Bread

A couple of months ago I wanted to try making some homemade bread. My mom makes amazing bread and rolls, but I've never had the courage to take on the yeast and make my own bread. One day, while at the grocery store I took the first step and bought some yeast. About a week or two later I decided I wanted some homemade bread so I pulled out the yeast. I found a recipe in cookbook and started making bread! I was pretty proud of myself, but looking back on it, it was a disaster! First off, we only had white flour and we all know homemade wheat bread is the best. Secondly, there was some major poor time management on my part. The recipe made two loaves, but I only had one loaf pan, so the second hunk of dough was just going to sit on the counter while the first loaf was baking. I guess that's not too bad, but I didn't have time to bake the second loaf before we went over to a friend's house for dinner, so the second hunk of dough just sat on the counter for 4 hours until we came back home and I popped it in the oven. The first loaf was okay, but the second loaf was just a flat dense piece of bread.

Fast forward to yesterday. While at church I was sitting next to my friend who was feeding her little girl a piece of bread and I kept thinking "mmm... I really want some homemade wheat bread." So we came home and told Dave my plans. It took a couple of hours for me to muster up the gumption to take another stab at making bread. However, this time we had whole wheat flour, I found a supposedly wonderful recipe online, and I altered the recipe to just make one loaf (for our one loaf pan). The entire time I was making it I kept telling Dave that it just didn't look right and that it was going to turn out horribly. And this is what came out of the oven!
This bread is perfection!!! We each had a slice last night and I had a couple of pieces of toast this morning. YUM!

If I Ran the Zoo

If I ran the zoo it would be free... wait the Henry Vilas Zoo is free!
One Saturday Dave and I wanted to go to the zoo. The zoo isn't very big, but they do have a quite a few animals.

We also saw giraffes, rhinos, monkeys, apes, tigers, lions, polar bears, giant turtles, and more! Not bad for a free zoo!

A Day Downtown

On Saturday we decided to go to the Farmer's Market and the Taste of Madison. Every Saturday from April through November there is a huge farmer's market that happens around Capitol Square. It's a lot of fun walking around and seeing everything there is to buy. This time we bought some scones, maple suckers, and some tomatoes.

After the Farmer's Market we had an hour to kill before we ate lunch at the Taste of Madison. We decided to go give ourselves a little tour of the Capitol building.
We had fun exploring all the nooks and crannies and looking at the details. It's a very beautiful building with a very ornate dome.
If you are able to make your way through the maze of hallways there is an observation deck that we went out on and were able to see all around Madison.
It was probably because it was a rainy day, but there were tons of people in the Capitol.
We still had some time to kill so we went across the street to the Veterans Museum. Madison is really nice because many of their museums have free admission.

After we went through the museum we made our way outside for the main event. We walked around checking out all the vendors and deciding on what we wanted to get. Everything ranged from $1-$4. On our first stop we bought some Arancinette which are little fried risotto balls. They were quite tasty. Then we tried some crab rangoons. They were delicious as well.
Then we tried some eggplant fries with a garlic paprika sauce. These were so good. Okay, everything we had was really good.
We also had a sweet plantain and roasted garlic empanada, a jerk pork slider, and sweet potato pie. I meant to take a picture of each of these, but our stomachs beat the camera.

We had a lot of fun spending the day downtown. Don't you want to come visit us now and spend the day downtown?