Careless Cooking

I kind of failed at writing every week during the CSA days last year. It became an added chore on top of the chore of cooking all of the crazy CSA bounty. I'm still doing this CSA business and am often trying to find ways to use up all the stuff.

More recently it has been basil. It must be a good basil year because it's coming out of my ears. 3 weeks in a row we have received 1/4 lb of basil. do you have any idea how much basil this is?? well i'll tell you: it's a lot. we have used it in dressing and made caprese salads. But these things use scant amounts of basil. I used two big bunches in two different rounds of pesto. And then another CSA day came, more basil. So just when I think i'm on top of my basil problem, more arrives. I think i'm getting more this week! It feels like European Vacation when the food keeps coming and the daughter has to keep eating.

Needless to say, I was tired of pesto so came across this "basil beer bread" which sounded amazing and seemed really simple to make as the beer helped in the rising and didn't require kneeding. I would use up an entire cup of chopped basil! so one day after work last week, i bought all of the supplies and made it on another night last week. I agonized over the kind of beer to get but ended up with a nice local bottle of berkshire ale that had enough for me to have a glass while i baked. I was so excited for this warm bread, i thought about it all day. so i got it all ready and put it in the oven. The recipe said to oil the baking sheet. So I put olive oil on it. Seemed like a good idea, right? WRONG. the oil proceeded to drip off the pan and burn at the bottom of the oven creating a rediculous amount of smoke. So our smoke alarm goes off. And we fan furiously. And we open all the windows. My oven doesn't have an overhead vent so the smoke just goes into the air. le sigh. we then had this brilliant idea that we would fan the smoke with the door to the apartment. bad idea #2. Apparently when you fan the smoke, it just goes into the hallway and sets of the smoke alarm FOR THE ENTIRE BUILDING. all of my neighbors spill out onto the sidewalk with their babies wondering what's up. Oh did I mention it was really hot that day? Yeah. So sweaty babies and their half-dressed moms standing out on the sidewalk. Also unbeknownst to me, you have to call the fire department to have the alarm reset. What seemed like an eternity of alarms going off finally ended when 2 trucks pulled up and two strapping firepeople (one man and one woman) came into the apt in full regalia and holding axes. The woman said "nice place" and then "don't worry, i do this all the time." The man radio'd, "cooking incident". Once they were satisfied that nothing was on fire, they left. But we were still frazzled. I tried one more time to cook my bread after cleaning up all the oil I could find, but the damage had been done. More smoke. No bread. boo.

I now need to figure out how to clean the oven. rumour has it that it will create a lot of smoke which i'm really not looking forward to. See above.