Sunday Lunch

Over the last several weeks Wife and I have been cooking a big Sunday lunch. Mostly this is my excuse to cook something elaborate. Dishes have included pork shoulder roast braised in a tomato and red wine sauce, fettuccine Alfredo, and lasagna with meatballs. Wife also made an extremely delicious Guinness chocolate cake in honor of St. Patrick's Day. To put it bluntly, we've been eating well on Sundays.

Today took it to a whole new level. Yesterday I started feeling ambitious so I decided that I would try to make some bread. I've made bread before, but I wanted to do something a little more involved than the standard white bread in a loaf pan.

Lately I've been eating some salami or chorizo on baguette sandwiches for lunch because they're very full of flavor so I don't feel the need to eat so much. The only problem is that the baguettes we can get from the grocery store are not as good as what I got used to when a Panera was close by. That's why I thought I should try to make some baguettes.

The recipe I used came from the Williams and Sonoma baking book, which we highly recommend. To get things started you make a sponge. This is something I'd never tried before so already on to something new. It was really cool to see the sponge start to grow. The start of my bread was alive! ALIVE!

Once the sponge had developed for three hours (next time I'll leave it longer to develop more flavor) I made the dough and began the standard rising process. Knead, rise, punch, rise, shape, rise, bake. The shaping part was really the only bit that went wrong. Had it gone better I would have posted a picture of the finished product. As it was, I thought it better not to post a picture of some bread that brought to mind something that wasn't exactly family friendly (baguette, not family friendly - you figure it out).

Good bread can be a something incredible on its own, but find something excellent to slather it with (good French butter or fresh goat's cheese come to mind) and it becomes something ethereal. Well, today's lunch provided just such a substance for slathering.

A favorite Good Eats recipe of mine is the 40 cloves and a chicken. It's a very simple dish of baked chicken with roasted garlic and thyme. The chicken and garlic bake with the thyme in olive oil so the garlic goes all soft and spreadable. It was the perfect thing to spread on slices of the baguette. The chicken gets very tender since it's almost braised and I use dark meat so it's that much more juicy. I made some sauteed kale with bacon and garlic to go with everything and we washed it down with a very tasty Cotes du Rhone (E. Guigal 2003 for the curious).

Now I'm going to spend the rest of the evening digesting and relaxing. Hope everyone else out there is eating well too.

Cheers,
Frog