A special walk in the fields

Pullman can sometimes be boring, sometimes sad and depressing (when its grey and nasty) and sometimes righteously ridiculous. Often times its mundane, repetitive and industrial, too many things look the same, too much food mediocre.

But sometimes Pullman can be a magical place, you just need a little help.

I got the recipie for this rosemary beer bread from sweet sugar bean and it was pretty easy to make and is fantastic with soup and a nice slab of butter once out of the oven. I added caraway seed for a little something exotic but it was all very good anyway. I didn't make soup though. Also great as a dense sandwich bread for school.

Beer and butter bread with rosemary and caraway
3 cups All purpose flour
3tsp Baking powder
1/4 cup Sugar
1 tsp Salt
1 tbsp Dried rosemary and caraway seed (more or less depending on how herby you like it)
1 can of beer or 12oz. I used a home brew which had a real hoppy flavor to it, though i dont know if that really adds anything to it
1/3 cup Butter


Preheat oven to 350F.

I know i bitched about using a weighing scale in the whole macaron making post but some recipe's don't really need it, such as this where precision isn't as big of a deal. So just throw all the dried ingredients into a bowl and make sure everything is nice and mixed up. Make a well in the center of your dry ingredients and pour in the beer. You can open the beer ahead of time and make it flat if you'd like to make the mixing somewhat easier to do. Now with a spatula or whatever, slowly bring in the edges of the dry ingredients into the beer until you incorporate everything. The mixture will be quite thick. Grease a 8x8 inch pan and pour your batter in. Melt your butter and pour over the batter. With a thin knife, run the knife along the edges of the batter letting the butter get into all the creaks and creases. Bake for about 30 mins, checking at 25 to make sure its not burning or anything. Poke a toothpick in the middle of the bread to make sure its done, the toothpick should come out clean.

Eat with soup or there and then with a nice slab of salted butter.

 Oh yea, i also made red curry.
I used the Mae Ploy brand of red curry paste which i think you can get quite easily anywhere. There's no real recipe but it involved some chicken, carrots, beet roots, onion, coriander, curry paste, coconut milk, palm sugar, fish sauce and that green hard looking bits on cauliflower that most people throw away. If you cook it straight like by steaming it, it just kinda taste like some green vegetable, with a texture similar to celery but not so stringy. Oh and straw mushrooms which  i got from a can. Excellent with rice on a cold day or any day for that matter.

Enjoy the rest of the pictures on a walk I took the other day!