Pepper Poppers

bread catch up! i cannot tell you how either of these breads tasted-- i gave them away the same day they were baked. i can tell you that the batch bread was the softest, smoothest dough i have made to date and i could have played with it forever.

batch bread

whole wheat pan bread

so, the bug finally hit and left me today. that's right, hit and left all in one day, due mostly to my wonderful husband letting me sleep through literally half of what is normally my waking hours.

his one request as repayment for taking over maternal and paternal duties was some tuna melts. i was a little nervous that the smell of tuna might not go over so well with me yet and we have some veggies we need to use up, so i made these instead!

pepper poppers

10 petite bell peppers, halved and de-seeded (mushrooms or jalapenos would also be good for this!)

1-1.5oz goat cheese

1 tbsp mayo

1/4c parmesan cheese

1 sprig thyme

1 tsp garlic

1 tsp black pepper

3 pieces of bacon

2 tbsp white wine

ready?

put the bacon and the bell peppers into one pan on medium heat, bell peppers skin side up. you don't need any oil, the bacon fat will take care of that for you!!

cook the bacon until it's crispy; flip the peppers over when they have a nice dark brown/black skin, like this:

once the skins are that great color on the other side of the peppers, transfer them to a paper towel to drain, skin side up. 

once your pan is emptied of foods, you'll still have some bacon grease in there. add the 2 tbsp of wine to it, scrape all of the char and goodies off the bottom of the pan, and let the alcohol cook off for about 2-3 minutes. take it off the heat and set it aside.

in a bowl, mix together the cheeses, mayo, pepper, thyme, garlic, crumbled bacon and the bacon grease/wine mixture. 

line a pan with foil, turn your broiler on high, and set all of your peppers, skin side down, on to the foil. scoop little bits (about a tsp) of the cheese mix on to your peppers.

put the peppers under the broiler until the cheese starts to bubble, 3-5 minutes depending on your broiler.

take them out and enjoy!!

Black and Bleu

i went through an intense bleu cheese phase in my life. there was nothing bleu cheese could not improve--sandwiches, wraps, chicken, stuffed mushrooms, my credit score.

that phase was followed by feta, then goat's cheese. right now i'm in a laughing cow phase. 

don't judge me, those things spread like magic.

during this phase i managed to find a bunch of black'n'bleu foods--burgers, sausages and chicken wings were the main ones. generally it was bleu cheese and a dark meat or dark peppery spices. always delicious.

there is a recipe for stilton and bacon bread. 

stilton is a specialty bleu cheese that is only made in a few towns in england.

die and go to heaven bread. nevereatanotherbreadinyourlife bread. 

i didn't buy stilton for this because its status as a bleu cheese already makes it a bit more costly and its status as a specialty blue cheese puts it out of the price range of an army family.

i bought castello blue cheese instead, which you can find at walmart. maybe not the best cheese ever, but it's going into bread paired with bacon. this cannot fail.

this bread will take 2 days to finish. ready? here we go

blue cheese and bacon bread

day 1:

1/2c warm water

3/4c white flour

2 tsp yeast

mix all of those into a bowl, cover and let sit in a warm spot overnight. by the next morning it should smell a little sour and beery--not rotten, mind you, but a bit like sourdough bread.

yours may look more or less wet than this. 

i recommend it be more on the wet side

day 2:

1 1/2c warm water

3 1/4c white flour

2 tsp yeast

1 1/2 tsp salt

6-7 pieces bacon, cooked then crumbled

2-3oz crumbled blue cheese

add JUST THE WATER AND YEAST to the mix you made last night. let it sit and soak in for a minute or two, then start stirring mixture until it is no longer hard or clumpy. add the flour and salt, mix well. take it out and knead it for about 5-10 minutes, until it's smooth, a bit sticky, elastic, and moist. put the dough into a well greased bowl, cover and let sit in a warm place for 30 minutes.

this would be a great time to cook your bacon-- it provides a warm stove to put your dough on and 30 minutes is the perfect amount of time to cook all the bacon and get it on towels to drain and cool off.

take out your dough and divide it into two portions. knead the blue cheese into one of the portions:

chop up the bacon and knead it into the second portion of dough:

now knead the two together. i know, i know, "why not just knead it all in to one ball of dough at the same time??" i suppose you could, but doing each separately ensures that your crisp, somewhat sharp bacon won't attack and break down your cheese and it means that each bit of this bread will have a special mixed texture and separate tastes that will hit your tongue at different times.

once you've got the two well combined with one another, roll the dough into a log of sorts and put it into a well greased bread pan. let it rise for about an hour in a warm place.

cook your bread at 400 until golden brown.

now tell me that doesn't look delicious. 

you could obviously eat this bread alone with no regrets. but i was thinking some great toppers for this would be some thinly sliced peaches or peach jam or figs; it would also be an amazing nest for a little birdie or a great sandwich bread for some nice spicy lunch meat. E loves shredded chicken doused in buffalo wing sauce and garlic with a little bit of mozzarella. this would be an awesome bread for that sandwich too.

if it survives until lunch time, that is ;)

Got A Whale of A Tale to Tell Ya Lads

a whale of a tale or twooooooooooo, bout the flappin fish and the girls i've loved on nights like this with the moon above, a whale of a tale and it's all true, i swear by my tattoo!

aaaah disney! while i don't have any tales about flappin fish or girls i've been in love with, i do have a tattoo and i swear by it that this post is all truth. ;)

first, the breads i've made since the beer bread. a milk loaf and what is called a cottage loaf. i think the thing that separates the cottage loaf from just plain ole bread is its shape; however, it is an exceptionally delicious bread. i have not tried the milk bread-- it is nicely wrapped and waiting patiently for a home because we have 2 loaves sliced in the freezer and 2 in the refrigerator. so people who do us favors are now going to get bread as repayment.

cottage loaf

milk loaf

the men of the house are doing better, but are not completely well yet. it's starting to take its toll on me (selfish, eh? they're sick and i'm the one whining. so typical!!), so when dinner time rolled around, all i wanted was a quick fix. 

solution? open faced tuna melts.

what you need to feed 2 people:

2 cans tuna

1 tbsp mayo

1/2 tbsp mustard

1/2 tbsp old bay or black pepper

1 tsp garlic powder

all the veggies you want, diced, sliced, julienned, whatever size you're comfy with

a good melty cheese-- cheddar, swiss, mozzarella, etc

bread 

cut up and start sauteing your veggies (you can skip this step if you like fresh veggie crunch)

mix all of other ingredients, save the cheese, in a bowl, set aside.

if you have a super cute helper to 

mix the tuna, use them!!!!

once your veggies are nice and soft (or still cold and crisp!), mix them into your tuna. 

turn the broiler on HIGH

grab your bread. i don't know how much you'll need, but i used the beer bread for its thinness and we needed 9 pieces that were about 3-4 inches long.

mound some tuna on to your bread slices, top it with some thin slices of your cheese, put them on a cookie sheet and under your broiler.

cook them until the cheese is bubbling--it will only take a few minutes, so watch carefully if you don't know what your broiler is capable of!!. take them out and enjoy!

In Heaven, There Is No Beer, That's Why We Drink It Here...

i'm cruising along quite nicely in my loafy endeavors--here's the bread i made on monday, a crusty cob

it was pretty darn tasty. it had a bit of a crunch to the crust (i suppose that's where it got the first part of its name) and reminded me of a french loaf, but a bit less sweet. pretty good, pretty basic. i sliced it up and threw it into a ziploc bag in the freezer. hello sandwich bread!

let me tell a short story:

my husband loves beer. not necessarily for the purpose of getting drunk--he loves the taste of beer and loves trying different beers. i think some of his favorite memories from colorado involve beer flights and tastings of locally brewed ales. 

when he was out getting my anniversary present, he almost bought me the book "artisan bread in five minutes a day" (also, might i add, a fabulous blog). he ended up choosing the book i'm currently using because while flipping through, he saw a recipe for beer bread. that made his decision quite simple. if there is a bread that contains beer, he wants it.

so naturally once i decided to start baking nearly a loaf a day he inquired where in the plan the beer bread would fall. i told him i would make it as soon as i had both beer and whole wheat flour (we had neither in the house on the sunday we were discussing this). yesterday afternoon he arrived home from work with whole wheat flour a regional beer from pennsylvania:

how could i resist? :)

here's the recipe and a few pictures!

1 1/4c beer of your preference (a decent beer, no natty lights here!)

1 1/2 tbsp, or 2 packets, active dry yeast

1/2 tbsp sugar

1/2 tbsp salt

2 tbsp butter

1 2/3c white flour

1 1/2c whole wheat flour

warm up the beer then dissolve the sugar into it (there will be brief fizzing)

add the yeast (more fizz) and let it get nice and foamy

mix in the butter, then the whole wheat flour (1/2c at a time), then the salt, then the white flour (1/2c at a time again) until a dough has formed.

tip the dough out of the bowl on to a lightly floured counter and start kneading. knead for 5 minutes, until the dough is nice and smooth.

put the dough in a greased bowl in a warm spot to rest for 2 hours.

tip the dough back on to the floured surface, shape it into a ball and put it on a greased baking sheet. cut criss-cross slits across the top with a sharp knife, then back to the warm place to rise for one more hour.

bake at 400 for about 30 minutes.

as far as notes about this bread, i thought it was a beautifully colored dough. it was easy to knead and smelled pretty good. it has a nice crust, and here's something i didn't expect-- and haven't seen until this loaf: it rose outward. 

the whole loaf is incredibly puffy, which makes sense given the yeast in the beer and the addition of more yeast. but instead of puffing up really high, it puffed out really wide. so we have a rather short, wide loaf of yummy bread. i'm trying to figure out exactly what we'll end up using this for. my guess? i'll unfreeze it and broil it with cheese on top or toast it up to use as dippers for a party. either way, it's going to be delicious. and E is quite happy!

for now i cut off a slice, cut it in half and made a thin meatloaf sandwich out of it. meatloaf+beer(bread) in the middle of an army school day=winner.

by the by, both boys are doing much better!!! turns out jp has his bottom two eye teeth breaking though his gums, so i'm sure that was not helping his sickly state. hopefully this will be the worst we get of the flu season, but if it's not, i'll have plenty of comfort food on hand :)

I Would Do Anything For Love....

yesterday morning i woke up to my son yelling. not atypical, he yells a lot in the morning for me to come get him. but this yelling was continuous until i went in and found him sitting in his crib, tears streaming out of his eyes, his face filled with snot from the nose down. this is one of those moments where the strength of your stomach is really tested. 

i passed the test and spent my morning fighting him to get the snot out of his nose and off of his face and trying to keep him from wiping his drippings all over our couches and blankets. i was even a good mommy and still let him play with all of the pots and pans. i just resolved to wash everything at the end of the night.

i texted E about all the cute sickness related things jp was doing--snoring, drooling, screaming at the snot sucker, climbing onto the oven... that one might not have anything to do with being sick...

E called me around 4 when he was on his way home from work (don't be jealous of his 4 o'clock departure, he goes in at 5am and has to go back at 5 pm!) and told me that whatever jp had he also had coming on and would need medicine and an early turn in after dinner.

what better time for some nice, heavy comfort food than when both of your men are sick and will be going to bed early? 

i should mention before i put this recipe up that i don't generally eat meat. i am not at all a strict vegetarian, and i don't frankly care so much about animals. i choose my mostly meatless lifestyle because 1) i don't like the texture and taste of almost all meats, save fish, 2) vegetarianism is a healthier lifestyle when carried out appropriately, 3) i would prefer to not support a market that is lending a helping hand to the creation of antibiotic resistant strains of diseases, and 4) americans consume ENTIRELY too much protein!! the suggested serving of protein for the average adult female is 50g--you can get that in one 5oz serving of chicken. you can get your ENTIRE day's worth of protein from one chicken breast. the main part of your dinner. think of all the other sources of protein you take in at all the other meals!!! that's a lot of protein that you don't need! unless you're a body builder. then by all means, have a dinner of meat with a side of meat, topped with meat. :) ok, off the high horse, back to the ground!

tonight wasn't a special night. we weren't celebrating anything. no major events, no happy victories. but both E and jp were exhausted and zombie-like by the time dinner rolled around, so both of them sat quietly at the table and ate dinner. jp actually laid his head down on his high chair for a while. i decided that instead of making myself a second meatless entree, i would just sit with them, eat the meat, and enjoy this rare moment of total compliance :) i could have fed them cat food and neither would have noticed. glorious.

leanne's marvelous meatloaf

1lb ground beef (85/15 or fattier. you need fat for meatloaf)

3/4c breadcrumbs (or crushed chex mix for you gluten-freers)

1/4c finely chopped, almost minced, veggies of your choice

1 tbsp onion powder

1 tbsp garlic salt

1 tbsp black pepper

1 tsp your favorite grill dry seasoning, or a hot spice (cayenne, chili powder, etc)

1 egg+milk to make 2/3c

preheat to 375

mix it all together REALLY REALLY well, with your hands. if it's still pretty wet and not really sticking together, add more breadcrumbs/chex mix. if it's one giant clump of hardness, add a tad more milk. either way you're going to end up with this sucker baking in a ring of its own fat. quite a sight to behold.

put the mixture in a well greased bread pan. i used a 9x5 and it was a bit too big. 

bake until the edges start turning dark dark brown, approx 1-1.5 hours depending on your oven, pan size, and pan location in your oven.

* veggie ideas-- i used  red, yellow, and orange petite bell peppers and mushrooms. other good ones? corn, tomatoes, mushroom varieties, large bell peppers, spicy peppers, shredded carrots, apples, green beans (WELL DRAINED if you use the canned ones), broccoli, etc. bear in mind that you could load this loaf down with a ton more veggies than the recipe calls for if you wanted to. it's really up to you, just keep an eye on the texture. well, keep a hand on the texture!! :)

i also made bacon gravy (go big or go home!!)

this is enough for about 3-4 servings

6 slices bacon

flour

cook the bacon until it gets crispy. you need the fat in the pan

once all the bacon is cooked, set it on paper towels to drain and grab your flour and a whisk.

sprinkle about a tablespoon of flour in to the fat while whisking, heat at medium-low. break all the flour up and see how thick your gravy is. add flour a tbsp at a time until it's just a little thinner than you would like and let the gravy simmer while you break all the bacon into bits. add it back in to the gravy and let it simmer for another minute or two. pour it over slices of meatloaf. die and go to heaven.

the boys were sleeping by 8. that might have something to do with the benadryl they both got, but i'm going to attribute it to a food coma :)

Corn sheaf bread

the book, 100 Great Breads by Paul Hollywood, asks the reader/baker to start with this bread before making any other in the book. going through the recipe, i thought that was a strange request because it is a VERY standard, basic bread recipe--water, flour, salt, yeast, olive oil. what makes this bread unique is that it's sort of art--you have to sculpt the bread into what eventually becomes a corn sheaf.

i make soft pretzels for my husband routinely, so this didn't seem like it would be any great challenge, but i obliged, smugly, to the author and made the dough (by hand instead of in my mixer, might i add!).

after letting it do its initial rest, i took it out to begin rolling. 

this is when i realized exactly what he meant by "If you can make a cornsheaf, you can make anything in this book."

this dough was not exactly agreeable with the process. it wanted nothing more than to bounce right back to the shape it started in--giant clump. i understood that he did not mean the dough was tricky or that the process would be confusing. it was simply time consuming and physically tedious. 

my confidence was quickly stripped and i told my husband that i didn't think i would make it through this bread. i should mention that we went kayaking yesterday, and the very muscles you need to roll out the required 20-30 quarter inch logs for this bread are the same muscles that you need to kayak. i was already sore and those muscles needed a break!!

i have a tendency to get excited about things at their inception and then lose interest within a few days. weeks if the object is lucky! i was so excited about this bread, but once i realized how (literally) painstaking this process was going to be, i nearly gave up.

but my husband encouraged me and i told myself this would be only an hour or two of my life and the reward would be worth it. so i continued.

it was in fact worth it.

maybe not the most AMAZING corn sheaf shaped bread ever, but for a first try, i would say not bad!! E is certainly impressed, and i must admit, i am too. this will be a fun bread to eat, and it has me looking forward to the other fun flavors and shapes i'll be introducing to my bread arsenal over the coming months!

i won't be putting the recipe up for this, but i hope it inspires you to try some new shapes with your breads! it's got me thinking!

Yeast Infection!

let's talk about my husband.

is anyone concerned about where this is going? yeast infection, husband?

it's our anniversary today.

more concern?

he got me this book:

100 different bread recipes. only downside to this book at all is that it uses compressed fresh yeast in every recipe, so i'll have to learn to convert or find some compressed fresh yeast. not a problem at all.

we ran out of bread yesterday when i used the last of the loaf for our picnic lunch that we had today in the park we went kayaking and walking in. 

so today when we got home i started with my usual amish white bread, but i decided to stray from the standard recipe a little. i used 1/2c sugar and 2 tsp salt. not really a big deal, although this dough was stickier than normal. that could be because i didn't add as much flour, but i don't really know. i don't keep track of the amount o flour any more as much as i do the texture.

so i have a saltier batch of bread. it still makes 2 loaves worth and i still only have one loaf pan. i've always used the other half to make rolls. 

i took some inspiration from my new book and made a braid. 

i know, real evel knievel, right? i'm a dare devil, what can i say?

anyway, this got me thinking. i'm definitely in a bread phase of life right now. we go through bread like crazy between my birds' nests and E's lunches. and my amazing husband just got me an incredible book with a lot of ideas that i think would probably get us into any holiday party this fall once word gets out that we're bringing homemade, fresh out of the oven bread. i'm all for worming our way into popularity.

in addition to just loving bread, i'm also trying to gain weight right now (unheard of in an obese nation, i'm well aware. but winter is coming! i need a layer of fat to keep me warm!! :) but seriously, you need some energy reserve when you're chasing a kiddo) and we're sticking to a pretty tight budget as we prepare for seasons to come. buying some basic baking essentials (flour, sugar, yeast, butter) in bulk will provide us with artisan breads that will cost less than a loaf of horrible, chemical ridden supermarket bread. that's worth it.

i'm going to make all of the breads by valentine's day. since i got the book on our anniversary, valentine's day seems like a good place to end.

i won't share EVERY single bread with you, but i will share. and that will be the majority of what i'll be talking about for the next few months: bread.