Adding another person to the mix complicates one’s planning. Not sure when I’ll be back.
Yesterday I was making some recipes from the excellent book Mangoes & Curry Leaves and I wanted some naan to go with dinner. I’ve had one experience with homemade naan before and I left with the impression that without a Tandoor oven to cook it in, it wasn’t worth the trouble. Well, I was about to be corrected.
While I was reading the recipe, I noticed that both the dough and the cooking instructions were extremely similar to my huge passion, pizza. All kinds of buzzers went off in my head, and I made the dough. I didn’t adapt too many of the Peter Reinhart techniques other than to get my oven really hot and well in advance so my stone was at full heat. I made the dough, and cooked it into these beautiful breads, and they tasted awesome. No more Trader Joe’s naan for us! So good and fresh. Almost like pizza dough…
Pictures next time, since I was way too overwhelmed with the other dishes to take any.
To recap the past week since I’ve been dealing with some extremely frustrating connectivity issues…
The Upside-Down Tomato Planter is a big hit. I wanted to address the comments, add some tips, and give some updates.
First, I wanted to give a pointer to Matt for making the original 2-liter bottle instructions. I did make one of these, but for my patio I figured I’d go with something with more soil volume.
Jen asks if jute/burlap bags would work. I think they should, I don’t have any good ideas as to how to hook it to a hanger though. Could require a lot of sewing. Starla mentions that she’s done it and they dry out quickly. I could see that being a big issue.
Lynn asks about rain barrels, and Matt gives her a good pointer. I got one for Xmas and it came with an attachment to hook it to your downspout. I think it came from Great American Rain Barrels.
Barbara worries about the weight once the plants get big. I don’t know for sure, but I did put quite a few beers in there, and it held the weight. She also mentions the potential UV damage. None yet as far as I can tell.
Robbie mentions using plastic buckets. At one point there was a site that described doing that, but it seems to have gone offline. I think that would be great, I’ve actually been considering them for regular planters.
Router died, getting around 30% packet loss and pings of over 2 seconds to google. New one is en route.
Posts are still being written, and will be posted when it doesn’t take 5 minutes to load a single web page.
I’m about 1 day away from flipping everything back to dial-up. At least when I got a good connection, it worked. This is horrid.
As part of The Big Cookbook Binge of January ‘06, I picked up Breads from the La Brea Bakery and the previously mentioned American Pie. In both of these excellent books, they have techniques for building your own sourdough starter.
I have tried. Both times I ended up with sponges that were bubbling away, and smelled wonderful, but did not have the necessary leavening to actually make any bread rise. Needless to say, it is disappointing. So yesterday I decided to try, yet again. Only this time I brought in a secret helper from the homebrewing side, brewer’s yeast.
There’s a great company in San Diego called White Labs who produces vials of all kinds of yeast for beer making, and when I started my new batch of, er, starter, I threw in a vial of Kölsch yeast. Basically I had 2lbs of flour, 2lbs of water, and the extra brewer’s yeast. Things are looking bubbly, and I’ll keep you posted.
