Culinary School

I love baking and cooking, and I told my husband anytime we have an extra $50,000 laying around I’d like to go to culinary school.  To which he said, “you don’t need to go to culinary school to be a good cook.”  And he’s not wrong.  There are plenty of excellent chefs with no formal training.  Some of these chefs even have their own show on Food Network!  So, with that in mind I’ve decided to bake the heck out of my kitchen.  I don’t own a stand mixer (which I desperately want) or a bread maker, so I’m doing everything by hand.  I have a couple of go-to bread recipes that usually come out quite nicely, but I want to mix it up.  So I’ve deiced to try a ton of different types of bread recipes and do them over and over until they come out the way I want.  Yesterday was my first attempt.  It was a sandwich bread recipe from The Bread Bible.  It has a lot of steps, and requires a lot of rise time.  I hadn’t read the recipe completely through (my fault) so I mismanaged my time.  I made the Starter the night before, then started again just before 7am the next morning.  We go to church at 9:30 so I didn’t have a lot of time.  The result was very disappointing.

It fell–a lot.  I read there are at least 3 reasons why my bread could have fallen.  First, I didn’t knead it enough.  Which is possible, because the dough was very sticky and I had a hard time kneading it.  Second, it rose too long.  Again, because of my mismanagement with the time it did sit rising for far longer than the recipe called for.  And third, too much yeast.  It’s possible, I think.  As I was putting in the amount of yeast it called for, I felt like it was a lot.  The taste is great.  My husband likes it, and Liliana loves it.  (She loves anything homemade I make).  But I’ll try the recipe again soon, but for now I have the King Arthur Sandwich Bread rising on my counter.  We’ll see what happens with that.

Little Frankenstein

We tried out our costumes at a “healthy” trick-or-treat at our local Children’s museum.  The place was packed and Liliana was more interested in playing.  But here is a picture of my little Frankenstein.  (Yes, Frankenstein is a girl.)

We also just came back from a short trip to Kansas City, MO.  We had a ton of fun visiting a farm, the Sealife aquarium, and other stuff.  Our biggest concern when traveling with small children is how well they’re going to sleep.  Luckily, they both slept as well as we could have hoped–so that made our trip extra enjoyable.  Sleep changes lives!  It was a happy coincidence that the World Series was being played the same time we were down there.  There was Royals support everywhere.  This was one of multiple fountains that was turned blue in honor of the Royals.  Spoiler alert: we let our kid get away with a lot.  So when she asked to touch the water–we let her.

New Site, New Post

Welcome to anyone reading! I have so many thoughts swirling in my head, I should probably get them out. As you read, maybe you’ve had some of the same thoughts going on in your head.

While I was in college, in one of my first English classes (one of many) my professor started out by saying that he wasn’t going to preface everything he said with trite, “in my opinion” statement(s). He said this was his class, and unless otherwise stated everything he said was “his opinion”. Fair enough. So, with that in mind: I’ll do the same. Everything on this site will be my opinion and my ideas of what worked for me. I’m not going to pretend to be able to know how to handle everyone’s situations–because everyone’s situation is different. And no judgement. If I do something different than you (and vice-versa) I won’t judge.

Also, don’t mind the lack of capital letters sometimes. My six month old’s fingers are just the right size to fit under individual keys and flick them off. Purely accidentally–she’s just grabbing at anything. But she does it every time. The last time she did it, she got the Shift key. I put it back, but it isn’t the same.

Here’s a picture of my little computer-key grabber: