Progress Report: or, The Curb Fairy Is my New Best Friend

So, yesterday was Saturday and I didn’t post and today’s post is going to be truncated, but there has been progress with the move:

1. With the CDs, I’m now through the Ps, and am definitely going to need to run out for more CD albums in the near future.
2. While out for a walk in the neighborhood yesterday, we found two wardrobe boxes on the curb, and John carried them – both at once – the twoish blocks back to our house, removed the tied-off bag of dog doo that another neighbor had so classily dropped into one of the boxes, inspected said box to make sure the bag was really and truly tied off (it was), and then brought them into the house, where we realized we had nowhere to put them, SO …
3. John took all the books off of a bookcase that was in the process of collapsing and carried it out to the curb, and then we boxed up NINE boxes of books from that bookcase (and there are at least two more to go – it was tall, and we’d overloaded it, hence the collapse).
4. I made a double-batch of my mom’s meat sauce, enough for last night’s spaghetti dinner, plus four more dinners.
5. I bought John a mini German Chocolate cake for being such a good sport about lugging the wardrobe boxes home and dealing with the doggie doo.

In other news, while all this was going on, a group of college girls from up the street took the broken bookcase plus several CD racks that weren’t in good enough shape to bother moving from our curb. At one point while they were taking all the shelving, John startled them by answering the door (ironically, someone selling security systems door-to-door), and they hid behind a bush in our yard. When one of them finally got up the courage to ask if we were throwing the stuff out, John assured her that we were and couldn’t be happier to have someone take it who could use it.

Today, I need to do research, which entails – I’m dead serious – watching Buffy and Twilight and taking notes. I’m giving a paper on vampire TV and movies marketed to teen girls and they way they depict dating violence at the Children’s Literature Association conference in mid-June.

So, I’m off to the Buffyverse.

Sourdough Bread

So, here are the results of yesterday’s first-ever sourdough bread baking. Unfortunately, I was halfway through making the sourdough before it occurred to me to take pictures, but here’s one after the first rise:

The two indentations are from the tips of two of my fingers. When bread dough is done with its first rise, you should be able to make indentations in it with your fingertips that stay after you’ve taken your fingers away. Also, the dough should have doubled in size. Rising time varies by recipe, so I can’t give you a general approximate time; for this bread, it was an hour.

As you can see, after the first rise, you shape the dough into loaves and then cover it to rise again, also until double. With most breads I’ve done, the second rise is a bit shorter than the first. With this one, it’s also an hour. As you can also see, shaping loaves is a tad tricky. Because the dough is VERY elastic (a result of the yeast doing its yeasty business), it’s hard to divide it into equal parts (most recipes make two or three loaves). Once the pieces are unequal, you find yourself pulling a little off of THIS loaf to put over HERE, and then things get lumpy and bad. So I usually end up with one REALLY nice-looking loaf, one so-so loaf, and one pile of lumpy bad, as you see.

Something else that varies is at what point(s) you glaze the bread and what you glaze it with. Usually, it’s either melted butter or some kind of egg wash. For this recipe, it’s the white of one large egg and one tablespoon of water. For a recipe like this, you slash the tops of the loaves before glazing. This is tricky because you’ll be afraid of slashing too deeply, but you won’t; I find that I’m much more likely to make slashes that are too shallow because I’m worried about making them too deep. With this particular dough, the slashes were tricky to cut because the dough was REALLY puffy, probably because of the long second rise.

When I’m doing a recipe that calls for either just the white or just the yolk of an egg or two, I usually save the remaining portion to add to scrambled eggs or an omelet within 24 hours (shown here in a Ball un-canning plastic jar – like Tupperware, but with a screw-on lid, designed for freezing (I used them TONS for baby food when Danny still ate purees) but also good for refrigerating a small amount of something, like one egg yolk).

After the second rise and usually somewhere in there a glazing (either at the beginning or end of the second rise), the bread is ready to bake. You know it’s done when it turns golden-brown and sounds hollow when you tap it. Since I use at least some whole-wheat flour in all of my breads, the color is usually more brown than golden, but it shouldn’t look burnt, and to be clear, these loaves do look a little burnt, even though I took them out of the oven 5 minutes early because they were smelling very done.

Unfortunately, the smell is something I can’t describe with justice or post pictures of. I was about 8 minutes into baking these loaves when I could smell baking bread from my computer (at the dining room table). As you might imagine, different varieties of bread have different smells, and I’ve been enjoying the sourdough smells since I first put together the starter two days ago. I will warn, however, that enjoyment of the smell of sourdough starter – especially after it’s been sitting at room temperature for two days – is not for novices. Make sure you’ve grown to enjoy other yeast smells before leaning over a bowl of sourdough and taking a good whiff.

I also feel like I should apologize to all the gluten-free folks out there. I’m a huge fan of gluten-containing foods, and am lucky in that no one in my household has a gluten sensitivity so I can make lots of them. However, I do have a couple of dear friends with gluten and other grain sensitivities and there’s a whole world of wonderful recipes out there for the gluten-free set, many of which may be found here, at Gluten-Free Bay, which specializes in Kosher, Gluten-Free recipes and is written by a very old friend of mine (that is, I knew her in junior high – she’s not a very old person, in fact she’s younger than I am and I won’t be 30 for another … 7 days!).

I also feel like I should note that this is NOT a recipe, or even all that detailed a tutorial. As I noted in yesterday’s post, I’m using the Sourdough French Loaves recipe from Great American Home Baking, and I strongly recommend that you go look it up there; I’ve had great success with their recipes over the years. But I’m happy to tell you what I can about following a bread recipe; it was REALLY intimidating for me at first, as I’ve said, and so I’m hoping to make it less so for other folks if I can.

By the by, just to make clear that I actually don’t do ALL that much of the cooking around here and because I mentioned what I do with leftover egg yolks/whites above, here’s a picture of the beautiful plate of scrambled eggs and toast (from Honey Whole Wheat bread) John just put in front of me. He used the extra yolk from the egg wash into the mix, but he makes us a beautiful, hot breakfast pretty much every morning.

And on a self-flagellating note, I did not get to the satin blouse yesterday. However, John and I did pack our entire DVD collection in preparation for our move back to New York at the end of June; that, though, is another post for another day.

Stuff I Made This Week

So, as I mention in the subtitle and in my first entry, I’m kind of into the whole home ec thing (as long as there’s no cleaning involved; John does the dishes). So I thought, to explain what I mean, I’d make a list of stuff I’ve made in the past week or so:

1. My Grammie’s Brownies: This one is almost a gimme. My Grammie Mylott made the greatest brownies in the world, and so did my mom, and then recently, when I started baking at least weekly, I called her for the recipe – which she no longer had, and she had to reverse-engineer it from the recipe in her older-edition-than-mine Betty Crocker cookbook, but she figured it out to the letter – and now so do I. No frosting, no nuts; just brownies.
2. Herb Baguettes: This one was a new recipe to me, from a cook book my mom got me as a teenager, installment mail order style. It’s called Great American Home Baking, and it was one of those deals where they send you a binder and X number of teaser recipes and then for X dollars a month you get X more recipes for your binder. My mom always REALLY wanted me to get into helping her in the kitchen and I was never much interested, so she ended up getting me these things because I showed a spark of interest and I made a lot of cakes and muffins and quickbreads, but I’d intimidated by yeast breads. Then earlier this year, I was looking at our monthly spending and trying to figure out where I could economize, and we were spending crazy amounts of money every month on whole-wheat sandwich bread, so to save money, I pulled out my Betty Crocker cook book and made a couple loaves of Honey Whole-Wheat Bread (only, with ALL whole wheat flour, not just half) just to see how it went. It ended up being WAY cheaper than getting commercial bread with all whole wheat flour and without high-fructose corn syrup and tasting more like bakery bread; like seriously, I was amazed at how un-threatening yeast bread actually was. So from there, I started doing the two loaves of honey whole-wheat plus some other kind of baked treat each week. Monday of this week, I did the Herb Baguettes from Great American Home Baking and also the starter for the Sourdough French Loaves, which needs to sour for two days, so I’ll be continuing with that later today.
3. An Eyelet Blouse: When I say made, I mean I started with a pencil, some paper, and a measuring tape. I did a lot of measurements, based on knowing where I wanted seams to be and what I wanted the neckline to be shaped like and stuff, and I came up with pattern pieces, and then today, I cut the eyelet – leftover from the bolt I bought four years ago to make my wedding dress – and made the blouse. I’m not sure I’m 100% happy with it; it might look a little too handmade. But I’m going to try a similar-but-not-identical one with some satin I have sitting around tomorrow and then see what I feel about the two of them. I also plan to use the scraps from the two blouses to embellish a T-shirt, since embellished T-shirts seem to be a big deal this summer. If I’m feeling ambitious – and photogenic – I’ll post photos of all the finished products. In the meantime, here are a couple pictures of the wedding dress, which I made four years ago this very month (photos by Dan Leavey):

 This shows some of the detail on the bodice.

And this shows the length and the way in which the dress went with the other outfits at our wedding, which was '70s-themed.

Sometime soon, I’ll also have to do a couple loaves of Honey Whole-Wheat bread because I took the last loaf out of the freezer today. And last week, I also did a project based on this project at Sew Green. Fair warning: this is a Lady Project, for Ladies. Also fair warning, after I assembley-line-stitched 8 of this pattern, spending a whole afternoon and evening, I discovered that I wasn’t really that happy with the pattern and re-designed it on my own. So, I’m down with the idea over at Sew Green, but the execution, for me anyway, required some fine-tuning. Anyone else out there working on anything projecty?

Hey, There

So, there was a blog here beginning a little over two years ago, and continuing until a little over a year ago. By then I'd had a baby. And a few disgruntled political rants. And I ran out of time and energy.

I still really don't have either time or energy, but I wanted to give this another shot anyway, 'cause I'm chock full of opinions and interests and stuff. And I figure, if my half a reader (or less?) wants to hear about them, that's awesome.

So ...

Things I expect I might be interested in and/or have opinions about that are likely to turn up here?

1. Grad School: I'm a doctoral student in the English Department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, majoring in Children's Literature, with minors in Restoration/Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Early American Literature, and Rhetoric/Composition. So, you might hear about grad school itself, or about stuff I'm reading. Just to be clear, I'm All But Dissertation, so I'm not in coursework reading diverse materials; what I'm reading now is all related to one topic, the one covered in my diss.
2. News/Politics: I try really hard not to talk about this because it just makes me angry most of the time, but more often than I'd like I end up talking about stuff on the news, or about politics. To be clear, my own, personal politics tend to be a bit oddball, and revolve around everyone needing to be generally altruistic more often than not, which is a fairly unpopular ideology in the contemporary US.
3. Food and Sewing: Or more generally, stuff you might do in home ec. I'm kind of big on saving money and the planet by doing stuff myself rather than purchasing stuff ready-made. Most especially, this tends to revolve around baking my own bread (but as I don't grow my own grain or mill my own flour, I don't have too many illusions about the fact that while I save a TON of money doing this, I'm not doing much for the environment).
4. My Family: I've been married for going on four years to a talented playwright, fellow doctoral student, and all-around spiffy guy named John and we have an eighteen-month-old son, Danny.

So, those are the things you're probably most likely to hear about, but based on the eclecticism of those things, you probably have some idea how likely I am to stay on-topic. And it's entirely possible I won't discipline myself to post at all. But we'll see.