What I Cooked/ Baked on my HolidaysMy wifes family is largish! There are four children (all with partners) of which my wife is one, nine grandchildren (some with partners), and nine cousins/ aunts and uncles. Thus, mealtimes have a minimum of eight eaters, which often reaches mid teens, and occasionally into the twenties. The point: Food production is very important!My wifes mother is an excellent cook and pastry maker who, with age, has withdrawn somewhat from the creative activities, but keeps a keen eye on the kitchen and provides excellent critiques.

Sagone, CorsicaThus, I have lots of opportunities to cook what I like, especially as cooking talents were not uniformly passed down. Also, my newfound bread baking talents were given full rein in the three weeks I was there. So, in the non-loaf line we have Queen of Sheba chocolate cakes (Julia Childs favorite chocolate cake), my son Etiennes birthday cake (actually Nigella Lawsons Lemon Polenta cake), and two plum tarts. Sorry, Lois I forgot to photograph an apple tart, a mound of brownies and a couple of apple crumbles that I made!On the bread side I was able to do a number of loaves. Let me just set the scene. Since returning from the course in NY it has been winter in Brazil, and the average daily temperature highs have been in the area of 70F. In a country where highs are generally in the 85F range or higher there are very few dwellings that have heating. That means that getting dough to rise at 70F temperatures is slow to say the least. By contrast, the temperatures in Corsica were in the 90F+ range, so it became almost impossible to let dough rise during the day, and one had to wait until the lower temperatures of night time.Pain de Campagne (Country Bread) The flour of many types for breads, cakes, tarts etc. is much more developed in France than it is in Brazil, and I suspect the USA. For instance, in a supermarket you find wheat flour type 45 (All Purpose Flour), T 55, (Bread flour), T 80, T 120, T150..who knows! Also there are flour bags already made up for differing types of bread, such as the pain de campagne. This is not quite the same as buying a cake mix in the USA, as one has to add yeast, manage the fermentation process, and let the dough rest and bake, but it does mean you dont have to worry about mixing the flours.

Pain de CampagnePain de Campagne is a very common type of French bread, using 3/5 ths bread flour and 2/5 ths whole wheat flour. The texture is more chewey than crusty but fulfills the French need for mopping up meal juices well. Easy to make, tastes good with butter and jam too!CiabattaI followed again the ICC directions for the ciabatta bead and made four loaves. In fact I gave one away to my wifes aunt who also didnt quite know what to do with it. I dont know if anyone else has this experience with ciabatta, but Im never quite sure what to do with it once its made. As you will see below, we finally resolved to provide it as an appetizer, a type of bruschetta with a tomato, onion, basil and olive oil sauce. In any event, it was a success. Pain de Mie CompletThis is simple, but nonetheless versatile and excellent bread that went down well with the family. As usual I came close to ruining it by taking it out of the oven too early. In France I had a gas oven which was really two ovens in one. Two sets of burners. In other words you could use either only one side of it, or the other, or both, but there was no separator between the two sides. This led to difficulty in knowing what the appropriate temperatures were in either the one or two burner functions. Anyway, after about an hour out of the oven the bread felt a bit soft and stodgy, so I put it back in the oven for about eight minutes and it came out rather crusty and tasty. So I put it down to a success!

Pain de Mie CompletChallahThose who read my previous post about making Challah bread may remember that I made the dough too liquid and I was unable to braid the bread as the ICC requires. My problem has been that I seem incapable of adding 80 grams of egg to the dough (which is probably 1.125 eggs), if two eggs need to be broken! In other words I put too much egg in! Of course, I did the same thing this time too.

As with my previous effort, this one worked out well, and tasted great with the apricot jam.Country Bread with Sausage Stuffing There is a pizzeria close to where I live which serves sausage bread as an appetizer. It is so good that I dont even want the pizza afterwards. Thus, the bread, photo below, was my first attempt to use it as a vehicle for meat. The sausage used was Toulouse (pork, smoked bacon, garlic and wine). In fact the sausage bread at the pizzeria is mixed with the dough, and occurs throughout the loaf. For my first experiment I chose to make it as a sandwich loaf with the sausage between the two layers of bread.

It was served as an appetizer for dinner. Le Pain ViennoiseJust to prove that I can braid bread, please find below a photo of my Pain Viennoise. I basically followed the ICC recipeno eggs this time, only butter. I made this bread towards the end of my vacation, and my sister-in-law complained, Why did you wait until now to do this bread?

As you can see, I had a great time on my vacation, and I thank my appreciative audience of eaters. For those of you that like to lie on a beach while on vacation I can only quote the famous British playwright, Noel Coward, Work is so much more fun than fun!.