unintentional baking blog

 Since I turned my Alta pass, I have been looking to fill the weekends by actually doing things, and not just sitting on the couch, binge-ing all the television on my list.  (I have a lot of content on my list, however, so the temptation is real.)  This comes in the form of getting up early-ish (by 7:30 a.m.) and taking Milton on our 3+ mile loop, getting caught up on laundry and other household chores, and cooking.  

I like to cook but since I go to work, work out somehow and then drive home from work, our weeknight recipes tend to be quick and easy and repetitive: lentil soup, pastas, stirfries and the like.  With this extra time on the weekends now, I've been trying to dive deeper into my favorite cookbooks and put together new, slightly (only slightly) more complicated dinners.  This past weekend, as an example, Saturday's dinner was baked potatoes stuffed with broccolini (from Power Plates) and Sunday's was the Goddess Noodles (whole wheat linguine with tempeh, broccoli and a tahini sauce) from Isa Does It.  I also made a split pea soup to freeze for future consumption.

What I'm really enjoying have the time to do, however, is bake.  I love to bake, even though I'm not that good at it; I don't know what it is but I get a lot of satisfaction out of it.  This past weekend I made a batch of chai-spice snickerdoodles, also from Isa Does It - not pictured here because they came out unlike any snickerdoodles I remember from growing up.  More successful was the coconut-turmeric bread: slightly sweet and with a tiny kick from the turmeric and black pepper.

You can eat it like cake but it's also good lightly toasted

I also took another stab at olive oil bread, this time using instant yeast so I wouldn't kill it with too hot water during the bloom.  It didn't rise as much as I hoped it would (I think I'm still combating the high elevation issues here at 4,800 feet above sea level) but it came out a half decent loaf that we snarfed down in two sittings.

Improvement

I know this isn't a cooking blog - it isn't going to turn into one.  But without me skiing and with this winter's low snow (thus far) keeping H on the groomers, my successes and failures in the kitchen are going to have to be on offer.  Bear with us - we're hoping for more outdoors adventures soon.