as they feed me crackers!!), I asked the Dr. " Should I avoid gluten?" He responds "No, go ahead, you're fine," which was the wrong thing to tell me. 3) After speaking with him on the phone and getting the diagnosis, he tells me that gluten free is "a miserable diet". Seriously?? India, Thailand, Japan, Vietnam and many other countries are pretty much wheat free or gluten doesn't play a huge role in their diet, unlike western countries. 

I find avoiding gluten isn't that hard, especially since I feel much better when I don't eat gluten.

Emotionally, now that is a different story.

Tuscan Peasant Bread

I have not made this bread in a while, at least a year. The texture of the bread is quite excellent: quite airy with some larger air pockets, but so large as to make it look like I tried to "inflate" the bread . The flavor of the bread was a little bland as the recipe doesn't require much salt - just a pinch. I got the recipe from The Bread Maker's Bible by Beth Hensperger. However, it is an awesome bread for soaking up sauce, say from chicken parmesan or some olive oil - preferably infused with some oregano. According to my mom, it is also great as toast with jam.

The one big mistake I made is below:

The bread rose very well and the slashes worked fine - maybe I will do a tic-tac-toe game on it next time. However, I placed the dough on cookie sheet with some olive oil on the bottom, expecting to slide the dough off the sheet and onto the baking stone. Big mistake. I should have put the dough on parchment paper and then on the cookie tin. If I did that, I could have slid the dough and the parchment paper directly onto the baking stone.

This is a great bread for a dinner party of more six people with tomato sauce type dish. You definitely want to eat it by breakfast the next morning as it goes stale quickly. It probably would also make good croutons.

Vermont Maple Honey Oatmeal Bread

     One of my favorite breads to make and one I haven't made in a while. It is from the King Arthur's Baking Companion. I generally follow the recipe except I add probably three times the amount of cinnamon in the recipe - my wife and I love cinnamon - and I also add maple syrup instead of maple flavoring.
     The bread is fairly dense as the two cups of whole wheat flour and the oatmeal make the bread denser. It also makes a fair amount of bread as well. I made one long loaf and 4 shorter loaves for gifts. I prefer to give bread to fellow my grade eight teachers and paraprofessionals that I work with. I figure who needs more cookies or sweets around Christmas time but almost everyone appreciates home made bread. The only problem is one of my teammates has Celiac Disease and gluten literally makes her sick. I would bake her some gluten free peanut butter brownies but there is no way I guarantee that there would not be any flour as both my wife and I like to bake and cook so flour is everywhere. My fellow teacher is very sensitive to cross contamination.
    Anyway, so pictures are below. I didn't do anything different than I usually do. Just had a snow day so I figured I would bake some bread.

 
   One more thing, everybody always loves the bread and appreciates having it.

Peace and Love

Buttermilk Honey Bread

This is one of my favorite breads to bake. It is from the Bread Bible and is simply delicious. No one I have ever given this to has said they did not like it. The secret is the buttermilk which adds a tangy flavor to the bread.
The only change I make to the recipe is I start with two cups of whole wheat flour rather than simple white, unbleached flour. I usually use King Arthur's 100% whole wheat flour combined with King Arthur's white, unbleached flour (which makes sense since my daughters just finished watching Avalon High which is about the reincarnation of King Arthur and knights of the Round Table).
As you can see from the picture, the bread is also popular around my house as the girls ate about half of it while I was building the frame for a set of cornholes in the basement.

Kung Pao Chicken

For something different, I made Kung Pao Chicken from Yan Kit Martin's cookbook - Chinese Cooking: Step-by-Step Technigues. I generally stuck to the recipe with a few exceptions.
1) I used three milder dried red peppers (seeds removed) we grew in our garden rather than the three red chili peppers the recipe recommended.

2) I used one teaspoon of the Chili paste rather than one to two tablespoons of chili paste as recommended. We don't mind spicy food in my house, but straight out heat is too much for us.

The final product was tasty. It was spicy enough to give our mouths a tingle, but no so spicy that we were all reaching for the water and sweating as we ate. I need to cook the chicken a about two-three minutes more next time as the texture wasn't quite what one daughter likes. The chicken was cooked enough to be safe as we are all still here, but good to remember for next time.

Also for next time, wear some type of latex gloves when handling the hot peppers. This will stop my eyes from tearing up when I rub them with my fingers. It will also avoid your friend thinking you are crying over your beer at the local restaurant.

White Mountain Bread

In my quest to bake most of the recipes from the book The Bread Bible, I started with the first recipe, White Mountain Bread. I used all white flour from King Arthur. The bread was ok. The dough was fine to work with:

Smooth and absorbed the flour well. I actually used a cup of water rather than 3/4ths of a cup. I also use about a 1/4th a cup of buttermilk since I ran out of whole milk. I made my usual two loaves:

Which resulted in these, which my wife and daughter started eating:

while my other daughter and I were out sailing on the sunfish.

(Actually my daughter and her cousin, but my very few, if any readers, will get the idea)

The texture of the bread was fine. It made great toast with some jam and was good with sandwiches, but I wouldn't make it again. The buttermilk honey from the same book is much better and takes the the same amount of time and materials.