Dining and Opining

So, I know that one of the failings of the modern shiny-photo-filled blog era is that it can seem like bloggers never make mistakes, and always have perfect results from their perfect kitchens. That's only because the mistakes don't get posted! So, in honor of transparency, I'll now share the flipside of that rosy braided challah you all saw yesterday . Are you ready? Yep. Pretty gnarly, eh? And after lots of scraping and slicing with various tools, my cutting board looked like this: But the bread somehow pulled through, and the top 80% has offered us delicious slices of toast. I'll blame our old and drafty oven for this one (and for all the burning of baked goods I do), but at least the rolls (which were on the top rack) came out without a touch of black-ness, only the rosy glow of bread baked just right.

I am a regular reader of Smitten Kitchen , a lovely cooking blog that you should totally be reading if you aren't already, if only for the gorgeous photos (but also for the light writing voice and the great food!) But although I never miss a post, I've almost never actually made any recipe directly from the site. This is partly because I rarely follow a recipe unless there's a particularly thorny ingredient I need to use up, but also because, although the food on Smitten Kitchen always looks delicious, it looks like food that someone else would make (and that I would happily eat!), but not me. Today's recipe, apple cheddar scones , is a total case in point. I haven't baked a lot of scones, I don't usually have much extra cheese on hand, and whatever apples I have typically get eaten raw. So, the fact that I came to bake these amazing little scones had only to do with the fact that my friend RM suggested we make them with some of the abundant apples straight o...