Another month has blown by

A month has blown by since the last time I posted here.  With good reason: we spent most of November in Europe visiting my wife's family.  

We had a couple of days in London:

The rest in Warszawa...

and Kraków.

Food/bread-wise, we didn't have time for food tourism.  Yes, I hit Blikle bakery while in Warszawa for some pączki, but most of our meals were either with family or at Bar Mleczny.  

Which I am not complaining about: the food is fantastic, the breads and rolls always fresh and very, very good. I wish we could find breads like the fresh bułki (seen above) as easily in North America as you can there. Literally every corner store has them, fresh and unwrapped, and very good: light and crispy but not massive and pillowy like most of the grocery store rolls I find here. It must require a very different approach to shopping than what we have here, with many more frequent trips to a local shop, for it to be profitable for even small stores to stock so many fresh perishable items. 

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I have been baking since being back.  At top is a cross section of a Dill Cottage Cheese loaf I made last night, very similar to this dill bread recipe.  An exterior shot:

I also baked a white French loaf to go with a pot of soup:

and my regular sourdough rounds, two of which are rising at the moment.

I've been enjoying reading about everyone's Thanksgiving meals. This was the first year since moving to Canada that we didn't also celebrate American Thanksgiving. We did a big production with turkey and stuffing and cranberries in October, however, so it didn't feel like we were missing anything. It is just good to be back home and baking in my own kitchen again!