I’m out of coffee! Somehow I missed the fact that I didn’t have any more in the cupboard. *sob* No coffee today.

Well, at least I got another review written: Greg Patent’s A Baker’s Odyssey. Excellent bread!

I think I’m going to save my review of Bettie Sharpe’s super-awesome Ember until the 15th, so I can link to her new book when it gets released. She’s an incredibly good new author, and I think incredibly good new authors deserve all the exposure they can get.

We’re still going strong with the recipes from the artisan baking book. We have a batch of pumpernickel dough in the fridge now that’ll yield fresh home-baked bread for the next handful of days. I noticed at Amazon that there was a baker who was very snippy about the whole notion of this different way of making bread. What made me shake my head, though, was that some of his complaints weren’t even particularly valid. He said the title’s ‘5 minutes a day’ was misleading because of things like rise time, but the book is extremely explicit about the fact that it’s referring to time during which you’re actually working with the recipe, not time during which you can be doing other things. He also said that because it’s a wet dough people would find it difficult to shape into anything other than a round boule loaf, yet I’ve found it just as easy to make dinner rolls and baguettes with it. I can’t help thinking this is either a bit of traditionalist bitterness (it’s different/easier so it can’t possibly be good), or a smidge of feeling threatened that folks might not need to pay $5-10 for a fancy loaf of bread at the bakery if they can make it themselves so easily. In particular I have to think this is the case because all of the other people who’ve used the book—myself included—have had delicious results with it. To which a feast of almost 20 people from last weekend can attest.

We have a printer box full of bread and then some. The whole wheat oatmeal rolls are delicious, and the Kachauri is so good it’s taking a supreme act of will to avoid hoarding it for ourselves.

We’re resting our feet for a few moments. Before long it will be time to get changed into fancy clothes and head to dinner. Full reviews to come next week, but I can already tell you how ‘Baker’s Odyssey’ and ‘Artisan Bread’ will fare. To put it simply: YUM!

We didn’t end up making saffron rolls, but I think we made more than enough, so I have no regrets!

The Cheese Sambouseks came out deLIGHTfully delicious. Now we’re making a quadruple batch of corn muffins (with whole kernels and chipotle cheddar), which actually only works out to 24 muffins since this recipe makes small batches.

We’re also baking batches of plain, crusty dinner rolls from the master recipe in the artisan bread cookbook, and they’re coming out beautifully. The whole wheat oatmeal bread has almost finished rising. We still have to decide whether we’re making saffron rolls, and of course we have to make the Kachauri. We ended up appropriating a printer box to put all the baked goods in because nothing else was large enough.

I wonder if our friends realized what they were in for when they asked us to bake bread. I picture Jervis finding out that his wife asked us to do so, looking at her with wide eyes, and saying, “Are you insane?”

Next we made Cheese Sambouseks, made from a batch of Kahk dough surrounding a cheese-and-egg filling (we decided to use a rather untraditional mix of chevre and maple-smoked cheddar). Those are currently in the oven. We’ve also made a batch of Kachauri filling, which is soaked and pureed split peas cooked with spices and such; that will fill a flat bread later. In another half-hour we’ll be able to continue the whole wheat and oatmeal bread recipe, and once we’ve baked all the Sambouseks we can bake the plain rolls from the batch of dough we made last night.

Good to get off of my feet for a moment, but soon it’ll be back to the wonderful smells of baking bread!

As previously mentioned, my husband and I are baking bread for 25 people for a friend’s Twelfth Night feast. Last night we made doughs from the ‘Artisan bread in 5 minutes a day’ book for a plain artisan loaf and a Limpa bread (minus the anise seeds since we couldn’t find any at the store and didn’t have time to order them). Last night we also baked Kahk—a traditional Iraqi recipe for round, crispy breads—from the ‘Baker’s Odyssey’ book.

We’re currently baking rounds of Limpa in roll form; we of course had to ‘quality-test’ the batch, and they’re awesome! Next we’ll bake rounds of plain rolls. We also started a sponge going for whole wheat-oatmeal bread, also from the Baker’s Odyssey book. We still have some cornbread mix from the Make-a-Mix cookbook that we plan to turn into muffins with the addition of some cheddar, whole corn kernels, and cayenne.

Now, back to baking with me!

Today’s Booking Through Thursday is all about anticipation:

What new books are you looking forward to most in 2008? Something new being published this year? Something you got as a gift for the holidays? Anything in particular that you’re planning to read in 2008 that you’re looking forward to? A classic, or maybe a best-seller from 2007 that you’re waiting to appear in paperback?

Oddly, the two books I’m looking forward to the most are the ones I get to use this week. My husband and I are going to a Twelfth Night feast this weekend at a friend’s, and we were asked if we’d be willing to make bread for 25 people. Willing? We’re psyched! As it so happens—and this is a total concidence—I just got review copies of two very appropriate cookbooks. One is A Baker’s Odyssey, a book of traditional bread recipes from around the world. The other is Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. So we get to make a bunch of really great breads that we’ve never made before, share them with wonderful people, and test out two review cookbooks! It doesn’t get much better than that.

Speaking of cookbooks, I have two new book reviews up: Wild Game Cookery and Make-a-Mix. More to come—particularly those bread books!