My Cooking Spot

When Girl Meets Kitchen



Homemade French Bread

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I think my second love (my husband being my first of course) would have to be bread. I am being so serious right now. I adore crusty bread, soft bread, savory bread, and sweet breads…big breads, little breads…get the point? Bread is like my love language. I am currently making 15-18 loaves of sourdough bread from my house every week and selling them to friends and local folks around town. I just have this thing for watching as flour, water and yeast create something as magical and comforting as homemade bread.

So today I am sharing with you a simple and fairly quick homemade bread recipe – French bread that is. This does use yeast but it doesn’t require you to wait 3 days to bake it, and it pretty fool proof in my opinion!

Simple and fool proof french bread recipe!

 

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Apple Hand Pies

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It’s apple season!  My dad has a big apple tree in the back yard.  Every year, I fill up a bunch of buckets with apples and spend a few days cranking out jars and jars of applesauce.

Then, my fruit loving son spends the following week eating them all.  It’s a labor of love.

Rustic Apple Hand Pies

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Apple Pecan Salad with Apple Cider Vinaigrette

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Oddly enough the fall is more about salads for me than any other season. Our social schedule seems to pick up a bit, life isn’t the laid back days of summer anymore, and the holidays are right around the corner. So when it comes to easy, quick, healthy meals I can throw together on a weeknight or before we run to an event on the weekends – salads is our choice.

applepevansalad1

 

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Roasted Beet, Heirloom Tomato Salad with Ricotta Salata

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IMG_5047

 

It’s the peak of summer harvest here in the Pacific Northwest. Gardens are over-flowing with the bounty. Local farmers markets are saturated with the vivacious tastes, smells, and colors of the season. Co-workers bring in boxes full of produce, letting the bright colors seep into the office, laying out the summer bounty in the break room, making the donuts seem sad and desperate. Neighbors drop off baskets overflowing with greens, yellows, oranges, reds, and purples so deep and rich you can hardly believe it.

Your mind starts to race as you think of all the recipes to be explored. Your heart quickens as you dream of the canning to be done; to capture the tastes to be savored on a cold winter day as you open summer captured in a jar. You start to salivate as you think of sitting down to a meal, oh the cooking to be done! But instead of turning on the stove and tying the apron strings on, you slice a tomato and sprinkle it with salt, taking a bite of it raw. It is perfection on the tongue, so sweet and juicy; it makes you wonder what piece of plastic has been posing as a “tomato” the rest of the year in your grocery store. Yes, it’s time to enjoy the splendor of what the good earth has to offer.

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