Third Rising: Whole Wheat Bread (Again, Some More)

I've posted about my issues with bread-baking here and here using my mom's recipe, but I never did get it to work out perfectly every time. When I had Jack, my friend Emily brought soup and bread to us one night for dinner. It was so good, and she offered to have me over for a long playdate one day to show me exactly how she does it. She starts, as did my mom, with whole wheat berries that she grinds into flour. I don't have a grain mill (yet) so I go with the same brand of flour, Wheat Montana, which is nonGMO and can be purchased in bulk on amazon. There is only one store locally that sells it, and that's Wal-Mart, though I've requested it at two other grocery stores, so we'll see if they start to carry it. I love the Prairie Gold varietal, because it doesn't produce too dense a bread, but their other varietals are great, along with the all-purpose flour, which is a natural white flour; unbleached and unbromated.

The recipe she uses for her everyday bread is the Fresh Milk Bread from The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book, with a lot of' 'you'll know it's ready when it feels like this' and she'd pinch the dough between two fingers looking for the perfect amount of give. It was the best, most generous thing for her to host us for about four hours on a sticky, summer day. She walked me through each step, fed my kids lunch and sent me home with a loaf of fresh bread.


I ordered the book right away and embarked on my quest to replicate. After several months, I've had consistently good bread and am so grateful to her. My kids are brimming with gratitude as well. I believe H's direct quote was 'Can't we just buy bread at the store like normal people?' Brats. I do a one and-a-half batch of this bread to make three full loaves. My kitchen aid won't work a full double batch. The big-daddy kitchen aid is next on my appliance upgrade list. Also, I find that it's really important to weigh your flour because the way you scoop and measure it, may make the difference of about a cup when you compare weight to volume.

First rising

Punched down and risen again

use a bench scraper to divide into three equal balls and allow to rest on the counter

roll each ball with a pin into a rectangle and then roll up into a loaf and place in pans to raise for a third time

Third rising complete and ready to go into a 350 oven for 40 minutes

Golden Delicious

cool before cutting

Unless you baked it, and then you get a warm slice with honey and butter

Do you have a favorite bread recipe?

Meal Plan Monday

Another week has come and gone, which means another meal plan is ready. Planning what I'm going to eat helps me stay on track, and saves money because I'm not buying a bunch of random things and hoping they'll get used in a cohesive way before turning into the stank at the bottom of the produce drawer that gets tossed out.

On nights that are busy, we often do breakfast for dinner or a crock pot meal. The first two Mondays of the month are when H has Cub Scouts, so it was a breakfast night per H's request. 

Monday: Egg and Cheese Breakfast Sandwiches on Whole Wheat English Muffins, with berries. I had my eggs over a bed of roasted broccoli and Brussels Sprouts with some feta cheese crumbles.

Tuesday: Thai Chicken Salad (made into tacos for the kids)

This is also a day I'm using to prep some freezer meals during Jack's nap when the big boys are at school. On the menu for freezing are: Skinny Spinach Lasagna Roll-ups, Lasagna with Meat sauce in 8x8 pans, Minestrone Soup, Sweet Potato Turkey Chili and Taco Filled Pasta Shells.

Wednesday:  I'll be out of town, so the boys are on their own...could be dangerous

Thursday: -home late, boys still on their own. I'm sure Chef Boyardee will be involved.

Friday: Lasagna with Meat Sauce.

We're lucky enough to have a great butcher who makes their own sausage. I use a mix of their sweet and hot Italian sausages, along with the roasted tomato marinara I made from my garden bounnty this summer and froze. Adding fresh basil and minimal cheese atop whole wheat noodles makes a very hearty dinner that everyone likes.

Friday is always Family Movie Night and this week we're taking the boys to see the Lego Movie at the theater for Valentine's Day. Also, I'm making these strawberries for their treat, yum!

Saturday: Grilled Halibut with roasted Brussels Sprouts and Quinoa cakes (I make extra of these little cakes and keep them for breakfasts. They are so good under an over-medium egg, with some wilted greens or spicy arugula.)

Sunday: Slow Cooker Pot Roast with Root Vegetables

Also, for lunches this week I have some really good salads on tap. My friend made one for us when she hosted playdate last week, and I've been thinking about it since, so I bought the extras for it today. It was a kale salad with shredded red cabbage (maybe I'm imagining that part, but I'm adding it anyhow ;)), crumbled feta, pomegranite seeds and a little bit of brown rice that really just added another dimension of heartiness that made it a true meal. It was very simply dressed with and olive oil base and could be made even more filling with some chicken breast, but I liked it just as it was.

What do you have on your menu plan?

Holidaze

With a husband whose job requires shift work, I'm often left to fly solo on the holidays. Thanksgiving I woke up early and literally didn't leave the kitchen until I put 'dinner' on the table at 11:30am, so we could eat together.  The meal lasted approximately ten minutes, during which I heard a lot of 'this is gross' and 'I don't like like my (fill in the blank) like this.'

I roasted my first turkey, including the overnight brine, made the smitten kitchen green bean casserole which had amazing thin-sliced (home-fried) crispy onions atop a bed of blanched green beans in a from-scratch mushroom sauce. It was delicious. Or disgusting. Which depended on whether or not you were in the over or under 8-years-old set. Jack ate everything, like the gracious baby he is, and the big kids were excused from the table. After clearing the table and glumly accepting my husband's praise and gratitude for the meal, I did what any strong-willed, self-respecting grown-up does. I went into my bedroom and cried. Seriously, I didn't even take any photos of my food that day-that's saying something! Next year I'll be sticking to my original idea to have Thanksgiving brunch. Although the layered Pumpkin Pie Toffee Cheesecake was ahhh-mazing. But you can totally eat cheesecake for brunch.

Christmas was spent at our house with my mother and father-in-law and I made my first prime rib, which turned out fabulously (we'll be doing that every year!) with all the trimmings of a steak dinner; horseradish and jus, twice baked sweet potatoes, green beans and salad. The kids all loved their deliveries from the jolly guy (including the KidKraft play kitchen that took a certain elf until 3:30 in the morning to build...) Sweet baby, Jesus, maybe next year she should start before 11:30 on Christmas Eve, but there were a lotta pieces! We had friends over for dessert a few hours after dinner, and it was the perfect meld of food and fellowship. Thanksgiving's sadness was erased.

Any day spent playing blocks with Grandma is a good day.

Tiny Pliny in the kitchen

Fast forward to New Year's, where J worked the afternoon shift which ends shortly before midnight, so I decided to host a small New York New Year's Eve with friends (read: we shuttle the littles to bed when the ball drops in Times Square...at 9pm.). Living on the left coast definitely has its perks. After a search of pinterest for ideas, I knew I wanted to keep it simple, so I put together little bags of dollar store finds for random times throughout the evening. The first was mini tubs of play-doh to occupy kids that were feeling left out, or tired of playing with legos, while the adults ate dinner. The second was about an hour later, a bundle of bead necklaces to wear while watching a movie. The third was blowers (not noise makers) to 'get your second wind' at about 8:15, then it was mini bottles of bubbles to 'break out the bubbles' at 8:45. For the New Year's toast, I did Shirley Temples with a cotton candy float. All of the supplies (including the cotton candy, but excluding the drink fixin's) were purchased at the dollar store for less than $10. I just put them in brown paper lunch bags I already had, and labeled them with labels printed in shades of the same tone and attached with washi tape. Simple, but fun. Just like our evening. I hope you had a great night and that 2014 is treating you well!

Nothing says party boy like skinny jeans and a sweatervest

Luckily J got home in time for an actual kiss at midnight. But this would have been a close second.

Like Buttah(cream)

The sad 'before'

So, after about four months of sitting in my garage and staring at me with disdain for my lack of follow-through, the supplies for the tiling job finally got moved into the house.

With the momentum from the satisfaction of last weekend's completed projects, I decided it was high time I bit the bullet. My biggest concern was that I go into every project with a lot of what we'll call 'lack of skill' and just call the results good enough. Mistakes are happy accidents that I use to make things look rustic. There is nothing rustic about a tile job. You either do it correctly and it looks nice, or you do it wrong and it looks like you've got a hillbilly's teeth stuck to your wall until you're ready to hire someone to come rip it out, replace the backerboard and start all over again.

With much trepidation, I put the kids to bed on Thursday night and messaged a picture to J with the tiles laid out. He said that he commented to a co-worker 'Guarantee she'll be working on this still when I get home.' Yes, yes I was.

It all started innocently enough, I called my neighbor to see if she thought I should just forego the decorative 6x6's I planned to insert at random intervals. She offered to just come over and help me see how to lay it out. My issue was, I told her, I didn't have enough hands to hold the sheets up on the wall and figure out placement of the decorative tiles at the same time.

C: Weren't you just going to lay them out on the floor?

Me: Of course, I was! (while in my head I was thinking she was a genius, because you know that I fully intended to just slap those puppies up. Fast forward to what would surely have been Jared coming home to a gigantic mess and me sobbing in the tub.)

Like pretty maids all in a row

Obviously I had measured the things to death, so I knew exactly how many sheets, and fractions of sheets, I needed on each wall. But the placement of the 6x6's? That would have been tricky business to try vertically. After painstakingly laying out each wall and placing the 'pretty tiles', I cut out the extra 2x2's and dropped in the 6x6. I can't even imagine how much time this saved me in the long run even though in my head I was already feeling itchy at the tedium of it all.

Tiles laid out, it was time to bust out the mastic; how hard could it be, right? Surely I haven't logged nearly a thousand hours (I hope this is an exaggeration, but 100 would be a gross underestimation) of DIY and HGTV for naught. With the soothing, encouraging voices of Amy Matthews and Marc Bartolomeo (but mostly Marc) in my head, I popped the top of the bucket (after taking a Blizzard break, because it was offered, and I don't turn down free ice cream), dipped my trowel, smoothed it at the proper angle against the wall...and my heart sang.

It was exactly like consistency of thick buttercream. I slapped some more on the wall and oh! my! gosh! It was just like frosting a cake! Though I have to say, I think the trowel was right-handed, I was able to get 'er done. God bless prior planning because taking those sheets from their spot on the floor directly to their designated position on the wall left behind the chance of an ulcer, and by the time J walked in the door I had the first wall completed, and was starting on the second.

Then comes the hitch. All along I knew that the wall shared by our bedroom had about 2/3 of an inch more tile than it's matching side, which would require me to nip a row of 8 tiles. After watching a how-to video online, I realized that this was going to be te-di-ous...so, being who I am, I decided to think of other options.

It's neither the wall you'll see when you walk in the bathroom, nor the one you'll look at while you're bathing, so I decided at 11:45pm that I was not going to use the extra tiles at all. I made the spaces between the sheets just a little larger and there's a tiny space where the bottom tile that was already there before sticks out further but it looks fine. At about 1am, I finally laid my weary head down, with the prayer in my head that I didn't wake to the tinkling sound of tile falling off the wall. I felt pretty good about it, though, because I'd been thorough and consistent with the pressure I applied to each tile. It was very much like decorating a cake.

This afternoon, I taped over the decorative tiles so the design wouldn't get filled in (thanks for the tip, Heather!), and I prepped the grout. It was a tiny bit thinner than the creamy peanut butter that Marc (yes, we're totally on a first name basis) always recommends, but I didn't have any more to add that was the right color, so what are you gonna do? H was my faithful observer through the process, as he always is when I'm working on a fun project for the house.

At one point, I got super nervous that I wasn't going to have enough grout (which was special ordered in the color to match the existing grout), and after dropping about the tenth big glop of what I thought was a substance more finite and precious than the breast milk I painstakingly pumped for H all those years ago, I asked him to leave the room because 'mommy might have some cuss words slip out'.

Relief washed over me as I was about half-way through the last wall and realized I'd have enough (with the assistance of a bowl scraping spatula to get the dregs out of the bucket and onto the trowel). Just before J left for work, I had him be my second pair of eyes to see if I'd missed any spots. I have to say, I was still skeptical of the process as I set the time for my 20 minute wait before I could start sponging off the excess.

Sponge in hand, I began the process of wiping, dunking, squeezing it out and wiping again, and it was not only quick, but very rewarding.

Tub cleaned out, buckets washed, and two hours later a quick wipe across the tiles with a clean damp cloth to get the final 'grout haze' off of them; I'm a happy girl. Later I'll use the extra silicone caulk (which has a sandy texture in it to look like the grout) that they left behind for us after finishing our house to go around the top and sides of the tile. Then, in a month, I'll seal it and this will be a fully completed project. All told, the supplies for the project, including sponge, spacers and the bit to stir the grout, was under $300. Using the sheets of tile were not only economical, but I think they're pretty forgiving and allow you to eyeball the spaces a lot better, plus they don't really slide around like the 6x6 tiles did (when I was pushing on them.) a great option for my first project.

More and more I'm finding that the hardest part is just getting started. Once you begin a project, finishing it is, especially in this case, a piece of cake.

Pretty good match on the grout! 

The 'bad' wall...not so bad, really.

The new view from our bedroom. Now to find some art or a cool sculpture to round out that wall!

Blues Traveler

After waxing poetic about the beautiful shade of blue I was planning to paint my room for several months, I figured it was time to actually slap some paint up on the wall. It wasn't until my brother-in-law was visiting my house for the first time over Fourth of July, and politely commented on my 'decoration' in my bedroom that I had some serious motivation to get 'er done. Paint swatches are about as decorative as Tyvek wrap. Read: They're not.

I've been reading Young House Love and Our Humble A{Bowe}d a lot. A lot. YHL has some great video tutorials, one of them being on the art of cutting in. It was very helpful for the areas around the windows, and I still need to go back (probably isn't going to happen) and fill in the tiny gap in some places where the edger couldnt get quite close enough to the molding. But, the result is great, and I love the color just as much as I'd hoped I would.

Due to the amazing amount of natural light we get in our house, the color looks very different at each phase of the day. When I was done painting at 11pm, I started having second thoughts because it looked very masculine and almost a mallard green. With the wood trim, I had the sinking feeling I'd feel like I was in a billiards room instead of feeling reminiscent of tropical waters. Never fear, the morning sun shone in the morning and all was well. I still have to arrange photos and find a cool decorative accent for the bed wall. I'm also thinking of plug-in sconces for the bedside, instead of the teeny, tiny lamps (that I love, but are looking off-scale).

It was also a great opportunity to re-evaluate what's in the room. The only furniture I brought back in was our dresser, nightstands and bed. I figure the less flat surfaces we have, the less opportunity for clutter. I'm on the hunt for a great chair to serve as a knitting and reading nook, but it would be ideal if it were comfy enough to nurse in when the time comes again.

I love this wall sculpture for above the bed, but it would definitely be a splurge, so I need to decide if I lurve it, and not just like it.

So here we go; boring in beige to awesome in aqua in one evening. 

The dreaded cutting in!

When we get our king bed, the red skirt will be gone but for now it works, picking up the red in the curtains.

Love the fun pop of color in the nightstands. Oops! Forgot to put our pillows back on :)

Above the dresser will be a gallery wall of ocean vacations, surfing and some prints I've picked up along the way; all in crisp white frames.

When we get our bed, this is the bedding I'm getting (in natural or white), along with a simple white or natural fitted bedskirt.

...and plug in sconces like this with a lighter, or white shade

Any suggestions for the bedroom decor are welcome, so please leave a comment!