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Oatmeal Buttermilk Bread with Flax and Walnut Oil
by: Renée via Baking Experiments on Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:32:00 -0500

Keywords: Flax , Bread , Baking , Oatmeal

This is a variation on the Oatmeal Buttermilk Bread recipe from the Macrina Bakery and Cafe Cookbook. I used walnut oil instead of canola oil and I exchanged one half cup of AP flour for one half cup of ground flax.

The dough was a little stickier than last time. I think I may need to only remove 1/4c of AP flour and add the 1/2c of flax. Also, the bread didn't rise as much as I thought it would. I think I need to let my oats cool down more before adding them to the yeast. I think I may have killed some of the yeast.

As you can see the bread came out of the oven with a beautiful golden crust. I remembered to put the oats on the top this time :P If you look closely you can see the bits of flax in there.

The bread came out sooooo good! Chris and I picked up a pyrex loaf pan at the goodwill store ($5 and a little elbow grease with a magic eraser and its as good as new!) so I made two loaves this time instead of the one huge one that I had last time. I lowered the oven temp to 375° this time (I think my oven is off ten degrees or so though) and reduced the baking time by 5 minutes.

I love the nuttiness that the walnut oil and flax give, it's subtle but there. The crust has just the right amount of crustiness to it and the inside is soft and fluffy.

I ate about half of one of the loaves by myself today... I had it toasted with apricot jam this morning, with my chicken salad at lunch and had a ham and cheese sandwich for dinner. Seriously, I can't resist it!
Sundays with Macrina: Brioche
by: Renée via Baking Experiments on Sun, 23 Aug 2009 22:48:00 -0500

Keywords: Brioche , Macrina , Bread

Chris wanted to make Brioche, so we used the recipe in Macrina... all I can say is WOW! So buttery, so light, so..... mmmmmmmmm.
Sundays with Macrina: Brown Sugar & Almond Coffee Cake
by: Renée via Baking Experiments on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:13:00 -0500

Keywords: Cake , Macrina , Berries

On Saturday Chris was out with The Guys and I was kinda bored and couldn't decide what do to and I thought 'hey, I haven't baked anything in a while...' So I broke out the Macrina book and flipped through to find something that I could make with stuff I already had in the house. I found this Brown Sugar and Almond Coffee Cake that calls for fresh or frozen raspberries. Well, I had frozen mixed berries (raspberries, blackberries and blueberries) and I thought that was good enough. So I follow the recipe and it says I need a 9x9" pan to make this cake in. Well, I don't have a 9x9 pan, I only have an 8x8 pan. I poured it in and it was clearly too full and so I changed it to my higher sided round baking dish, thinking that it could at least hold it in if it puffed up a lot.

Well.....
I think the combination of the heavy almonds on top and the fact hat my oven is slightly tilted resulted in the almonds sliding off onto the bottom of the oven and making a huge mess. I really don't even think a 9x9 pan would have been big enough for the amount the cake rose.

This cake is delicious. It was super moist and really tasty. I happen to love almonds and almond flavored anything so it was perfect for me. I didn't really get a brown sugar taste from the cake and I probably would have named it Berry Almond Coffee Cake instead but either way, it was really great. My only complaint was that the berries sunk to the bottom, which I kind of suspected they would do. I thought about tossing them in flour to prevent this from happening but I thought that if I needed to do that, the book would have said so. Either way, yum. I will be making this again, but first I need to find a pan that can contain it properly :P
Summer Chicken Pasta Salad
by: Renée via We Cook Together on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:50:00 -0500

Keywords: Dinner , Chris , Pasta , Salad , Chicken

First, let me say sorry for the bad photos. My camera battery died (why can't I remember to keep it charged?) AGAIN so I had to use my crappy cell phone camera that has no flash. (Thanks, Samsung)

This is a dish that Chris learned from his Mom. She made it when he was growing up and he wanted me to try it.

Ok so we started with some really amazing Heirloom Tomatoes that we got at a local farm stand. Heirloom Tomatoes have a much better flavor than your boring old beefsteak tomato. We also got a few English cucumbers at the grocery store. We only ended up using the one large tomato because that was enough for the dish.

Next we pan seared some chicken breast in olive oil to get a nice crust on it. We only seasoned with kosher salt and some black pepper.

I made a vinaigrette with two cloves of garlic, pressed, half of a lemon's worth of juice, kosher salt, pepper, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and fresh thyme. Just whisk it in a bowl. I used a little more vinegar than olive oil and about double the amount of olive oil than lemon juice. (Algebra, anyone?)

So everything gets cut into bite sized pieces and then everyone goes into a big bowl with one can of black olives (drained) and one pound of rotini pasta (cooked al dente, we use Dreamfield pasta). Only use enough of the vinaigrette to coat everything, you don't want a big pool of it at the bottom of the bowl.

You can eat this salad hot/warm like we did for dinner or put it in the fridge and eat it cold. I usually take the left overs for lunch the next day and I don't heat it up. It is really refreshing and has a nice bite from the balsamic and lemon. We also added a little grated Parmesan cheese, but I really didn't taste it at all and you can save the calories and just leave it out. We might try adding some feta next time, but probably to the plate and not to the big bowl because I don't think it will hold up well in the fridge.
Kitchen Project: Magnetic Spice Rack
by: Renée via We Cook Together on Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:48:00 -0500

Keywords: Kitchen Project , Spices

Chris and I used to have all of our spices in the cabinet over the stove on a lazy susan. The problem was that we had more than really should fit on there so when you would spin it sometimes one in the back would get stuck and then a whole bunch would come flying out at you. Also, it was really hard for me to reach over the pot/pan that was being used on our gas stove without burning myself or being in fear that I would catch my shirt on fire.

We learned from Alton Brown on Good Eats episode "Spice Capades" that you really shouldn't keep your spices above your stove because the heat is not good for them. AB stores his spices in different size round tins that he writes on with what I think is a grease pencil and sticks to the inside of his cabinets with velcro. (I tried to find a picture, but I cannot. You can YouTube the episode though if you want to, its a good one)

I loved the idea of having my spices in tins and having easy access to them while I'm cooking. I went searching for magnetic spice racks and found them to be expensive and generally they didn't come with enough tins for the number of spices we have. Then I came across Amber's blog over at myaimistrue.com. She made a magnetic spice rack out of magnetic knife racks from Ikea and some tins from Leigh Valley. I thought 'Awesome!' I showed it to Chris, he loved it and so we got the magnetic knife racks from Ikea and ordered the tins from Leigh Valley... and I hated the tins when they came. They were thin and small and cheesy looking (they looked so great in Amber's pictures! I was really shocked.) So I sent them back. Leigh Valley was really great about it and returned my full price paid plus shipping to me in cash. So then I went on the hunt for tins... and I searched and searched and searched until I finally found these from Specialty Bottle :

And I absolutely love them. They were inexpensive, sturdy and (most importantly) good looking. I put all of our spices into the tins (with a few exceptions that we decided were 'baking spices' and so they went into the baking cabinet such as poppy seeds, pumpkin pie spice & caraway seeds). I wrote the names on the bottom with a black Sharpie marker. Then Chris got to do the manly thing and drill holes in the wall (after of course measuring three times and writing all over the wall in pencil, very necessary for a good home improvement project) and hang up the knife racks and then....!!!

Voila! They were done! I purposely did not straighted out the tins when I took that picture because I'm trying really hard not to be OCD about the fact that they are not at perfect right angles. They look great! Really colorful and very much a piece of usable art. We put the spices we use a lot of (oregano, basil, parsley) and our spice mixtures (Chris' Spice Rub and our homemade Taco Seasoning) into the big tins and all the other spices into the small tins. We also have about 12 extra small and two extra big tins for expansion in the future. Its been about two weeks since we put them up and they are really convenient since that is the counter we use to cook on. We made sure that I could reach them without a problem (or a step stool :P) before we put them up, so they really are at the perfect height.

We really love it.