Midnight Oil

I am already used to the fact that when Mark makes dinner, we end up eating really late. That's especially true when he bakes breads. Last night was not an exception. Except maybe to the fact that we ended up eating even later than usual. I guess we broke our own record and started eating at half past midnight. How appropriate that it was slices of olive bread dipped in balsamic vinegar and olive oil!



The olives featured in the bread are the ones we made ourselves! We picked them a few months ago, got all the bitterness out of them and then marinated them. They turned out pretty good! We used a lot of olives for this bread, but we still have a lot more, so come and try some, if you like!


Aren't they pretty?

Yammy Bread #3

It's the orange kind again! This time Mark forgot to put eggs, which we got specifically for that! It was yammy nonetheless!

Happy Hanukah

I never know how to correctly spell the name of that holiday. But I do like to celebrate it: it has the best food! Doughnuts, latkes, cheese pancakes...


I made the "Chardonukiyah", as Mark named it :)

The doughnut was made by my aunt. It was very good and filled with strawberry jam. I wanted to make something with sweet potatoes, but I didn't want to make the regular latkes, so I decided to use this recipe, substituting the pumpkin with sweet potatoes.


I made some with white sweet potato, and they were slightly sweeter.

Don't they look nice? They're also easy to make, make very little mess, and are healthy - a good addition a night filled with deep-fried goods.

Spinaroom Pizza

We wanted to have pizza, but also use up some spinach and mushrooms we had, so I found this recipe and decided to follow it, using, of course, Mark's very own pizza crust.



We did follow the advice of several reviewers, and added some garlic on top of the oil. It was good - I liked the sesame oil effect. It wasn't so good reheated, though, which is unusual for pizzas. I think the spinach just became too liquidy. The crust was still yummy, though :)

Cherry Bread

Thanks For The Bread(s)

Thanksgiving was celebrated at our place with lots of bread.
We had a turkey made out of wheat gluten, bread stuffing and pumpkin bread pudding for dessert. Celiac patients would have really suffered.

So here's our dinner not including the dessert:


As you can see, I made the turkey look like he's alive. Which made it rather difficult for us to carve it.


Yay! It's stuffed!

But we had immense pleasure picking his Swiss-cheese-and-olive-eyes out and eating them. Mind you - these are home-cured olives! Delicious!

The cranberry sauce was a treat to make: the little fruit change color and pop, it's just so much fun!

If someone told me 3 years ago that I would eat (fake) meat, stuffing, gravy and (sweet!) sauce all assembled together on my fork, I would not have believed it. But it's really yummy!

For dessert:


I took the recipe from here, and smothered it with my very own Super-Easy caramel sauce:
Mixing evaporated milk (about 1/3 can) and brown sugar (4-5 T) and heating it gently over medium-low heat. A little butter would have probably made it shinier, but it wasn't lacking in flavor at all.
We topped it with some vanilla ice cream. YUM!

Yammy Bread in White

It's that time of year again! Hurray! Sweet potato season makes for very yammy breads. Last year it was with an orange sweet potato. This year it was with white.



I was surprised (probably for no good reason) to find out that the sweet potatoes are very similar in flavor. The bread came out a bit lighter, but I think it's mostly because Mark didn't write down the recipe last year, so he had to reinvent it. It was so good to eat it straight out of the oven with just butter spread on it. Mmm... melting in the mouth...



Two rather large sweet potatoes make a lot of bread. Mark baked one of them - the long one - in the ceramic bread pan, and the other in a small glass loaf pan. It stuck terribly to the glass and was very difficult to remove. The bread was slightly damaged, but it was still yummy!