Day 26, 27 & 28 - It's becoming a blog about bread.

Dinner On Saturday: Because I've been grocery shopping on the weekends lately we do a pretty good job of running out of food right before it's time to go to the store again. But on Saturday I managed to scrape together a turkey barley meatball soup for the kids, and that same Curried Carrot and Apple soup I made a couple of weeks ago for us. Hooray for vegetables with a long shelf life! See our salad? Aka lettuce in a bowl? We roll that way sometimes. 

Dinner Last Night: Spinach and Egg sammies on homemade 100% whole wheat bread. 

And here it is! See the guy on the left? He's a little darker because his pan was a little smaller and I maybe didn't divide the dough quite evenly (oops). He's also a little shinier because he came out a little more done I decided to top him with some butter after he came out of the oven. We ate the guy on the right first, and he was super great, light and fluffy. 

The recipe I used was from my "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" by Deborah Madison (I tell ya, that book has everything - except meat, of course). I did a little searching online for something similar and this was the closest to it. The trick was in the sponge step with the vital wheat gluten (because I wasn't using bread flour). After the sponge step I added the other ingredients and began kneading by hand and it was already so light that it was practically rising as I kneaded it. The book stressed letting the dough rise in a warm place and covering it with a damp cloth (you may have seen on facebook that I let mine rise in front of our wood stove). 

From start to finish these two loaves took me five hours to make. That's ridiculously long for two loaves of bread, right!? But it's a process similar to doing laundry, you do a step then you wait then you do another step then you wait. I'm glad I started with something more simple, but now that I've made bread "the long way" I can't wait to do it again! 


I wasn't the only one spending time in the kitchen this weekend. Jeremy made these delicious oatmeal chocolate chip cookies!

Did you notice the new cooling racks, too? Jeremy got those for me as an early Valentine's Day present (thanks, babe!). I love that they stack because we have limited counter space.

We're chugging right along. We've got three weeks under our belt now and not eating meat is starting to feel a lot more normal than it did in the beginning. It's not taking all of my time and concentration anymore, either (just five hours of my Sunday, but you know, whatever). And one more thing, speaking of my time, that goal to blog every day, if you haven't noticed, isn't happening and I don't think is going to happen, but I still plan to write a new post as often as possible. 

See you soon!