dlgreen

The wife and I are having guests over for a nice dinner in exchange for a favor they did us, and I’ve decided on the menu for the evening.

Bread: Seaded Sourdough
Salad: Mixed greens
Dinner: Spinach Mushroom and Ricotta Ravioli w/homemade Italian tomato sauce
Desert: Molten Chocolate Cake (a la butter pig)

Recipes for the pasta are below, and pictures will be posted after the dinner is over.

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The first type of bread made from the starter was a loaf of country white. If the yeast and lactobacilli bacteria had been from the San Fransisco bay area this loaf would have been called a sourdough. As it turned out both loafs had an extremely present bread smell and a slightly sour taste that increased as the loafs aged, but never became overbearing. Overall this was a great beginning to artisan bread making, and I would encourage anyone to make this bread before continuing on to any other more complex bread recipes.

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A few weeks ago I set out to do something that no one I personally know has done before. To catch wild yeast and build a functional starter without resorting to commercial yeast. I have tried this once before, last summer, in what can only be described as a miserable failure. I never managed to get a culture much less a starter out of it. However I am proud to say that this time around with the help of Breads from the La Brea Bakery I have successfully collected a culture, and developed that culture into a starter.

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I made pizza last night on impulse.  Started at around 7 and finished at around 9.  It came out really nicely.  Unfortunately a recipe is impossible to give out since I haven’t used a recipe for pizza in years.  However I can give a basic recipe that I modify based on what I feel like.
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According to this newspaper (soul sucking registration required…use bugmenot Ohio is considering becoming the fourth state in the country to have a “stronger” form of marriage. Admittedly at first it doesn’t seem like to bad of an idea, but when you think about the reason behind it it’s actually insulting. It’s an insult to me in two ways. 1) The government is insulting me by telling me that they don’t think that my marriage is going to last and 2) It would be an insult to me if my wife told me that she didn’t trust me enough to have a “traditional” marriage and she wanted a covenant marriage. And on that note what are two people who can’t trust each other doing getting married! John Scalzi discusses this in depth so I’m linking to his page, and I’m not going to try to reproduce his argument. Instead I’m going to discuss why covenant marriage will never work in it’s current form.
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In a probably vain attempt to improve the spelling around here I have installed a spell checker on all my copies of mozilla firefox. For others who have bad spelling and would like to use it too it’s called Spellbound. And it’s a port of the thunderbird spell check to firefox/mozilla. Lets see how it does

Tomarrow is ChiliFest at work. So I’m making….(can you handle the suspence)….CHILI. Following a long standing tradition of mine (whenever you have a captive audiance try a new recipie) I’m making the Domestic Goddess’ Vegetarian Chili. Tastes pretty good so far but the camera is out of bateries so you don’t get a picture today. Maybe I’ll remember to take a picture tomarrow morning before it gets eaten.
UPDATE: The chili won runner-up under the most unique category. I (and others) think it tasted better than the winner, but unfortunatly the winner was almost more of a hummus than a chili, and since the category was most unique, and not best tasting unique chili. Oh well, it’s still yummy. Thanks Domestic Goddess!

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