Cooking up a storm

Or during a storm, as the case may be. I ended up setting bread during a thunderstorm this weekend, and weirdly enough it was the best of the bread recipes I have tried recently. Of course, with the sheer variety of recipes I've been working my way through, a large number of them have been horrific, but I always worry about how yeast will react to things like lightning striking trees just down the road.

(Please note that I am not saying anything about rain. It did not, in fact, rain, despite three hours of thunder and lightning. Sheesh.)

I've been cooking my way through the cookbook known to my family as "the bread book." Also known as the Food Processor Bread Book, now out of print but still my family's bible when it comes to bread making. And since I grew up with a mother who set bread for the week on Sunday evening, that's saying something. This weekend's recipe was: plain old ordinary white bread. Which I never eat, and therefore never make. After the kugelhupf and the pain d'anis and the cardamom buns of the past few weeks, I figured it was time for a change.

I've also been entertaining myself by reading other people's food-related blogs. N's, of course, which is always fun since she keeps coming across vegetables that no one around here would give garden space to. (People in Pageland grow corn, tomatoes, okra, and watermelon. Lots and lots of watermelon.) You can check out her latest experiment here. Then there's Ree, who goes off in the opposite direction and uses piles of butter and white flour and sugar and all those things I try not to cook with. And there are the newer (to me) blogs I have taken to checking out during my lunch hour: All Things Edible, Closet Cooking, and Big City Little Kitchen. Obviously, all of these people have way more creativity in the cooking department than I do, not to mention a heck of a lot more time to blog.

Now, if only one of them would blog about a surefire way to use the sixteen-pound watermelon sitting on my counter. I bought the smallest one the stand up the road had, and it's still waaaay too big for one person. Sigh.