Dinner: Kale, Strawberries, Smoked Salmon + Wheat Bagels

Tonight we had kale and strawberries from the Farmers Market, and smoked salmon and cream cheese on the homemade wheat everything bagels we baked this afternoon.

As Promised, Wheat Bagels

So it seems that I only need to cook all my breads for about 50% of the time that is recommended in the recipe. I didn't take these out when I thought they might be ready so they're a little darker than they probably should be. But they're still really good!

We used garlic, poppy seeds, sesame seeds and salt as toppings:

Here's a pic of the bagels in progress:

Streak's Donut

We've starting making a donut for Streak at night:


Pretty cute, huh? If you're really slow and careful you can share the couch with her:


She doesn't seem to mind:

Potato Rosemary Wheat

This week was Potato Rosemary Wheat bread, mainly because we cooked potatoes earlier in the week. For this bread you use the water the potatoes cooked in since it is more starchy I suppose.

I was able to use fresh rosemary from our neighbor's herb garden, which is always nice.

It also has a mashed up cooked potato, garlic (was supposed to be roasted but I didn't realize that until I was ready to put it in so it was raw :)), pepper and honey.

It was a very flavorful bread and we had no problem eating it all in 3-4 days. Definitely something I will make again.


Here is a detail shot of the crumb.

Today I'm starting wheat bagels, and also the starter for a sourdough bread. The sourdough start will take 7-14 days (!!!) so hopefully it will be ready next weekend.

Wheat Challah

This weekend's bread - a whole wheat Challah:



Again from the wheat bread book. For all the eggs and oil that went into this loaf, I feel like it is pretty dry. I've also finally gotten used to making two (or more) loaves and freezing the extras. I don't know why it took me so long to do that.

Tonight's Bread : Wheat Ciabatta

Transitional Wheat Ciabatta

Continuing my bread baking posts from my old defunct blog, today I made a half wheat, half white flour ciabatta from one of my new bread baking books, Whole Grain Breads, by Peter Reinhart (thank you Peter (Graham - not Reinhart - he gave me the book for XMas)!). Since getting this book I have made four wheat breads. This is the first one that is a 'transitional' bread, i.e. it has half white flour which is suppose to make it easier for people used to white flour breads to eat. I made a transitional bread this time just because I didn't have enough wheat flour for the full wheat recipe. All the breads from this book have come out well, and I like his 'delayed fermentation' method since it allows me to make the starters the night before and then bake the bread the next day - an easier schedule then some other bread books.

Dana and I enjoyed it with our Trader Joe's turkey chili - a simple but yummy dinner!

Ignoring .svn directories with emacs' eshell grep

I'm an emacs user. In the morning I fire up emacs and right away open up an eshell buffer. I prefer the eshell (M-x eshell) over the normal shell buffer due to its little perks like:

dylan:~/one/two/three/four/five$ cd .....
dylan:~/one

i.e.:

cd ... = cd ../..
cd .... = cd ../../..

It's the little things :).

Also, I like how when I'm in an eshell buffer and run grep, it opens the results in a new buffer and I can continue with whatever I'm doing.

One thing that has been annoying me for a while, however, was that when I ran grep -r in an eshell buffer it would also search through .svn directories, giving me a lot of crud in my results. In a normal bash shell I got around this by adding this line to my ~/.bash_aliases file:

alias grep="grep --exclude=\*.svn\*"

But that didn't work in eshell, since it's not really a bash shell. Luckily, after looking around a little, I found instructions on how to do aliases in eshell. I added a file called ~/.eshell/alias with the following contents:

alias grep grep --exclude=\*.svn\* $*

After killing and reopening my eshell, all is good! No more .svn directories in my greps. You'll notice that the syntax for the aliasing in eshell is similar, but not equal to the bash syntax. It seems you don't need the '=' or the quotes, and also you need to explicitly reference the args with the '$*'.