A shockingly large portion of my time in the kitchen is devoted to disaster recovery. (The shocking part is how bad I can sometimes be at cooking and yet have the audacity to have a cooking blog.) I think it’s important to be resilient to errors and able to turn mistakes into something edible. Tonight I inexplicably burnt the bottoms of two loaves of Peter Reinhart’s pain a l’ancienne, which I’ve made numerous times before and which I didn’t overbake. I still don’t know why the bottoms burnt. (They were also too flat, but I suspect they fell because they over-proofed.)

This is the better-looking loaf:

Upon withdrawing them from the oven, I sighed and announced, “it looks like we won’t be having bread with dinner.” But I quickly decided to try to salvage the sad-looking loaves. I sliced off the burnt bottoms of each. This didn’t leave a very tall loaf, since they were too flat to begin with. But if you put them cut sides together, it looked like one normal-sized baguette…one normal-sized baguette that I could smear with some sort of garlic paste and call garlic bread!

I had made garlic rosemary oil earlier in the day and had several soft rosemary-infused cloves of garlic sitting around. I smashed them and whipped in a couple tablespoons of the aforementioned garlic rosemary oil, a little bit of flaked salt, and some vegan parmesan, which I then smeared on each loaf:

Then I wrapped them in aluminum foil and stuck in the oven during the last 15 minutes of lasagne baking. Voila! An even more interesting accompaniment to the meal than I’d originally intended!

Speaking of bread, you may be wondering why it is that I’ve been on vacation all week and still haven’t made that sourdough bread post.

I guess I’ve been lazy:

Oh, I don’t know if that’s entirely fair because I have been cooking and baking a lot, and I spent a lot of time at various grocery stores today, but as for the rest of my time not spent shopping or in kitchen, imagine this picture:

… but me in a “swimming costume” instead of Tigger, on a raft in the pool instead of in the window (and with a book in my paws), and you should have a fairly accurate idea of what I’ve been doing instead of spending time with my computer.

And it’s been great.