Recipe testing

On Tuesday night since I had no meetings, I tested recipes. I tried out the long-rise, no-knead bread recently made famous by Mark Bittman writing about the Sullivan Street Bakery's version in the New York Times - and gajillion people are blogging their experiments with that, so suffice it for me to say that I was pretty sure I used too much water (and now that I am trying again, today, I am positive I used too much water) but even so, as Bittman says in the article, even your failures will probably be better than a lot of purchased breads, and we have been happily eating the slightly too damp WW version that was the result of my first experiment.

I also tried out a recipe for the REAP book, that I had thought on reading it was not likely to work - it is a strawberry rhubarb cobbler - starts off fine:

But the topping is made from melted vanilla ice cream, vanilla yogurt, and flour - no eggs, no leavening, no nothing

It still looks good when it comes out of the oven, but the topping is pasty and doughy - even my cat, who loves all kinds of people food - was not interested; she only wanted the ice cream. The lunch time kids sampled it, and did not eat very much of it, but managed to drip it on the floor (the filling was kind of runny - probably because since the flour was all mixed with the ice cream & yogurt, there wasn't any loose flour to thicken the rhubarb) where it was so sticky that the foot of my tights got yanked by the sticky spot. That seemed like ample reason to ditch the uneaten portion of the cobbler, so I did.