Rainy Weekend

Several storms moved through over the weekend, bringing lots and lots of rain. What is one to do on a rainy weekend in San Diego? Well, I baked, and cooked, and drank beer. All in all, a nice way to pass some time. First, the baking. My mom has a recipe for Dilly Bread, which I haven't had since I was little. She had posted about the bread on her blog recently (yes, my mom has a blog) and I decided I wanted to make it. So I got the recipe, and set to work. I had been making bread with my kitchen aid and the dough hook, but the motor is somewhat wimpy, and can really only handle making pizza dough. Any significant kneading sends the mixer shuddering across the counter. I also have a significant lack of counter space in my kitchen, so kneading by hand is challenging. Thus, I put the bread maker to work. I let it knead and rise the bread for me, then baked it normally. I think it turned out lovely. And delicious.

The trouble with baking bread is that I'm always faced with leftovers. I could sit and eat the entire loaf in one setting, but that kind of goes against this whole eat less exercise more thing I'm working on. So bread always goes stale before I can make it through the loaf. Sunday morning it was still raining, so I deicded to make breakfast. Utilizing the Dilly Bread (and a lot of cheese) I made a strata. It was tasty, although certainly not part of a low fat/low cal diet. I only ate two meals Sunday to make up for it:

After breakfast, we drove up to Escondido to visit the Stone Brewery. As far as breweries go, it was your typical brewery tour. They mainly brew bitter beers--IPAs, pale ales and their signiture Arrogant Bastard Ale. Strong, but tasty beers. Adam had the cask ale, which was the smoked porter with chipotle pepper. Very unusual, but I liked it. We also ate lunch at their beautiful restaurant. Then drove home in the rain. Now the sun is back, but the rain is supposed to return this weekend. We will be in Connecticut though, so we'll miss the rain. And I'm ok with that.