What's Cooking?

You know, there comes a point when you have to say to yourself that enough is enough.  I think I am almost there with this whole making my own bread malarkey.  I have tried 2 different sourdough starters and they flopped.  I have attempted making Heavenly Homemakers whole wheat bread and even watched her tutorial.  No go.  In fact, as Engineer was laughing uncontrollably (not helpful dear) at the looks of my sad lumps of bread-like baked goods, I dropped one and it sounded like a brick hitting the kitchen floor.  My next effort is to have a friend and master bread baker come into my house and using my equipment and ingredients, show me what to do.  The final attempt will be to borrow a friend's bread machine and see if that works for me.  This may be one perfectly practical item that is tossed from my repertoire. 
In other and more successful news:
Lord have mercy at the pickles!  Pickles...pickles...pickles...  As soon as I get one batch done, I have two more waiting in the wings!  These sweet pickles take 8 days to cure but if you ask the people who beg to be put on our Christmas list so that they get a jar if they are worth it - oh yeah, they're worth it.  I am not complaining at all about the abundance of cucs in the garden (we love them in any form) just that I have A LOT of cucs still to be pickled.  The best thing about that though is that I have enough that I can experiment.  The next round I am going to throw in jalapenos from the garden with the cucumbers and try out some sweet/hot pickles.  Mmmmm....
With pickles comes pickled peach preserves.  My box under the bed for storing homemade canned goods is filling up quickly.  Yea.
Soon I will be swamped with crab apple jelly and fig preserves as well as the pickles.   Once that starts, I will hardly be leaving the house.
The vegetarian recipes out of the Great Green Cookbook have been either really good or okay so I think the book is a keeper.  Actually, like I said in an earlier post, I had bought this to feed some vegetarian friends and had made some quite lovely food from it before so it is definitely a keeper.