Chris McAvoy’s Blog
I’m 30!
So, expect a lot more mature blogging now, instead of all this hot open source stuff I’ve been tossing out at you. Now that I’m an old man, I’m pretty sure I’ll be writing Java or C#, kicking back with my enterprise friends, chatting about the power of waterfall.
So long 20’s, I barely knew you.
I’m interested in trying to bake some Sour Dough again. We had a colony a while back, but let it die. I found a good primer on starting your own Sour Dough colony (our first was from a packet). As del.icio.us is down, I’m linking to it here. John Ross on Sour Dough
I added pictures to Flickr from this past weekend’s Super Bake Sunday. I ended up baking a “Rustic Italian Loaf”, Molasses Spice Cookies, and Peanut Butter Cookies. Everything turned out really well. The bread was especially good. The whole “sponge” pre-ferment process was new to me . Despite the time involved, an hour on Saturday, seven hours on Sunday, the bread really wasn’t that difficult to make.
That’s the loaf. It links to the set that I put up on Flickr. Camri made a big batch of honey butter and garlic butter. We sliced the bread up with an electric knife at the Johnny Roast Beef Christmas Party. I think it went over well.
For a while now, I’ve wanted to try baking Buttermilk Biscuits. Buttermilk isn’t in our fridge as a rule, so it took a little bit of pre-planning. Saturday was the first attempt.
I used the recipe from Baking Illustrated
Everything turned out well, despite the fact that I got my teaspoons and tablespoons mixed up (it was early in the morning) which led to somewhat salty biscuits. Last night at the grocery store I picked up another carton of buttermilk, and plan on giving it a second go this Saturday.
I’m also thinking about trying a big “rustic” loaf of bread during the day Saturday. The BI recipe is pretty involved. You make a “sponge”, which is a little bit of flour, water, and yeast, and let it sit for five hours. Then you add the rest of the ingredients and let them rise, punch them down, rise again, and then (finally) bake. The entire process is ~ 8 hours. I’m not sure if I have the time on Saturday or not. We shall see.
In related baking news, Camri and my tasting log (written in Rails) is progressing nicely. I’m hoping we’ll have something online before the end of the month.
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.
I’ve recently declared myself the world’s greates Pecan Pie baker. Here’s the secret, the Karo syrup recipe from the back of the bottle. I am of the belief that the recipes on the back of the packages are generally the best. Take for instance, this ingredient list from an online recipe:
* 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 2 tablespoons white sugar
* 1/2 cup butter, chilled
* 4 tablespoons ice water
* 3 eggs, beaten
* 3/4 cup light corn syrup
* 2 tablespoons dark corn syrup
* 3/4 cup light brown sugar
* 3 tablespoons butter, melted
* 1 pinch salt
* 1/2 cup pecans, finely crushed
* 1 cup pecans, quartered
* 1 cup pecan halves
That’s too much. Salt? What for? The fewer ingredients, the better. Rule of thumb number 2, less ingredients are better.
Delicious Links Latest Tastebud
Recent Comments