Fit, part 2

Still baking bread like it's going out of style. (As though bread would ever go out of style!) 

Here's a variety of 100% whole-grain loaves I've made, all using whole wheat and some combination of quinoa, oats, and chia seeds:

Sandwich loaf

Hearth boule

Another hearth boule

Country batards

Here's a very seedy character: a boule with flax seeds, sunflower seeds, blue poppy seeds, black sesame seeds and walnuts:

Here's some serious, serious challah bread. You can't tell in the picture, but those loaves were HUGE. I was really proud of the eight-strand braid.

 And here are the beautiful sandwiches Adam made from that challah for dinner. 

Arugula, ham, gruyere and cherry preserves. YES PLEASE

Here's a crazy-delicious loaf of brown soda bread, made from a cookbook that Anne sent me from Galway. Rich with sesame, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, it was unbelievably good on its own and absolutely transcendent with Adam's fig jam. 

The recipe called for "pinhead oats" and I had to Google to learn that that's European for steel-cut. Maybe it means I need to do more traveling, but the Googling required when cooking out of cookbooks from other countries always makes me feel like I'm adventuring.

And BAGELS! I totally made bagels, you guys. And they were good. Both of us are ex-East Coasters and one of us is an ex-New-Yorker, and so we feel pretty definitively authoritative on the subject. 

And of course there must always be chocolate.

This is a dark-chocolate and strawberry bread braid based on La Fuji Mama's guest-posted Apple Braid recipe on the lovely Jenna Beaugh's stellar blog, Eat Live Run. Here's a link to the recipe.

I used the dough recipe, braiding instructions and baking instructions from La Fuji Mama's recipe, and then improvised on the filling: strawberries from our beloved local strawberry stand chopped and mixed with a tiny bit of sugar went in, then I topped that with the chocolate croissant filling from Peter Reinhart's Artisan Bread Every Day. Then after the braid came out of the oven and had cooled a bit, I glazed it with a spur-of-the-moment strawberry glaze: I used a bit of strawberry juice that was left in the jar in which I'd mixed the berries and sugar, and I took that and a mashed strawberry and mixed them with powdered sugar and a little bit of Adam's homemade vanilla till it was a smooth, glaze-y consistency. Lastly, I melted some dark chocolate in a bowl set over boiling water and Pollocked it all over the loaf.

All of the breads in this post were made using recipes from Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day, with the exception of the soda bread, which comes from the Ard Bia Cookbook, and the dark-chocolate and strawberry bread braid.