Craftsbury Sunsets

Last night I spent the evening in Craftsbury, VT with a good friend of mine and right as we got to her home the sunset was just hitting its peak.  I grabbed my camera and messed with the white balance and settings until the colors looked right and man the results were spectacular.  I'm learning to love this camera; it took me awhile to get the hang of it after having nothing but cannons for so long, but this pentax is pretty damn fabulous.  Fabulous camera + fabulous VT country side + fabulous sunset = fabulous photos.  So much of photography is all about right place, right time.  I love it when the stars line up and I'm in that place at that time...because this is what happens:

Bread and Amazingness!

Today was a great day.  I woke up before my alarm to a swiftly darkening sky followed shortly by an epic thunderstorm and torrential downpour.  The snow is mostly gone, the world smells like the wonderful smell of spring in Vermont, that wonderfully earthy smell of rain and mud and changing seasons.  I had a strawberry banana smoothie for breakfast and then got started on the days baking challenge: whole wheat bread with milled flax seed.

Now theres something excellent about making your own bread, and if you've never done it I suggest you try at least once or twice.  Baking bread is so relaxing, its a fabulous contrast to say, cooking dinner for 3.  Dinner usually involves multiple skillets and 3 to 10 things happening at once - add the butter, sprinkle with salt, turn the heat down on that one, thats too think now, thin it out, the meats not cooked through, etc. - whereas baking bread is downright leisurely.  This particular wheat bread involved scalding milk and then stirring in butter, honey, and salt in a saucepan, then waiting for it to cool.  Mix the yeast with warm water and then wait a few minutes for it to activate.  Add the yeast to the cooled milk mixture and then add milled flax and flour until the dough reaches the correct consistency and then knead for 10 minutes or so.  Kneading in itself is very therapeutic, watching and feeling the dough become elastic and waiting until it just feels right.  Then place in a buttered bowl, flip it over so its buttered on all sides, cover with a towel and let rise for an hour in a warm place.  See what I mean by relaxing?  Bread baking comes with a built in nap, this particular recipe even called for two - after it was risen punch it down and let it rise again.

I used my built in recipe break to take the doggies for a walk in the freshly washed world.  Rushing water provided the soundtrack to our trek through the woods and the sun even graced us with its presence for a few glorious minutes.  Too soon though our walk was over and it was time to punch down the bread dough.  This has to be one of the all-time greatest bread-making moments - go ahead, bury your fist in a bowl of warm bread dough and watch it deflate and try not to smile.  I wager that it cannot be done.  Anyway next comes more rising, another hour; another built in break.  I read The Mountain Ear, a local arts and culture magazine, and then attempted some sudoku during this one.  Next you knead the dough some more and then separate it into loaves, and set it on an oiled pan for more rising, this time only about 30 to 45 minutes.  When the loaves have almost doubled pop them in the oven at 375 for 45 minutes and thats it.  You have bread.  There is nothing frantic about that recipe, in fact you almost have to be utterly chill to get through it, because if you are in any hurry at all bread-making is the wrong activity choice.  Just bake a batch of cookies, they are far more instant gratification, but way less gratifying.  Here is my pride and joy, my wonderful, tasty, fabulous bread:

This is by far the best loaf I've made to date; I think it was all the happy thoughts I kneaded into it!  Anyway after I finished the bread my Momma came home early and we had lunch and then did some shopping.  When we got home that evening I started right in on dinner.  Tonight was calzones.  I made some whole wheat pizza crust from this recipe (subbing whole wheat flour for white) and  while it rested a bit I chopped up a wide array of fixin's and then set up the dough into 3 little calzone shaped rounds on the pizza stone.  Everyone made their own then we closed the dough around them, wrapped them loosely in tinfoil, and baked at 375 for 30 minutes, removing the tinfoil for the last 5.  While they baked I warmed some dipping sauce and set the table.  They were done just in time and heres the result:

Calzone fixin's: fresh mozz, basil, orange bell pepper, chicken, mushrooms, sharp cheddar, olives, shredded Italian 4 cheese mixture, and sundried tomatoes

Super easy, super delicious, and way wayyy healthier than take-out calzones.  

After dinner I felt like I had maybe over indulged just a bit and the lump of calzone was sitting heavily in my belly so my Pops and I decided to take a walk down to the falls to check out the roaring Lamoille River after this mornings rain and warm temperatures.  The walk was just what I needed at the end of a lovely and relaxing day.  I love to feel just pleasantly tuckered out at the end of the day, especially when it is the result of baking bread and dog walking and not work.  On that note I shall leave you with one final shot of the engorged Lamoille.  Good night!

cook-bookin

I am in the process of reading the book Julie and Julia by Julie Powell - you know the one, girl starts blog chronicling her adventures cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child and it eventually is made into a book and then a movie.  I got the book for Christmas from my mom a few years back in the gift pack (meaning the novel came shrink wrapped to the cookbook that inspired it) just a few days after I saw the movie.  Now I have to say, I found the movie to be...well disappointing; that is why I sort of subconsciously put off reading the book for so long.  I have always found books to be better than movies but that movie just didn't strike me as something I would want to put the time it takes to read 359 pages into.   I've been meaning to, because I mean to read every book that I receive as a gift, but I hadn't gotten around to it until now.  The cookbook, sadly, has scarcely seen any action either.  It inspired my French-themed potluck very early in the Tahoe-Potluck days (which failed miserably by the way, not that it wasn't a blast, but the theme was butchered with no one except for me all that interested in French cooking we ended up with about 5 loaves of French bread, 3 cheese platters, some Pilsbury crescent rolls, and even some French Fries - arguably the least French thing there, even with their very "Frenchy" name - on the menu) and since that fateful potluck I have done little more that cart it back across the country and stick it back in the pile with all of my other cookbooks to be forgotten when I arrived home and had all of my mothers vast (compared to mine at least...) collection of cookbooks to play with.  

At any rate that brings us to now, I am only 93 pages into the novel and already I am dying to share two things - one, that I now want to cook my way through Julia Child's cookbook and two, that this book is miles better than the movie with more likeable characters, sillier narration, and a whole lot of humor that was completely lacking in the movie.  Julie explains where her obsession with Julia started (something to do with the resemblance of Mastering the Art of French Cooking to the copy of The Joy of Sex she discovered hidden in her home as an adolescent) and how finishing her cooking project had more to do with her stubborn-ness than a real commitment to the cause, giving background stories that make me like her a whole lot more than I like the Julie character in the movie.  I understand her a little better now I guess, her silly crass jokes and self-deprecating humor make her a little more relate-able to me than the whiny little woman of the movie who couldn't seem to get through a single recipe without an emotional breakdown and had none of the wit and smart-ass-y-ness that I am finding to be characteristic of the woman in the book.  

Ok, I'm making up words so I think its time for me to change subject; I'll share pictures and recipes from the book when I try them but this week I have been cooking recipes that I had saved before I started reading it.  The first was recommended by my grandmother who saw it on PBS, made it once and lost the recipe.  Through the glories of the internet I found a recipe, potentially even the same one, for artichoke chicken from a PBS cooking show and printed it out to give to my grams (who was very suprised - I guess she had assumed I would forget - oh ye of little faith!).  I had to sample it of course so I made it for the family tonight and I quite enjoyed it.  The recipe is posted here but I took a few liberties with it, as usual.  First I used a boxed couscous that came pre-seasoned and took only 5 minutes to make.  Easy, delicious, and made up for the fact that I had already thrown out the wilted shallot greens that were supposed to be tossed into the couscous had I made it plain.  Next, I used bagged, dry sundried tomatoes (about $2.99) instead of the kind bottled in oil as the recipe calls for (about $6.99) and let them soak in olive oil that I already had for 2 days before I used them.  Finally I didn't measure anything and made the recipe to serve 4 instead of 1.  I was starving when it was done and it smelled so good I just wanted to dig in so the photos might have been a little rushed, with not much attention to detail, but here's what it looked like:

Now if you'll excuse me I have to get back to my book about some crazy girl with a blog about cooking.  seriously who does that?

April Fools.

As a cruel April fools joke on us all the powers that be have caused a small spring snow storm to white out all of the wonderful dirty-ness of spring on April first here in Northern Vermont and I'm not what you might call thrilled.  April is about warm rains, mud puddles, and my doggies finally being able to play in the river again without fear of being swept away under ice.  Snow is not included, nor is it welcome, in that description.  In an effort to cheer myself up in the few remaining hours before I have to go to work and sort sale tags for 5 hours I have decided to visit my favorite website and make a list of some new recipes to try for spring.  Recently I have been in a chocolate chip cookie rut, baking a batch every week or so with a few different recipes but always fairly consistent results.  Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with chocolate chip cookies, but I feel that it's time for a bit of a change.  Last week I went for oatmeal cookies using an old fashioned cranberry oatmeal cookie recipe from one of my mothers cranberry cookbooks and I was VERY disappointed.   My cookies came out way too cakey for my liking, not nearly chewy enough, annnddd the first batch cooked faster than anticipated and set off our mind-blowingly annoying smoke detector system when the bottoms got only ever so slightly burned.

No pictures of those because they were a great disappointment for me.

The day before yesterday I set about making cookies to bring to lunch with my Grandma and again, in an effort to stray from my chocolate chip cookie rut, I attempted a new recipe.  This time butter cookies with a thumb-print full of blackberry jam or chocolate in the center.  These came from an old Betty Crocker cookbook and turned out much better, but still not as satisfying as I might have hoped.  Pictures below, but no recipe because to be honest, they just weren't that special.

Now onward, to new and exciting things.  I have realized that I am going to need to work a little harder to get out of my plain old chocolate chip cookie rut and so I will be branching out much further than simply other varieties of cookies.  The possibilities are endless, but here are some of my favorites thus far:

Peabody's Really Bad Day Fix-It-All Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cheesecake - A new and cheesier way to enjoy chocolate chip cookies!
Homemade Samoas - Yep, thats right, make your own Girl Scout Cookies.  I'm there.  Samoa's are my favorite so naturally making my own is the next logical step...unless I decide to make these instead:
Samoa Truffles - So everyone knows I love truffles.  Love to make them, love to share them, love to eat them myself, play with new flavors, coatings, fillings.  Samoa truffles?  Yep, this is definitely going to have to happen.
Cinnamon Raisin Brown Rice Pudding - This just looked all warm and delicious and it is snowing out so naturally warm cinnamony-raisin things would have to make the list.
Bri's Sweet Pretzel Cookies - A super twist on traditional chocolate chip cookies, these pretzel and berry and chocolate chip cookies look to be anything but boring.  Still in the cookie comfort zone, but with all kinds of new flavors.  I'm intrigued...

So there you have it, my "I spent 5 minutes on tastespotting and already have more recipes than I could possibly need so I have to stop now before this gets out of hand" baking wish list.  Now if only I could find people to share with...

Eventually I will most likely try them all but if anyone has a preference for which one I should try first, like if you're planning on stopping by my house and would like to find some Samoa Truffles all ready for you, just let me know.  I would be happy to take requests.

There, that brightened up my April Fool's Day!