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Since I have all these vanilla beans sitting around (I bought half a kilo of them a couple of months ago) as well as raspberry liqueur that nobody really wants to drink, I came up with this variation of my fruit bread. It just came out of the oven, so I can't try it yet. I won't know what it tastes like until I get to Italy and share it with my family! Let's hope this experiment was a success. ;) It sure smells and looks like a success.

Raspberry-Vanilla Fruit Bread

about 3-4 cups mixed dried fruits--a small handful each dried cherries, apricots, figs and apples and half a handful each dried peaches and pears
about 3-4 Tbsp candied ginger
3 vanilla beans, halved, seeds scraped out
1 cup raspberry liqueur
grated zest of two small clementines
2 Tbsp unsalted butter at room temperature
5/8 cup sugar
1 egg, beaten
2/3 cup milk
2 1/4 cups unbleached white flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp sea salt
1 cup walnuts, lightly toasted (stir often in a dry pan over med-low until they smell/taste toasty)

Cut the larger fruits into smaller pieces. The pieces of fruit in the bread can be as large or as small as you like. Place all the fruits in a saucepan with the ginger, liqueur, vanilla seeds and pods and clementine zest. Bring this to a boil, then remove the pan from the heat, cover and let it steep for about 30 minutes. (You don't really have to put the vanilla pods in this mixture, as the flavors won't have much time to come out. It might be nice to use them for something else, such as making vanilla sugar).

Butter and flour a loaf pan. Preheat your oven to 180° C (350° F). Cream the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl, then beat in the egg, then the milk.

Combine the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt in a large bowl. Make a well in the center and pour in the wet mix. Fold the mixture together, being careful not to overmix. Stir in the walnuts, the macerated fruit and its liquid. Spoon or pour the batter into the loaf pan.

Bake for 1 hour or until a knife inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean. Let the bread cool in the pan for 15 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling. Wrap the bread in plastic or foil once it's completely cooled. Wait until the next day before slicing it. In this bread's previous incarnations, we've enjoyed toasting it and spreading it with unsalted butter, cream cheese, or mascarpone.

When I was searching for something to eat this morning, I saw lots of things to make a good sandwich with (smoked turkey breast, buffalo mozzarella, tomatoes, gouda, goat cheese, prosciutto, etc.) and started craving one of my sandwich concoctions--I do make fabulous sandwiches. I was sad that I had no bread in the house, having eaten the last of a baguette late last night when I got hungry and, feeling very lazy, the last thing I wanted to do was to get dressed and go buy bread. So I thought about baking bread. I started thinking about various quick breads that might also make a good sandwich and got stuck on biscuits. Not only did it seem that a biscuit with mayo, tomato, turkey and gouda would probably be pretty damn tasty, I started craving just the biscuits themselves.

You all know how I love to cook and bake and if you've been reading for any length of time you know I have no trouble with quick breads, yeast breads, pie crusts or other pastry. Yet I have always been a drop-biscuit-from-Bisquick-mix kind of person. It's the ease of this method (and I do find the biscuits made this way tasty) that always wins over making my own from scratch. And even on the few occasions I've made biscuits from scratch, I've made drop biscuits, just so I wouldn't have to knead the dough and then clean up the mess from that. Lazy, I know. But today I was craving *real* biscuits, the kind that are round and tall and fluffy yet mouth-melty sexy. Oh gods.

I started searching for a recipe that had the ingredients listed by weight, because I've found that I always get better results when baking if I weigh. But alas, Americans are not into weighing, and even Alton Brown's recipe used volume measurements.

I searched my recipe database for biscuit recipes and came up with about ten of them. But which to use? I ended up flipping a coin to decide between what I decided were the two best candidates. The winner was from a book called Learning to Cook with Marion Cunningham. I have no idea who Marion Cunningham is, but damn does she have a good biscuit recipe!

Still missing a printer, I wrote only the bare essentials of the recipe down (her version is greatly detailed).

1/3 cup shortening, plus extra
2 cups AP flour, plus extra
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1 cup milk

Oven 225 C (450 F).

Stir dry ingredients together with a fork.

Add shortening and cut in.

Add milk and stir. Don't overmix.

Lightly knead about 10 times on a floured surface.

Cut out biscuits and place with a little space between them on a greased baking pan.

Bake 12-15 minutes or until golden brown.

A recipe like that would probably confound someone like V but is was probably more info than I needed. :P I could have done it with just the ingredient list and the oven temperature. ;) When I patted the dough out to a 1/2 inch thickness, ready to cut out the biscuits, I suddenly realized that I had nothing to cut them with, so I ended up using a Guinness pint glass.

They came out of the oven after a bit more than 15 minutes, beautifully browned and fluffed up. I took a few photos before spreading two of them with butter and devouring them. The biscuits were everything I wanted--a bit crispy on the outside and the fluffy insides did that sexy melting thing in my mouth. Is it possible to have oral sex with food? I think I just had oral sex with biscuits!

The recipe made eight biscuits and I only ate two, so I'm thinking forget the sandwich idea, go buy some sausage and make some sausage gravy and have biscuits and gravy for dinner. Ye Gods! I love knowing how to cook. :)

( two photos )

Edit: I'd like to include some notes about the making of this bread. I am a bit amused at my own nonchalant attitude about making up a yeast bread recipe for the first time. But that's just my attitude toward cooking in general. I like to make up my own recipes, not follow others--so I figure I understand the basics of yeast bread now, so why not make up a recipe for tomato bread, based on the recipe that I'm using for Italian bread (a recipe which is modified from a cookbook recipe)?

I figured I could use smashed roasted tomatoes rather than water and that it would be a good idea to add more salt than usual, as well as some sugar, to help highlight the flavor of the tomatoes. When it comes to flour, well, I used all the flour in my house. Thank goodness, I had just enough. That's the real reason why I used some whole wheat flour--I didn't have enough white. I didn't really realize how much liquid all those tomatoes would yield--I ended up with about twice as much bread as I usually do.

Deliciously sweet, tart, sensual tomatoes, filled with the energies of summer...I bought them at Viktualienmarkt. I loved how their different-colored skins and bits of pulp confettied the bread. :) When we ate the bread and roasted tomatoes (yes that's what we had for dinner!) last night V kept saying "fuck yum." And the whole roasted tomatoes were so divine with some of their balsamicy/olive oily/tomatoey juices spooned over the top and eaten whole--a sensual mouth experience on the level of raw oysters and sushi in the realm of pure sensual pleasure.

This bread was my entry for this week's Vegan Cook-Off. So we'll see how that turns out...

Ingredients:
an assortment of vine-ripened tomatoes--I used four orange plum tomatoes, four small red tomatoes and four small yellow tomatoes
13 small tomatoes, still on the vine
1 handful fresh basil leaves
sea salt and fresh ground black pepper
peperoncino oil (peperoncino steeped in extra virgin olive oil) or crushed red pepper
extra virgin olive oil
1-2 heads garlic
aged balsamic vinegar

Bread:
roasted tomato liquid (see below)
2 Tbsp unrefined sugar
4 Tbsp dry yeast
extra virgin olive oil
4 tsp salt, or to taste
1-2 cups whole-wheat flour
about 6 cups unbleached white flour

This makes four small loaves of bread.

Preheat your oven to 150 C (300 F). Prick each of the tomatoes which have been washed and removed from the vine with a knife. Toss them into an oven-safe pan or roasting tray . Toss in the basil, season with salt and pepper, and drizzle some peperoncino oil and olive oil over the top. Stir with your hands to mix everything up.

Gently wash the tomatoes which are still on the vine, being careful not to break them off the vine. Place them in another roasting pan. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.

Chop off the top of the heads of garlic, place on foil, drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and wrap tightly in the foil.

Place the tomatoes and the garlic in the oven together. Roast for one hour. Drizzle the tomatoes on the vine with aged balsamic vinegar and return to the oven for another half hour.

Mash the roast (off the vine) tomatoes, mashing in the cloves of roast garlic as well. Pour the tomato mush (there should be a bit more than 2 cups tomato mush; you can add water if you don't have enough) into a bowl, stir in 2 Tbsp sugar, and let cool to lukewarm.

Sprinkle the yeast over the top of the tomatoes and let stand a few minutes to dissolve. Add a few lugs of olive oil and 4 tsp salt. Stir in the whole wheat flour. Begin adding the white flour, a cup at a time, until you've added about five cups. Continue adding flour bit by bit just until a dough forms. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead until it becomes smooth, about 15 minutes. Put the dough in a large oiled bowl, turning once to coat with oil. Cover and let rise until doubled.

When the tomatoes on the vine come out of the oven, gently remove them with their juices to a deep plate or bowl to cool.

Punch the dough down and shape into four loaves. Let the loaves rise again on a baking sheet which has been lightly oiled and sprinkled with cornmeal. Heat your oven to 190 C (375 F). After about 30 minutes, put the loaves in the oven. Bake for about 20-30 minutes, or until a loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.

Serve slices of the bread with the vine-ripened tomatoes and their pan-juices. Place a tomato on each slice of bread, smash and spread. You can also tear pieces of the bread to dip in the juices. Yum! :)

( three photos )

I made up the shape on the spot--it's a spiral of two long strands of dough, which are also twisted around each other. I followed the recipe I've been using for Italian Bread (I finally decided that 2 tsp. salt was the right amount) but added 1 Tbsp. honey. The texture was much softer this time. V said he liked it better than regular Italian Bread. ( many photos of my bread )

Friday: take-out sushi

Saturday:
Pulled Pork with Cherry Chipotle Chutney on Poppy Buns ( recipe )
Coleslaw (Good Eats recipe) ( cavolo bello )

Sunday:
Banana Insanity Pancakes (buttermilk pancakes made with walnut oil instead of veggie oil, with loads of toasted walnuts and bananas, spiced with cinnamon and cardamom, served with maple syrup &/or butter &/or cardamom whipped cream)

Fantastic Roasted Chicken with Celeriac and Potatoes (Jamie Oliver's recipe)--the flavor "bits" as I called them--prosciutto, lemon peel, garlic and fresh thyme in butter under the breast skin--brought this chicken to the food for the gods level. :)
Homemade Whole Wheat Cloverleaf Rolls ( photo )

The real stars were the chicken and the sandwiches, both of which I neglected to photograph because I was too involved in devouring them. :)

A couple of weeks ago I made Italian Bread for the first time. We ate two loaves in two days! Since I enjoyed it so much, I decided yesterday evening to make a couple more loaves. While the loaves were rising, I marinated some quartered cherry tomatoes in my best olive oil along with fresh basil and thyme and a healthy pinch of salt. After devouring a couple of fresh-baked slices, I cut more bread, rubbed the slices with garlic and brushed them with oil, then placed them under the broiler for bruschetta.

Mmmmm, I just ate a couple of pieces covered in mozzarella.

I'm still working on perfecting the recipe. ( Here's the work in progress, along with a couple of pictures. )

I'm trying to decide what to do for dinner tonight--fresh pumpkin ravioli drizzled with butter, toasted walnuts and fried sage, or hot and sour pumpkin soup with lemongrass and chive cream? Or something else entirely? Ah, delicious decisions...

Bread recipes as requested:

( Sherried Fruit Bread )

( Cheese and Herb Festbier Bread )