I applied a bunch of system patches, did a server reboot, and upgraded to the latest version of Drupal today. The server took about 5 minutes to come back, which is longer than usual, and just long enough to make me worry that I was going to have to spend the rest of my day emailing back and forth with tech support. Happily, it looks like everything came back fine.
Some french bread I put together quickly for a pot of black bean soup. Not world class bread, but great for mopping up the soup.
My Christmas Stollen. I used the Peter Reinhart recipe. I changed a few things, like using Amaretto instead of Grand Marnier and dried cranberries instead of raisins. I was very pleased with the results.
Here is a picture of the Cholocate Chip Sourdough I tried last week. It didn't come out exactly as I'd hoped, but it is was still pretty good. I mean, c'mon.... chocolate.... sourdough... how can you go wrong?
I've got a sourdough rye and sourdough French bread fermenting right now. I'm using a couple of the recipes from Local Breads. We'll see how they come out tomorrow.
I'm still working on tuning it. Ideally it'd be just as easy to stay in tune with what is happening on TFL there as it is in any other RSS reader. Personally, I watch TFL activity in a number of places: on My Yahoo page, on live journal, now on Food Buzz, and via email updates too. My goal is to make it easy to keep up with TFL where ever I and others happen to be hanging out.
My laptop has been in the shop, so for the past few days I've only been on the site long enough to check that there was no spam. That said, it looks like there have been some very good posts lately, like ehanner's garlic bread and bwraith's recent blog posts. I have some catching up to do.
I did bake this weekend. I tried a sourdough with chocolate chips. I added milk and some sugar to the dough and bumped up the amount of starter to around 10%. It was pretty good, but I don't think I really nailed it. Have to experiment with that some more, because I love the idea.
Oh yeah, and I got my hands on Dan Lepard's baking guide that ran with the Guardian a few weekends back. If you have any way of getting your hands on a copy, do. It is quite nice.
The sad thing is I'm just going to chop this up and let it dry out to make stuffing out of it. Yes, it is cheaper and easier for me to do this than go buy a bag of bread crumbs at the store. Besides, this will taste considerable better I am sure.
As you may have noticed, in the past couple of days I've replaced a few of the ads on this site with ads for Food Buzz.
The folks at Food Buzz approached me a month or so ago to talk about sponsoring the site. After chatting with them I agreed because it seemed like a mutually beneficial relationship. Food Buzz will include The Fresh Loaf as one of their Featured Publishers, thus increasing the exposure of this site. Presumably that'll increase traffic here and expose more people to the great content we're creating here.
For us it establishes a relationship with a vibrant, growing food portal. Their site is structured more like a social networking site and includes a lot of features I'll be unlikely to add here, thinks like geographically tagged restaurant reviews and photos. It seems like a good place for some of us who have other food-related passions than just bread to go find other like-minded folks to share our enthusiasm with.
This relationship should also improve the finances of TFL. I'm afraid I'm not able to quit my day job to devote myself full-time to The Fresh Loaf or anything like that yet, but I should be able to do things like migrate the site to a faster server or pay for a backup service in the next few months without going into the red. I have a few other projects I've been meaning to work on here too, and this increases my incentive to get on it as soon as I can. So it seems like a good thing all around.
