weekend update

That title still makes me think of Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin, which I guess dates me, but so what? This was a quiet weekend--with the teenager out of the house most of the weekend the rest of us spent a lot of time quietly reading. There were things we could do (and we did a few, like go to the library and to a concert on campus) but mostly we were quiet. And we caught up on sleep, which was nice.

I did, of course, bake. With, I have to say, somewhat mixed results. I was intrigued by the no-knead bread in last week's NYTimes--I have a long love affair with no-knead bread, after all. But this one used less yeast and sat around a lot longer. In my case, about 20 hours. In the end, I was frustrated: the bread did not rise anything like as high as I expected, it stuck to the kitchen towel I was raising it on, and it didn't brown up in a lovely way. It did, however, make a more than edible loaf of bread. I'm thinking that maybe he really meant it when he called for "instant yeast," since that's the only deviation from the recipe I made. (Believe it or not!) And in some ways it was fine that it didn't rise up very high because I don't actually have a casserole big enough to bake a bigger loaf in. So we'll see if I try that again.

I also decided--because we had two pears, and because it seems to be pear baking season--to try this pear upside-down gingerbread. And it is very tasty, I must say, even if you bake it in the toaster oven because the regular oven is already full of pork tenderloin and roasted vegetables and bread. The toaster oven does, you will remember (a bit too late) bake a bit faster than the regular oven, so the cake may be a little, um, burnt on top--but that becomes the bottom anyway, so who cares?

All in all, a perfectly fine weekend, rain and wind and all.