Breadsticks! The good kind!

How cool are they!  I made those! 

I'm so obsessed with bread lately.  There's something so satisfying about delicately, yet firmly, kneading a blob of wet mess into a beautiful ball of dough.  These are some yummerific breadsticks I "threw together" when I had a few people around last weekend. 

One of the nerdy boys from work was there.  I'm surrounded by boys talking about firmware and cloud computing all day - but the Aussie Nerd is the only one who pretends to be interested when I talk about what I cooked for dinner last night.  He's really good at that.  Much better than pretending to be interested in the bag of new clothes I came back with after lunch from Uniqlo. 

So I thought I'd show off some bread skills by whipping up this batch of ridiculously easy breadsticks.  The recipe is from the new Bread: River Cottage Handbook No. 3 by Daniel Stevens, and uses half bread flour, half white flour.   They recommend curling the edges over like candy canes.  These don't look anything like those uniform sticks that come in a box from the supermarket! 

First batch had Parmesan shavings and salt, second batch had fresh rosemary from the garden. 

I thought I'd go one step further and make a big bowl of Aioli to dip the sticks in.  An hour later I was still pouring olive oil in one drop at a time, with my other arm about to drop off from whisking, and remembered why people buy mayonnaise these days.  It tasted pretty darn good though.  Well worth it.