My beer-drinking secret

When Jill and I started thinking about adding soups and salads to our menu, one of our criteria for doing so was that we would have to find a way to make our own bread. We don't like buying things that we can make, because the quality suffers so much when baked goods are not fresh. However, baking great artisan bread in relatively large quantities usually requires a different set of equipment and even different ovens than we have, so it took us a while to figure out how to do it. We eventually developed a recipe based on Cook's Illustrated's "no-knead bread", which has a unique mixing and baking technique that results in great flavor and crust development. One of the unusual things about the recipe is that you mix the dough the night before baking the bread, and the dough includes beer to impart a nice fermented flavor. The best beer to use is a light American-style lager, which doesn't make the bread taste too beery, so I buy 24-packs of whatever cruddy beer is on sale at the liquor store. I make the dough on Sunday night, and Travis comes in early on Monday morning to shape and bake the loaves.

This process has been working well for us for months. A few weeks ago I took a Sunday off, so I asked Travis to mix the dough himself. The next day when I got to work, Travis said that he was so relieved about something that had been bothering him for a long time. Every Monday he would find empty beer cans in the recycling bin, and he didn't realize that I was using the beer for the bread dough. He thought I just hung out by myself late at night at Generous Servings and drank really bad beer. He was less concerned about my drinking habit than my poor taste in beer. When he told me this I laughed so hard that I strained a muscle in my side.

Have you made it to the Highland Micro-Market yet? We had a great turnout on our first market day. The second week was much slower because the weather was bad, and this past Thursday was steady but not super-busy. It's always nervewracking to start something like this, because the beginning is so uneven, and you're never sure if it's going to work out. Of course all the vendors need to make a certain amount of money for it to be worth their time, although no one is trying to get rich from selling stuff at a farmers' market. God bless those of you who have come to the MiMa several times already--you're the greatest!

I got my first CSA box from Heirloom Gardens (one of the farmers at the MiMa), and it was full of great greens. There was some cress in there that was incredibly fresh and spicy--I've never had such fresh cress before, and the intensity of flavor is amazing. I am looking forward so much to tomatoes and peas and such.

Mitch (The Green Fooder) is offering Ela Family Farms' fruit shares through the MiMa, and I would trade my kingdom for a peach right now. Colorado peaches don't show up until August, so when they do, make sure you've got a guaranteed supply and eat as many as you possibly can. I was in California last weekend and bought some cherries at a farm stand, and they were so good I realized that I had forgotten what in-season cherries taste like. Local fruit, picked ripe, is so much better than the year-round stuff from the grocery store, so sign up for a fruit share this year and revel in the best, freshest fruit around. If you end up with too much to eat (which doesn't seem likely), come to my Summer Pies and Tarts class and I'll show you how to make a great pie with it.