ABin5

I'm not eating bread - at least right now anyway. Husband and I are about halfway into the yearly Awakening fast. Sadly the fast doesn't include bread. But I found this bread recipe that I wanted to make right now! So  I managed to bully mom and Dan into being test subjects. After two loaves, they don't appear to regret it.

Yesterday, Mom and I made the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes recipe. It's a bread recipe that has you make four loaves of bread that you bake when desired over the next two weeks. The dough stays in your refrigerator until you're ready to whack off a chunk and bake it. The recipe has easy and clear instructions except when it came to the shaping and scoring step. Luckily, shaping and scoring bread have tons of tutorials on the web. 

On day 2, I just shaped into a baguette straight out of the fridge. You don't have to worry too much about manhandling this dough it's pretty forgiving.

Scoring is a bit of an art that I haven't mastered yet. I usually end up deflating the dough rather than allowing it to expand further but I'll get it one day! Before I attempted to score the dough, I sprayed it with some oil to make it easier to score. The oil also makes sure the crust doesn't get too hard.

The finished loaf has a nice golden brown color which is partially due to mom's super awesome steam oven. The broiler pan steaming method works well enough but it's not the same as having a semi-professional appliance. The bread was really delicious as well as being easy to make and bake. The same authors have a ~70% whole wheat dough that I'm going to try next time.

You don't have to do all that shaping and scoring business if that doesn't appeal to you. You can just form it into a rough cylinder and put it into a greased loaf pan. I'm going to bring some dough to Vi's one day to try baking it in her bread maker.

Broccoli Dal

David has been a bit irrational lately. I think he might have entered that "terrible two" phase. I'm at a loss trying to predict what might tempt his gourmand palate. After striking out on my last two attempts, I was getting mildly frantic about what to do. The doctors want him to be a fat kid and I can't make something he wants to eat! So I was a tad panicked while I was cooking yet another dish for my little man. He may have just been starving from my preceding failures but tonight I finally won the David dinning lottery. Success!


Broccoli Dal (adapted from here)
1.5 cups Red lentils
1 onion, finely chopped
1 tsp cumin, ground
2 tsp mustard seeds
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5 cups Broccoli, finely chopped (original recipe for pictures)
4 cups Broth
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1 can Coconut Milk
1-2 Tbs Lemon juice
0.5-1 Tbs Crushed Red Pepper
1.25 tsp Garam Masala 
0.5 tsp Ginger, ground (if using fresh grate it and add with the first group of ingredients)
1 tsp Tumeric


Saute the first group of ingredients(red lentils to mustard seeds) over medium heat in oil until the mustard seeds start to pop (~10 minutes). Stir in the second group (broccoli and broth) cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Stir in the third group (coconut milk to tumeric) and simmer uncovered for 10 minutes. Makes 7 cups.


Failure one was this without the milk or yeast. Normally David is a HUGE fan of spinach but I think it was a little too garlicy for him.
Failure two was a red bean hummus based on this but I forgot to add the tahini. I think the lack of nut butter offended him.
As a blog note, I've decided to post how I mutilate other people's recipes as well as posting the recipes I make up myself.