Crock, Stock and Two Smoking Hot Loaves Of Bread

Yesterday was the day I dirtied up just about every pot, pan, mixing bowl and measuring cup I own. Two big kitchen projects (plus a few small ones) converged and aligned and generally bumped into each other at every opportunity. I never intend to have days like this. I certainly don't plan them this way, but they sometimes happen. Hey, you do what you gotta do when you gotta do it, right? Well, the lovely turkey carcass in my fridge desperately needed to be dealt with, and I couldn't put off baking the bread another minute. I'd gone far too long without toast.

The Great Summer Pantry & Freezer Clearance: Day 2

I found the perfect soup to deplete my frozen back-stock of stock. There was still a lot of vegetable stock left, and then there was the last of the turkey stock from last Thanksgiving that I found shoved in the back of the freezer. Pooled together they would be just barely enough for this big soup. What I didn't count on was how thirsty the brown rice was. It just kept absorbing liquid and I had to grab a can of chicken stock from the pantry in order to placate the giant soup-sponge it had become. What the soup pot demands, the soup pot gets. But once it gets everything that it wants, it's happy.

That's what I was shooting for - a happy soup, a soup that's everything it should be: warm, filling, flavorful, and full of good things that are good for you but taste so good together that you don't have to pretend to like them. A good soup is always more than the sum of its parts.

Almost No-Knead (SOURDOUGH) Bread x2 (3 Variations)

After bringing to life my colony of bacteria*, and naming it Edwina, I wondered, "Could I make bread using Edwina and the fabulous "almost no-knead bread" method? It sure would be swell if I could. The ANKB recipe from Cook's Illustrated approximates the flavor of sourdough, but I wanted the ease of that method with real sourdough flavor. They say good things come in "three's", and as it turns out, they're right. Here are three variations of no-knead sourdough bread: Rustic Sourdough, Brown Rice & Flax Seed Sourdough, and Maple Oatmeal Sourdough. Great article, great recipes, and more great advice available on the author's blog** (another set of 3 good things!).