It was a baking day!!Tomorrow we are off to visit some dear friends! Jenny Lee, the finest Magee, is coming all the way from Boston for a weekend blowout with lots of friends in the seattle area (and some of us from farther away). We are meeting for lunch at Araya's Vegan Thai in the U district, an old favorite of ours and one we have been just waiting for the excuse to visit again...and what better excuse than catching up with a great friend! When we part ways til next time, we are heading across the bridge to visit some other good friends, Bill (who was our best man!! and has been a good friend for nearly 20 years (?!?!?!?!?!?! WOW) as well as a visit with my English teacher, who owned the bookstore where Shawn and I met and remains my favorite teacher in the world! This will be a lovely visit.
I thought it would be good to bring some breads down to our traveling friend Jenny, who will enjoy the sourdough rosemary olive oil loaf. And it is a tradition that we bring a delicious dessert whenever we visit with Bill. He provides all kinds of crazy movies and we
***"chapeau rolls" (can you see the little beret?)***
bring the dessert. Usually we bring pie, but this time, since we haven't seen eachother in nearly 3 years, we thought it only right to bring something really special. I made a jam tart using an Italian tart dough that I really like, taken from Field's The Italian Baker. It's simple and delicious. The jam filling is an apple juice sweetened wild maine blueberry jam. I really like the apple juice sweetened jam for baked desserts, it's rich and decadent thanks to the fruit juice. I sprinkled the lattice topping (with only one spot of jam boilover!!) with powdered sugar and ringed the edge with toasted almonds. We had a sample tartlet made separately after dinner tonight, and it was lovely!! Now to see if we can hold off sampling more till tomorrow! :-)
Bill has arranged a night of Japanese films, they should be a wild assortment! These we are really intrigued by....he's been wanting to show them to us for a long while! The time has nearly arrived...+++Wild Maine Blueberry Tart+++
~~~Here are the rosemary olive oil loaves. One for us, one for Jenny Lee and one for Bill B. They smell delicious!!~~~
The sourdough starter is coming into its own at last, really making up delicious loaves, and leavening better every time. I fed the starter yesterday and made two batches of bread with the extra, the rosemary olive oil (with fresh rosemary from our friend Sylvia's garden), which I think I may add more rosemary to next time depending on how it tastes.
The little chapeau rolls featured in the top photo are tasty little beauties too. The recipe comes from Nancy Silverton's Baking at La Brea Bakery and I used a whole wheat sourdough rather than white and coarse cornmeal rather than rye flour for the rolling of the caps. They were awesome hot (too hot, probably) from the oven with a simple veggie soup supper tonight. I think Shawn feels like he may be in heaven. He loves all the baking. Come to think of it, so do I, much more so than I ever did when I was a baker :-)
Up early tomorrow and tonight we're running into Lee Valley in Vancouver to pick up the last materials for the workbench. I think we are starting to build it this coming week. Exciting. Shawn bought a planer in Bellingham last week and it is pretty impressive what it can do with ordinary two by fours, and that's to say nothing of other plans. But I think perhaps he will write about that later!
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