eating simply

I have had about, oh, zero desire to cook or bake in the last few days. I haven't really had much interest in food at all. I despise phases like this. I hope to come out of it soon. I'll have to thumb through my bookmarked cookbook pages and the many, many, many recipes I have saved on the computer. Inspiration...I'm here waiting.

In the meantime, I started today off pretty simply:


My smoothie this morning was spectacularly purple; my camera was not up to capturing the vibrant hue. Ah, well. Today's smoothie: banana, strawberries, cherries, blackberries, spinach, dark chocolate chips, ice.


This bread is the "You Could Call This Sandwich Bread" from Beauty That Moves*. It was so incredibly simple to put together. I love mixing together the foamy yeast mixture with the dry ingredients, kneading the ingredients together until they form a wonderfully smooth lump of dough.

I only had one oven problem with this: my oven cooks everything too quickly. I have an oven thermometer, but that doesn't help (in fact, it often reports the oven at about twenty-five degrees lower than the temperature the dial seems to be pointing at). Uh, this just came to me...perhaps it has something to do with our altitude. I have never once, in the ten-plus years I've lived here, had to adjust a recipe for altitude, but I might need to start. How exactly does that work again? For now, I'll just cook things at a lower temperature for a longer amount of time. (With this bread, the top was browning alarmingly rapidly well before the bread should have been ready.

Anyhow, the bread is tasty. As soon as I get another needle for my sewing machine (one day), I'll be making a bread bag. I hate to put my bread in a plastic zippered bag because it gets weirdly soft. I threw my piece in the oven, under the broiler, today, so it was nice and warm and crispy.

Does anyone else have any go-to, simple, everyday-type bread recipes to share? I think I'll have to find a bread cookbook at the library on my next visit. I'd like to have a few different regular recipes at hand. (I also make Amanda's WHO Bread, but, perhaps because of the cinnamon and oatmeal, I feel like it's not so much a sandwich bread...although it could be...hmm.**)

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* The linked post includes a recipe for homemade chocolate sauce!

** I don't own a bread machine (as if I have room for anything else), so I make the non-bread-machine version of this. There is also a bread-machine version, if you have the necessary equipment.