I'd like more weekends like this.

[madbaker]

Mostly, I played with my trains.

That comes from an episode of Chef! - Lenny Henry's character has the day off, but spends it in the kitchen anyway trying to perfect a recipe.

This weekend I:

• baked a batch of sourdough bread using (mostly) Lammas Fayre medieval blend flour (a blend of heritage wheat and barley). This would have been a basic lower-class bread. The loaves looked good as the slashes separated dramatically but as expected, the bread did not rise much. Barley is very low gluten. The flavor is like a basic whole wheat loaf, but with a Grape-Nuts aftertaste. Interesting and I still have most of the 5-lb bag of flour left, so I will clearly be making more. (The mill recommends about 50/50 with strong white flour to get a lighter loaf but with similar taste; I probably used 1/3 white.)
• used a dinner plate-sized piece of beef shank to make osso buco in one of our Dutch ovens. It was delicious and I will be eating that all week for lunch.
• made three 12^th c. sauces to go with leftover beef steak.  I plan to teach a class at next year's West Coast Culinary Symposium on these sauces, so I want to experiment with them.  They'll show up in the next couple weeks as Resolution Recipes.
• Played a bunch of computer games.  It was fun and brainless.

Now, back to work.

Comments

[threadwalker]

Yum.

I'm ready to learn about more bread-foods. Pretzels were fun to make.