pass the Nutella, please!

We have made three...that's right, THREE...batches of french baguettes this past week last week like a month ago.  At three loaves per batch, that's NINE baguettes...ridiculous, right?  I'm sure I'll say this a bazillion times over the life of this blog, but that's what I get for living with a guy that wants to be a chef.  The baguette craze certainly isn't the weirdest thing to have gone through the kitchen, but it might be the messiest and most time consuming (4-5 hours of mixing, kneading, rising, kneading, rolling, shaping, baking...geez).

Just LOOK at what comes out of the 500 degree oven every time we make these, though:

This is the first batch we made (also showing off the fancy new bread knife and bamboo cutting board that chef wannabe got for his birthday):

Ok, so we didn't have a fancy baguette pan at the time, so we had to rig up the oven with an upside-down cookie sheet and a cast-iron skillet.  Needless to say, we didn't get the proper baguette shape, but who cares? 

We cared.  And immediately ran out for a baguette pan.  Next two batches looked like this:

I don't know why, but it took us two batches before we realized we ought to have nutella for this.  I don't know where our heads were.  French bread + nutella = awesomeness.  Yep.

The bread obsession didn't end there.  Yeast in hand, we just had to make pizza as well.

Inspired by the brilliance of Mario Batali (and Nancy Silverton and Joe Bastianich) of Pizzeria Mozza, we topped our homemade pizza crust with a ricotta cheese sauce of sorts (weird, I know), bacon bits, shiitakes, roasted fennel and garlic, scallions, and goat cheese.  Toppings were ahh-mazing, crust was eh.  I'm a crust girl but this one didn't really do it for me.  Fail.  Not the first, and certainly won't be the last.  So goes the life of a wanna-be chef's girlfriend (dishwasher and cheerleader!)

Oh, and this is what The Dog thought of all of this:

That is, until he got our rejected pizza crust!