After seeing this attempted by a friend on facebook and looking at the beautiful result, I thought I'd give this a try. I was in the middle of writing papers, which is what my life is all about at the moment, I needed a bit of procrastination in carbohydrate form. The dough took less than 3 minutes to prepare. All you need is time for it to rise and for the yeast to do its thing, and a 2 hour window of opportunity to let it proof and bake. This bread is so easy and the results taste like you spent hours slaving away. This one's a keeper, and I plan on making more of this in the near future.
You'll need:
3 cups of flour (i used 2 c. organic all purpose wheat, and 1 c. organic spelt)
1 1/2 cups of warm water (you'll need 1/4 c more if you use spelt or other alternative grain flour)
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 teaspoon instant yeast
Combine the ingredients and mix with a wooden spoon.
The dough should look "shaggy" and "piecey".
Here's what my dough looked like after mixing. Now all you need to do is cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let sit for 12-18 hours.
My specimen after a nice long sleep. Way to go yeast, you did your thing!
The next step: you might need to wet your hands to turn over the dough a couple of times to form a nice smooth ball. Nestle it into a tallish bowl for it to rise for another 2 hours. 30 minutes before you want to bake it, heat the oven to 450 degrees and pop in a heat resistant pot with a lid, such as a cast iron casserole. When the oven and pan are nice and hot, place your dough into the pan and give it a few shakes to distribute the dough nicely. Cover the pan with your lid. This creates steam while the bread bakes and results in a wonderfully crispy crunchy crust.
After 30 minutes of baking, remove the lid and bake for another 15 to 20 minutes. You can tell your bread is ready when it sounds hollow when you tap it.
Straight out of the oven. Note the parchment paper at the bottom of the pan to prevent sticking.
I love baking. I am always amazed by how beautiful it can be. Is this the end of store-bought bread for me?
The spelt flour added a sweet nutiness to the bread. All that resting for 12-18 hours imparts a complex flavor to the bread with a dense and chewy crumb and a crusty outer shell. Amazing.
I scarfed down two slices with butter while it was still hot. The next day it got slathered with cream cheese, smoked salmon and capers.
I was never a huge fan of cheesecake until I started making them myself. I was always dissatisfied with the crust, or the sweetness, or the texture. Store bought cheesecakes haven't got anything on homemade cheesecakes. It's practically a whole different desert. They're not too difficult to make. This is only my third cheesecake ever. Here's the recipe I used.
I had some strawberries in the fridge and was toying with the idea of incorporating fruit into my cheesecake as I had only ever made the plain vanilla cheesecake.
I used about 2 cups of fruit, mashed them with a potato masher and then used the blender to puree.
I prefer chocolate wafers to graham crust. Who doesn't want more chocolate in their lives? Plus the chocolate crust reminds me of my favorite part of dairy queen ice cream cakes. To make the crust, crush the cookies by hand or with a hand blender and add 4 tablespoons of melted butter. 
Now comes the fun part. I don't own a springform pan or anything fancy so the cake went into that lovely round casserole dish. How to ensure it can be properly removed from said casserole dish? Your friend parchment paper saves the day.
Get a square of parchment paper bigger than your dish. Fold in half and the continue folding in on itself so you can make a circle with the right diameter for your pan, like so. Use the middle of the circle as your guide.
Then trim the paper with scissors along the top edge of your pan and voila!
Butter the pan before arranging the paper around it.
Parchment pan with strawberry puree lurking in background.
Back to the crust. Press the cookie/butter combo into the bottom and up the sides of the pan with your fingers. Careful not to leave any holes or your batter will spill out of the crust and we don't want that. Bake at 325 for 8 minutes. 
This is 3/4 cup of strawberry puree and a package of cream cheese. 
This is the finished batter. Tricks: use room-temp ingredients and don't put air into the batter, it's not about vigorous mixing, more of a folding action. Of course, if you have a mixer it will do the trick, but my arm is my mixer.
Pour the batter into your crusted pan and then it's time to get fancy! I dropped the other 3/4 cup of puree over the batter to make amazing patterns by running a knife around the blobs, all while imagining myself on ace of cakes.
Psychedelicious, man!
The prize, fresh out of the oven 1 hour 25 minutes later.
The morning after a good night's sleep in the fridge. This is when the casserole lid came in handy.
It barely cracked, booyeah!
This is by no means a healthy or low calorie desert, but I tend to give my cheesecakes as gifts so as not to overeat them! This cake tasted exactly like the cheesecake version of strawberry ice cream. While it cooked Rocky said " this is what heaven must smell like!"
Can't wait for summer salads!
I'll take the kitty and the french bulldog.
Doctored the recipe with some ginger and garlic. Pourquoi pas?
I made some more no-knead bread. This time with sunflower seeds!
Start checking them after 15 minutes...mine were a little overdone. You want them to still be wobbly when you take them out of the oven.
Guess where I am going with this mess of berries?
What did you make this weekend?
