Nourishing Joy in the Home Kitchen
During my first week of vacation between working and starting culinary school, I gave myself a challenge: croissants. I’ve never made puff-pastry and it’s always intimidated me, so I figured a full day off with nothing to do was the perfect time to take the …
I’ve written before about how much I enjoy baking homemade bread here: Sunday Baking Series: The Miracle of Bread. After baking many different types of loaves, mostly from Ken Forkish‘s fabulous book Flour Water Salt Yeast, I was ready to branch out on my own. I thought …
Actually, “first” is a lie. I’ve made homemade macarons 4 times in my life, with progressive success (“success” being a relative term), but this time I had a teammate. That teammate happens to be a materials engineer who fixates on following instructions perfectly, so I …
Bread gets a bad wrap these days. It always seems like everyone is trying to “cut down” on their bread intake, be it calories, carbs, gluten, or whatever other fad diet grabs our attention. And yet, bread has sustained humans for thousands of years. I’ve …
Bread may be one of the most intimidating things to try your own hand at, especially if you already have access to good-quality bread from a professional baker nearby. Yes, most recipes look more like chapters out of a textbook and use weird words like …
Hubtastic and I got in to The Great British Bake Off about 4 or 5 years late, for Americans, which is really like 8 years late for anyone who pays attention to food. The typical Food Network competition really turns me off (other than Iron Chef) …
Focaccia has never held a ton of appeal for me. I typically associate it with those spongy, oily, crustless pieces of bread surrounding “fancy” sandwiches at places like Panera, so why in the world would I want to make it at home? That all changed …
Hubtastic has decided that he’d like to become The Baker of the family, while I remain The Cook. I love that idea, because he’s a scientific-perfectionist and I’m much more about whimsical improvisation, which I hope is evident from the entire premise of this website. …