Sunday Dinner

For dinner Sunday night, we had our friend's the Hernandez's over for dinner. Patricia and I met at Bellevue, she trained me and we worked on the same unit for the first 6 months until I started bopping around to all the units.

Anyways. For dinner I made this soup. Tomato Tortellini never tasted so dang good! I didn't think to take a picture of it until we'd already put things away, but here's the residual in the bottom of the pot. It is dang good and I can't wait for leftovers. I made it with my favorite crusty french bread (I'll put the recipe at the bottom, I can't find it anymore on allrecipes.com), and with a spinach salad. Of course we had pumpkin chocolate chip cookies for dessert.

Patricia and her cute baby boy!

They brought us (me) flowers! Love those sunflowers to remind you of summer a little while longer!

Okay, here's the most perfect/easy (but time consuming) french bread recipe.

Ingredients:
1 package of active dry yeast
1 cup warm water (110-115*)
2 Tbsp sugar
2 Tbsp vegetable oil
1.5 tsp salt
3 cups all-purpose flour
cornmeal (I never have this so I never use it--no biggie)
1 egg white
1 tsp cold water

Directions:
1. In a large mixing bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. Add sugar, oil, salt, and 2 cups flour. Beat until blended. Stir in enough remaining flour to form a stiff dough. (I put this all into my kitchenaid with the bread hook attached and let that do all the work.)

2. Turn onto a floured surface; knead until smooth and elastic, about 6-8 minutes (I usually don't do it this long since I let it go a while in the mixer). Place in greased bowl, turning once to grease top. Cover and let reise in a warm place until doubled, about 1 hour. Punch dough down; cover and let rise for 30 minutes.  (I just realized I didn't let it rise again after punching it down, I skipped to step 3--and it still turned out delicious, soooo this recipe is very forgiving : )

3. Punch dough down. Turn onto a lightly floured surface. Shape into a loaf with tapered ends. Sprinkle a greased baking sheet with cornmeal (again I skip the cornmeal and usually bake it on a slipat). Cover and let rise until doubled, about 25 minutes.

4. Beat egg white and cold water; brush over dough (very important for getting that crusty golden brown crust!). With a sharp knife, make diagonal slashes 2 in. apart across top of loaf. Bake at 375* for 25-30 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from pan to wire rack to cool.

Enjoy! So good, so easy, really forgiving recipe. Just make sure you plan out enough time for it all--the rising just takes a while.