Let's welcome 2012 with some gushing...

So much for my plan to clean, organize, and generally make progress on various projects around our home on the first weekend of the year. Instead, when I went into the guest bathroom to do some ironing I discovered 2 inches of nasty water backed up in the spare bathtub. So I guess we still got a "project around the house," but not so much with the making progress on stuff that's been bugging me thing. Instead, we've had to empty a storage closet and generally make a big mess.

We've already tried a snake, both from the bathtub drain, and from the washing machine drain without success. We've also done some experimentation to convince ourselves that none of the other drains in our unit are connected to this problem; they all drain just fine and don't seem to add to the volume of the bathtub.

We've bailed the bathtub twice. Water does not seem to be coming from our unit, so hopefully it will be the condo association's responsibility to pay for it if it comes to hiring a plumber.

In the mean time, we're still hoping to see the water level actually go down so that I'll feel a little more comfortable with the notion of using a chemical drain product on it.

Rustic Focaccia

It seems that turning my rustic bread dough into focaccia is a yummy idea. I just pulled it out of the tightly covered glass bowl where it had been rising for 24 hours and placed it directly onto a preheated cast iron pizza pan, poked it with finger holes, and put olive oil over the top. I don't know how long I cooked it. Maybe 15-25 minutes. As usual, started with 50% whole wheat (plus some extra gluten) rather than the base white bread recipe. It was really good. And very much like the bread they use for the bruschetta at Buca. I'm going to make it next summer for bruschetta.

The inspiration for cooking focaccia more like pizza comes from all the "Pizza Bianca" we ate in Italy. Pizza Bianca, according to our guidebooks, is pizza without cheese or red sauce. But in real life, it was more like focaccia. Well, that and a bowl full of dough that we didn't want to take the time to give a second rise and bake in our conventional rustic bread manor, per the recipe above.

Too bad I won't be around to eat the rest of it this week.