Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Pita Bread

I made pita this weekend. It's one of the easiest and fun recipes I have, plus it's 100 % whole wheat! Seriously! Check our ingredient list: whole wheat, water, flour, yeast, salt.

Bread the way bread was meant to be. I modified the steps a little bit from our Laurel's Bread Book recipe. Rather than dive into mixing and kneading, I started a proof the night before and got the yeast started. I also mixed the dough and relaxed it a bit before I started kneading. Just a few tips I stole from Alton Brown and Rose Levy Beranbaum.

For baking, it's so fun. I just roll the dough flat (as thick as a whole blanket, so says Laurel) and bake them about three at a time for three minutes. And they just puff like balloons.

We filled the pita with tabouleh and made copious "om nom nom" sounds while we stuffed ourselves. Benjamin Franklin said these things are great riches: "a little house well filled, a little land well tilled and a little wife well willed." In my experience, you're better off filling the wife, like so:

Thursday, May 14, 2009

The Quilt, Part 9 (DONE!)

It started with these:


And now it's this:


It's actually been done for a solid month now, but I'm slow on updating these days.

Yes, the mighty quilt is done after nearly two years of conception, design and construction (and about a year and a half of posting about it here). It was almost a non-event when I did complete it/ The partially-complete quilt had been lying around the house so long that we were using it when watching TV already, even though there were frays of batting, denim and cotton sticking out on all sides.

But now I've sealed it all off and can enjoy it all the time.

Now, I worried for a while that the quilt took entirely too long to complete. BUT, it's worth noting that Megan and I as a pair have completed at least six quilts in that same period of time. There may have been more, but I participated or led the process on six of them, including the one hiding under this cutie-patootie:


And the one warming this other cutie-patootie:


My personal quilt benefited greatly from my efforts to make a quilt for Megan this Christmas. Doing the project surreptitiously by myself forced me to learn a number of steps that really helped on the final steps of this newest one. I'll add a full-frame, proper picture of the new quilt later when I get home again.

And we're moving on to other baby quilts (darn people having babies!) and a couple for ourselves too. We're getting attached to having nice, home-made quilts around the house. And we're making a pact to through out one old, ratty blanket for every quilt we make for ourselves. It'll be a slow process, but eventually we'll have nothing but hand-crafted goodness around for our warmth.