rainy

It's been raining forever I think. I did manage to make another round of pain levain, and it made improvements. I added a bit of dark rye flour and it made a huge difference in taste. The crust was crispier too. Of course there had to be a mishap, and I dorked up one of the steps in the rise process but the loaves didn't turn out leaden. What will happen when I manage to follow all of the directions at once?

On the eve of their six-month birthday, cute boys:

Dash looking out the window at the rain, while chewing on a toy. Always gnawing.

Liam in his chair

I love these wee baby jeans

why, hello

stitchery

I am on a roll! Over the past few weeks I've snuck sewing time in 10 and 15 minute increments and it has finally turned into something.

When I bought my sewing machine a few years ago, I was very excited about it's ability to make awesome buttonholes. I also was keen to try out some free-form machine quilting. I may have inherited my walk and some mannerisms and also a love for olives and cream cheese on english muffins from my mother, but I did not inherit her smashing hand quilting ability.

tipsy owl

Yes, I know that if I quilted as frequently as my mom does I would probably improve. But for now I'm juggling knitting and crocheting and also trying to make that damn bread so getting my hand quilting leveled up is just not going to happen. Enter: la machina. It has this dandy foot that stitch regulates while you glide the fabric underneath. And it is way, way harder than it looks. You can make a serviceable stitch that holds fabric together right out of the gate, but to make it actually look good is proving to be more difficult than I thought.

completely drunken tree

My first project is a blanket for the boys to roll around on while we're in Hawaii. I want to minimize sand-in-baby-crevices, so I used some of my coated fabric for the backing. It's the same stuff that backpacks are made out of so it's water resistant but very malleable. The middle layer is an old Ikea curtain. Then the top is a zany yard of a new Moda print that I love. Owls, yes. I love owls. I basted the layers together (by hand, mom!) and then tried my hand at putting on just enough stitchery to hold the layers together. I tried some outlining, some crazy curlicues, and some sort of straight lines. The end result looks like I sat on my glasses and then proceeded to sew, but it does the job and from a distance you can't really see how crooked and wonky it is. First attempt: satisfactory.

Then because I love having bags for everything, I had to put one together for this too.

other slices

Sometimes I am not covered in babies. It doesn't happen very often, but I try to take advantage of it.

I decided that this year I'm going to master 1) Roasting a Chicken and 2) Pain au Levain.

For the chicken, I have puttered around with a few different recipes but am focusing on the very simple roast from Thomas Keller's Bouchon cookbook. It's a dry roast, just with salt pepper and thyme. I'm not very good at making pan sauces but I am quite good at making mustard so this is perfect. Bake it, let it rest, cut it up, slather with fresh mustard (pink peppercorn is my current favorite). It's not perfect yet, but I think I've gotten skilled enough that it is always tasty.

The bread is a bit more thorny. I've got a reliable sourdough starter living in the fridge, and I've gotten my hands on some french-style high protein flour. I have many bread cookbooks but am using the very detailed Local Breads for instruction. He makes this bread sound more like an animal than a grain, and it feels that complicated sometimes. This type has very precise requirements for humidity, acidity, flour, and the undefined "magic" category. But at the same time you need to roll with the day to figure out how much flour you need and how long it wants to rise. It's a very wet slack dough and I can't work it with my hands so I'm using my mixer. Nice to have my hands free. I think it's actually helping me because I think that the consistency and amount of flour that I would add based on previous experience is detrimental to this bread. You want the dough wet.


First attempt tastes pretty good but is heavy. None of the lovely air bubbles and pockets I was looking for. Made good toast, don't think I would rip off hunks and dip in soup. It's too tough for that. But toasted with butter and honey? Divine.

crumb-y

I enjoy baking bread. We often don't eat it all, and sometimes the loaves come out a little less than tasty because of textural issues. Leftover bits and sometimes those leftover loaves are destined for one thing: breadcrumbs. A basket lined with a tea towel lives behind our bread bin and into that go the ends and stale slices from bread past the tasty point. Last week I baked a pair of loaves and through some vagary of rain or too much kneading the loaves were dry from the get-go. Ok for toast but even I must ration my toast consumption (trivia answer: my favorite food is toast). Part of one loaf and the entirety of another got sliced up and it was past time for breadcrumb making. That little basket was overflowing already.

The usual life cycle of bread-to-crumb is as follows: Uneaten ends of loaves (and whatever may remain of a stale loaf, sliced thinly) gets put in the crumb basket to dry out. Over the course of several weeks, even the hardest thickest end slice becomes a vulnerable dry hunk.

When I have a larger supply (say, an entire loaf not good for eating but fine for crumbs) I slice it thinly and give it a few 10 minute doses in a very low oven. I want to dry it out, not toast it. Then for a few days I spread it out on a clean tea towel on the dining room table to get good and dry. And hope that no one comes over and asks why I have 50 super thin slices of curling dried bread on my table.

Once dry, I employ freezer zip bags and my favorite mallet (a weighted pounder Charlie uses to flatten cutlets) and pound the slices into bits and pieces. I want them relatively small, nothing bigger than a dime.

ready to get out some aggression

Then comes my high tech solution. If you don't have a mixer and a meat grinder attachment, proceed to beat the crap out of your bread pieces until they are small. I use the larger disk on the grinder and some saran wrap to help with the crumbs-all-over problem. This is an effortless way to get your crumbs a uniform small consistency. I used to think that pounding them pretty small was fine, but then realized when cooking that you really want your breadcrumbs to be more of bread dust. The only time you want something larger is with panko, and that's an entirely different creature. So run all of your bread gravel through the grinder and you end up with lovely uniform crumbs.

the white zephyr

Since I'm using homemade bread, I can control the preservative and other chemical content. A bonus is that most of my bread contains a combination of buttermilk, regular milk, flax meal, and frequently a seed mix of flax anise poppy caraway and sesame. The resulting crumbs can only be described as....seasoned. They add zest. They are a secret ingredient in my meatloaf.

the end result

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Liam prefers giraffe meat