Yesterday afternoon, I asked Amber if she’d rather do more of a finger-food, casual kind of dinner. She agreed and here’s the result with an ecstatic Emma overseeing the documentation.

The bread (lower right) is a Garlic Parmesan with some basil and sun-dried tomato bruschetta thrown in. We bake it in a cast-iron pot wit lid to get the shape and a really nice crust.

The triangles (above and right of bread) are phyllo dough triangles with a spinach and feta filling. We made a bunch of them for dinner on Christmas Eve and froze half. This is half of the half.

To the left of the triangles is some pear, and beyond that is cheese that Emma cut up on the cheese board. Just above the pears is some carrots and broccoli for dipping in the hummus.

The hummus (above the carrots and broccoli, with the 2 spoons in it) is the basic recipe from “Feeding the Whole Family” but I’ve added some of the sun-dried tomato bruschetta to give it some color and additional flavor.

The crackers (to the right of the carrots and broccoli) are Chickpea Crackers which we made in the afternoon. They were really good with hummus or cheese and had a very nice kick to them. We also mixed up the dough for Wine Biscuits and we’ll bake those today.

The wine in the back is our next-to-last bottle of wine that we started in October of 2005.

The purple/blue/pinkish flowers floating in the bowl next to the wine were picked and arranged by Emma to decorate our table.

So, there you have it - homemade bread, homemade crackers (we ground the chickpea flour in our mill), homemade hummus (with chickpeas that Amber cooked before and we had frozen and juice from lemons from our lemon tree), homemade wine, homemade phyllo dough triangles and homegrown flowers for decoration. The only thing that came out of a box was the phyllo dough.

We’re going to work on having homegrown fruits and veggies next time.

Last night I was flipping through our cookbooks trying to figure out what to make. I knew that I wanted to make something that had to be started that night for breakfast the next day because I like to take advantage of that level of preparation when I think of it. I considered yeasted pancakes or cinnamon rolls, but I wasn’t really in the mood for them. Then my eye lit upon the crepes recipe.

I first had crepes in college. There was this great crepe restaurant in town that served both savory and sweet crepes. I remember being amazed at how good they were. Amber and I have made them at home before but it’s been a number of years. The recipe we have for them says that they need to rest for 2 hours or overnight for the batter to be perfect - exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.

I mixed up the batter last night and cooked them up this morning. They were a hit with everyone! Emma really liked being able to spread jam on them, roll them up and eat them with her fingers.

All-in-all a great meal.

• If you’ve got a pasta insert for your stock pot, use it when you make stock. It’s much easier to strain out the solid bits and vegetables when you get most of them in one big batch.
• Use celery. I’ve found that stock just plain tastes better when I include celery.
• When you use parsley in cooking, save the stems and freeze them. Then, when you’re making stock, take them out and use them for your parsley component.
• Get a skimmer to skim the fat from the stock after it’s cooled. Amber got me one of these for Christmas and it’s been wonderful.
• We usually make stock from the carcass after we cook a chicken in the crock pot. Just cut off all the meat you can find, then put all the bones, skin, fat, reserved neck, etc into the stock pot to make the stock.

Yesterday afternoon was spent on apricot jam and this afternoon was relish. Both came out well and we’re quite pleased with the results.

Now, about the title… It’s been really hot here. Upper nineties both days and the last thing either of us want to be doing is boiling water for canning inside - fortunately, we didn’t have to. See, we also brew beer and part of brewing beer is getting 5 gallons of water to boil. This is not something that you want to be doing on your dinky (Dy, this doesn’t include you) house range. It can easily take an hour to get that much liquid boiling so we bought an outdoor burner a few months ago. This baby puts out 55,000 BTU’s, can boil 5 gallons of water in 20 minutes and is perfect for outdoor use. We get to stay inside our air conditioned condo and only dart outside to set jars out for sterilizing or processing or bring them in for filling or cooling. A very nice way to do it.

Oh, and there’s a few pictures.

• 1/2 cup steel cut oats
• 1/2 cup 10 grain cereal
• 1/3 cup rolled oats
• 4 cups water

Just throw all ingredients in a small crockpot and cook overnight on low.

I’ll let you know how it turns out tomorrow.

Update
Well, it’s a bit watery and I didn’t mix in the wheat cereal enough so it clumped. I added more wheat cereal and some raisins to my bowl and it turned out all right. Too much wheat to groats, I’ll probably use higher proportion of oat groats to wheat cereal and decrease the water a bit next time.

We mixed up the starter two weeks ago because we had time and thought it would be a great idea.

The starter got contaminated and we had to wash it. And wash it. And wash it.

About a week and a half ago, everything seemed good and I made some bread from it. It turned out pretty well. Had a nice sour taste and the crust looks pretty much how it is supposed to. It didn’t rise as much as I’d hoped it would but I think that that’s due to not letting it proof long enough and interrupting the kneading to stop and have dinner.

Your supposed to steam the bread while it bakes to get that perfect sourdough crust. I saw directions talking about misting the bread frequently or spraying the sides of the oven and it all seemed like a fair bit of work. I decided to just put boiling water in our cast iron skillet and place it in the lukewarm oven. The bread went onto a stone which was cold. and I put that into the oven a few minutes after the water. A really nice steamy environment had built up and the crust came out ok.

I forgot to slash the bread so it popped during baking but it seems like that added a little bit of rustic charm to the loaves.

It ended up baking for about 90 minutes but that’s probably mostly due to starting out with a stone and nothing being preheated fully.

It only took 3.5 hours in the slow cooker and Amber made some great tortilla chips to go with it. All-in-all a delicious meal.

Now, we just need to figure out what to do with the remaining 16 cups of stock…Oh, well, at least we’ve got a freezer big enough to hold it.