It all started one night unwinding from a particularly L-O-N-G week on Friday. That meant downing a couple of Mike's Hard Lemonade Seltzers (the pineapple ones, those are the BEST) and finding myself blissfully buzzed. With age comes wisdom, gone are the days when being buzzed meant getting the courage to dial your crush... and promptly hang up... and proceed to giggle like a moron. No, no, no. Nowadays I get buzzed and proceed to announce to David that I'm gonna make bread. Gotta hand it to him though, he didn't blink, he said OK, grabbed a Monster, headed down to his man cave and started watching YouTube videos of Tool.
OK, the floor was mine, the stage was set, now to find a good recipe. Wait, why were all the recipes taking so long? 11 hours? Overnight? I needed to make the bread and eat it NOW, not when I had dentures and chewing was gonna be a luxury! Phew, thank you Nagi @ recipetineats, yours will be the recipe I make tonight. Let's start at Step -1, capturing pictures for the blog and Step 0, assembling the ingredients. Which, let's be honest, when slightly tipsy COULD be a problem. I swig another sip of the lemonade seltzer and decided making the bread trumped, hence, all the pics you see were taken later during the day sans the buzz.
I loved working through this recipe especially in my tiddly state (yes, tiddly is an actual word, bet you googled to verify it). Minimal ingredients, concise steps, lots of resting time to get tiddlier and reach my contemplative zone. Case in point, I spent a good 5 min admiring my bottle of olive oil (there were some moments of being cross-eyed), followed by going down the rabbit hole wondering if it was possible to pop the cherry of a bottle of virgin olive oil. Yeah, welcome to my brain, it's a magical place...
Resting periods are over, dough has more than quadrupled in size, pretty much like what my waist is going to do. Now comes the fun part; going caveman-style with claw like hands and poking holes into the dough, a.k.a. dimpling the bread. Whoa, I might have just discovered another therapeutic alternative to pounding dough. Imagine stepping into a pool filled with warm, melted chocolate, well, this is nothing like that but comes a close 10th.
All that's left now is to give free reins to my artistic side using sun-dried tomatoes and spring onions. In the oven it goes, and TADA! Ladies and gentlemen, I present to thee the yummiest focaccia bread EVER! I kid you not; hands down best focaccia bread I've ever made. Granted it was my first time making it, but nevertheless, fundamentally brilliant!