Mother Daughter Luncheon

I like my mom.

I love my mom too... she is my mom after all.  But I LIKE my mom. Do you get the difference?

So I invited my mom over for a special mother-daughter luncheon.  What's the difference between a luncheon and lunch you say?  A luncheon is fancy.  My mom deserves fancy.

MENU

Salmon Cakes over seasonal greens w/ lemon vinaigrette

Artisan Bread

Chocolate Nirvana Cake

Here is my menu & planning.  For a meal like this I had to do some planning and spread some stuff out over a few days.  I do have a family and household to run afterall.

I started on wednesday by making the bread dough & refrigerate it.  I used a basic no-knead Artisan bread recipe.

No Knead Artisan Bread

Get a big container. 

Add 3 C lukewarm water, 1 1/2 T yeast, 1 T salt.  Mix.

Add 6 1/2 C flour all at once.  Stir.  Sit on counter w/ lid on but cracked for 2 hours.  Refriderate.  That is it!  This makes 4 small loaves.

About 3 hours before you want to eat it, pull out about a grapefruit size ball of dough.  Flour, shape into a ball and sit for 1 hour or so.  Preheat oven w/ stone in it to 450.  Dust stone w/ cornmeal, slide dough on to it.  Put a pan w/ 1C HOT water on the rack under the stone and bake for 30m.  Cool on a rack for 30m.  Enjoy! (you can use 1/2 whole wheat flour if you want)

This was the final loave.  Can you smell it?

On thursday I make the Flourless Chocolate cake.  This was the first step in the Chocolate Nirvana Cake. This recipe is from Karen Krasne's Extraordinary Cakes Cookbook.  This is the finished fully assembled cake.  Yum!

My First Chicken

I baked a chicken.

Big deal you say? You do it all the time?  Well this was my FIRST whole chicken.  Yup. First. Ever.

GASP!!! 

What you say?  You… who makes your own tortillas and pasta and bread from scratch.  You who reverse engineers recipe’s so you can change them? 

Yes.  Me.  My 1^st whole chicken.  Of course I’ve done turkeys but honestly I didn’t really want to do a whole chicken.  We preferred white meat.  I didn’t like getting my hands slimy.  Blah blah blah. 

The more I read and the more into cooking I get, the closer to my food source I want to be.  I want to know where my eggs came from.  Are there antibiotics in the milk?  Is the food local?  Is it seasonal?