this week's stovetop: a full fridge

Our fridge is in a very (happy) full state.  There's leftover Moroccan carrot soup and vegan hibiscus enchiladas from my roommates' cooking last week, burek, ajvar and fried potatoes and onions from a Balkans-inspired dinner party we hosted on Saturday night and my contribution to keeping it full: handmade sourdough pasta, lamb ragu, and green beans

Nom nom nom.

If you decide to try making the pasta, note that I added a *lot* more flour and a bit of olive oil--the dough as per the recipe didn't stay together when I tried to roll it out with our pasta roller.

thrifty snowstorm crafts

I started making a braided rug during the snowstorm as a way to get a little more life from a few pairs of ripped jeans (and a pair of khakis)

Here's how it's coming so far:

I've got more denim to braid in, and I expect it will get to be something like 2' x 4' before I run out of the fabric I have here... although that won't happen this weekend.

Nemo

I ventured outside after the storm. It was an adventure. Most of the neighborhood was out shoveling out cars or walking dogs, and a few people had snow blowers that were sending arcs of snow high above the streets. The best part was trekking across a field of knee-deep snow in the park, but the photos of that don't do it justice.

the sidewalk : a transition between shoveled and not

bike racks in the park

the street.  look closely : those bumps are cars

this week's stovetop: bagels

I've recently been expanding my bread repertoire, from the Colombian bread I made a few weeks ago to making sourdough (I started a culture in early January).  This week, the name of the game was bagels.

I followed Joy of Cooking's bagel recipe (page 617 of the 1975 edition).  That dough is a variant of the standard white bread recipe that uses more milk and egg than most of the recipes I make. The resulting dough is soft but pliable; I made the bagel holes by piercing a finger through a ball of dough and spinning the dough around.  It reminded me a bit of tossing pizza dough.

The difference between standard bread and bagels comes in how it is cooked.  Bagels are boiled first, then coated with an egg wash and put in the oven to bake through.

Overall, I was pleased with the results--despite a thick crust and some burning on the bottom, the interior texture was good. That said, this may be my only foray into bagel making.  Unlike fresh bread, which I find calming to make, the timed boil-then-bake was stressful and the resulting bagels didn't make the process worth it.