It's Friday!

Like I had to remind you :)

It's going to be a busy day at work, which I'm hoping means the day goes by really fast, but we have another beautiful, sunny San Diego weekend to look forward to! Nothing exciting going on, actually the only things we have to do are the opposite to exciting - work on our budget and try to finally finish unpacking - so grown up now...

One of the many things I've loved since we moved to San Diego in November is the amount of time we spend outside. Being a naturalist and general nature lover (and working for an environmental nonprofit of course), I have a hard time staying inside when the weather is so inviting and there are so many new places to explore. Last week, I discovered an amazing little park right up the street from us! And by up, I mean UP. Like up a gigantic hill to get to the base of the park, and the up a crazy steep hill to get to the top of the park. But it is most definitely worth it once you're up there!

The view is amazing, you can see the city, two of the bays, and the ocean all from one spot! We've been trying to walk up there a few times a week because it's such a good workout, and a nice little reminder of why we moved here. So relaxing. Over the weekend we took a walk up there and guests were arriving for a wedding right in the park! They set it up perfectly so that the back drop was that amazing view. We didn't see the wedding party, but I'm sure there pictures are going to be awesome.

My other favorite part of weekends? Breakfast. During the week I'll make eggs and grits or toast, but breakfast is my favorite meal so on the weekends I go all out. Last weekend I made California breakfast tacos:

A lot of people probably think, if it's a California taco, where is the avocado? That's pretty much what you get on the east coast if you order a California burrito/taco/sandwich right? It just has avocado on it. While avocado would've been great on this, real California burritos/tacos have french fries in them!! You should've seen the look on Ty's face when he bit into his first real California burrito....the awesomeness of french fries left him speechless. We didn't have french fries for breakfast that morning, but I did make some delicious hash browns that you can see peeking out from under the eggs. All sorts of yum.

Any plans for the weekend? Grown up or not? :)

And just for fun, cat picture of the week:

Fresh Baked Bread...and Hamburger Helper :)

Our beautiful new standmixer has been sitting on the counter staring at me, begging me to bake something yummy. Brandi's blog provided the inspiration, although I was sad to see that on the very same day I made her farmhouse bread recipe, she posted an even more delicious looking Nutella bread recipe! One thing at a time though, I don't have a history of successful bread making...

That one was literally the size, shape and weight of a brick. Ty found this hilarious :)

This time I had much better luck, the first good sign was that the bread actually ROSE like it was supposed to! I assembled all of the ingredients, but of course didn't read the recipe very carefully and didn't realize this makes two loaves...thankfully I've somehow ended up with two bread pans. One is silicone and one is ceramic (part of a set of Giada de Laurentiis ceramic bakeware we got for the wedding), I was really interested to see if the loaves baked differently (science class nerd!).

I thought I put less in the silicone pan and more in the ceramic one since it's bigger, but it didn't quite look that way when I went to put them in the oven. It's ok though, because they turned out like this:

The loaf from the silicone pan was a little lumpy on top, only because it sort of out grew its pan when it was rising :) doesn't matter, it was still absolutely delicious! And our apartment smelled amazing for the next few hours. This was definitely the best bread recipe I've tried, the bread is really fluffy and the honey gives it a little sweetness. I can't wait to try Brandi's variations now! And the standmixer was definitely easier for mixing and kneading the dough, although I'm not totally sure I used the right attachments at the right times. I only used the dough hook, but that didn't really do so well in the initial mixing part of the recipe?

So what do you serve for dinner with perfectly baked, fresh, hot and delicious homemade bread? Hamburger Helper of course! I wish I was kidding :P I'm definitely kidding about what you should serve this bread with, but we had some ground turkey that needed to be cooked, so this is what we had.

Question: what is the best way to store homemade bread? I put ours in a large Ziploc and stored it in the freezer. I also thought about freezing a loaf, but I'm afraid that might ruin the texture?