It’s been some time since I’ve done anything on here; 3 major projects have occupied ALL of my time lately, so I haven’t had a chance to do much for hobbies since before the new year.
Fortunately, all three projects wrapped up more-or-less at the same time, so my weekends and evenings are a bit more freed up, finally. I intend to get back to the trains soon, and now that I’m past this major hurdle of work, I’m going back to working out more.
And I’m getting back to spending time in the kitchen. It took a while to get a good stretch of time for doing this stuff; it’s not that any of the recipes I have takes a particularly long time to set up; most of them are under 20 minutes. The problem is that I wouldn’t have a second period of time in the same day (or the following morning) to conclude the process.
So while I was trying to get all of my work out of the way, this was on hold.
This weekend I got back in the kitchen, and after a bit of planning and prep, I popped out a few new(ish) recipes. I say new(ish) because the one is a rehash of a recipe I’ve already done before; the other two are completely new for me, but it’s not like I came up with these entirely on my own. I spent some time reading up on a few articles on Pinterest and going through the material of Steve Gamelin. For those of you who are not familiar with Steve, he has a channel on YouTube and some great books on Amazon (available for Kindle / Kindle Unlimited) that really teach the art of making great breads without insane effort.
That is great for me, because I don’t have so much time that I can just focus on nothing but baking; but I can produce some excellent quality baked goods to go along with all of my other types of cooking. And the result is nothing short of fantastic; at least, that’s what my family and co-workers told me.
I’ll include the links to Steve’s materials down below, and I will write at length about the individual projects in the near future; but for now, here’s a few shots of the results of a weekend back in the kitchen.
Upper left is the Emile Henry loaf pan my mom got me last year. It took me until now to get to use it because of those aforementioned projects taking up so much of my time. Now that my time is freed up, I’ll be putting that to a LOT more use. the next two shots are the loaf that came out of that pan. That’s a Steve Gamelin recipe, tweaked slightly and doubled to make proper use of that pan. It’s a dense, filling bread, and everyone who’s had a piece said it was fantastic. So I guess I got that right.
Next are two shots of a recipe I found on Pinterest. I’ll post up my information on that soon; it’s an Apple Cinnamon loaf. It took two tries, and it reinforced the important fact that you need to be ready to adjust things for each oven. Still, the recipe was amazing and was a hit with everyone.
Finally, a second Steve recipe, “Turbo” Cinnamon Rolls. They’re turbo because you use more yeast to cut down on the time for the rise. Rather than the minimum 8 hours, you can get these ready in as little as 2.5. It took me more like 3.5, but that was part of me learning how to do those little ones.
So that was my weekend of baking. I also will note that Kelly took her first stab at soldering and did a bunch of the connectors for the train layout. She did a great job, so I’ll write a post about that soon, too.
Check back soon for more updates, including (hopefully) a re-design on the site.
Steve Gramelin on Amazon
https://amzn.to/30W875X
Steve Gramelin on YouTube
https://bit.ly/3aIAtF8