October 10, 2026 - Baking Day

 It seems like forever since I've had time to make different types of recipes - two types of bread and cookies. Most of the summer, I was barely keeping up with having one kind of bread available. 

I started with a Marbled Rye. It was the first time I've made this recipe and it was perfect. Such a great dough to work with.

The kitchen was so hot that all the dough was rising way faster than I had planned so things got crazy in the kitchen!  Plus, Vince was planning to watch the Georgia Tech/Duke game. I always ask Vince the night before if we have games to plan meals around so I can plan what time we eat. Last I knew, the game was at 6:30. At some point during my baking frenzy, Vince told me the Tech game had been moved up to 2:30. Here's what Vince thinks he communicated to me: Because the game time got changed, we need to eat at 1:30. Here's what I heard: They moved the Tech game from 6:30 to 2:30 because of the weather. Here's what I thought: Oh, good, he'll be downstairs watching football and I can turn my music up loud!  

I never thought about having dinner on the table by 1:30 . . my brain was concentrating on bread and rolls and cookies. Then about 1, he said "Are we still going to eat by 1:30?" Huh? Who said anything about eating at 1:30?  We were having a broccoli and chicken casserole. Chicken hadn't even been cut up yet but I got busy. Once it was in the oven, it only had to bake (at 450) for 20 minutes because the chicken got browned quickly in a skillet on top of the stove.

I had the wall oven, which is what I mostly use, preheating to 350 to bake the bread so I switched it to 450 for the casserole. I store many of my cast iron pots in the regular oven so I had to take all those out, get it preheated to 350 for the bread.  

The casserole was cooked, I had leftover homemade pasta so I heated that up . . and that was dinner. 

The rye bread was baked, then the rolls/hamburger buns went into the regular oven. It was a bit chaotic for a while but it all worked out. We ended up eating about 2:15 so Vince probably missed a few plays.

All that to say that I had hoped to have the rolls ready for dinner but we ended up cutting into the hot rye loaf for our bread. It was past ready to be baked and the rolls weren't quite ready.

I used Grains in Small Places Sweet Dinner Rolls recipe for the rolls I made.  I made 7 rolls and 3 hamburger buns. We're having grilled pork burgers tomorrow.

Next thing to bake was Grains in Small Places (can you see that I love her recipes?) Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies.

I don't like chocolate, and I didn't have any chocolate chips in the house so I used white chocolate chips. I also added chopped walnuts.  I think next time I make them, I'll leave out the chips completely. They are really good cookies!

It's after 5 now; Georgia Tech game is still on. I'm headed outside to see if there's anything left in the garden I can salvage and maybe plant some arugula and get one bed of garlic planted.