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.

Cinnamon Chip Scones

I have been meaning to make cinnamon chip scones for a while and I finally got some cinnamon chips from Wilbur Chocolate store in Lititz, PA. It was after we went to Hershey Park but before we went to Dorney Park in Allentown, PA. We liked Dorney Park better - smaller crowds which meant less people and some very cool steel roller coasters, including Steel Force which had a 205 foot drop and Hydra which started with a slow corkscrew roll at the very beginning. Even though I knew it was coming, I was still pretty surprised.
Anyway, the scones were okay. I didn't incorporate the butter enough into the flour so they were a little drier than I like and the dough was fairly dense. They should have been lighter, flakier. The flavor was okay. I also rolled the dough out to about 1/2 inch thick like the cookbook said to. I used the King Arthur recipe. My wife later made chocolate chip scones as well as cinnamon chip scones. She used a food processor to mix the butter and flour and rather than rolling them out, she just made round balls of dough. Hers definitely tasted better.
I have pictures somewhere on my hard drive, but I can't find them. Will try them again next week and see how it goes.

Fiberglass repair on Phantom

I purchased a trailer to carry my Sunfish rather than put it on the roof of the minivan, which could get rather awkward. If you have ever purchased a trailer, it usually comes with a boat attached to it. In this case, the boat is a 13 foot Phantom with two holes in it. One in the hull along the waterline and the other on the deck:

I did some research on the internet and figured out the basics of fiberglass repair on boats. What I did not find out is what to do when you don't have access to both sides of the side needing repair. You are supposed to fiberglass both sides of the hole. So what I did was first clear out all the weak and cracked fiberglass around the hole and then sanded out the old gel coat. I then put blue painter's tape around the hole to protect the "decent" finish around the hole.

In order for the fiberglass have something to stick to, rather than just fall into the hole, I cut out a piece of cardboard a little bigger than the hole, put gorilla glue around the edges and reached through the access port and held the cardboard against the deck until it stuck. For the hole on the side and bottom of the hull, I could not access the hole from the inside. So I again cut a piece of cardboard a little bigger than the hole, put gorilla glue around the edges, took two strings (the core strands from an old dynamic climbing rope in this case) and used them to pull the cardboard against the hull. The picture makes it pretty clear. I put a knot at the end of the string so it wouldn't pull through the cardboard.

The next steps were cutting the fiberglass, mixing the resin and them applying the resin to the fiberglass. The resin sets up quickly so you have to move fast. I should have had more fiberglass cut and ready to layer on to the hole in the deck as it really isn't flush with the deck. The smaller hole on the bottom came out much better.

The final step was to add the gel coat, which sets up even faster than the resin, came out fairly well. Technically, I was supposed to match the color of the gel coat to the color of the boat. I did not do that. It could also use another layer of gel coat. However, as this is my first fiberglass repair, to a boat I essentially got for free and it is not a great boat to begin with, I am pretty pleased. The way I figure it, there are fiberglass repairs to a your 20 foot Chris Craft or your Hunter 240 and then there are fiberglass repairs to old Phantoms. As long as it doesn't leak, I am happy.

Baguettes - Another try

I tried some baguettes again. This time I used a recipe from The Bread Bible , given to me by my brother-in-law and his wife. An excellent book and I plan to bake as many recipes as I can from it over the summer. This recipe did not call for a Poolish or starter like the King Arthur recipe did that I used last time. So it was quicker to make. It also called for more yeast - 1 and 1/2 tablespoons - than the other recipe. So it rose extremely well.
The other change I made was that I used 6 cups of King Arthur unbleached four rather than 3 cups of cake flour and three cups of regular flour. The weather was extremely hot and muggy. The weather report said the humidity had dropped, but I didn't feel it. But when the temp is 85 and the humidity is say 80% rather than 95%, what really is the difference? I certainly can't feel as I sit, sweat dripping down my back and chest.
The bread tasted fine, it didn't have the tang that the King Arthur recipe did or the air pockets, so I prefer the taste of the King Arthur recipe better.

My biggest problem baking this getting the dough rising in a baguette pan:

onto the extremely hot stone (450 degrees) in the oven without destroying the logs or my hands. The King Arthur blog suggests letting the baguettes rise in cotton cloth dusted with flour, a couche, like they do in France. But I am still not sure how to get them from the cloth to the extremely hot stone without creating a fire. I tried using the dull side of a cleaver and my hands, which worked okay, definitely not ideal.

Finally, I put ice cubes and then water on a paella pan to get the steam. Next time I will mist the dough.

Challah Bread

Hello, I made Challah bread for my Dad's birthday. I made it in the morning and then we took my Dad on a tour of the Grey Sails Brewery in Westerly. We all liked the Flagship Ale the best.

The Challah bread recipe is from Kings Arthur's Baker's Companion. I basically followed the recipe except I added two egg yolks rather than two whole eggs and a yolk so the bread was a little drier than normal but still tasted fine. It is basically like cake but it a bread form. I highly recommend it.

New Portable Work Bench

      This is the new work bench I built. I used plans from HandyMan magazine - November 2012 - and then made some modifications. Since I am tall - 6-8 - I made the bench 40 inches high. I also made the back of the workbench open, rather than closed as suggested so I can get tools off the shelf rather than lifting up the extension every time I want to get a portable drill or circular saw.

     I also reused old drawers from my old work bench to save time, though on reflection, building brand news ones would have been easier since I could have made all the measurements the same and I had plenty of extra plywood. I also purchased new pegboard and hooks from Home Depot so I can find tools much easier now as well as get tools off in one place, rather than all over my basement.

    I also put wheels on it so I can move it around the basement as needed. I generally like the idea, though the extension doesn't doesn't feel as sturdy as I am accustomed to. If you do a lot of work that requires a vise or vises, this is not a good work bench. I do have two vises that I can easily take on and off, but only on the sides. I may decide to put my heavier vice on it, just not sure where and how it will "interfere" with the extension (or my knuckles - when I reach underneath the bench to get a tool.