scratchmade bread: a mission

So among my goals is a Patrick/Lindsay goal to ultimately scratchmake all our food.

Well, a couple of months ago I bought a ton of bread from the grocery store, popped it in the freezer, and made a deal with myself: by the time those loaves ran out, I'll need to have started making our bread from scratch.

And guess what? I did it.

My very first attempt ... success!

I have this picture in my head of hand-kneaded, whole grain loaves or crackly french baguettes. But for the purposes of actually get myself into gear, I decided to start simple and work my way up as I learn more about bread-making, more about our kitchen and oven, and more about patience with dough.

Lucky I have a friend who's already more fearless with breadmaking than I am, right? She suggested the very first recipe she ever used, Emeril Lagasse's basic Italian bread. It includes sugar and oil right in the dough, which I have a feeling makes it an easier dough to work with.

I'm looking forward to the day I know how to extract all the flavor and texture I'm looking for from those four basic ingredients: yeast, flour, water, salt.

In the meantime, this was recipe was very good to me, even when I messed up just a bit (lucky for you, I have pictures of the batch I muddled ... learning experience!).

Basic Italian Bread
Emeril Lagasse, foodnetwork.com

The only note I have to add to the original: I used 5/8 oz active dry yeast (the recipe calls for cake yeast). Thank you, Melizza, for directing me to this yeast conversion table!



That's a lot of yeast! It seemed like a lot to me, anyway. I'll be curious as I get further into my life with bread if I look back at this recipe with a bit of wonder.


At left is the dough just a minute or so into kneading; on the right, just before I pulled the bowl off the mixer (after about eight minutes of kneading at medium speed, around 4 if you have a KitchenAid).



Some notes: Windowpane test! (Read a nice description of the windowpane test and its relationship to gluten development.) I'm kinda proud. I mean the machine did all the work, but I made that dough!

Another note: that dough rose way too much. It should have merely doubled. Clearly it exploded during its first rise. Can't wait to find out what happens to bread when I get it just right.

And yet another note: See those scores on the finished loaf? Yeah, they should be more like cuts. I didn't provide the dough/steam/gas enough of an escape route when I made these psuedo cuts, and you can see what happened below.


And what happened? The little dimples you see pale to what they should be (the photo at the top of this entry is actually a great example of what should have happened: big craggy cracks). And to the right ... those cracks along the bottom of the loaf are, I think, what happens to the loaf when it doesn't have its exits properly marked ...

In any case, the bread was tasty, perfectly serviceable as bread. I made a sandwich within twenty minutes of it coming out of the oven. Nothing could have made me prouder that day.

simplify: a wardrobe of 12 items or less

So, remember how I organized my office to help bring some order to my life? It was great; it's still organized; and I was inspired to let that momentum carry me.

I was also inspired by the Six Items or Less project, which encourages people to see what it would be like to pare down their wardrobes considerably.

reasons the idea appeals to me
1. Simplify. It's a thing I want to do everywhere in my life.

2. Focus. I love clothes (and shoes and scarves), but my dresser tends to look a bit ... war-torn. I interchange going-out clothes and work clothes and lazy-day clothes. No piece of clothing is assigned any particular meaning or purpose, and then I find myself with a huge mass of fabric and colors to sort through as I try to figure out what to wear.

3. Quality and care. That huge mass of fabric? I treat it like a huge mass, like an amorphous heap. In other words, I don't treat it very well, and those clothes I have get to looking worn quickly. The vision I have for my ultimate 12 Items: that it be a collection of carefully crafted, quality pieces of clothing that I'll be able to hold on to and look good in for a decade if I want to. And how much easier would it be to properly care for only 12 items?

so i did it
I dumped all my clothes onto our den floor ...



... sorted through them, and came up with these piles:


giveaways / baking clothes


exercise / loungy

and my 12 items







so many possibilities
My 12: neutral colors, simple cuts, easily accessorized. I'm a scarf and shoe girl. I'm gonna start taking photos of my outfits to see just how versatile 12 items can be.

And then those other piles ... exercise and work clothes are absolutely necessary. And loungy clothes? I wanna make sure my 12 items stay nice, which means not wearing them around the house while I'm cleaning, watching TV, napping, cooking, etc.

next up: phases two & three
two. As I was staring at those exercise and lounge piles I thought I could whittle those down to 12 items or less each, too. But I'll live with my current setup and see which clothes I gravitate to ...

three. And then ... I like the clothes I have in my 12 items, but very few of them are good enough to hang around in my closet for 10 years. As I get in better shape and need to buy smaller clothes, I'll use it as a chance to replace my 12 items, one by one, with higher-quality pieces.

and this relates to food & do how?
Like I said when I reorganized our office, a cluttered space is a cluttered mind is a weak foundation for making good decisions. I was feeling a little overwhelmed by the overfilled dresser looming in our bedroom.

I feel like I exacted control over it, and that I've crossed one more thing off my list of things to worry about.

So now I have more energy to worry about tracking my food and exercise ...

a (mini) new start: reorganizing the office

So, first, some confessions:

We didn't go on our first long Sunday ride. The weather got in the way, so I don't have to feel too guilty about this one, and in fact I went to Sunday spin class instead (where I wasn't as on top of my game as I'd been just a few days before).

I haven't been counting my points. My excuse? I've been building the spreadsheet infrastructure to track those points; I'm figuring out this blog thing; we've gone out of town or had other out-of-the-ordinary weekend plans; etc. None of these is a good excuse not to stay on top of my tracking, though.

something that might help? organizing
I've long had a thing: where if I sit to eat and I see mess around me, I have to clean up that mess or else I won't enjoy my meal; when I worked in an office, I kept my desk clean and orderly (sometimes reorganizing every couple of weeks to keep files and such updated).

A cluttered space is a cluttered mind is a weak foundation for making good decisions.

So with me trying to keep up with this blog and all, I thought it might be a good idea to tackle our home office, which has always been a hot mess. My initial attempts to arrange the furniture were amateurish; so the space was treated a bit second-class; so crap was piled high.

a little bit of the before

Hot. Mess. Disorderly, bare, boring. I've always felt cramped sitting at the computer desk. And while I won't claim that what I've done to the room has brought cohesion, what it was before just felt ... floaty.



And when a cat who loves nesting in boxes thinks the junk piled on your desk is cozy enough to nap in ... it's time.



some things that irked me
The two shelves next to each other. Different fake-wood grain and color! Different heights! Different widths! I feel like we were straddling the dormroom/first apartment look with this here.

The desk with the computer (& friends). Overall, it just bugged me. You can see I backed a shelf against it so it could face into the room. There's a little side-table next to it to hold a printer, external hardrive, miscellany. Over time it became a weird floating island that gathered garbage.

My desk, abandoned. Without a computer at my desk, I hardly sat there. Instead, I emptied my purse on occasion (that mess is a whole other blog entry). Every now and then I've cleaned it off, but within two days its back to being a junk station.

Lonely walls. We have lovely diplomas to display, but they're too small for the walls where they hang. Plus? Boring! I want color! Something to inspire me when I look at it!

phase one of innumerable phases
I'm nearly certain this will always be a work in progress. I'm not an educated interior organizer lady. Our needs for the space will continue to evolve. I will invariably get bored with my view and want to liven it.

But I'm pretty happy with phase one. It's clean, open, and there's art!



I knew going into this that I wanted to move the computer from the righthand desk to the left one; to move one of those two mismatched shelves behind that left desk; and that was it, actually. My aim was to create an open space to sit and write, with books, notebooks and pens handy for my inspired moments.



I took advantage of the opportunity (me? organizing an entire room? it'll happen again, but not for many months) to find homes for some of the errant scraps in those heaps, and I otherwise rearranged and straightened to create a bigger feel for the room.



I love it!