Smitten Kitchen's French Onion Soup

One of my favorite food bloggers, Smitten Kitchen, recently posted an adaptation of Julia Child's French Onion Soup recipe. I tried it out this weekend and pretty much followed her instructions (except to use a homemade veggie broth instead of beef and to use Romano cheese because that's what I had on hand). I'm sorry I failed to take any pictures of my own, but oh my goodness!  You should head on over to her site immediately and get to work! The soup was rustic but elegant with complex caramel flavors, and the toasted cheese on top was absolutely mindblowing. 

Here she is in all her glory:  French Onion Soup  Enjoy!

Crusty Bread Heaven

 

I know the name of this blog is "Grow, Knead, Pickle and Sew", but for my first bread-related blog I just have to tell you about the greatest-ever-no-kneading-necessary recipe!

There must be a thousand recipes for "no-knead" breads floating around on the internet, and I have tried most of them. Along about the millionth try I gave up hope that any of them would truly produce a palatable loaf (except beer bread, but that's a whole other post!) Until now. I came upon the 2007 New York Times adaptation of Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François' recipe for "Simple Crusty Bread" from their book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. They also had a recipe for "No-Knead Bread" by Jim Lahey published about a year earlier. When these two recipe's are combined, oh man! The resultant loaf is perfectly golden and crunchy on the outside, dense but fluffy on the inside. There are lovely air pockets to catch your melting butter but most of the inside is reminiscent of the best Italian loaves. You know the ones. The kind you keep dipping in olive oil until you look up and can't believe the entire loaf is gone. And that's exactly what I did when this loaf came out of the oven. Who knew that simple could really be better?

The key here is that the dough must be left alone to ferment for a good amount of time. The Simple Crusty recipe only has the dough rising for 2-5 hours. There have been critics that say the quicker rising time leaves the bread with a bitter, overly-yeasty flavor. I don't know because I let mine rise much longer both times I've made the recipe. On my first try I stuck with the NYT recipe that calls for only using all-purpose flour. Incredible. For my second try I used 3 cups of bread flour and 3 1/2 cups of all purpose thinking that it couldn't possibly not be better with bread flour. I was wrong. The texture skewed toward sandwich bread instead of luscious Italian, and the crust lost some crunch after cooling. So my recommendation is to stick with all-purpose, as unlikely as that sounds. 

As for storing the dough, it works wonderfully.  I've stored the dough in the fridge for up to a few days and the freezer for about a week, and both baked up perfectly. If storing in the fridge, allow the dough to rest for about an hour before shaping into a ball and letting rise for another 40 minutes. If freezing, I would recommend letting it thaw in a warm spot for a few hours. Once it is completely thawed let it rest for another hour, then shape and rest as above. I found that as it thawed it spread out on the cutting board. Then as it warmed and rested it rose to about double its size. 

The other adaptations to the recipes that I've made are to cut down the salt a bit (so if you like your bread more salty, then increase my amount by 1/2 tsp), to divide the batch of dough in three instead of four loaves, and to bake on parchment paper on an overturned baking pan (because I don't, gasp, have a baking stone). I also used a rising time that varied between 8 - 20 hours. I feel that a rise on the longer side, 12-15 hours, is fine because we're using quite a bit of active dry yeast as opposed to the smaller amount of instant yeast from Lahey's recipe. He also calls for up to 20 hours. 

(Click through for the recipe!)

Bracelet to Necklace Transformation

Ever have the perfect bracelet for an outfit but what you really need is a necklace? Well friends, I have the solution for you. I have the most beautiful bracelet, made for me by my step-mom. While searching for a necklace the other day I spied this bracelet and a blue ribbon sitting side-by-side. I've been inspired lately by a lot of Kathleen Francis' Grosgrain designs, this one in particular, and knew what I needed to do.

So here's what you do in 4 easy steps. You'll need to use a bracelet that has at least one hoop-type closure (see picture):

1. Tie one end of the ribbon to the end of the bracelet with the non-hoop closure. Leave at least 2 inches of ribbon on that end.


2.  Put bracelet around your neck at desired length. I found it easiest to put the bracelet part in the back and the ribbon in the front, then turning it around after tying.

3. Thread the ribbon through the other end of the bracelet, the one with a hoop-closure.

4. Pull as tight as you wish and tie a one-loop bow with both ends of the ribbon.

I recommend wearing your hair up!

My garden grows! (Well, it will soon)

Yesterday the sun came out! We jumped into our shoes, hopped on our bikes and flew off to buy seeds. Until January of this year we've been regulars of Full Circle Farm and have feasted on delicious farm-grown vegetables. But in the spirit of saving money and producing more of our own food, we decided to put our membership on hold and see if we could survive on what our garden can grow. Then, of course, this unseasonably rainy spring arrived in Seattle! I know, I know, it's Seattle. It rains. But we normally get those sunny days peeking through and providing perfect planting days. It's a little later than hoped, but yesterday was finally one of those days that happily fell on a weekend!

There was a night in January when we were packing for a month-long trip to Mexico and we realized that we had forgotten to plant garlic and it would be too late by the time we got back. It was raining and muddy and I think it was about 2 in the morning. But we put our muck boots on and planted two garlic head's worth of cloves anyhow because, well, we love garlic even more than we love sleep.   

The little garlic plants poked their heads up a few weeks ago and they were interspersed with about 300 onions that came up from our landlords' seed from last year. We thinned the onions way down, moved them to one part of the raised bed along with two stray leeks that also showed up this year, and replanted our precious garlics in two rows. Two garlics into 22 plants! Not too shabby I say!

We also sowed in beets, carrots, yellow squash, sugar snap peas and bush beans, and there is still so much room!

The rain came back just as I was finishing laying the twine (ahem, yarn) along the rows. I'll keep you updated on how our little garden is growing!

Update:  Our landlords read this post and let us know that, oops! Those 300 onions were actually pesky ornamentals that they'd tried to get rid of but keep coming back!  So we pulled them and planted mizuna, something that can't easily be mistaken for any type of onion-family plant, in their spot. Ah the silly mistakes of the novice gardener! At least I didn't mistake water hemlock for parsley, as I hear is pretty common (and unfortunate!)