A Delicious Dinner!

I was very pleased with myself last night, and cooked a really good dinner!  After going to the store and picking up a few things this weekend, the refrigerator was very full of things to be taken care of, and since we're trying to eat better for DH, I thought I would cook up something.  I was going loosely after a recipe my brother gave me.

I sauted 5 chicken breasts with about 8 cloves of garlic that I squeezed right over the top.  I added about half a jar of sundried tomatoes and oil, and then some white wine (don't I add wine to everything?).  I didn't have any heavy cream, so I used a can of cream of celery soup.  Since I wanted it to be a little bit richer than that, I added some cheese, mozzarella and a little bit of parmesean.  I made up some whole wheat penne to go with that, and then sauted a bag of spinach with about 5 cloves of garlic and a little bit of anisette.  I know that it sounds like a lot of garlic, but it was strong at all, because I added it at the beginning of cooking.

I will definitely make it again.  It was delicious, and if you are in need of an easy dinner, this is it!

Sourdough Starter Part 2

Well, my original intents on the sourdough starter, poolish method did not go so well.  I threw it out last night.  It did not do what it was supposed to do, and I tired of it quickly.  So I am doing a Desem method sourdough bread instead.  I'm not going to go into the whole method.  You can read about it here.  Tonight starts day 7, so I hope to bake bread within the next two days with this.  It smells pretty good, and its nice and sour.  Now the problem with this is going to be converting it to a liquid starter so that I can give it to my mother too.  So, I picked up 3 books at the library to assist me with my sourdough endeavors.  Any of these 3 would be a great addition to my library (ahem).

I originally went in looking for The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book by Laurel Robertson, which I thought they had, but they didn't.  Instead I got:  Bread A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman, The King Aurthur Flour Baker's Companion, and The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Bernbaum

The first book, Bread, A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes is full of great information, and a good conversion table for convering the stiff starter to a liquid one.  Most of the recipes are for large format baking though.  Easy if you have an 80 quart mixer, but I don't have access to one anymore.  I really liked the King Aurthur Flour book, it has some great recipes in it, and the long lost Panzanella recipe, which technically isnt a baking recipe, but totally cool that they included it.  Not a lot of info about sourdough, but it would be a great general baking book to own.  The last book the Bread Bible I was reluctant to pick up, because the writer is one of those "cookbook writers" and not a real baker or chef.  Luckily she did a lot of research, and it had a lot of good stuff in there, most important the bakers percentage which I had never heard of which is strange because I was a commercial baker.

Anyway, tonight I will be dividing the desem to bake.  From what I read, it should take all day to rise.  Hopefully tomorrow night we will have some bread!

A Sourdough Starter Experiment

So He says He wants me to make Sourdough.  Only problem is we have no starter.  So I'm off to find a recipe!

3/8 cup of Flour
1/4 cup of water

Now I wait 12 - 24 hours....