The university is doing a program this year where they give us 125$ a quarter to spend on things that make us happy. Micha spent his on a zoo membership for us, so we went out today.  

 

It's a winter wonderland out today, apparently.

Update: we went for a snow walk :)

 

Happy squirrel appreciation day! We made pecan shortbread for us to appreciate, and the squirrels got some seeds. 

Bread-a-palooza

Today is Martin Luther King day, and everyone had the day off. We debated what to do with ourselves, but the weather was lousy and so the kids wanted to do a baking project. But we already had a fairly egregious amount of dessert lying around the house, so we decided to do some savory baking instead.

 

Project number one: fried flatbread. Owain has been reading the Stormlight Archive lately, and there's a food described in there at one point called "chouta"- fried meatballs in gravy wrapped in fried flatbread of some kind. This was our attempt at something that would work for that. Very high hydration dough, not quite deep fried, salt and nigella seeds for flavor. It was really good.

 

 

Project number two: Micha was already planning to make bread for his lunches before I proposed doing two more bread projects the same day.

 

Loaves proving (flatbread in the back).

  

 Project number three: challah. This is the only kind of bread I really know how to make, so I showed the kids how to do it. stretching the strands out for the braid went way faster with the three of us working on it.

 

Many bread! 

 

Birthday weekend breakfast for my soon-to-be fourteen-year-old!