Bread, bread and more bread

Well April and May have been all about bread here in the Palmer household. It all started when I noticed a growing buzz on the Internet around a bread recipe featured on the New York Times a year or two back. The appealing part of the recipe was that it required very little work and resulted in a fantastic looking (and apparently fantastic tasting) loaf. I had first come across this recipe last year some time but I lacked an important item used in the recipe, a heavy pot. That all changed however when T and I took a trip to Seattle and popped in to the outlet mall on the way. There we came across a Le Creuset store, and they were having a sale too! Well it didn't take too much convincing to get T to let me buy one, I just had to let her choose the colour. So we are now happy owners of a bright yellow Le Creuset cast iron/enamel pot. I'm not sure how we are going to get this heavy thing back to New Zealand, but I'm sure we will find a way.

So now that the missing pot was not a factor we could get on to baking wonderful home made bread whenever we wanted.... so long as we thought about it 20 hours ahead of time. All you have to do is mix up the dough to combine, then let it sit out for 18 hours, then give it a quick shape and rest it for another 2 hours before baking in a very hot oven in our yellow pot with the lid on for the first 20 minutes or so.


So here are a few photos of the no knead bread...


The bread after the initial 18 hour rise


Fresh out of the oven (and our cool yellow pot in the background


And just moments before it was devoured.


While looking at websites with the no knead bread I came across an interesting recipe for German Pancakes. So for dessert one night we decided to give it a try. We have since made it a couple more times. It is super quick and easy and looks really cool when it is in the oven puffing up.



Now our no knead bread is pretty jolly good, if I do say so myself. But when my sister-in-law Sharon mentioned there was a recipe for bread in 5 minutes a day I just had to look in to it more. She had just received a cookbook called "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day", and they have a rather useful website too. T had just joined the library and after a quick check we realised that the library has several copies of the book, so we put a request in for one and within a week I had a copy of the book in my hands. Oh the excitement. The whole deal with this technique is you mix up a big batch of dough - a rather wet dough - in a big bucket or container and then just let it sit in the fridge until you want to use some. Then you cut off a chunk of dough, shape it and let it rise before baking it in a pretty hot oven. There are a bunch of different types of dough in the book. So far we have tried the basic white dough, a peasant loaf, a brioche (very yummy), a challah dough (similar to brioche but not as rich), an olive oil dough, and now today we mixed up a Deli-Style Rye. Hmm, that is a lot of bread for less than a month, especially considering that we have made the white one at least 2 times, and each batch of dough makes about 4 small loaves.

So far we have not managed to make a basic white loaf that competes with the NY times no knead bread recipe, but the versatility of these doughs is particularly handy. We have made many basic loaves, a few pizzas, pita bread, naan bread, baguettes, cinnamon buns, brioche loaf, monkey bread (sooooo good). The brioche dough was particularly nice, it made the most delicious cinnamon buns, and they were not even as bad for us as the recipe in the book (we didn't make them too gooey with sugar and butter etc.). We undid all that being good a few days later though with the monkey bread. Little balls of dough dipped in butter then rolled in cinnamon and sugar, stacked in a loaf pan and baked to be a loaf that pulls apart. To help overcome the guilt we have had to start going to the gym in our building. Anyway we are very much enjoying this new bread technique and now own our very own copy of the book. And another great side effect is I now have even more food stuff to take photos of. So far the loaves all look very "rustic", but they are meant to be, so don't laugh at my wonky baguette please.

Cooking with T

So now that the wedding blog is out of the way I can get back to the food blogs. Most of my life isn't all that interesting to write about, so if you want any new material to read here then you will just have to put up with food stuff.

It figure T wouldn't mind me adding the odd photo of her crazy cooking skills too, so from time to time I will throw some of her culinary masterpieces in too.

Right, well I had better be quick with this. I have some cinnamon rolls in the oven and hope to have this blog all done before they are done. (Hopefully I will find time to do a bread blog soon and will be sure to give a cinnamon roll review as part of that.)

Slow Baked Salmon

OK first up there is the slow baked salmon. This was a neat looking idea from a blog I have been looking at a bit lately called steamykitchen. It is a pretty entertaining read at times and the photography is really good. The dish simply involved laying the salmon on a bed of sliced oranges and onions and baking it at a very low temperature. The salmon tasted pretty good, but the oranges were sadly lacking in flavour and juice, and the onions didn't really do it for me. The asparagus was wonderful though as was my new favourite vegetable, broccolini. A friend of T's (Kate) who was staying with us a few weeks back introduced us to it and I just can't get enough of it. YUUUUMMMMMM,

Bacon Wrapped Halibut with Asparagus and Lemon Mayo

This has been T's favourite meal I have made her so far (and a really simple meal too). The lemon mayo was nice and tangy, but the asparagus and fish worked well to offset the tanginess (just like Jamie Oliver said it would).

Oh well the cinnamon rolls are ready now, so I guess I didn't meet my target. Still I am have the other photos uploaded already so may as well continue.

Satay Chicken Curry

My wonderful wife made this for dinner one night recently, and she didn't use a box. It was a kind of Thai inspired chicken curry. It was scrumptous. I even enjoyed taking it to work for lunch the next day as well.

Tandori Chicken with Sour Cream and Chive Asparagus and Perogies

Yet another T creation, this time she still didn't use a box, but made good use of a bag of perogies from the frozen food section of the supermarket. As you may be able to tell there is plenty of asparagus around here in Vancouver at the moment and we have been making the most of it. I can't believe I disliked this wonderful vegetable for so many years.

Well that will have to do for today. The cinnamon rolls are smelling jolly good and I can't wait a minute longer. So I am not even going to bother spell checking this blog entry, you can just live with any poor spelling or grammatical errors that may have made their way in.