i don't know what my problem is. on the weekdays i can't sleep in long enough, but on the weekends i wake up at the ass-crack of dawn. argh.

so now that i'm up. i might as well blog about our saturday while i wait for my laundry. i mentioned that zucchini was on sale at safeway, so we picked up more in the hopes of becoming america's next top model...er, i mean, in the hopes of making zucchini bread.

i've made it lots of times before, but i can't seem to find the recipe, nor remember it either. so we used one from m.bittman's how to cook everything.

mix the dry ingredients, mix the wet ingredients, then add the wet to the dry, fold the zucchini and walnuts in at the end. bake at 350F for about an hour or whenever the knife comes out clean.

our zucchini bread turned out ok. i kinda fell asleep so cavin took care of the rest (actually, he's the resident baker, so he took care of the most).

it came out pretty dense, with not as much zucchini flavor as i would have liked. i think next time i would add more than one cup of zucchini. there was something different about this bread than ones i've made before. maybe we could have kept it in the oven a little bit longer, but i don't think that was the problem. if you have any tips or another recipe that is superior than what we did, please leave a comment. zucchini bread is so easy to make that i'd like to have a go-to recipe that is easy to remember so that i can just whip up some in no time.

after the zucchini bread was made, cavin started work on the no-knead bread recipe from the new york times bread article that they ran in november. the thing about this bread that makes it different than most bread recipes out there, is that you don't have to knead the dough. you just let it rise (i think, i haven't read the article in a while) for 18 hours or so, and then bake it in a le creuset enamaled cast iron pot.

i've read a lot of positive comments on don rockwell's baking bread thread, plus pam & chief bro now swear by it also (though, i haven't yet seen how their bread turned out), so we're going to try to jump on the bandwagon, depending on how it turns out for us. cavin started making the bread yesterday around 4pm (yes, i was napping again so i didn't see exactly what cavin did, though i think he took notes in his bread notebook?). it's been sitting in a bowl covered with plastic wrap for the past 16 hours or so. here are some of our pictures:

cavin is still sleeping, but i think when he wakes up he is supposed to start folding the dough, let it rest again for 15 minutes, and then add more flour, let it rest for 2 hours, then start baking.

i'm very curious to see how this will turn out. i'll make sure to take more pictures of the process in case anyone wants to try the recipe out. we might have to let it rest longer than the 18 hours because i want to go to dupont farmer's market and pick up some mushrooms and what not.

i still need to get the turnips for the braised pork belly i'm supposed to make today, but unfortunately, turnip season is spring/summer, so i doubt i'll see any at the farmer's market. i should have thought about the seasonality of the ingredients before i jumped into marinating the pork belly in the coriander, dill and pepper. oh well. i saw some turnips at safeway yesterday, but they looked just general. i'll have to regroup and figure out if i want to have turnips out of season, or if i can find a better substitute. stay tuned.