GSnyde's blog

My baking this weekend was good, but not novel.  I baked more of Sylvia's sandwich buns to have with Bulgogi.  Still I feel like I should contribute a blog post this week.  So, here's one of the many excellent recipes using stale bread (a plentiful commodity in our household).  "Panzanella" (which I believe means "Nell's trousers" in Italian) is a Florentine salad, according to Wikipedia.  

This weekend has been pretty much perfect.  We’re on the North Coast.  The weather is sunny and mild.  The birds and flowers are enjoying Summer.  I’m barbecuing three nights in a row (loin lamb chops, Bulgogi and Tandoori Chicken).  And I baked something new and something familiar; something sour and something sweet.

Today I made a variation on Reinhart's Cinnamon-Raisin-Walnut Bread from Bread Baker's Apprentice.  As usual I mixed Pecans and Walnuts.  This time--being out of raisins--I used dried cranberries, soaked, drained and sprinkled with sugar.

Here it is:

It's very good.  The cranberries have a nice tooth and touch of tartness.

Glenn

Here’s my favorite variation on my favorite bread--the Basic Country Bread from Tartine Bread.   Since it’s now my most frequent bake, I figured I should write up my procedure both for my own reference and the breadblogosphere.

I’ve been giving more attention to cooking than baking lately.   I’m trying to expand my Asian cooking experience, and Thai food and Korean food go best with rice, not bread.  But I did manage to bake some baguettes and a variation on the Tartine Basic Country Bread this weekend.

For no particular reason, this weekend turned into a cheese-baking spree.   I planned to make Curry-Onion-Cheese Bread to take to our friends’ house as appetizers to snack before pizzas baked in their wood-fired oven.  And I was making the pizza dough--the Reinhart recipe from TFL’s Pizza Primer (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/pizza).  Then I learned that Beloved Spouse wanted to try baking cheese-crackers—a “homemade Cheez-Its" recipe from instructables.com

This episode in my baking story starts with lamb.   We received a shipment of lamb meat yesterday from a ranch in the Sierra foothills that supplies several of the finest restaurants in the Bay Area.  We got some chops and some stew meat (roughly 2 inch pieces of leg meat).  I planned to make shish kebab today, even though the bizarre June rain threatened to snuff out my barbecue.

I didn’t want to steal Brother David’s blog post title without due credit.  Last Fall he told of his scissor-happy bake of epis and dragon tails (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/20226/baguette-and-variations).  And today I pursued a similar adventure.

Since we got back from Hawaii a few weeks ago, we’ve been craving Hawaiian sweetbread.  When we were there we bought a local bakery’s cinnamon sweetbread, pull-apart buns coated with cinnamon sugar--not gooey sticky buns, just barely sinful.