Haven’t posted much on what I’ve been cooking. On Monday I made bread. My grandmother gave me a book with bread recipes in it and I’d been wanting to try bread. I have Alton’s baking book, but he made it seem a lot more complicated than the book my grandmother gave me.

Well it ended up taking way more flour than the recipe called for to turn it into dough and I ended up with three loaves instead of two. Also the recipe did one of those dumb things where they say to do something complicated in one phrase. In this case it was to braid the three rolled out pieces of dough. How do you braid three things together? I ended up just twisting two together.

Wife and kids said the bread was great. I thought it a little dense. There is still a loaf and an half left, but at this point I think it is almost read to become bread crumbs. I took a picture, but haven’t gotten it off the camera yet. I’ll edit this post with the picture later.

Also made Cook Illustrated’s Beef Stew with Tomatoes, Cinnamon, and Cloves. I screwed it up and added the pearl onion at the beginning instead of near the end. I also added the currants once I realized I’d screwed up. I did cook the chopped onions before adding them into the stew, so they were still soft. Cooking started at like 8:30 at night and when every thing had been cooked for the amount of time in the directions the meat was still pretty tough and it was almost midnight. So I decided to leave it in the oven overnight. The meat was much more tender after 8 hours of cooking.

This is the first time I’ve added wine to a recipe and I thought the whole stew came out quite fruity. Not sure if that was the way it was suppose to be or not. Was good, but just not what we expected.

I’ve found that pizza is a quick meal if you have the dough made. So tomorrow I’m going to make pizza dough. I may also cook some chicken so when I do make pizza I can put some meat on it.

Kids need cookies for a party next Friday, so I’m thinking I may make some cookie dough too and then just cut it up and cook on Thursday night.

Seems there was something else I was going to cook…oh yeah Ice Cream. Haven’t made any in awhile so I plan on doing some tomorrow.