Skip to main content

Bread

I've been waiting to write this post for a while. In fact, I even started writing it a week or two ago and then realized I wasn't ready. You see, my beloved Tom has been working out of town since January 15th. That's right folks, 48 days of 100% dirty (cloth!) diaper changing. Tom, although he may not realize it yet, owes me a lot of dark chocolate.

I am a bit of a sulker when it comes to Tom being gone, prone to sit around and read magazines during Piper's nap time and apt to drink too many glasses of tea to make myself feel better. But that cannot continue, praise the Lord, for 48 days. At some point, (the exact time of this point I'd rather not calculate since it did not happen quickly enough), I pulled myself together and started thinking of all the "projects" I've halfheartedly researched and set aside in despondency. One of those, I am delighted to say, I officially completed as of 12:00 a.m. last night. I am also delighted to have taken some photographs of it (photography being another "project" in itself) which I will post here for your viewing enjoyment.

I call this project                              
                                                         "A Protest Against Winter" 








To protest this unusually cold and long Texas winter, I warmed up my house with a 475 degree oven full of, you guessed it, bread! My grandfather gave me a cookbook called "My Bread," by Jim Lahey, which teaches a no-knead bread baking technique. I haven't ever made bread with yeast in it before this, but the idea of not needing to knead definitely appealed to me. I was also intrigued by the use of a dutch oven to bake the bread. Because my grandfather gave me that too, I had zero excuses.The time had come to bake. Although it was 28 degrees outside two days ago, I bundled up sweet baby Piper Joy and headed off to the grocery store to pick up some bread flower and cornmeal (overall cost of bread baking: $5. Amazing!). We ran through the parking lot both ways because there is no way I will walk anywhere in 28 degree weather. Piper Joy didn't seem to mind it though. She kept saying, "Windy! Windy! Windy!" while shaking her head back and forth in the biting wind.

Putting the three ingredients together in a bowl with some water took about 30 seconds, and then the waiting began. Because this is a no-knead method, the rise time for this bread is really long. It was also freezing cold in my house despite the heater's best efforts, so, I let my bread rise for 24 hours. Then you make it into a cute little circle and let it rise again for 2 hrs. Then you put it in the dutch oven and cook it with the lid on and off for a total of 1 1/2 hours and, voila! You feel like a champ even though your husband is never around and you often don't use your time all that well.

Then you take pretty pictures of the bread with some yellow flowers you picked before all the blooms died in this last freeze. Winter may have struck again hard, but spring, however slight, is on my blog. Take that, Winter!

I am now sitting at my kitchen table eating bread with a lovely, thick, crunchy crust and a soft and almost sticky inside. Mmmmm...

Here's to springtime a-coming and the sweet smell of bread in the oven! May there be many more loaves to come!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Enough

At 1:30 p.m. today, my sister, Nurse Cori, arrives back in the U.S. after a two week medical missions trip to Costa Rica. This is the third in a series of trips, one to Mexico, and one to Jordan. We haven't heard much from her while she's been gone, so everyone is chomping at the bit to get a phone call. All I know at this time is that she got to give a fancy wheelchair to a kid who's been bedridden his entire life. That's so fantastic it makes me cry. At 10:30 a.m. yesterday, my mom and I were walking with a giant red stroller full of sweet baby Piper Joy. Piper was trying to fall asleep and I was trying to rouse her enough to keep her awake through the walk so I could take her home for a good nap. I employed such tactics as jumping while singing and flapping my arms as well as racing ahead of the stroller and executing a 360  to end up facing Piper with a giant grin. Neither of these tactics worked and Piper insisted on falling asleep. On our walk with a sleeping ...
6 comments
Read more

Easter Fires

We used to live on top of a hill. It was so densely covered in live oaks that you had to drive halfway up the granite driveway before you could see our house - grey and white and tall in the midst of the trees. I can't even imagine how many times I drove up that driveway and caught the familiar glimpse of my home. First, as a high school-er in my blue minivan, then home from college in the old Lexus, then back from Austin in the Miata. I even drove up the drive as a married woman in my beloved Tom's  black Jetta. But we do not live on that hill anymore and I was reminded of that this Easter as I brought my sweet baby Piper to visit her Nan and Pop in their new home. It was not my parents' initial choice to move to a new home. They as well as I pictured their grandchildren coming up the live oak hill for visits. As little as I consciously thought about it, I had always expected to be able to bring my kids back to see where I grew up. But, after last Easter, a fire started ...
4 comments
Read more

Becoming a Traveler

And so I begin the blogging. It's like starting a trip with Tom Bowyer, my beloved. He takes off full speed ahead before he does anything else. No effortful, intentional planning needed, no calculation of cost, no anticipation of possible problems, he just goes. You'll see this trait in action if you hang around on this blog long enough. It defines our story together. Makes it glorious, actually. He has told me many times to start blogging. "You're a writer," he says, "so write and let people read it." And I think it through and excuse myself under pretenses of not knowing what to write. "Write a journal," he says. "You do it all the time." And I have little to say against that. Then, it comes to me, "But what if no one else wants to read what I write?" The conversation usually ends here. Until today, when a friend of mine, Mrs. Katherine Suzanne Ramsay Rhodes, brilliantly undermined all my efforts to keep from keeping a b...
4 comments
Read more