The Chopping Block...Redux

ARTISAN BREADS

Holy yeast breads, Batman! During my Baking Boot Camp experience, one of our teacher-chefs, Carolyn, told us that she was going to be teaching a class called Artisan Breads in mid-March. A few weeks after the Boot Camp was over, I signed up for the class. The class description said we were going to bake 7 bread recipes: whole grain dinner rolls, challah, English muffins, whole wheat pita, sourdough ciabatta, marble rye, and rosemary breadsticks. Mostly, I was interested in the ciabatta bread. But seriously? Seven yeast breads in 6 hours? That's just crazy talk. Especially since we were working sans mixers. That's right--everything we were doing was by hand, including whipping egg whites to medium peaks (bowl + whisk + arm muscles = medium peaks in a little under 3 minutes) and mixing all of our doughs.

Sure, it helps that a lot of the prep was done for us, like the grains already being soaked, the sourdough starter ready to go, a few bowls of flour had already been measured, etc. But still, we got way behind throughout the day and ended up having to cut the rosemary breadsticks from the rotation. I was pretty bummed about that, but we did get the recipe, so maybe I'll try making them on my own.


The whole grain rolls were small--slider-bun sized and very dense--but delicious.


The challah was a relatively easy dough to work with and fun to braid.




The ciabatta dough was crazy wet and a pain to manipulate.





English muffins I've done before and did a better job on my own (the griddle was way too hot and burned everyone's first batch of muffins).



The marble rye was a disaster from the beginning. The dough was way too dry, even though Carolyn insisted that it would get wetter and easier to work with, it never did. She conceded in the end that I needed to add a little water to the dough while I was putting the layers together.



It was fun to learn how to cook pita, though I never did get any of mine to puff up, so they turned out like flatbread, instead. (S'okay, I actually prefer flatbread to pita.)



The only complaint I had about the entire day was my partner. If you sign up for a $150 class that's entitled "Artisan Breads," don't you think you'd be interested in, I don't know, baking bread? My partner, Trisha, wasn't. In fact, she made it clear in my first 5 minutes chatting with her that 1) she was not a baker and disliked baking because it was too precise, 2) that she was single (something she just kept bringing up randomly throughout the day) and 3) that eating carbs was bad because it made you fat (mind you, Trisha is about 100 pounds heavier than I am). Please people, if baking isn't your thing, don't take a higher level bakery class and whine the entire time. It's incredibly grating to the rest of the people there.


CHUCK PANEL
After I was done at The Chopping Block, Rick picked me up and after a quick bite at Jason's Deli, we headed to C2E2 (Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo). One of our favorite television shows, Chuck, was headlining a panel of some of the actors and the producer. It was first experience at a comic-book style convention. I used to think I was a geek. I'm nowhere NEAR geeky enough. My geek credentials have been revoked after attending that con.



Before the panel started, Warner Brothers' representative got up and presented a really cool recap/preview clip of the show. It got a lot of laughs and got me all choked up and wanting to start watching all over again from the beginning.

Mo Ryan, a TV critic for AOL who is based in Chicago, moderated the panel. On the panel? Chris Fedak, the co-producer, Josh Gomez (Morgan), Ryan McPartlin (Devon "Captain Awesome" Woodcomb), Vik Sahay (Lester) and Scott Krinsky (Jeff). They answered Mo's questions and then took questions from the audience. Both Mo and the audience brought up the possibility of returning to more storylines revolving around the Buy More. Fedak (rightly, though unfortunately) pointed out that "Chuck" is one of the fastest moving TV shows currently on air. They usually are trying to fit in three storylines--BuyMore, spy life and family (Devon, Ellie and Clara)--into 43 minutes every episode.

What I loved most about the panel was how funny everyone was! Ryan was riffing off of Josh and taking heat for being the first one to talk. Vik was continuing his "Jeffster is not one character!" rant and lamenting his rare exodus from the Buy More. We got to hear about how Awesome originally was slated to be a Russian mole 3 episodes into the show, but Fedak and Schwartz loved Ryan's delivery in the Pilot episode so much, they decided to keep him. We were told a few minor spoilers, like they had just gotten done shooting the bachelor party (like, literally that morning at 1:30 AM) episode and everyone was in it. It was hilarious and while it would have been nice to have Zachary Levi and Yvonne Strahovski there, I was just thrilled with the actors that did come.

GARDENING



It's that time of year again! Time for me to actually start trimming back everything that died late last fall. The seedum is always the first thing to peek up through the soil.

We're thinking of hiring people to come in and mulch everything this year. It's just way too much work for two people to do and would take probably at least two weekends of 8 hour per day work. Ugh. If we do hire people, we're going to ask them to pull out the boxwoods and arbor vitae against the garage so we have more vegetable growing space. I think I'm finally ready to dedicate a portion of our yard to asparagus (which is a perennial, so it comes up in the same spot every year).