Weekly Meal Plan 2.6.22

I’m getting back into my weekly meal planning, and posting them here on the blog always helped me keep the recipes in one place. So here we go!

Sunday: peanut tofu wraps (Hungryroot)

Monday: curry wurst, potatoes and green beans

Tuesday:

Wednesday: Indian curry (still need to decide which kind)

Thursday: leftovers

Friday: Tuscan chicken thighs with chickpea pasta

Saturday: takeout

The Bread Bible Week 1: Brinna’s Pugliese

This week I’m baking Brinna’s Pugliese from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Bread Bible. This is a dough that requires a biga started at least 6 hours before, so it’s not a dough I often feel I have time for. But as luck would have it, I was flipping through the book yesterday afternoon, which gave me plenty of time!

I started my biga around 4pm on Sunday, which meant getting it into the refrigerator at 10pm. It was then ready to start step 2 on Monday morning!

One of the things I love about rustic hearth breads is that, while they may take a lot of time to rise or ferment, each individual step is very short in hands-on time. That was true for this bread as well. It was easy to fit each step into my day around a toddler, which is always important!

We ate much of the loaf as egg salad sandwiches and all enjoyed it! The addition of rye flour gives the dough a little extra depth over an all white loaf. Unfortunately, while I might have an appreciation for the crusty ends of hearth breads, the small child does not, so this might not be a bread we put into our regular rotation. But it was a fun one to try!

Baking through Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Bread Bible

 Sean and I have been baking for years. When we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, we primarily did sourdough because it was so simple to get it right! Then we moved to Colorado, and struggled with finding the right balance with our sourdough starter. But, we started turning to The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum more often. We found that even at altitude, her recipes come out well very reliably!

Fast forward a couple years. We stopped baking as much after the Munchkin was born, because who has time for bread when you’re working and taking care of a baby?

Fast forward some more to spring 2020. Like much of the nation, we were home and grocery stores were seeing shortages. We started baking again as a way to provide for our family and bring some regularity to the week (Mondays became sandwich bread days, Fridays became challah days.) This continued until January 2021, when I got pregnant with #2 and nausea set in so badly that I couldn’t stand to be anywhere near the kitchen. 

Well, after months of pregnancy nausea, I can finally cook and bake again! Some things still trigger the gag reflex (Sean is still in charge of any raw meat) but I’ve been able to find joy in baking again! Munchkin enjoys it too, since he’s now at the perfect age to help stir with lots of supervision. Since we’re baking regularly again, I thought I’d try doing a series I’ve thought about for ages, and bake my way through The Bread Bible. Rose Levy Beranbaum has so many amazing recipes here, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of this book! My goal with this series is to try a different recipe each week, photograph and write about it. Hopefully this will be a good way to take notes as I bake, and maybe act as a review of her delicious recipes.

Happy baking!

#WasteNot 30 Day Challenge: Day 3

For Day 3 of the WasteNot Challenge, I'm sharing my homemade lemon curd.

After all of the Passover baking at the beginning of April, I had a bunch of unused egg yolks. Not wanting them to go to waste, I decided to turn them into lemon curd.

This is actually a picture from the last time I made lemon curd, back in CA, but it's the same recipe and I even put it in the same clip top jar! This is the recipe I use. It's delicious!

I love lemon curd on toast, English muffins and scones. I also mix a spoonful into my plain yogurt, sometimes with some blueberries. There are so many great ways to use lemon curd.

What are your favorite ways to eat lemon curd? How are you reducing food waste? Share in the comments!


****

Linked up to:
Waste Not Want Not Wednesday

Eating Locally: Our Dairy Delivery

One of our amazing foodie discoveries since moving to Colorado has been dairy delivery. When we were touring homes with our realtor, we noticed that many had a cooler on the front porch with the name of one of two dairies. Our realtor told us that these dairies are both locally owned, and they deliver fresh milk and other products throughout the Metro area.

After the craziness of moving settled down, we did some research and settled on Longmont Dairy for our needs. They own their own cows, practice organic farming (though they're not currently certified) and best of all they deliver all milk products in glass bottles! Each week, the night before our delivery day, we set out the clean empty bottles in the cooler, and in the morning we have a new bottle of fresh milk.

If you're in the Denver area and looking into dairy delivery, here are some of my thoughts on Longmont Dairy:

-they have a three item minimum per delivery. We tend to get milk, orange juice and eggs, and change it up every once in a while (the photo above shows milk, whipping cream and half-and-half, which I got so I could make ice cream)

-they have amazing seasonal eggnog. It's a good thing it's a short season.

-prices seem to be comparable to purchasing the same quantity of organic milk at the grocery store, but you don't have to run to the store for "just one thing" and come out with extra

Overall, we love the ease and convenience. Plus, for once the convenient thing is also the one that produces less waste -- the lids go in the recycling bin but the bottles are returned and reused. Our neighbors were already getting this same delivery service, so the truck would already be stopping on our street -- no extra gas used.

And, the milk is really delicious and tastes fresh!

Do you have dairy delivery in your area? What do you think about it? Share in the comments!

Single Duck Egg

On Friday, Sean came home from work with this:

It's a duck egg from one of his co-workers. She has ducks, chickens and I think even some turkeys. Apparently she picked up the egg while taking care of the flock before work, but put it in her pocket and forgot about it until she got to work. When she pulled it out, she offered it to Sean. And so we have a single duck egg.

We're thinking of making something very simple with it, like a simple omelette, so that we can really taste the difference between the free range chicken eggs we get and the duck egg. But I thought I'd ask if any readers have any favorite ways to use duck eggs. If you have recipes, please share in the comments!