Julia Child's French Bread

This blog seems to be steadily becoming more focused on bread than on anything else, but I'm not going to stray from the trend with this post; I have another bread recipe to show you . Today I decided to try my hand at Julia Child's French bread recipe from her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume 2.

I took a quick look online for the recipe, as I really didn't want to type it up here. You can find the instructions at: http://andreasrecipes.com/2008/02/29/the-daring-bakers-make-julia-childs-french-bread/. 

The cookbook has many bread recipes to try, including brioche, regular white sandwich bread, and croissants, but the most basic of them is the French bread. Like Laura Calder's boule recipe that I posted about last month, French bread consists of only water, yeast, flour, and salt; it's really the most basic a bread recipe can get.

Where the recipe gets a little bit more complicated is that it requires kneading (which I have little experience doing), the numerous risings (three in fact), shaping the loaves, and creating a golden crust, but the instructions are extremely helpful so that I had little difficulty executing the recipe. I particularly appreciated the fact that Julia Child took the time to explain why kneading has to be done, because I'm not a very experienced bread baker and it opened my eyes up to developing the gluten of the bread so that it'll hold its shape in the oven.

Chocolate Cranberry Squares

 My mom requested that I make a chocolate cranberry square recipe, so I decided to give it a try today. The recipe actually came off a milk calendar we have lying around the house, but I managed to find it online as well. You can find the recipe here: http://www.dairygoodness.ca/milk/my-milk-calendar/recipes/gooey-chocolate-cranberry-squares.

It's actually a really easy recipe to make, but it includes two components. You need to make both a crust and a gooey, brownie topping for the crust. The crust is basically like a shortbread. It includes butter, flour, sugar, milk, and salt and it becomes a soft dough that you flatten into the bottom of a pan and bake for 15 minutes before adding the topping. The topping includes milk, flour, sugar, cocoa powder, butter, eggs, vanilla, and the dried cranberries, which you just have to mix together and pour over the pre-baked crust. Then the squares bake in the oven for 30 minutes.

I found I had to leave the squares in the oven longer than the recipe called for, however, simply because the squares seemed a bit too jiggly. I wondered if I left them in a bit too long though, because there wasn't any jiggle left when I removed them from the oven, as there's supposed to be, but once we cut into them we saw that they still had the moistness they're supposed to have.

Ciabatta Bread

 I've been itching to make something over the last week, so I decided to make Anna Olson's ciabatta bread recipe yesterday, which can be found at http://www.foodnetwork.ca/recipes/recipe.html?dishid=10906. I've never made ciabatta bread before, but the process of making it is similar to Laura Calder's boule recipe, so I figured I was up to the challenge. The biggest difference was that I had to make a starter, also called biga, which I had never heard of doing before.

In truth, although I began the recipe yesterday, most of it was done today. All I could do yesterday was make the starter, as it had to sit in the fridge for at least 12 hours. Upon taking the starter out of the fridge (which consists of yeast, water, and flour), I noticed that it was full of bubbles. From what I understand, the starter is meant to add to the flavour of the bread, as a fermentation process takes place while the starter mixture sits in the fridge. Only a cup of the starter was required for the dough, so I decided to double the bread dough so that I could make full use of the starter. This recipe gives you enough starter for two cups. 

The next step after allowing the starter to ferment was to mix the actual bread dough. This bread dough begins with a mixing of milk and yeast. Then you add the olive oil, water, and one cup of the starter mixture to the dough. Once that's all combined, the flour and salt get added. The recipe uses a stand mixer, but I don't have one, so I mixed the flour and salt into the mixture with a spoon, and then kneaded the dough by hand until it felt stretchy and elastic. Then the dough went into a bowl greased with olive oil, was covered with plastic, and left to rise for 90 minutes.

The Notre-Dame Basilica of Old Montreal

I enjoy traveling, and although I don't get to do it very often, I really want this blog to be an opportunity for me to talk about what little travel I do get to do. So, I'm going to talk about the little Montreal trip that I took with my sister and friend, or more specifically, the Notre-Dame Basilica that we got to see while in Old Montreal.

In three days, it can be difficult to see all the sights of Old Montreal; there are just so many. We were lucky to get a chance to see the Notre-Dame Basilica, and it was definitely worth the $5 entrance fee and was probably my favourite historic site we visited during the whole trip.

We had wandered past it numerous times during the course of our trip, and its beauty is stunning, even from the outside. Not only that, but it was just one of the buildings in Old Montreal that happened to be lit up, making Old Montreal a little more scenic for the Christmas season.

It was on our last day in Montreal that we finally made time to see the inside of the Notre-Dame Basilica. Upon arrival, there weren't any tours being provided, so we just had a look around the Basilica and the little "wedding chapel" in  the back that's called Chapel of Notre-Dame du Sacre-Coeur. Later, when we did get an English-language tour, we learned that a later addition to the Basilica was the stained glass windows depicting the history of Montreal, including Montreal's religious history, the arrival of Jacques Cartier to Montreal on his second voyage, and Montreal's relationship with the native peoples. Unfortunately, the battery in my camera died at the Basilica, so the pictures were taken with my cell phone and are of a lower quality than I would like due to lighting, but you can definitely get the idea from the pictures below at just how beautiful the stained glass is.

A Culinary Tour of Old Montreal: Day One

I just got back from a little trip to Montreal, where my sister, a friend, and I spent three days. We decided to stay in Old Montreal, as we enjoy history and we knew from our research that it's an extremely historical and beautiful area.Naturally, we were also very excited about the food there, and we expected to eat Quebecois or even French food. What struck us, however, is that Montreal is so much more than that. It's highly multicultural, and the food in Old Montreal definitely reflects that. Allow me to provide you with some reviews of the restaurants we ate at.

Stash Cafe: Our first stop was the Stash Cafe. After an early morning, a small breakfast of delicious cinnamon rolls made by my friend, and a walk from Central Station to Old Montreal, the Stash Cafe was a welcome lunch. Located on the corner of Rue Saint Francois Xavier and Rue St. Paul, this little Polish place is in the heart of Old Montreal, and it reflects Montreal's multicultural identity.

Although the interior of the restaurant is somewhat dark, the atmosphere is cozy and warm, and the place was extremely busy. To me, the crowd of people was a sure sign that the food at Stash Cafe is good. 

We made our choice to eat here partly because our friend wanted to try something she had never tasted before, and also because we knew a hot, Polish meal would be welcome on a very cold winter day. My friend chose to eat potato and cheese perogies, which she had eaten before this time, but the addition of sauer kraut on the plate gave her something new to try; unfortunately, she's not a big fan of cabbage, so she didn't enjoy the sauer kraut too much either. I ended up having perogies as well, but while half of mine were filled with the common potato and cheese, the other half were filled with mushroom and cabbage, a combination that I hadn't previously had the privilege to try. I thought the food was really tasty, and that the only flaw of the restaurant was that their portions are rather small. I was still a little bit hungry after the meal, but at least I knew I wouldn't be too full for dinner that night. My sister had bigos, which is a Polish stew made of cabbage, sausage, and sauer kraut, which she thoroughly enjoyed. It was probably one of the heartier options, and she left the restaurant with a full belly.