Recipe Night #3 / Perfecting my bread recipe

1/20/08 - Sunday

Sunday I didn't have Scrabble, so I thought it might be a good day to do some cooking.

I started out with breakfast and made:

- Tofu & Egg Scramble with tomatoes, goat cheese, & mint
- Rosemary Pork Loin Chops
- Drop Soda Biscuits (from my new bread book Beard on Bread)
- Half Grapefruit

The breakfast was good, although my Tofu & Egg Scramble turned out a bit wet because I didn't squeeze the tofu out enough. I have found that if you briefly boil the tofu the press it in a colander lined with a towel to soak the moisture, the tofu gets a distinctive ground meat texture. I just pressed this one with my hands and it was not very satisfactory.

The drop biscuits were very bad because we used baking soda instead of baking powder. Ugh. Maybe next weekend we will try it the right way.

In the evening, I made some Rolled Oatmeal Bread from the above mentioned bread book, that was very delicious despite my messing it up a lot. I didn't really observe my yeast enough when I added it and some sugar to the warm water. Apparently it didn't bubble at all which would have tipped me off right then that the yeast was no longer active. This being the case, I didn't know until the dough didn't rise that there was a problem. We decided to go ahead and bake what we had. What turned out was what you can expect from unrisen bread: a very dense almost doughy bread that retained all of the same flavors it would have had. Thus, it is a very very tasty recipe, but the final result will probably be a much easier to eat bread. that being said though, I will probably still only let the dough rise once as the denseness of the bread appealed to both Katy and I.


1/21/08 - Lamb Redux & Roasted Fingerling Potatoes

Last night I made dinner from the leftover half leg of lamb from cooking Katy's birthday dinner and a dozen or so fingerling potatoes:

- Roasted Leg of Lamb ala Brett
- Lemon Salt-Roasted Fingerling Potatoes
- UberDense Oatmeal Bread

I roasted roasted the leg of lamb in a thrown together sauce of red wine, olive oil, rosemary, mint, garlic, onions and pears. I basted the leg with the sauce and then put the onions and pears on the top to let the juices drip onto the leg.

The potatoes turned out really nice, but there wasn't a whole lot to them. Tossing the potatoes in the butter and olive oil gave them just the right amount of stuff to roast without them being really oily. Also, the spices allowed the potatoes to do there thing and accent their natural sweet flavor.