What do your meals look like (show me pictures)....

🍽️ was in the mood to roast a chicken. The skin came out nice a crispy. 😋

Snacked on bell peppers while I waited and made a side of steamed broccoli with garlic and a drizzle of EVOO.

Caprese with the addition of peeled roasted red pepper and olives followed by pici cacio e pepe with grilled courgette. Next time I need to make the cacio e pepe sauce more liquid. Tip on doing grilled veg--if brushing with olive oil or melted butter add a dash of SE Asian fish sauce to the fat for a hint of anchovy umami.

Creole gumbo for dinner.

Andouille sausage & shrimp. Used yellow and orange bell peppers instead of traditional green. 🫑

Plain old bread.

I bake about 80% of all our bread products. Away for the weekend and arrived late back home. I realized I had to bake some for the morning. "You'll be up for hours yet," said my wife - since my usual approach is "no-knead" and takes about 3 hours from start to out-of-the oven. "Nah," I said," I'll use the overnight fermentation method."

So here it is. 2 loaves, 30% whole wheat/70% unbleached bread flour, about 17.5 hours total from start to out-of-the-oven, with about 30 total minutes of work - including some "dough folding" after 1st rise for my "no-knead" because it seemed to be a good thing to do in this case. Lower calorie, higher protein, lower salt and much better flavor than commercial loaves - a few days on the road was a good reminder of this. 1 loaf for the freezer, 1 loaf for now.

Pics:
1 - dough sponge after about 14+ hrs of room temp fermentation on the counter. Bubbling away happily.
2 - baked loaves cooling. forgot to shape the loaves; "oops."
3 - sliced to show interior.

Since I always get alerts when there's something new on this thread, I reckon rather than just wishing I could unsubscribe from it like I can from other sites, I figure I'll send a picture of what I'm eating.

I took a slab of Sockeye out of the freezer the other day. I bought a "share" from a fishing family last year. It's vacuum sealed. The year before, I split a share with a friend, and we paid just a little more for fillets that were cut down to about one pound. Last year I decided to save a little money and get whole fillets.

They're kind of huge, so too much for me to eat.

I've tried to open up the vacuum sealed bag and cut the fillet in half, vacuum seal one half, and put it back in the freezer. I don't have the right cutlery to cut frozen fish. I tried using a heavy cleaver, and I broke a cutting board in half. So this time I just thawed the whole fillet, then cut it roughly in half. Rather than cook it all and have leftovers, I just cooked half last night. It was good. I cooked the other half today, but it was still too much to eat. I'll save leftovers. The skin is currently browning up on the baking stone - dessert!

After drying the fish, I rubbed it with olive oil and sesame oil. I topped it with freshly ground black pepper, a tiny bit of smoked paprika, grated garlic, grated ginger, and grated lemon zest. I sprinkled just a bit of Maldon salt on it, added a generous amount of dill, and added a tiny bit of butter. One of my shiitake logs gave me one single mushroom the other day, so I sliced that thin and put it on top. I laid three lemon slices on top.

When it came out of the oven, I put some capers on and let it rest five minutes before putting it on the plate and digging in.

Mmmm.

mjbnj0001 wrote: »

Plain old bread.

I bake about 80% of all our bread products. Away for the weekend and arrived late back home. I realized I had to bake some for the morning. "You'll be up for hours yet," said my wife - since my usual approach is "no-knead" and takes about 3 hours from start to out-of-the oven. "Nah," I said," I'll use the overnight fermentation method."

So here it is. 2 loaves, 30% whole wheat/70% unbleached bread flour, about 17.5 hours total from start to out-of-the-oven, with about 30 total minutes of work - including some "dough folding" after 1st rise for my "no-knead" because it seemed to be a good thing to do in this case. Lower calorie, higher protein, lower salt and much better flavor than commercial loaves - a few days on the road was a good reminder of this. 1 loaf for the freezer, 1 loaf for now.

Pics:
1 - dough sponge after about 14+ hrs of room temp fermentation on the counter. Bubbling away happily.
2 - baked loaves cooling. forgot to shape the loaves; "oops."
3 - sliced to show interior.

I hope to make bread of that quality at some point. I’m definitely struggling but enjoying the process regardless. Here’s my recent batches. I’ve had to figure out why they burn on the bottom and what to do about that (putting a cookie sheet on the bottom rack as helped somewhat). They’re also fairly dense in the middle still. I’ve also purchased a Dutch oven and I’m experimenting with different recipes, but my oven isn’t cooperating with their temperature and timing recommendations. I don’t remember making bread this hard before. Anyway, I won’t give up. I’ve recently purchase a sourdough starter from Etsy and looking forward to using that in the future. Please send your tips and tricks if you have any.