Operation Domesticity
We interrupt this writing day to bring you … bread.
A few months back, I decided to put my domestic skills to the test and bake a loaf of bread. But, even I know that my domestic skills suck, so I went with the easiest bread recipe ever. The results were okay. It was tasty, but my bread ended up much less substantial than expected and, frankly, a little airy and chewy. That, however, did not stop Hubs and me from eating every last crumb.
When I mentioned that I tried the recipe, my friend Karin told me that Cook’s Illustrated had improved it and so I proceeded to badger her for a copy until she finally brought it last week. Turns out it’s available on the internet. Whoops.
So, feeling the urge to be domestic again (and looking for any excuse to avoid a painful revision), I decided to test the 2.0 recipe. The result was much better. Not at all airy and completely substantial. It had more flavor and the crust was slightly thicker and crispier, which is just the way I like it. From now on this will be the recipe I use to impress people with my mad baking skillz.
Here’s what you need:
A couple of modifications on my part. First, the Cook’s Illustrated version calls for all-purpose flour, but why use all-purpose when you have bread flour? I’m not sure there’s that much of a difference, so if you only have all purpose on hand, use it.
Second, the recipe suggests using Budweiser for your mild-flavor lager. I’m not much of a beer drinker, but I simply will not buy Budweiser. Too many bad college memories. I chose the Sierra Nevada Summerfest Lager. It wasn’t bad, but I’m open to suggestions.
Here’s how ridiculously easy the recipe is. Once you’ve gathered everything up, mix up your dry ingredients in a large bowl and then pour in all your wet ingredients and combine until you have a shaggy ball of dough. So easy. After that, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, finish the rest of the beer, and wait 18 hours. At this point, I probably should have gone back to the revision, but instead I read a book.
Anyway, the rest of the recipe is just as simple as the first part. Place a sheet of parchment paper in a shallow skillet (I used my Lodge 10-inch skillet) and lightly spray it with cooking spray. Then remove the dough from the bowl and knead it into a small ball. Put the ball in the skillet, cover with plastic wrap, and wait another two hours.
With all this waiting you would think I could be doing a lot of writing. You would think that, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong.
About 30 minutes before you’re ready to bake the bread, set your oven at 500 degrees and put your dutch oven in to heat up. The recipe suggests using an enameled cast iron, but I used my trusty Lodge. Then find every potholder you ever owned and get them ready. You’re going to need them. After the pot is heated, transfer the bread to the pot by using the parchment paper. Genius idea, really. Just don’t burn yourself. Then reduce the heat to 425 and bake with the lid on the dutch oven for 30 minutes. Remove the lid and bake for another 20 minutes.
Using your gazillion potholders, remove the bread from the oven and let cool on a wire rack.
And here is were I worry that the Cook’s Illustrated editors are smoking crack. You’re supposed to let the bread cool to room temperature for about two hours. Two hours!? Seriously? Have you smelled warm bread? Do you think it’s possible to resist the craving to taste warm bread once you have smelled it. Let my clue you in, it isn’t. Wait as long as you can, but I only lasted 10 minutes
That small disagreement aside, I think this recipe is a huge improvement over the New York Times version. Very tasty and much less complicated. (Not that the NYT version was complicated, just that this one is so much easier.) Also, cleaning up for this recipe means washing one bowl. That alone is enough to win my loyalty.
A note about the beer. When I first read the recipe, I was concerned about the beer addition. My mother occasionally makes beer bread and the combination is just not my thing. I was pleased to note that this bread was not beery at all, but that the beer did seem to boast the flavor. You can use non-alcoholic if you so choose.
So Operation Domesticity was a success this time around. Operation Revise that crappy story, not so much.
Source: Cook’s Illustrated.
Living in a Powder Keg and Giving Off Sparks
Hubs finally got a Playstation 3 last weekend. I say finally because before we started dating, the man had aspirations of getting a PS3. Three years ago he bought his entertainment center specifically so it could eventually house the PS3. But all the fun in shopping for Hubs is spending years looking for the best deal and agonizing over whether the price will drop or a new version will be released and so he waited and waited and waited. Well, the wait was over last weekend when he decided that there wasn’t going to be a better deal before Christmas time and his desire to play Lego Indiana Jones and Assassin’s Creed outweighed the need to wait for another price drop. He came home on Sunday night with both the PS3 and the Indiana Jones game.
So of course, I ran out the next day and bought SingStar.
For those of you who are not familiar with the goodness that is SingStar, it’s essentially a karaoke video game. You sing along with the song and score points for timing and pitch. All the while, the music video plays in the background. The game is so friggin’ addictive that we already have SingStar 80s, SingStar Rocks, and SingStar Pop for the PS2 and SingStar for the PS3. We need help, people.
But by and large, the most fun thing about SingStar is the WTF?! factor of some of the lyrics and videos. To that end, I submit Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” video. Now, keep in mind that I came from a household that did not have MTV until the 90s. The only videos that I got to see were the ones that eventually made it onto NBC’s Friday Night Videos and I’m pretty sure I never saw that one because when we played the Bonnie Tyler song, I lost 2000 points simply because I could not stop laughing. Ninjas, high school swimmers and some freaky angel looking guy… this video has it all.
Enjoy.
P.S. My utmost respect to whomever can tell me what that video is supposed to be about.
/End Whining
Apologies for the temper tantrum in the last post. Lately a lot of the MFA stuff has come back to haunt me. That’s the thing about returning being a full-time writer. You get to live the dream, but you get all the nightmares along with it.
Speaking of nightmares, I may go silent for the rest of the week as I’m working on revising the last story I wrote. There are some major overhauls ahead and I have a feeling I should be concentrating on that and not buying and selling my friends on Facebook. (Thank you, hujhax.)
In other addiction news, Hubs brought home SingStar Rocks last night. We got SingStar 80s on a whim a couple of weeks ago and I feel a new addiction being born. I can totally rock 99 Red Balloons. Maybe if the writing thing doesn’t work out I can be an 80s pop star. . .
Tramps Like Us, Baby We Were Born to Run
Hubs and I are back from the Springsteen concert, but the fangirl in me has yet to stop squealing long enough to let me compose a coherent thought. Lowlights and highlights it is.
Lowlights:
- Hubs and I have the uncanny ability to attract loud people who talk about nothing. In line, we were behind the loud people bantering over the weather. In our seats, we were in front of the loud person who described every single section of the arena that he had sat in. And finally, just before the show started, we were in front of the couple discussing when their next sex night would be. Lovely.
- I-35 between Dallas and Waxahatchie. WTH, people? Can you not pave a road?
Highlights:
- Staying at the Hyatt Summerfield Suites for the win. Walked three blocks to the American Airlines center.
- The band. The only other time I’ve seen Springsteen was for the acoustic Devils & Dust tour, which, while amazing, had a very somber feel. This concert was more of a party. The energy was high and it was great to see Bruce and the band having so much fun.
- Hearing “Jungleland,” “Born to Run,” and “Dancing in the Dark” live.
- The man in full cowboy regalia that rocked out to every. single. song. He was having a great time and didn’t care who knew it.
- Jon Bon Jovi joining Springsteen on stage for Glory Days. There are no words. None. Just gleeful fangirlish screaming.
More when the squealing in my head subsides.
The Springsteen Reader: Songs
“We cut Greetings in three weeks. But Clive [Davis] handed it back and said there was nothing that could be played on the radio. I’m glad he did; I went home and wrote “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirit in the Night.” With the previously missing Clarence Clemons on the saxophone, these songs were recorded, and the record was finished.“I never wrote in that style again. Once the record was released, I heard all the “new Dylan” comparisons, so I steered away from it. But the lyrics and spirit of Greetings came from a very unselfconscious place. Your early songs come out of a moment when you’re writing with no sure prospect of ever being heard. Up until then, it’s just you and your music. That only happens once.”
~~from Songs by Bruce Springsteen
The Springsteen Reader: Down the Shore Everything’s All Right
Ivan first traveled to Asbury Park in 1982, soon after the release of Nebraska, three years after supposedly meeting Bruce Springsteen on a service road in San Mateo, California. He had gone to the Jersey shore with his brother, driven cross-country from San Francisco, hoping to get a glimpse of the world beyond the West Coast, and, more important, the world of Bruce. At the time, I was fourteen years old and a big fan of Madonna, and the crowd I ran with though of Bruce as some overly patriotic guy with a redneck heart and a sweaty bandana. Bruce was a Jersey thing; being from the Gulf Coast, we didn’t get it.
~~ from “Down the Shore Everything’s Alright” by Michelle Richmond.
The Springsteen Reader: Greasy Lake
I try to keep my fangirlish tendencies to the minimum on the blog, but today when I typed “our drive to the Springsteen show” in my head, I was actually squealing, OMG! The Bruce Springsteen concert is only 6 days away. OMG OMG OMG. You see why I’d want to suppress this side of me.
I’ve been a fan of the Boss since I was eight and yes, it was that damn Courtney Cox video that did it. In the years since, I’ve become a more sophisticated Springsteen fan. I would not have gotten through high school without my Born to Run cassette and in the months surrounding the first anniversary of 9/11, The Rising was pretty much the only CD in my car stereo.
True to the fangirl within, over the years I’ve hunted down pretty much anything I can read related Springsteen. In honor of this weekend’s trip, I’ll be sharing some of my favorite takes from the literary side of Springsteen. Enjoy!
There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous characters then. We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine. When we wheeled our parent’ whining station wagons out onto the street we left a patch of rubber half a block long. We drank gin and grape juice. Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hai. We were nineteen. We were bad. We read Andre Gide and stuck elaborate poses to show that we didn’t give a shit about anything. At night, we went up to Greasy Lake.
~from “Greasy Lake” by T. Coraghessan Boyle.
Sugarcat No More
Let’s start with the end of the story first: Mr.B is diabetes free. At least, that’s what the tests show anyway. We had a vet appointment early this morning and after four days being off the insulin, his blood sugar was perfectly normal.
The vet was also quick to point out that is a rare case. I’m not saying this to brag on Mr.B (though he is the best cat ever), but to warn anyone who might google for feline diabetes info and think that feline diabetes is something that can come and go in a month. Seeing the blood sugar levels return to normal this soon after diagnosis is pretty rare and we are very lucky. In the meantime, we’re keeping both cats on the diabetes diet management plan to make sure Mr.B is stable and because it seems to be helping his IBD. We’ll go back in four weeks for more tests to see just how stable Mr.B is.
Now, this story actually begins with a less happy trip to the vet. Last Thursday Hubs woke up at two in the morning because Mr.B was pacing in circles on his leg. Now, Mr.B is a weird cat, but this kind of behavior is unheard of. So we woke up, watched him for about two minutes and then I sent Hubs to get the Karo syrup. We gave him a little and then a little more, but he kept pacing and then fell off the bed. At that point, Hubs doled out another half teaspoon of Karo and I called the emergency animal hospital.
By the time we got him in, his blood glucose numbers were back to normal and we were sent off with instructions to watch him for the night. I stayed up until 5 and most of my “observation” consisted of watching Mr.B sleep.
I’m glad this turned out for the best. As I told Hubs last night, I’d like one week, just one week, where Mr.B would stay healthy and I didn’t have to call my vet. From the looks of things. I might get four of them.
Las Vegas: Before and After
Again with the apologies. Hubs and I went off to Las Vegas this weekend to make our annual donation to the Casino Association of Nevada. Well, Hubs did anyway. My idea of gambling is to put $10 into a 25 cent blackjack machine, lose it, and call it a day. Although, this time I made an attempt at playing craps, but more about that later.
Anyway, it’s been hectic here and that means no writing. Instead, I have a week filled with vets and pet sitter interviews. Before we left last week, I took White Cat to the vet for the third time in the last two months. He has feline IBD, but lately he’s also been losing weight and acting funny. We did some blood work and he was diagnosed with feline diabetes. There is nothing that will make you feel worse than getting news like this, then hanging up the phone and getting on a plane to Las Vegas. So today we have an appointment to learn the ins and outs of feline diabetes, including how to give White Cat a daily (or maybe twice daily) shot of insulin. Good thoughts, prayers, and other vibeage directed toward White Cat will be much appreciated.
On top of that, we returned to find that Tabby Cat, our normally healthy, resilient cat had been ill while we were gone. I blame the food, but am also feeling like a terrible Cat Mom for leaving them in their hour of need. And on top of that, we’re leaving them again in a couple of weeks so I have to quickly find a trustworthy pet sitter who can give insulin injections.
So, yeah. Not writing today. In the meantime, I’ll have some pictures from Vegas and some highlights from our trip up on the blog shortly.
Well Now I *Really* Love the Frog
Gah… 6:30 on a Sunday morning is a ghastly time to be awake. Someone needs to tell my cats that breakfast is not due for another two hours at least.
But since I’m up, I’ll brag on my friend Laura of A Life in Scribbles. She’s an extremely talented artist an has a real gift for comics. She took a blog post that I wrote last month (How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Frog) and turned it into an amazing comic! I’m so honored that she chose my piece to illustrate. Please check it out. It’s very, very cool. Click on the illustration a couple of times to get it larger.
Enjoy!
