rosemary olive oil focaccia

photos courtesy of The Son

The Daughter has baked this bread twice for us, and it always disappears within 24 hours. Freshly baked bread is a luxury unto itself. Nothing quite beats the experience of cutting a slice of hot bread, slathering it with butter, and biting into a crisp-chewy fragrant bit of heaven.

It's amazing that so few ingredients yield such wonderful, tasty results. You need a bit of time to let the dough rest and rise; otherwise, the actual hands-on time is minimal. You can prepare the dough a day or two in advance, as it keeps well in the fridge for 2 days or so. Just be sure to deflate it by punching it down if you don't use it the next day. Give it a try and tell me what you think!

rosemary apricot bars

These bars, from the Baked Boys, are a not-too-sweet, lovely grown-up tea cookie. I normally shudder at the thought shy away from throwing an herb into a cookie, but after reading a raving (in a good way, not lunatical) post by David Lebovitz, I wanted to try it out. I've always loved apricots, fresh or dried, and apricot bars. I've also always wondered why there seemed to be a weird residue left in the saucepan after cooking and plumping them up.

It has to do with added sulfur, used in order to preserve the bright orange color which we associate with the apricot. In this recipe, the pastry chefs ask specifically to use unsulfured apricots, which I found at Trader Joe's.