Today I made bread from scratch.

Yesterday, mushrooms popped up in our front yard. They are still there today.

Tonight, Gavin roasted coffee beans.

Here are roasted and unroasted beans together on a plate:

Each pile has the same number of beans. The beans get bigger when you roast them.

It started with pasta with pesto and broccoli planned for dinner on a night when the kids would be eating with us, and it turned into an all green dinner. We used the greenest place settings we had. We drank Gatorade and sparkling apple cider. And for dessert…

…we had green jello in brandy snifters.

We got a blueberry bush at the farmers’ market.

I’m going to try growing them in our yard.

Duck eggs from DerVaes Gardens here in Pasadena

These duck eggs are delicious and worth every penny.

I called DerVaes Gardens hoping to try their chicken eggs, but they were sold out when I called. The weather was overcast, and the chickens don’t lay as much in overcast weather, but the ducks don’t seem to mind it. (They don’t force their hens or ducks to lay.) I was hesitant about the idea of duck eggs. I was afraid that they’d be gamey or off-tasting, but I decided to give them a try. Actually, I waited for Gavin to try them first. He had fried a couple for us, and he took the first bite. He said they tasted like chicken eggs. I took a bite. They were… good. I ate some more. They were great, even. I think the word “Wow!” was uttered several times that morning. They tasted like chicken eggs… only better.

The yolks are bright, dark orange, and the shells are strong and thick. We’ve been eating them fried (basted, actually) and in omelettes. We’re on our second dozen of them now.

Cross-posted at Eye Level Pasadena.

Check out those blisters on the crust of my last batch of sourdough bread.

I baked it inside a cloche:

Here’s the bread inside:

It was delicious.

My mother-in-law, Andrea, has been baking sourdough bread for years. A few years ago, while out on a visit, she taught me how to make it. She turned me on to Nancy Silverton’s Breads of the La Brea Bakery cookbook, and the cloche is from her and Ed. Thank you both!

Photos by Gavin

Brownie Points posted a tutorial last week on how to make your own butter. Gavin and I tried it this weekend. It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done in the kitchen.

You whip heavy pasteurized (but not ultrapasteurized) cream using the wire whisk attachment on a KitchenAid mixture. You whip it until it turns into whipped cream, and then just keep whipping until it breaks down into little yellow bits of butter in buttermilk. Pour it into a cheese-cloth lined bowl, squeeze the buttermilk out, put the butter in one jar and the buttermilk in another.

Two pints of cream makes a pint of butter and a pint of buttermilk.

This is pretty handy, because I make this chicken finger recipe about once a week for the kids, and it uses just about two cups of buttermilk.

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Update: This buttermilk doesn’t come out quite as thick and rich as the buttermilk I’ve been buying from the store, so the chicken finger recipe didn’t turn out as well as it usually does this week. I think I’ll stick to store-bought buttermilk for chicken fingers. The butter, on the other hand, is great.