Creative cookery time
Sep. 2nd, 2007 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaunthieYesterday was Sanafi and Technocrat's annual Festival bash. Among other things, it's a bring-a-dish-to-share affair, so I did some pondering about what I wanted to do. I decided I wanted to experiment with a stuffed bread. I have a chicken braid recipe that I really enjoy, but I wanted to try something vegetarian, and I wanted to see if I could improve on the bread recipe too. I more or less winged it on the bread recipe, gleefully substituting in some buckwheat flour, altering the fluid ratios, and just trusting that I would know when the dough "looked right" and it was time to let it rise. It worked. I rolled out half of the dough for the braid and sliced the sides. For the filling, I wound up degilling, slicing up, and sauteeing four portobello mushrooms in butter and olive oil and layering those on top of a generous layer of "green stuffing": a combination of fresh ricotta (1 cup), 10 ounces of spinach (1 box frozen cut organic spinach, thawed and very well drained), a cup or so of homemade pesto, and a dash of fresh lime juice. I laced up the top, let it rise again, and baked it for 25 minutes at 350. Since I had the oven on anyway, I also baked up the other half of the bread dough into a simple round loaf. And since I had the gills of the portobellos, I combined those in a dish with a bunch of the recently-harvested garlic (some of the cloves that didn't stay in their heads), drizzled some olive oil on the mix, and roasted it up in that same oven to mix in with some hummous, a dip for the bread.
And since all this was experimental and could very well turn out badly, I whipped up a batch of my chocolate-espresso brownies, just in case the other stuff proved inedible. Hey, they bake at 350, what a coincidence...
Fortunately, I think everything came out pretty darn well. The braid seemed to go over well, particularly with the vegetarians at the party but not just with them, people really liked the dip and bread (although the dark-brown color of the dip was a bit alarming to the timid), and the brownies were completely gone by the time we left. And I had a really, really good time, both in playing in the kitchen beforehand, and at the party itself.
It does make me wish I had more time to cook and experiment with things in the kitchen, though. Cooking is fun. Making up recipes is fun. But it all takes time.
And since all this was experimental and could very well turn out badly, I whipped up a batch of my chocolate-espresso brownies, just in case the other stuff proved inedible. Hey, they bake at 350, what a coincidence...
Fortunately, I think everything came out pretty darn well. The braid seemed to go over well, particularly with the vegetarians at the party but not just with them, people really liked the dip and bread (although the dark-brown color of the dip was a bit alarming to the timid), and the brownies were completely gone by the time we left. And I had a really, really good time, both in playing in the kitchen beforehand, and at the party itself.
It does make me wish I had more time to cook and experiment with things in the kitchen, though. Cooking is fun. Making up recipes is fun. But it all takes time.
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Date: 2007-09-02 10:01 pm (UTC)(Hey! I recognize that martini in your icon! :D )
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Date: 2007-09-03 01:48 am (UTC)(I recognize that glass as well!)
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Date: 2007-09-03 03:05 am (UTC)Monkeybard, glad you liked everything. SunKrux, you were missed! Glad you had a good day today.
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Date: 2007-09-04 07:55 pm (UTC)