Novel Eats

This post is a few weeks after the fact, but it was really so nice to be home for the Fourth of July. I started a new job a few months ago, so I am still at the beginning of accruing vacation and sick days. When I left my last job I was very sorry to see all the days I earned go (although I did get my vacation days in the form of a nice check). So now, I have to be careful how many days of anything I take, and when there is a holiday that the company gives, I find myself appreciating it so much more.

Anyway, we didn’t do anything lavish or go see fireworks, although if you look out the window in the right direction you’ll see some fireworks through some trees off in the distance (yes – we have trees in NYC!). But I did make the usual big meal, which translates to – too big of a meal for two people, but a lovely amount of leftovers for a couple or three days. We had corn on the cob (a requirement of the holiday if you ask me), homemade bread, chocolate pie, and potato salad.

I just wanted to give you all a heads up that I plan on redesigning my website. I actually like the current look and layout pretty well, but this is more of a technical need for me. For the more technically inclined, I use Drupal as my platform, but I just haven’t had the time or technical know-how to address things that aren’t exactly working well on my blog. I plan to move to Wordpress which is an easier blogging system to use (and recently much improved with their 2.5 2.6 version), and should provide me with as much capability that I’ve been utilizing with Drupal, but in a simpler way.

We rarely buy a loaf of bread. Sometimes we do, and we’ll buy variations of bread – like hot dog buns or bagels. But your standard loaf of bread is typically made at home. It’s cheaper, very easy, and tastes just as good if not better. It’s also nice to control and know exactly what is going into our bread.

But back to the easy part. We have a bread machine. That’s why we can get away with making it all the time. Sure, that no-knead bread is an easy substitute, but if you want to throw all of your ingredients in and press the start button, and then a few hours later discover that you have a loaf of bread – well, that’s the easiest type of homemade bread you can get.

This loaf of bread is somewhere in between the easier and easy.

I recently had a hankerin’ for some cherries. I am not usually a cherry kind of girl, but when they’re in season I’ll indulge in a pound or two. If you get a perfectly ripe cherry, you’ll get a perfectly sweet and spicy flavor – too soon and it will be tart (not my favorite), too late, well it will just be too late.

After gorging myself, I decided that I needed to do something else with them. What I wound up with was a variation on (or very much inspired by) apple crisp.