Activity

Yay! I got to go out with Michaela last night. It was a very satisfying girls' night which included prosecco and "Death By Chocolate." Such a cliché but what are you going to do?

Yesterday I mixed up my first batch of no-knead bread dough from the book, "Artisan Bread In Five Minutes A Day." Today I baked a loaf.

This being me, there were a few incidents:

1. The new olive oil in the bottle I just bought (Hannaford brand - I should have known) which says "use by 11/17/12," smells so rancid when you heat it up. I used it to oil my pizza stone when I baked the bread so now the whole house smells like hot, rancid olive oil.
2. Towards the end of the baking time my eyes began tearing and stinging. It turns out the house was filling with smoke. The bread was fine, not burnt.  I have no idea what what caused the smoke. The cornmeal? Some weird drip in the oven that I didn't see? The crappy olive oil?
3. As you can see in the photo above, I forgot to slash the top of the loaf before I put it in to bake.

Three "incidents" isn't so bad.  This was my first attempt at this method so it doesn't bother me that the loaf is misshapen because I didn't put enough flour on my hands when I was shaping it. I have a five-quart tub of dough in my fridge so I'll have plenty of chances to practice over the next two weeks (which is how long the dough keeps)

First I have to track down that smoking substance though!

The loaf is cooling now (and faster because I opened up so many windows to let the smoke out) It smells good - against the odds - so hopefully it will taste good too.

Maybe next time the house will smell like fresh baking bread instead of reek and stench.