Archive for July, 2011
Lavender we got from the farm the other weekend dried up beautifully! There’s four varieties — I’ve never seen white ones but it smells very nice! The very very purple ones smells sweet almost like blueberries.
…What would we do with them? Well!…
Sliced brioche with lavender butter (butter, honey, lavender)
Lavender biscuit.
Lavender shortbread cookie.
The lavender shortbread cookies turned out quite well! I love shortbread cookies but I haven’t tried making them in a long long time because last time I tried, I had hard time shaping the dough into log shape and then having it retain it’s (already ugly) shape in the freezer where it’s suppose to chill for a while. Then I suddenly had the idea to use the sushi rolling thing! (I don’t know what it’s called see the pic below) I lined it with plastic wrap and it worked like a charm! I stuck it in the freezer wrapped in it, and it was SO EASY.
I also want to make some dryer sachets (you put it in the dryer with wet clothes and clothes come out smelling nice!) too, hopefully soon!
So I’m continuing on with the baking adventure! I told you that I’ve wanted to make breads for long time, but when I moved to Portland there are so many wonderful bakeries that I didn’t see much point in taking up baking. One of the reasons why I changed my mind about this lately is that when we go to the market and get super delicious bread on Saturday, it’s all gone by the next day — leaving us breadless for 6 days! So it’s nice to be able to have some kind of bread mid-week.
Moving on from pizza, I tried focaccia. It’s onions and rosemary on top. Lucian LOVED this focaccia. It’s soft inside but flavorful probably because of olive oil in the dough.
I adopted a stuffed fougasse (I don’t know much about this bread, I just saw it in the book and thought — great! I can stuff all kinds of stuff in it!) instruction and baked in some left over meat sauce from last night’s pasta.
I didn’t want to waste sauteed onions left over from focaccia so I made a mini bun topped with onions and some meat sauce and scallion.
Hopefully at some point, I’ll gather up enough courage to bake REAL bread and not just a “flat” bread!
I made one for Immi. It’s designed to withstand beating (both the wand and the child). Though Immi is very good about not beating anything/anyone with it. Lucian and Ashland seems to want one too — Lucian is perfectly happy with silicon spatula I gave him instead but I’ll try to come up with something for Ashland.
It’s lavender season! We are at the lavender farm.
Here’s a chicken roaming around the premise.
I love lavender, it’s probably my favorite flower. Luckily for me, Portland loves lavender and past few years we’ve enjoyed lavender in all sorts of things — our favorites being lavender honey milkshake from foodcart in downtown, and lavender marionberry jam from the market.
There were many different varieties. They even had beautiful ones with white flower which smelled very nice!
I’ve always wanted to bake bread. In my early teens, my mom’s friend brought us delicious bread she had baked and I thought — how romantic! Years later, armed with a book and packets of yeast, I finally decided to give it a try. I’m starting with pizza because I’ve also wanted to make pizza, it looked easiest for my first attempt and I thought immi would really enjoy making it with me.
As it turns out, it was totally easy! Pretty good pizza too, though it’s not that I’m trying to compete with Portland’s millions of fantastic woodfired pizza joints, it was fun to make with immi and she loved it because it only has on it what she likes.
I made the left over dough into cinnamon caramel treats!
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