Buttery Garlic Pull apart Bread for #BreadBakers

It's time for another edition of Bread Bakers and this month's host is lovely Karen from Karen's Kitchen Stories. She chose 'Garlic' to be the theme in celebration of National Garlic day, that is celebrated on the 19th April.

Pull apart bread has been on my to-make list for quite sometime and when I saw this buttery herb bread on King Arthur flour, I knew I had to bake it for this month's Bread Bakers. I wasn't disappointed with my choice.

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Heart of Winter Loaf

After enjoying a relatively mild winter weather in January, we are back in the freezer for February. I'm not complaining, not that I enjoy the cold but I'm happy when the weather is seasonal, if it is not then I get worried about global warming.

This 'Heart of Winter' loaf recipe is from King Arthur flour catalog and it caught my attention with its name itself. We are technically in the middle of winter and what perfect time but to make this bread right now.

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Harvest Grains Loaf

Bake-a-thon 2015: Day 2
Bake of the Day: Harvest Grains Loaf

Here's another family favorite bread that is soft and delicious with a nice blend of grains and seeds. I used King Arthur's Harvest Grain blend which is a mixture of 4 grains and 4 seeds. You can use any combination of grains and seeds. Grains like oat berries, millet, barley flakes and seeds like flax, poppy, sesame, sunflower etc can be used.

I think the next time I make this bread I will use a higher ratio of wholewheat to all purpose flour. Like I said before this is a very soft and tasty bread that is great toasted for even in a sandwich. I made some potato curry & cheese sandwiches and also Nutella sandwiches with this bread. Both tasted great.

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Cucumber Tomato Sandwich with Hummus (for World Vegetarian Day)

Today is World Vegetarian Day, thanks to Mir for telling the group about this. After the month long mega marathon, I have quite a few posts in the drafts that need to be posted. So today seemed to be the best day to post one of them.

This sandwich recipe is made with Cuban bread, hummus and harissa that I made for the mega marathon. I also had some cucumber and tomatoes from my garden and I added them on top for a colorful sandwich. Serve with a soup and you have yourself a filling meal.

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Grilled Cheese with Tomato Soup

Buffet on Table: Week 1 -- Combos from Countries

Day 3: US -- Grilled Cheese with Tomato Soup

We are stopping in the United States for a hearty and comforting combo of grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. This is a such a classic combination; crunchy, buttery bread and melted cheese just begs to be dunked in a big bowl of hearty tomato soup.

One good thing about this combo is that both the sandwich and the soup can be customized to ones palate. So I took the liberty and made them both with Indian flavors. Skip the green chutney and caramelized onion in the sandwich and you have an all American sandwich.

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Vegetarian Green Eggs (with Spinach)

Blogging Marathon# 54: Week 3/ Day 1

Theme: Kid's Delight -- Cooking from Kid's Books/ TV shows

Dish: Green Eggs with Spinach

My theme for this week's Blogging Marathon is very interesting, it is 'Kid's Delight -- Cooking from Kid's Books/ TV shows'. PJ is hosting this month's Kid's Delight event with this very unique and interesting theme. My son loves to read books and like any kid watches TV too. So I thought it would be fun to make some dishes from books & TV shows he reads and watches.

For the first day, I made Vegetarian Green Eggs from Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham children's book. Like other Dr. Seuss books it is a very child friendly book with lots of rhyming words in simple vocabulary that even beginning readers will understand.

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Oats Bread with Maple and Walnuts for #BreadBakers

For this month's #BreadBakers challenge, our host for the month Rocio picked 'breads with oats'. We are free to pick any form of oats -- steel cut, rolled or quick and it can be a sweet or savory bread.

I chose to make Oats bread with maple syrup and walnuts from King Arthur Whole Grains Baking cookbook. Whole wheat and oats are the featured whole grains in this soft, high rising loaf. Original recipe used maple sugar, but since I don't have it, I just used light brown sugar. Maple syrup adds a hint of sweetness and the nuttiness of walnuts is a nice counterpoint. This bread is great as is or toasted with some butter, jam or my kids favorite Nutella.

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Cucumber Tea Sandwich

Blogging Marathon# 52: Week 4/ Day 3

Theme: Bookmarked Recipes

Dish: Cucumber Sandwich
Today's recipe is very very simple with just few ingredients. Many of you might even think that this sandwich doesn't really need a recipe post because it's that easy and simple.

All you need is green chutney, cucumber, cream cheese (or thick curd) and bread slices. With all the sandwich breads that I have been making, I was looking for simple sandwich recipes and I landed on this post by Sala @ Veggie Belly. Her clicks make you want to grab a sandwich right out of the monitor :-)

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Semolina Wholewheat Bread

Blogging Marathon# 52: Week 4/ Day 1

Theme: Bookmarked Recipes

Dish: Semolina Bread from Sandhya's My Cooking Journey
My theme for the final week of this month's marathon is 'bookmarked recipes'.  It is almost impossible to pick just 3 dishes from my ever growing list of bookmarks, so I narrowed my search to just breads. After the month long mega baking marathon from April, I have many breads and other baked goodies bookmarked -- I thought this will be the beginning of many I tried from those.
First up is Sandhya's 'Semolina Bread'. Her pictures really won me over and I immediately bookmarked it to try soon. I actually made the bread twice since she posted.

Semolina bread has been on my to-try list for a very long time. But most of the recipes I saw, needed a covered cloche or a special baking utensil. Also most of them looked very crusty and chewy. Since my family prefers soft, sandwich bread I never got around to try any of the recipes.

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Sourdough Cinnamon Raisin Bread

BM# 51 -- Baking Marathon: Day 10

Bake of the Day: Breads -- Sourdough Cinnamon Raisin Bread

Today I have a cinnamon raisin bread made with sourdough starter. I was planning to bake a sourdough bread and fed the starter the day before I wanted to make it. Then in the morning, I checked my blog to see that I already posted that recipe. So had to change the plan and a new search in King Arthur flour site landed me on this cinnamon raisin bread with sourdough starter.

It's been a long time I baked a cinnamon raisin bread and so started working on it right away. The difference between the one I usually bake and this is: here the cinnamon sugar and raisins are layered in after the first rise whereas in the other recipe, they are simply kneaded in.

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Swedish Limpa (Rye Bread)

BM# 51 -- Baking Marathon: Day 5

Bake of the Day: Swedish Limpa (Rye Bread)

I love trying out new ingredients and when I go to a grocery store, I feel like a kid in a toy store. I go with 2~3 things in mind to buy and end up with buying way more than that. So on one of my trips to Whole Foods, I picked up Whole grain Rye flour because I thought I saw seeing a recipe with it. But as luck might have it, I was actually imagining that recipe and couldn't find anything.

Hence the flour sat in the pantry for quite sometime, until I saw this Swedish Limpa or Rye Bread recipe in King Arthur catalog. The use of caraway & fennel seeds gives this bread the unmistakable rye flavor. I reduced the quantity of both the spices because I wasn't sure if we'll like the strong flavor. There's also some orange oil added to the dough making it very fragrant. The house smelled amazing when this bread was baking.

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Sweet Spring Bread

Happy Easter Sunday Everyone!!
Since I am doing the month long baking marathon, I thought why not extend the baking theme to the weekends too and post some of the bakes that I made from my cookbooks. This way I can link them to Valli's 'Cooking from Cookbook Challenge' and clear some of my baking recipes too.

I was planning to bake this Sweet Spring Cake on the first day of Spring, i.e., March 20, but we had a snow storm that day and it didn't really feel like Spring, so I pushed it until this past week when finally we got a little glimpse of Spring. It went back to being chilly and cold again, but at least there's hope that it will get better soon.

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Basic Sourdough Sandwich Loaf

BM# 51 -- Baking Marathon: Day 4

Bake of the Day: Breads -- Basic Sourdough Sandwich Loaf

I have had sourdough starter for more than 4 years now, but as a family we are not much into crusty breads. So I don't call myself a sourdough baker, I have a sourdough starter that I use along with quite a bit of yeast to make soft, everyday not-so crusty breads. Real sourdough bakers utilize the starter itself to leaven the breads instead of relying on yeast.

As I was looking for sourdough sandwich bread, I found this beginner bread recipe on the Kitchn blog and one look at the pictures I knew this was exactly what I need to bake with my starter. I followed the recipe to the 'T' and the bread turned out just perfect. Here's my just fed, bubbly sourdough starter. Here's the post with the recipe for the Sourdough Starter.

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Multigrain Loaf Bread

BM# 51 -- Baking Marathon: Day 3
Bake of the Day: Breads -- Multigrain Loaf Bread
After 2 easy bread recipes (sandwich bread and focaccia), here's a yeast bread with multi-grains and follows the typical 2 rise bread making process. This bread has quite a number of whole grain flours in it and is packed with 11 grams of whole grains per serving.

I have a very well stocked pantry, so I had all the ingredients on hand. If you don't have any of the flours, then feel free to increase the quantity of another flour to make this bread.

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Easy Sandwich Bread

BM# 51 -- Baking Marathon: Day 1
Bake of the Day: Breads -- Easy Sandwich Bread
Our Blogging marathon team is starting a month long Baking marathon today. Good thing is we knew about the marathon almost 6 months ago, so I started baking or at least planning what to make all this time. Eating all this flour and sugar all by myself or just with my family would have been quite a challenge, so I have been utilizing all the opportunities to bake and feed (and share the calories) friends and family.
There are no official themes for this marathon, but I imposed some on myself to streamline my thoughts. For the first week (or first week and a half), my theme is going to be 'Yeast & Sourdough Breads'. 

I have stopped buying store bought bread for quite a while now and try to make a loaf every week. My son loves bread and can happily live on sandwiches for breakfast, lunch & dinner. I pack him sandwiches to school too. Our requirement for bread is simple, it has to be soft and not too crusty. It could be sweet or slightly savory, it should work in pb&j and/ or grilled cheese.

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Veggie Burger Sandwich (Beans & Veggie Burger)

Blogging Marathon# 50: Week 1/ Day 2

Theme: American Sandwiches

Dish: Veggie Burger Sandwich

Homemade Veggie burgers have a bad rap -- they are flavorless and have a very high tendency to fall apart while cooking. There are quite a few good quality frozen veggie burgers but most of them are soy based and have long list of unnecessary ingredients with very complicated spellings. There are a ton of recipes for veggie burger recipes on the Internet and after going through a number of recipes I found this recipe by Guy Fieri on the Food Network site.

This recipe uses 3 different types of beans; white, chickpeas and black beans. I used only 2 types of beans and the burger worked beautifully, it didn't fall apart on me and cooked perfectly in the skillet.

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Vegetarian Hoagie Sandwich

Blogging Marathon# 50: Week 1/ Day 1

Theme: American Sandwiches

Dish: Hoagie Sandwich

We are starting a brand new edition of blogging marathon today and my theme for this week is 'American Sandwiches'. Didn't realize that there are around 70-80 different types of sandwiches in the US until I saw the list of sandwiches on Wiki that Valli shared with us. More than 90% of these are meat based, so after carefully looking through all my options, I picked 3 sandwiches that were vegetarian and those we knew I would be making again and again. 

For the first day, I made Hoagie sandwich. This is a kind of submarine sandwich and has quite a few different names like a sub, wedge, hoagie, hero, grinder etc. it is interesting to know that there are about 13 different names for this very sandwich in US. A submarine sandwich basically consists of a long roll of Italian or French bread that is split width wise either into two pieces or opened in a "V" on one side, and filled with a variety of meats, cheeses, vegetables, seasonings, and sauces.

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Afghani Bolani (Potato Stuffed Afghani Flat bread)

Blogging Marathon# 49: Week 4/ Day 2

Theme: Bookmarked Recipes

Dish: Afghani Bolani

For day 2 of this week's marathon,  I made a stuffed flatbread from Afghanistan called Bolani. This recipe has been on my to-make list ever since I saw a bunch of my fellow bloggers make it for the A-Z International marathon.

Bolani also spelled as Bulani or Boulanee is filled bread in Persian. Afghani bolani is a stuffed flatbread that is either baked or fried. It has a thin crust and can be stuffed with any veggie like potato, pumpkin, spinach, lentils or chives. It is served with either plain yogurt or mint yogurt. Since my husband doens't eat yogurt, I made him a simple tomato chutney.

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Spicy Vegetable Sandwich (Masala VeggieToast)

Blogging Marathon# 49: Week 2/ Day 1

Theme: Cooking for 1

Dish: Masala Toast

Being a South Indian, eating bread for a meal used to be a blasphemy some decade years ago. But then things and my thoughts changed when I came to the States and it was then I realized anything that fills your stomach can be eaten at any time of the day.

During my graduate studies, I was in Tampa for 3 months for internship and I shared an apartment with 2 American interns. This was still within a year of my stay in US and I wasn't completely used to the American food. I used to slave away in the kitchen cooking my rice, dal and curry (I didn't have a pressure cooker, so cooking used to take for ever). My American roomies on the other hand kept the fridge stocked with their cold cuts, cheese etc. and they used to be in and out of the kitchen with their sandwiches in no time. That was my first step towards sandwiches.

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Carrot-Zucchini Bread

It has been a while I participated in Home Baker's Challenge and even this month I would have missed the posting deadline if I hadn't checked the FB updates. I remember seeing this month's bakes announcement last month and then completely forgot about it during thew holiday season. Thankfully I remembered about the challenge right on time and made this moist and delicious Carrot-Zucchini bread yesterday.

My son does not like carrots and avoids them like plague. Interestingly, I was looking through my blog posts from few years back and I wrote in one of the posts that my son loved carrots and added them in just about everything. It's all reversed now and he doesn't want to get even close to carrots. So the easiest thing to do is disguise it in some way, so he'll eat it.

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