Geek in the Low Lands

It's that time, the time for me to remember and write a last minute blog post about what I've baked this week. Someday I'll remember to take more pictures and plan this post out, but today is not that day. Wednesday for our weekly D&D session I made chili and cornbread with honey butter. The cornbread was the first recipe in One Bowl Baking and so my first step in my project. Which of course means I took no photos. I will say that it was well-received by the group, though it was really the honey butter that people loved. About the cornbread recipe, well there isn't much to say. It was a completely adequate recipe. The new idea in the recipe is that it's supposed to be a toaster recipe and made in a muffin tops pan. I'm not buying a piece of baking equipment I don't see myself using much and the recipe did state that it could be done in a muffin pan. So, that's what I did. Certainly no complaints about the recipe, easy and tasty. The second recipe I t...

Forgive the truly awful pictures and the fact that there are almost no pictures. This is what I get for doing this so late. The original plan for today was to make chili con carne and the first recipe for my one bowl baking project, cornbread. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to get enough cornmeal for the muffins, so I turned to something else I had wanted to make for a long time: calzones! I only realized all this fairly late, so dinner was going to be late, though we've definitely eaten later. First step was pulling out a dough recipe. I went with Cook's Illustrated for their calzone recipe. I ignored the filling but I did follow their instructions for the dough. So the dough started rising around 7pm, and would need at least an hour and a half before I could start even thinking about eating. After that, it was time to divide up the dough into balls, let it rest a further 15 minutes and prepare the ingredients I was going to be shoving in them. Both would get some ri...

So, like many home chefs, I have a number of cookbooks at home. I do use them occasionally, but there are some that I haven't tried a single recipe from. I'm hoping to whittle down my entire library soon, and that will include my cookbooks, but I don't want to get rid of a cookbook I haven't tried even once. Another thing I want to do is bake and cook more, I particularly want to bake more. (I mean, I do end up cooking pretty much every night, even if it's not always something new and exciting.) Thus, this project was born. I'll try and document it as I bake my way through some of my books. I'm starting with One Bowl Baking by Yvonne Ruperti, which is a neat book I received from my sister. I'm setting an easy goal for myself of one new recipe a week. I'm hoping to do more than that, otherwise this will take forever, but I'm trying to be honest about my ability to set aside the time and gather the will power. The book contains about 112 recipes...