A Good Day - Saturday

Last night, before I went to bed, I put together a no knead dough recipe (From the Merlin Menu), in hopes that I would be having fresh bread in the morning.

The bread consisted of:
2 1/4 tsp of yeast - whisked into 1 1/2 warm water and rested for 5 minutes or so.
In another bowl I combined 2 c Flour and 1 c Whole wheat flour and a tsp of salt.
I mixed these together till it formed a kind of ball - This took very little effort, and no more flour. I then covered and let it rest.

I woke up this morning, to a big, soft, sticky dough, full of bubbles. I scraped it onto my counter that was full of flour and I folded the dough over on itself 6 times (The dough was quite tender - I wish all my dough felt like that). Then I placed it in a bowl (The same size of my dutch oven) lined in parchment paper and let it rest for another hour or so.

Seeing as I had an hour to kill - I took a trip to the Peterborough farmers market to purchased some goodies. On my buy list was honey crisp apples, some beets for Teegan (because she loves them), a free range chicken (which will be roasted tomorrow) and the prize of the day mushrooms.

One of my favourite stands at the market is the mushroom stand. The gentleman who runs it, grows all of his own mushrooms in a little town north of Peterborough. So far I have been able to purchase, portabello, shitake and oyster mushrooms - but if you don't get there early enough, you won't get any!

So being inspired by all the mushrooms - tonight for supper I made Mushroom Soup

Here's my recipe:

Add some oil or butter to your pot (as much or little as you like)
brown - a bunch of chopped green onion and garlic
Then saute about a pound of chopped mushrooms (till soft)
Add 4 cups of stock (veg or chicken) and simmer for about 20 minutes
Add 1 cup of cream (however thick you like).
Season with salt and pepper and lots of dried thyme

It's quite easy and quite nice.
Perhaps someday when I live somewhere different with better natural light (or for that matter light), I will make this again and take another picture, because this one does not do it justice.

Once home, I turned my attention back to my bread. I preheated my oven and dutch oven to 425. I gently place the dough into the dutch oven (with the paper) and baked with the lid on for 20 minutes before removing the lid and baking for an additional 15 to 20 minutes. The smell in my house was amazing. Once the bread finished, I wanted to launch right into it, but I know it's better to let the bread rest (I only made it 15 minutes, instead of the suggested hour). It was great with a bit of peach jam.

My only issue with the bread, is that I didn't end up eating it till 11 am. If only I could drag myself out of bed at 6 and prep it then, I may have been eating it by 9.