Back history:
My first foray into soft pretzel making was with a Collective Kitchen class, from a baker who learned to make them actually in Bavaria. His recipe was similar to the NYT’s, below, but started with a pate fermentee, a bit of dough made in advance and allowed to sit overnight before being added to the rest of the dough. I learned a lot ( Read more... )

Last night’s dinner was so tasty that I wanted to write it up. These are not proper shrimp po’boys; proper ones have the shrimp breaded and fried, and the remoulade sauce is much more complicated. However, these are easier to make at home for one or two people, mostly involved stuff I had on hand (I just had to buy the bread) and are extremely ( Read more... )

Sorted into what they used to call “heads” in old sermons (gratuitous L.M. Montgomery reference there) so I don’t just meander confusingly.

I. Rowing and such
My shoulder has been bothering me this week, to the point where I didn’t erg Wednesday or yesterday. Nothing really wrong, I don’t think, just a strain that hurts enough that it seemed smart ( Read more... )

While writing about the pot roast I forgot to mention my other adventures for the weekend: On Saturday I made apple/pear fruit leather, and we visited a couple of local wineries.

The fruit leather was basically the Best Thing Ever: easy to make, uses up a lot of those apples and pears we keep getting from the CSA, and very tasty. First I made ( Read more... )

Ted did something this weekend that he rarely does: requested a specific dinner (pot roast) because he wanted something that would go well with some of the Abacela wines we wanted to taste head to head. You can see the wine discussion over at Avontuur but I wanted to talk some more about the pot roast here.

The All-American pot roast recipe from ( Read more... )

The two wines of this weekend.

Also some notes about why and whether to hold a wine in your mouth for 30 seconds while tasting - warning, it can be unpleasant!

Tonight we had roasted cabbage and beets with our steaks, as well as some bread baked for a dough we forgot and left here at the lake house after Christmas. Conclusions: roasted cabbage is ( Read more... )

Not-very good steak; burned fried potatoes; mushrooms fried in butter; salad; burned garlic bread ( Read more... )

- An occupational hazard of iPod-shuffled songs: apparently " 'Til Then" makes me cry now. (From the musical 1776, taken from the letters of John and Abigail Adams, a couple who knew something about job-related separations. )

- If you liked Flora Segunda and Flora's Dare, you may like James Kennedy's The Order of Odd-Fish. What the two have in ( Read more... )