Bread, Wine, Salt

Lunch in the Park , a novel about love and family, is available for sale in multiple electronic formats at Smashwords , for the Kindle at Amazon.com and for the Nook at BN.com Wherever you buy it, it is DRM-free . The delicious recipes that Kate and Jeff cook up are right here on my blog. I hope you'll read Lunch in the Park , you'll love it, and you'll feel the overwhelming urge to write a review on one or more of the sites above. And of course I'd love to hear from you here on the blog, too.  "Kate was in the kitchen making banana cranberry bread, which she had learned to make from her own grandfather in his long ago kitchen that always smelled of coffee and baked goods.” Lunch in the Park, New Year's Eve Kate's grandfather taught her to make the bread as she stood on a kitchen step stool pushed up to the counter so that even as a small child of three or four she could help measure and mix. This recipe does actually come from a grandfather , ...

( Full recipe with vegan variation here. )

“All else” here means me. There are days when I simply cannot do anything right. Sometimes a few of those days string together and I begin to wonder why anyone (kids, husband, friends, dogs) keeps me around. I could wallow on those days (weeks) or I could throw my shoulders back and do something I know will not be a disappointment. So sure, the world doesn't really need another banana bread recipe. My friend Justine just posted one the other day ( with chocolate chips! ) and if you Google “banana bread recipe” you get “about 3,330,000 hits.” But I needed something to work, and this always does. There are two basic tricks to quick breads and muffins, first, don't over mix. Once you add the dry and wet ingredients together, stir just enough to get the flour wet, and then stop. Second, watch the bread, not just the time. For reasons known only to my oven, a recipe that took 45 minutes one day will take only 35 minutes the next time, and an overbaked quick ...

Adapted from the Tassajara Bread Book. “Bread makes itself, by your kindness, with your help, with imagination streaming through you, with dough under hand, you are bread-making itself, which is why bread-making is so fulfilling and rewarding.” I was determined not to be two years behind in the delivery of bread to the mom with the new baby. So this morning, as I sorted out my day to get ready to make dinner for them, I cracked open my copy of Tassajara and settled on this yeasted banana bread. There's a lot going on here, and the banana flavor gets lost. I think you could leave out the orange zest and the cinnamon and have a perfectly yummy loaf of bread, but you could also leave them in and have a perfectly yummy loaf of bread. This is an almost whole wheat loaf, so it uses the sponge method. The ingredients are divided into two parts, the first for the sponge, a batter which allows the yeast to make your heavy whole wheat flour into a light and fluffy lo...