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but I need to find a good place to photograph the results.
I was recently gifted with a sourdough starter, so this weekend I made my first loaf of bread from it. And I really do need to take a pic before I eat it all, I was pretty pleased with the results. it came with a version of the No-Knead bread recipe. I let it rise pretty much the limit of the instructions - mixed the dough up Friday night, did the bit where you kinda fold it over and give it a little exercise around 2 pm Sat - so at least a 16-hr first rise. Then I went for a walk with a friend and stopped by the store, and by the time the oven was heated up and I got the bread in, it was closing in on 7, so 4+ hours for the second rise. And it rose up again beautifully in the over, got those lovely big rustic-looking holes. Pretty decent crust - color a little uneven, but a good (and yet not too thick) crust. Not quite as sour as I would like, but we will see how it goes.
On an earlier shopping expedition on Saturday, I hit Trader Joe's, and they had 2-lb boxes of figs for $4.99. I love fresh figs, so I grabbed a box - and then realized there was no way I could eat 2 lb of figs before they started molding (they go fast). So I figured I would try my hand at fig jam. Found a recipe for Fig Preserves in my old Joy of Cooking; however, this called for 1 lb of rhubarb and 1/4 lb of figs....although now I wonder if they meant dried figs. Anyway, I like rhubarb, and had actually seen some at a decent price (hence my post-walk store visit). So I made fig jam (courtesy of Larousse Gastronomic) with 1 lb of figs, and rhubarb-fig preserve (I'm sorry, but the rhubarb deserves credit) with some of the rest, and they both came out pretty well (although now I understand why fig jam is so expensive, my 1 lb of figs gave me 1 half-pint jar and about 1/3 of a second).
So that was pretty much what I did on the weekend.
I was recently gifted with a sourdough starter, so this weekend I made my first loaf of bread from it. And I really do need to take a pic before I eat it all, I was pretty pleased with the results. it came with a version of the No-Knead bread recipe. I let it rise pretty much the limit of the instructions - mixed the dough up Friday night, did the bit where you kinda fold it over and give it a little exercise around 2 pm Sat - so at least a 16-hr first rise. Then I went for a walk with a friend and stopped by the store, and by the time the oven was heated up and I got the bread in, it was closing in on 7, so 4+ hours for the second rise. And it rose up again beautifully in the over, got those lovely big rustic-looking holes. Pretty decent crust - color a little uneven, but a good (and yet not too thick) crust. Not quite as sour as I would like, but we will see how it goes.
On an earlier shopping expedition on Saturday, I hit Trader Joe's, and they had 2-lb boxes of figs for $4.99. I love fresh figs, so I grabbed a box - and then realized there was no way I could eat 2 lb of figs before they started molding (they go fast). So I figured I would try my hand at fig jam. Found a recipe for Fig Preserves in my old Joy of Cooking; however, this called for 1 lb of rhubarb and 1/4 lb of figs....although now I wonder if they meant dried figs. Anyway, I like rhubarb, and had actually seen some at a decent price (hence my post-walk store visit). So I made fig jam (courtesy of Larousse Gastronomic) with 1 lb of figs, and rhubarb-fig preserve (I'm sorry, but the rhubarb deserves credit) with some of the rest, and they both came out pretty well (although now I understand why fig jam is so expensive, my 1 lb of figs gave me 1 half-pint jar and about 1/3 of a second).
So that was pretty much what I did on the weekend.
