Time to Teach

Yesterday I spent my time wisely. I wisely ignore the dishes, knowingly forgot to fold the laundry, and made the smart decision to have a late dinner. Things got done in their own time and a few have been put off for another day.

I think that I have mentioned on here that my little sister A comes over to hang out a couple of times a week. She plays with the girls so I can clean and loves to eat our "exotic" food which is quite different then what she's used to. Well today was her day to finally learn to knit. I could have taken her for a lesson at the LYS (local yarn shop) for only a few dollars and saved myself the time and headache, but this was something I wanted to do. She has taken to it well and I am really happy I got to do this.

Since she was here I decided to bake some bread, so along with the usual sandwich bread I made a loaf of Garlic and Herb bread to with our dinner. This is the fifth time I have made this and I finally managed to snap a picture before the devouring began. Per my friends request since she is always sweet enough to read this blog I am also including the recipe.

Garlic and Herb Bread

2 cups unbleached flour

.5 cups of wheat flour

1 tsp salt

1 Tbsp of Chico Spice Garlic and Herb (This is a local thing, but I'm sure another Garlic seasoning mix would work, you could also use rosemary and other herbs to make your own custom seasoning)

1 Tbsp of olive oil (plus 1-2 Tbsp more)

2 tsp active dry yeast

2 pinches of sugar

1 cup of warm water (110 degrees)

Mix the water, yeast and sugar in a bowl and let sit for 10 minutes, preheat oven to 200 degrees. Put flours, salt and seasonings in food processor and turn on to mix. Feed in olive oil and yeast mixture, pulse 30 times. Turn off oven. Pour about a tbsp of olive oil into a medium size bowl. Flour or oil hands and take dough out of food processor being very careful of the blades. Then smush into somethings slightly resembling a ball, dough will be sticky, but it shouldn't be so bad that you can't do this, if it's runny then you may want to add more flour, but I have never had this problem. Then plop it into yourbowl with oil in it and roll it around until it is coated in oil. Place cheesecloth or thin cloth napkin atop and place in the warm (but OFF) oven.

Let rise 1 hour. Then take out of the oven and turn it back on to 200 degrees. Grease large baking sheet. Take dough out of bowl and mush it into a ball, making sure that harder spot that was on the top of the rise bowl is moved to the center. Then place ball onto baking sheet and pat down to a 10" circle. Turn off the oven, cover dough with cloth and put back into oven. Let rise half hour. After 20 minutes you will want to take dough out of oven and preheat oven to 425 degrees. When 30 minute rise is done, take cloth off dough and gently brush it with olive oil. Place in oven for 18-20 minutes, bread will be golden brown and medium brown around the bottom edge (not burnt though). Let cool 10 minutes and enjoy!

I tried to make this recipe very beginner friendly so even some non bread making people can give it a try! If you are looking for better instructions on general bread making I would recommend going over to The Fresh Loaf and clicking on the lessons in there top bar, they have a lot of extremely valuable information in them.