A Dinner Date

Maia and I embarked yesterday morning on making Julia's transition back to life in Charleston a little bit easier. She has been in Winston for the past week helping her brother and sister-in-law through a very horrible dose of cancer. Her sister-in-law was diagnosed just before Christmas and they are already on their last treatment option - in short it's awful. Julia has been there helping with the hospital room duties, watching of the dogs, emotional/mental support and attempting to get some work done all through it all. There is not much you can do to help in a situation such as that except be there for the person, so when we found out she was definitely coming home today we brainstormed a few ways to make her homecoming a bit more welcome. We were going to clean the house for her, because how wonderful is it to walk into a clean house! But Joe said he had that under control, so we decided instead to prep a meal for them to simplify the first meal or so back.

So, Saturday morning we met at Harris Teeter and gathered our grocery list of items before beginning the process at my house. It was a tad bit chilly in Charleston (and the rest of the east coast apparently), and my house offered a fireplace, which I have to say significantly improves the chill factor in the air. We had decided on vegetable lasagna, some homemade bread and a salad - it had a good mix of comfort food and healthiness, plus Maia and I had good recipes for the lasagna and bread respectively. We began with the bread...which, however, turned out to be the wrong way to begin (I'll get to that later). This dough was a bit stickier than the whole wheat dough I made last week and I had a bit of a 'sucking up in the mixer' issue, but it was resolved with the help of the spatula and some q-tips. The bread being mixed just needed to sit in it's bowl and rise so we moved on to lasagna making.

This involved a LOT of vegetable cutting, which Maia was actually enjoying compliments of our new Christmas knives that were extraordinarily sharp (if you've never cut with extremely sharp knives before, you should, it makes you understand why real chefs with 'real' utensils love to cook).

While Maia was cooking the lasagna vegetables, I took over cutting and made up a salad.

Kaylinn sat sulkily on the floor, unhappy that no food was coming her way.

Lasagna assembly was next.

Resulting in a B-E-A-utiful lasagna. After consideration of both options we decided to hold off on baking it since many times Julia comes home with food, we thought it would be better to provide the option of freezing the lasagna if needed.

After some dishes and wiping down the counter we were finished with this installment of the meal making process and Maia headed home, just in time to keep from having a major allergy attack thanks to the feline members of the family. All that was left was for me to finish up the bread. Unfortunatley herein lied the problem.

The bread recipes I've been using are a no-knead variety, which use 12-18 hours of rising time rather than the physical act of kneading to get the yeast doing its thing. Not paying attention to this we started the bread a 10:00, having it mixed and in the bowl for the first rise at 10:30am. If you count out 12-18 hours from this you land yourself between the hours of 10:30pm and 4:30am... Yep, not the best bread baking time to choose. Once you mix it at the 12-18 hour mark you then let it rise for 2 hours again before baking it, which this one took 30 minutes. So if I did the 10:30 option that would be putting me to bed at a sweet 1:30-2:00am. I had been at church Friday night for an all night prayer vigil, which meant I was not feeling another late night. Since I didn't know if it would impact the bread to let it rise longer, I set my alarm for a sweet 4:30 am and headed to bed. At 4:30 I stumbled into the kitchen, stirred the dough, put some herbs in the pan, spread the dough out in it, washed my hands, and stumbled back into the bedroom to sleep for 2 hours while it did it's second rise. Then at 6:45 I stumbled back out to the kitchen, did some more herb adding, put the oven on to preheat, and laid on the couch until I heard the beep. Once the oven was hot, I got up and put the bread in and laid back down on the couch to sleep for the 30 minutes while it cooked. By 7:30 the bread was finished, and after wake-up number 4 I was still a little tired, but not really feeling like going to sleep just to wake up in another 30-40 minutes to prep before teaching Sunday school this morning. So, lesson #1 - do not start no-knead bread at 10:30 in the morning. But, lesson #2 - if you don't have problems falling back asleep after waking up and doing stuff for 10 minutes it does get you moving nice and early. AND - here is my first foccasia bread...


I dropped our dinner present off with Joe after church today, and we'll find out on Tuesday how it was. Joe was going to try really hard not to eat the bread before Julia got home :)