Outpost 505

I’ve been on a Spanish kick the last week or two. I’ve also been thinking that if I’m going to make the 24 loaves I committed to earlier in the year, I need to move on from the perfect baguettes that I’ve been making with the basic AB5 recipe. These two factors directly contributed to [...]

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A couple of weeks ago: Shane, eating breakfast: “Where did this bread come from?” E, making coffee: “It’s just the normal baguette.” Shane: “Oh! It’s really good! I thought maybe it was still some of the Roadhouse bread that Gemma had bought.” E: “That’s maybe the best compliment you’ve ever made about my cooking!” And [...]

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In the last month, I’ve baked 8 loaves from the basic Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day recipe. Five boules, which were more or less successful. The first couple were great, including the two I baked while extremely hung over the weekend of my birthday. That’s the beautiful thing about this recipe – even if [...]

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So tonight I made this sauce.  Except that instead of velvet buttery goodness after 45 minutes, after an hour and a half the sauce was still chunky and would not reduce.  I spooned a cup or so of sauce over a leftover chicken breast and warmed them together in the oven, hoping and hoping that [...]

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I’ve been cooking up a storm since we got home from Cleveland last Wednesday – I just haven’t been blogging about it. I made hummus and fresh pita bread for our friends’ New Year’s party – the latter was perfect, unlike earlier pita efforts. We were both somewhat worse for wear on Saturday, and the [...]

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I go through bread baking phases. When I first learned how to bake bread – back in 2003, in the apartment with a horrifically carpeted kitchen and tile on every surface – it was a revelation. We were broke, and the bread we bought was generally of the extremely inexpensive store-brand variety. Occasionally we’d get [...]

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I’m starting to think that snack dinner is our equivalent of leftover casserole – you know, a bit of this, a bit of that, finishing off a few things that are in the fridge or that looked appealing during the last minute run to the store. (I’d link you to the episode of Malcolm in [...]

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The idea of mushroom crostini had been kicking around my head since we had dinner at Lupa Trattoria.  This is why restaurant meals – cheap or expensive – are worth it to me on occasion: I go home with good ideas that I can’t get out of my head until I’ve put them on a [...]

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First, I am officially throwing in the towel on no-knead bread.  If the last attempt was a mess, the loaf I made tonight was an all-out disaster.  The dough stuck to the mixing bowl.  It stuck to the floured silpat mat and did its best to ooze off all sides of the mat, resulting in [...]

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So you know about the No-Knead Bread, right?  You know the one everyone’s been talking about since 2006?  Stephen made it.  Megan made it and has a whole photo set to prove it.  Laurie made an incredible-looking loaf.  Shana said it’s the only bread she makes.  The photos of Carrie‘s bread are amazing.  Rex‘s mom [...]

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