Driving home

Pretty sunset!



--post from my iPhone

Manly Ricky

So this is my wonderful husband being manly. You know...getting dirty, fixing cars...things guys do.









And these are a little project I made for Kelly that is evidently never going to make it into the mail...seriously Kelly, I swear it's coming. I have one more little project to add. It's pink! And then it's coming your way.


And this is Clair learning how to drum.



Random days lately.
--post from my iPhone

Vacations and coming home

This past weekend, Ricky and I trecked off to South Carolina to see our friend Carey get married. We have known Carey since college and were so excited to be able to have the opportunity to see him tie the knot.

Pics from the last time we saw Carey:

We also took the opportunity to do the trip without Clairbear. It's interesting because I felt so strongly that it would be good for me and Ricky to have some time away that I didn't really miss Clair until it got past the point where we were supposed to be home and weren't yet.

She spent the weekend being spoiled by Grandma and Grandpa, rocking in the chair and watching old movies. Learning to make horse noises, and generally getting held and smiled at non-stop for 4 days. So, she had it good.

Anyways, we spent the night in the Phx airport and made it into Greenville, SC on Friday afternoon. The flights were pretty packed but more or less easy to get on. By the time we got to the hotel, we were fairly tired and hungry so we grabbed lunch in the little lobby diner and then headed out on the town. Downtown Greenville has been wonderfully renovated over the last ten years. It's all brick and Christmas lights, fancy restaurants, not fancy restaurants, boutique shops, the river, horse drawn carriage rides, art shops and live music. We ate at a Larkins on the River, splitting shrimp and grits and creme brulee. Everything was really good, both the service and the food.

On Saturday I slept all day while Ricky watched movies until the wedding started at 4. The wedding was beautiful and the center pieces at the reception are something I would like to copy for an event of my own. They were really cool looking. I have a couple pictures but I still need to load them up.

Sunday morning we decided to sleep in and get breakfast before going to the airport...stupid, stupid, stupid...we got to Houston and then every flight was full so we ended up sleeping in the airport again. Only this time it was on the hard, very cold floor and I kept waking up and people were talking loud and the seams on my pants hurt my hips. Generally just not a good night. The next morning we got to Phoenix and I had to work but we were still in the airport trying to get on flights so I was intermitantly writing emails, making phone calls, and moving from gate to gate trying to get on oversold flight after oversold flight. Not so fun.

We finally both got in around 2:30 in the afternoon and crashed at home for the rest of the night. I fell asleep at 8:30.

Yay for home.

Daddytime

Ricky and Clair got to hang out a little bit this morning...thought I should get a pic. She is so into music!



--post from my iPhone

Brilliant mommy!

Shopping can be quite the fun experience when your child starts to melt down so today Clair's Mommy got a brilliant idea!

To prevent the below (well, mostly...she was really over the whole cart thing by the time I took this.)



Tie dried fruit to basket with produce bag!



--post from my iPhone

Newest family addition

I would like to introduce the newest addition to our family! The $20 craigslist chair! This brown leather beauty is so old its owner practically gave it away and our family is going to enjoy every minute of its mashed in, years-of-loved goodness. It is the final addition to our office, a room where I am desperately trying to clean house. My hope is that many a degree will be acquired here and many a family moment made! I believe we are already starting!








--post from my iPhone

Bread Post

Hi Everyone! Happy Saturday! As promised...here is my bread post.

The beginnings of bread baking!

Breadmaking started for me when I was about 10 years old. At that time my days consisted of reading Little House on the Prairie and sitting around, I kid you not, and dreaming about how when I was grown up, I would ride in a horse drawn wagon and bake bread...so there you go. These were the things I loved at the time:

And, naturally, you can see why baking bread was a necessary part of my everyday life and something that I must be able to do well. :)

Anyways, I thought this might be enlightening to layout a little bit about why I bake bread. It's because secretly I want to be a pioneer. I really think this piece of trivia is rather important because, for me, it is the sheer enjoyment of fulfilling a tiny piece of this ridiculously never-going-to-happen fantasy that keeps me making bread year after year and even into my current adult years where I do NOT live on the prairie and I do NOT drive a horse drawn wagon. I do NOT stay at home and clean and sew clothes. I DO drive a gas guzzling jeep and live in the heart of downtown Tucson and work full time at a corporate job. But, making bread has always been a calming piece of my life that not only harkens back to when I was a kid and would steal away in my closet reading nook to live for hours in a world that wasn't mine (wouldn't I like to do that now. It's sort of like taking naps. I remember taking naps every week...) but also puts a delighted smile on my husband's face.

See, now I bake for 2...well, 4-6 actually, if you count all the people who might eat the bread. But, mostly it is important to me that Ricky be happy with the bread when it comes out and that is why I have tried several different recipes.

My standard recipe that I've used for the last 7 or 8 years is Neil's Harbor White Bread. I love this recipe. It is easy and impossible to mess up. Oh, and it tastes great. When I started working and got married and I realized that bread making took a back seat to, oh, everything else in life!, I began to search around for faster options. I ended up with this amazing book Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a day. I really thought this was going to answer all my problems but quickly realized that you need a family that eats bread all the time, every day. Otherwise, you end up with large batches of dough that go bad before you have a chance to use it. The recipes in the cookbook, though, are killer and I would highly recommend owning it and using it if you have a true bread eating family where you will go through a loaf a day. The other thing about this particular bread is that the standard recipes get a bit sour doughesque toward the end of the second week so they won't taste like fresh baked white or wheat bread. They truly taste like artisan breads. Something you would get at a restaurant with dinner. Yummy and special and I will continue to make them when it makes sense for us.

This has brought me to my newest recipe...Honey Wheat Bread II.

A little background on getting to this point. As I said earlier, I have always just baked bread for the fun of it. I never gave much thought to its healthy aspects (white bread made with bleached flour is my specialty!), or of my ability to service my family's health by taking the time to make it. In the past several months, I have been introduced to the benefits of making whole wheat bread where the wheat is freshly ground or where the wheat is sprouted and in both these situations, whole wheat berries are used.

So, let's recap...bleached white flour=warm fuzzies and smiles, wheat berries=foreign and scary....

I am still doing my research on this as it would be a rather large change for me if I decide to embrace it as a normal practice. However, a few months ago, when I got the Artisan Bread book, I also got wheat flour. Baby steps, you know?

My mom likes to refer to white bleached flour as wheat feces and, slowly, I am beginning to realize how little it really does for people. This has led me to make my first ever wheat bread.

And this is what this blog is actually supposed to be about. How I made the bread...and how easy it was!

First, the recipe, found on http://www.allrecipes.com/:

Honey Wheat Bread II
SUBMITTED BY: Meghan Monahan
PREP TIME
30 Min
COOK TIME
30 Min
READY IN
2 Hrs
Original recipe yield 2 loaves
SERVINGS (Help)

Servings

US
METRIC
INGREDIENTS (Nutrition)
2 cups warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon active dry yeast
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup honey
1/3 cup vegetable oil
5 cups all-purpose flour or whole wheat flour (if you use whole wheat flour, add 1/4 cup of water)

DIRECTIONS
Dissolve yeast in warm water. Add honey, and stir well. Mix in whole wheat flour, salt, and vegetable oil. Work all-purpose flour in gradually. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface, and knead for at least 10 to 15 minutes. When dough is smooth and elastic, place it in a well oiled bowl. Turn it several times in the bowl to coat the surface of the dough, and cover with a damp cloth. Let rise in a warm place until doubled in bulk, about 45 minutes.
Punch down the dough. Shape into two loaves, and place into two well greased 9 x 5 inch loaf pans. Allow to rise until dough is 1 to 1 1/2 inches above pans.
Bake at 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) for 25 to 30 minutes

And this is how I made it:

Start time and end time. This was the start of mixing materials to when I first put it in the bowl to rise!

these are all the ingredients it takes.

115 degree water (I checked this with the meat thermometer-all I had-and it's basically equivalent to turning your hot water tap on and letting it run until it feels hot and then pouring your water into the measuring cup. If you let it sit for a minute or two it cools down to around 115 and you can add your yeast)

This is the progression of what the yeast does. It gets all mushy in the water and then starts to dissolve. I usually pour it in and then leave it sitting for a minute or two. Then I stir it until it dissolves.

Add the honey...it gets a little when it's all mixed in.

Just a little note here about the flour. If you don't have a flour canister with a wide lid, it can be easier to pour your flour into a wide bowl and scoop from there into your mixing bowl.

I mixed in the flour two cups at a time until it was all mixed together. After 4 cups, I wasn't really able to mix it any more with the spoon so I started in by hand.

Continue to knead the dough like this. I mostly just fold it over and then push down with the palm of my hands until it starts to look and feel elastic-y. The recipe says to knead for at least 15 minutes. I only kneaded for about 5. I don't believe the time factor is nearly as important as the fact that the dough needs to look and feel elastic.

You can kind of see in these pictures how the dough springs back into place after being pushed in.

At this point, you should easily be able to roll the dough into a ball. I use vegetable oil to grease the bowl. I roll the dough around the bowl to cover it in all the extra oil, and then I cover with a damp cloth and place it infront of the open oven. Before I do this, I turn the oven on preheat for 3 minutes, then turn it off. This gives off a good amount of heat to help rise the dough quickly. For this recipe, I still had to let the dough rise almost an hour to get it to the height I wanted which was almost filling the whole bowl. (Of course, I forgot to get a picture of this because I got busy) But, suffice it to say that your dough should be double the size and the one thing you don't want to skimp on when you bake bread is the rising time. When in doubt, wait a few minutes longer.

After it has risen the first time, you will want to punch it down in the center (this is fun!!) and then knead it a few more times to get all the air bubbles out. After that you divide it in even parts and roll it into a dough that will fit in your bread pans. You can also braid it or just plop it on a pan and let it rise the second time. I put this into two well greased bread pan (one not greased enough) I used vegetable oil to grease both pans and though it worked splendidly on my stone, it caused the bread to stick to the regular metal pan. If you bake bread a lot, I would highly recommend a stone. So much easier!!

I cut the oven on and off one more time on Preheat for 3 minutes and put the dough out to rise again. This time, there is no time frame, just watch the dough until it has risen 1.5 inches above the pans. I call this pretty bread height because it makes pretty loaves of bread such that when you cut the bread it looks like the bread loaves you buy in the store.

Ok, so I took this picture because I was trying to carry the baby and move the bread pans off the stove at the same time after they had substaintially risen the second time and the metal pan loaf dropped. This is like when you're baking a cake and you're not supposed to slam the oven door because it might cause the cake to collapse in on itself. Yup...just like that. The only difference is that you just really can't screw bread up, so I left it on the counter for even longer (remember, when in doubt, let it rise longer) and it popped right back up!

Here is the finished product, I baked it on temperature for the exact amount of time indicated in the recipe, except I always add butter to the top of the loaf about 5 minutes to the end of baking. I just like it that way.

Finished product. I immediately cut up the loaf from the metal pan because it stuck and I ripped it apart trying to get it out. But, the other loaf I let fully cool and this morning was able to cut it into centimeter size slices for sandwiches. It really turned out awesome. I used 100% whole wheat flour and it is a very dense and hearty bread. The honey makes it just a bit sweet, which is nice.

As a side note, I also made this at the same time:

Bake a Tasty Cinnamon Swirl Cake by Élena Nazzaro in Art of Cooking

I think all links to this recipe are bad right now. I was able to pull it right up on Thursday. Now it's gone. But, it is really tasty so if you manage to be able to find the link, let me know and I'll post it up here.