Today, I ate...

garden tomatoes with local goat cheese:

...vanilla ice cream with bourbon peaches (both homemade, natch)

...and meat on a stick.

At least the dough was homemade...

Syrup fail.

A few weeks ago, we had maple syrup boiling day. There are a few sugar maples on our property and Bill really enjoys tapping them. While we don't eat a ton of pancakes or waffles with syrup, I was hoping to use the proceeds of maple day as a source of a local sweetener for jams and baking. Alas, this wonky winter had different plans. We collected about 50 gallons of sap, but wild temperature swings in February and March let the sap get too warm. It became cloudy and tasted a little off as sap. Boiling it down concentrated the weirdness and led to unusable syrup.

It was fun to sit around a fire all day, though!

Bill attempted to make bread in his new Lodge Something Dutch Oven with the coal-holding lid that might have been designed by Paul Revere.

He burned the first attempt (having not read the instructions).

The second try was much better.


We'll try again next year, with an earlier boil day. That will probably mean hot chocolate and snowman building instead of a cold beer and book reading, but that's ok!

Bread day!

I hate running out of bread... To avoid that possibility in the near future, today was a dedicated bread baking day.

Today's loaves:

2 loaves of simple french bread

2 loaves of english muffin bread

1 loaf of caraway rye

1 loaf of honey wheat

1 olive oil rosemary loaf.

I am absolutely sold on the awesomeness of baking the bread in a dutch oven. The round loves above were baked in a 5 quart lodge dutch oven that had been preheated to 450 F. The crusty wonderfulness that results from this technique is a very good thing and I find the consistency and predictability to be quite high. Only problem is that I only have one dutch oven so baking throughput is not as high as it could be. It is probably worth buying a second or maybe even a third so I can bake multiple loves at a time.

Should provide a suitable substrate for JoAnna Spring's jams for about a month.