Challah

There are few things that get me really excited about the weekend. Sleeping in, grabbing lunch with friends, lazy Sunday's catching up on Grey's Anatomy and Revenge, you get the picture of my weekly ritual...

But to end the long weekday and welcome a sweet weekend, Friday nights always mean family time at my grandmother's house for Shabbat dinner. But whether you're Jewish or not, there is some type of get together your family keeps up that brings you all together in the best way possible. So when we get together I always look forward to conversing with family, a good movie and of course, the food.

Now while my grandmother spends all day making everything at the table (Shabbat dinner is always by far the best meal of the week), we always buy challah bread from a near by bakery until a few weeks ago, I decided to make it myself.  I had made it once or twice before in school when I was younger and decided to give it a shot using this recipe from Smitten Kitchen who gives the best directions and is so unbelievably helpful and clear. The recipe ended up yielding enough dough for four loaves of challah instead of the two that I expected, but that just meant more challah and French toast in the morning so hey, I'm not complaining...

I actually really want this...

Making the dough was surprisingly very easy and only took about 30 minutes or so. I tried making it with poppy seeds the first time as you can see in the picture, and then opted for sesame seeds this week yet both versions turned out equally great. The only issue I'm having is that it's not as light and fluffy inside as I'd hope for it to be so that's something I'm working on, but there's something about homemade bread straight out of the oven that definitely makes it better than anything I could get from a bag.

I've only used this recipe twice and have had great results both times. It is instructed on Smitten Kitchen's website that it should work equally well if I freeze half the batch and save it for later use, so I have about a loaf's worth of dough waiting for me in the freezer until I put that to the test Friday morning. Stay tuned for how it turns out and until then, I hope you have a great week.