The Focaccia Also Rises

You can find the full recipe for Jim Lahey's focaccia here.  And I cannot recommend MY BREAD more highly.  Before I heard about Lahey's incredibly simple no-knead recipes I had it in my head that baking bread was a huge ordeal best left to professionals, but that's not remotely the case.  Filling your kitchen with the incomparable aroma of fresh bread and then finally pulling a perfectly browned loaf out of your own oven is both surprisingly easy and hugely rewarding.  

Most breads are built upon a seductively simple combination of flour, yeast, salt, and water,  but,
interestingly, this focaccia also calls for the puree of a boiled potato.
This potato keeps the dough nice and light.

 Dimpling the dough and sprinkling it with olive oil before
it goes in the oven helps give this bread its unique crust.

You can top the focaccia with pretty much anything you can think of.  I garnished this one with a simple
combination of Roma tomato slices, fresh rosemary, sea salt, and a dash of black pepper.

Yum!

Asparagus Spears Wrapped in Prosciutto

I usually have a hand in most of the desserts we make over here, but Mother's Day is an exception.  This is the one day a year that my Dad rolls out his truly excellent cheesecake (if we had this more than once a year, someone would have to roll us out).  But I wanted to contribute to the meal, so I decided to attempt an appetizer we'd never had before.  I wanted to make something different, visually appealing, and, mostly importantly, really simple.  After some Googling, I settled on asparagus wrapped in prosciutto.

Asparagus is one of Mom's favorite vegetables, and who doesn't love prosciutto?  This dish is easy to make, fun to eat, relatively healthy, and it looks great on any table.  There are about a hundred variation of this recipe on the web, so I took them several of them into account and came up with this hybrid.  While the prosciutto gets nice and crispy in the oven, it also tends to get a bit salty.  For a less salty alternative, try wrapping the prosciutto around the asparagus after they've been roasted.

Here's the recipe (and my first attempt at typecasting, so please bear with me):

So typing that up was harder than I thought it would be.  Do you see how the type looks as if it's been cobbled together by a drunken five year old?  Really need to get that fixed.  I think my Corona 4 is in better shape, and I should be receiving a new ribbon for it in the next couple days.  Hopefully my next attempt will look better!

Asparagus is versatile, simple to prepare, and an excellent

accompaniment to many spring and summer meals.

All wrapped up and nowhere to go....except the oven.