I’ve become progressively more fascinated with baking over the past few months, turning out far more cookies and pastries than I ever should have in my house at one time (though my boyfriend’s co-workers now adore me).

So I joined the Daring Bakers, a collective of food bloggers with a passion for all things that come out of the oven. I thought that it would be a good way to push my boundaries a little, try some new things. After all, they’ve made lemon meringue pie, bostini cream, sticky buns…it would be fun!

But…you want me to bake bread?

The panic I felt at watching my printer spit out the 10 pages of Julia Child’s French Bread recipe surged upon reading note after note on kneading, rising, yeast, bread ovens. My head swam. I was sweating. What on earth was I going to do?

Well, I was going to try. And try. And try. And try again.

The first two batches of dough went with a resounding thwack into my garbage can. First thing learned: yeast from a packet apparently can be dead, even if it’s not expired. Go figure.

Batch three. Live yeast. More lessons. For example, don’t leave a 1 1/2-hour rise alone overnight, no matter how tired you are (don’t start a 9 hour process at 2 PM either). Also, when they say to let the loaves rise on “stiff floured canvas,” a floured kitchen towel does not suffice. Only one made it off the towel at all; the other was left to soak in the sink until I could scrape the dough off with a spatula.

But this is also where things got better. The one salvaged loaf, while probably the ugliest loaf of bread I’d ever seen, was still bread. It was edible, though one side was saltier than the other (thoroughly mix salt with flour — check). I was emboldened, excited. I would try again.

Batch four. It was rising fine, came together with the springy elasticity I had come to love when kneading. My biceps were still sore from batch three (no standing mixer in this tiny kitchen), but the thwack-thwack-thwack of the bread hitting the board moved me forward.

One rise, then two, then they peeled off the flour-coated parchment paper with only minimal sticking. I made my ragged cuts in the top with a shaking hand, and put them in the oven.

And voilà. Two loaves of bread.

Again, they wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests in the near future, but they were toasty and crusty and evenly salted. I’d done it. There was flour on every surface of my kitchen, in the pocket of my apron and probably in my ears, but I’d done it. I’d made bread.

I felt exultant. Triumphant. Exhausted. And daring.

Thanks ever so much to Breadchick Mary (The Sour Dough) & Sara (I Like to Cook) who hosted this particular event.

A corollary to the debate over the right ratio of pasta to sauce is the debate over the right ratio of pizza crust to pizza topping.

When a deep-dish pizza is set down before me, I will not turn it down. But when I make pizzas, I almost always go for a very thin, crispy crust that serves as a medium for the sauce, cheese and other toppings.

In the Cookthink kitchen, we’ve experimented with all sorts of handmade and store-bought pizza doughs, and plenty of them work fine. But our collective favorite way to get a quick, thin crust is to use lavash.

Placed directly on the oven rack, the lavash crisps to a perfectly crackling crust that holds up to even the most loaded pizza. Like this variation of the traditional Hawaiian pizza, which we start with a thin layer of tomato sauce.

Next, we spread 1/2 cup of diced ham across the top.

Then, 1/2 cup of diced fresh pineapple.

We slice 6 white mushrooms and sprinkle the pieces down into the spots between the ham and pineapple.

Finally, we add 1/2 cup of shredded mozzarella and a sprinkling of red pepper flakes, and slide the pizza onto the middle rack of a 500F oven.

We cook it for 5-10 minutes until the lavash is charred in places and the cheese is melted and bubbling.

Recipe: Ham, Pineapple And Mushroom Pizza (Cookthink)

I love how having a kitchen stocked with pantry staples can make impromptu meals more interesting than planned ones.

This morning, for example, I realized I was out of my usual home-mixed cereal. But I had picked up a few different flatbreads earlier in the week for a little pizza experimentation, and had some almond butter and fig preserves on hand. So, I decided to make a simple sweet wrap.

I put a 12-inch piece of whole wheat flatbread directly on the rack of a 300F oven, just until it was warm. Using the back of a spoon, I covered about 3/4 of its surface with almond butter.

I did the same with the fig preserves.

Then I just rolled the whole thing up and cut it in half on the bias.

The combinations of breads, nut butters and preserves are endless. Any of you have favorite variations on peanut butter and jelly?

We usually think of water as a rinsing agent, a soaking mechanism, a medium for boiling things, a drink. It’s easy to forget how critical an ingredient water is in its own right.

Water can miraculously save a broken sauce from going down the drain. Your Bernaise or Hollandaise is falling apart? Beat in a tablespoon of water and nobody will ever know the difference. Your salad dressing won’t emulsify? Your homemade mayonnaise splitting? Whisk in a tablespoon of water and watch as it is born again. I always find that hot-ish water works best, but other cooks insist on warm or cold.

Most people know that pasta water is a magic ingredient to thin a too-thick pasta sauce, or to make a pasta dish with sautéed ingredients into a unified dish. But water’s also a remedy for thinning soups, sauces or stews that have congealed in the night.

I thin my smoothies without the extra sugar of more juice by adding a little water or an ice cube. I use water to lighten up salty Asian dipping sauces without additional acid. I thin batters for pancakes or deep-frying with water. And to make a flavorful gravy after pouring off the fat from roasted chicken, I deglaze the pan with water.

We may have to do a root source on water soon. What are some other magical uses for water in the kitchen?

I always start my day with a feel-good visit to The Hunger Site, a website founded in 1999 that allows you to donate food to the world’s hungry by doing nothing more than clicking on a colored box.

According to the site, an average of 220,000 people from around the world click each day, and the more than 200 million total visitors have donated some 300 million cups of staple food — paid for by the site’s sponsors and distributed by Mercy Corps and America’s Second Harvest. A daily email reminder will help you remember to click.

More time-consuming and addictive is Free Rice, a clever site on which you answer multiple-choice vocabulary questions. For every correct answer, you donate 20 grains of rice through the UN World Food Programme.

The site evaluates your vocabulary level by throwing out sample words from simple to mind-boggling. It keeps score of your vocab level — up to 55 — providing an incentive to keep playing.

A quick Google search shows that there are a number of other web-based charities dedicated to ending world hunger and poverty that allow you to do something without doing much of anything at all.

Anybody else have a favorite food-based charity website?

Be sure to watch Cookthinktanker Lauren Ulm, of VeganYumYum! Lauren will be demonstrating her remarkable talent of knitting with marzipan.

Reference: How to “knit” marzipan (VeganYumYum)
Reference: Knit-night Cupcakes (VeganYumYum)
Schedule: Check your local listings for the Martha Stewart Show

Congratulations Lauren!

UPDATE: Here’s the clip of Lauren on today’s show.

One of my favorite web comics is xkcd, a blend of romance, sarcasm, math and language. I don’t get most of the math jokes, but the other strips often make me giggle (this one praising my body’s unique capabilities, for example).

Today’s strip tickled my food-fancy; it’s an x/y graph of the relative “tastiness” and “difficulty” of various fruits.

In looking for my favorite fruits, I was sad to see that the grapefruit lost out, but happy that our upcoming root source ingredient, pineapple, made it onto the top half of the tastiness scale, if not difficulty.

I wonder where the durian would fit in?

We’ve chosen our first featured recipe for parsley and the submissions are coming in for pineapple (due Tuesday!) and orzo. To keep looking ahead, we’re announcing the next root source challenge.

The ingredient for Root Source Challenge #4 is the Kalamata olive. Submit your best recipe(s), and you could win a copy of The Santa Monica Farmers’ Market Cookbook by Amelia Saltsman. And as always, the winner will have his or her recipe featured in the Root Source and published on cookthink.com.

Submissions are due by 12pm EST Tuesday, March 11th. Send an email with your name, email, URL and permalink to the recipe to rootsourcechallenge [AT] cookthink [DOT] com. For the complete rules, click here.

If this is your first time to hear about the Root Source Challenge, read the first post to get caught up.

(Thanks to The Lisa Ekus Group for partnering with us for the Root Source Challenge.)

As the many submissions to the first Root Source Challenge demonstrated, parsley is a versatile and hearty ingredient. There were a bunch of recipes to choose from, but we had to pick just one. So we chose this delicious-looking Celeriac Soup With Parsley Oil And Lancashire Cheese Toasts. It was submitted by Helen of Food Stories. Congratulations, Helen!

Here are a few of our other favorites:

Recipe: Baby Parsley Carrots & Parsley Grießnockerl Bouillon (R Khook)
Recipe: Parsley, Red Onion, And Fennel Salad (Running with Tweezers)
Recipe: Flat-Leaf Parsley Four Ways (Food Rockz)

Take a look at this week’s root source for more parsley-filled recipes, tips on prep and storage, and the strangest pair of scissors ever. And if you want to subscribe to the root source, sign up for a free account at cookthink.com.

If you’d like to see your recipe featured here, submit your best pineapple recipes for next week’s Root Source Challenge.

I love avocado as a main ingredient in a sandwich. Pairing a nicely ripe one with just one other main ingredient — a meat, cheese or another vegetable — gives the avocado a starring role. Today for lunch, I matched up an avocado with goat cheese.

First I tossed piece of whole wheat pita straight onto the rack of a 300F oven for 5 minutes. That gave the heat just enough time to entice a little steam from the pita, making it softer and easier to open. I cut the pita in half and opened the pockets with a fork. I drizzled in a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

I split the avocado in two, discarded the seed and cut the flesh into slices. For sandwiches, I like avocados that are dark green and barely tender to the touch on the outside, and very bright yellow-green and a little firm on the inside.

I put half the avocado and a couple of slices of goat cheese into each pocket, and dug in. It was damn good.

Recipe: Chipotle Grilled Chicken With Avocado Sandwich (Simply Recipes)
Reference: How to prep an avocado (Cookthink)
Root Source: Hass Avocado (Cookthink)