Let the Baking Begin!
Camri and I went to Ireland a few weeks ago, for a friend’s wedding. We stayed at a Bed and Breakfast in Dingle called the Captain’s House. Every afternoon we’d come back to the B&B and love the smell of baking for the next day’s breakfast. I liked it so much, that I committed to a renewed baking push for the holiday season.
So, last weekend I broke out our copy of The Joy of Cooking, and made a batch of scones. They turned out so well, that I made a second batch this past Saturday. Camri bought me a copy of Baking Illustrated as a Christmas present, but we agreed that it would be best served pre-Christmas for cookie baking. From that book, we made pretzels Sunday night. They turned out really great, and went well with beer and mustard. Good stuff.
I’m all hopped up on baking, and getting pretty excited for the Holiday cookie cycle. We built a list of key-cookie-events over the next two months, so that we’ll know what we need when. The next step is to build the list of cookies. I think I’m also going to throw in a few Pecan Pies, and some other non-cookie baked goods. Plus, we’re getting ready for our first Thanksgiving at home with guests. We had a just the two of us Thanksgiving a few years ago, but this will be the first time we have other people over. It’s sort of fun (and tremendously nerdy) to apply some project management skills to cookie baking and turkey stuffing.
In related news, Camri and I have used a pretty specific note card system to track different food things we like for the past year or so. We’re going to adapt it to a sort of blog. It’s going to be my first full blown Ruby on Rails project. The only thing that really differentiates it from a straight blog is that each post has special data associated with it, so if the post is about a wine we like, there will be different meta-data than if the post was about a cheese. It’s in the pretty early stages of development, but I’m hoping that we’ll have a site up and running by December 1. I’m also tracking hours against the site, to try and get a more objective idea of how long it takes to build.
