Food Friday - Cooking while sick edition

I feel crummy. But Shabbat is tonight. My lousy sons have jobs and are not around to wait on me hand and foot and cook Shabbat dinner. So I needed to cook for tonight.

I had made a big bread dough yesterday and only baked half of it. Today was a challah baking week. I suppose I could be fancy and say that I used a starter to bake this weeks challah. The truth is, It was half a batch of yesterday's dough. I pretended that that lump of dough was yeast and just added all of my usual challah ingredients to it.

I did have a moment of "what if it doesn't rise" panic and added about 1/4 of a tsp of yeast to the bowl of dough.

It was probably not necessary. I thought that a loose dough, that is with not all of the flour in it would rise better, so I let the mixture just hang out for about 30 minute.

I came back to see this.

Lots of bubbles are a good sign at this stage. My old lump of bread dough was doing it's job as a leavening agent. The bits of actual yeast was probably just the baker being a bit too anxious.

I kneaded in the rest of the flour and here is the the result a few hours later, a great dough ready to be shaped. At this point I think that bread baking is magic.  I throw all sorts of stupid things into the dough bowl and it works. The lazier I get about baking bread, the less worried I am about technique the better the loaves I bake taste. I don't get it at all, it must be magic.

I got a little fancy with the braiding. Most of these loaves are five and six stranded challot.

To tell you the truth, visually the five and six stranded challot don't look a whole lot different than the four stranded ones. 

Yes, I do keep washing my hands with lots of soap and water as I am cooking dinner so I don't get everyone else sick.

I roasted some tomatoes that are going into tonight's salad.  I went across the street and paid entirely too much for two whole kosher chickens. They are being cooked with smoked paprika, allspice and lemon. They will look like whole chickens with nice brown skin when they are done.

My son's are taking over from here. They are back from work. Time for more tea and a nap. If my son's feel like making it there will be rice or some other grain. And if they don't, we will live without the grain.

Shabbat Shalom!