January 2010 Archives

The sleet and freezing rain started up right as I hit the city of Frederick last night. I switched over to the car's thermometer setting, and it said 40 degrees, so I figured I had a little time. In the five to seven minutes it took me to get to where we live just outside the city, I watched the temperature drop. 38 degrees. 37. It skipped right over 36 and fell to 35. By the time I got to our house - after first following a car the inexplicably went 30 mph on the road where the speed limit is 40, and then 40 mph on the road where it is only 25 - I was down to 34 degrees. It's always a couple of degrees colder out here anyway, so that's not quite as dramatic as it sounds, but still, we were just about to cross over the freezing mark.

I still have time, I thought, and aimed the car down the driveway. The top part was fine, but once I turned off on to our section, I started to slide. I got to the house, parked the car and ran inside, throwing down my purse, groceries and gym bag. I kicked off my heels and greeted John and Seamus hurriedly while I put on sneakers. Then I raced back out to the car and up to the top of the driveway, slipping and sliding all the way. And it is a good thing that I did, because if I hadn't there'd be no way I'd be getting out of here today. All it takes is the slightest coating of anything (today: Ice) and that driveway becomes impassable.

I think maybe I'm getting the hang of this country living thing. Although I'd be perfectly content if we could be done with the stupid winter weather already. We lived in our townhouse with its nice, snow clearing HOA for four years and I think it snowed three times. I move out here where we have to do all the work - and a lot of work it is - and I think this is the fifth time in a month and a half that we've had weather bad enough to affect the driveway. Not cool, mother nature.

I think it is a well established fact that I do not like mornings. Nor am I a big fan of bugs. And yet I keep encountering them in combination, when I am really not at my best. The other morning I went to walk from the living room to the kitchen to get Seamus his breakfast, and there, dangling right at head level, was a gigantic black spider. I almost walked right into it. With my face. Luckily, I spotted it just in the nick of time and jumped back, yes, shrieking like a little girl. I may not be little, but I sure as hell am a girl when it comes to bugs. Especially when those bugs are hideously overgrown spiders.

Then the next day a huge beetle landed on me while I was in the shower. I yelled again and flicked it off, then scooped it up with the washcloth and threw the whole thing out of the shower stall. Like many of you, I shower naked, so it was particularly alarming to have a bug on my person. Plus I'm practically blind without my glasses on, so I feel even more vulnerable to sneak bug attacks. In this case, I got out of the shower - taking the time to carefully and suspiciously shake out my towel and bathrobe - and the beetle was just gone. There was no carcass in the washcloth, no trail of drops leading out of the bathroom. He had just vanished. Don't think that didn't worry me all day, knowing that there was an angry beetle lurking in my bathroom, biding his time and plotting revenge. Thankfully, the Beetle Disposal Team (while losing points for hearing me yelling about bugs and not running to the rescue) managed to locate and "transport"* the beetle later in the evening.

Dear bugs: I realize you have a role to play in the ecosystem. All I ask is that you not play that role in physical contact with my person. I think that's reasonable. Also, if you could try to limit our interactions to the hours between 10 am and 9 pm, that would allow me to a) be fully awake and/or b) not have to think about you right before bed.
*where transport=flush down the toilet

* Beagle not included with recipe.

I am an excellent baker. I don't say that to brag. There are a lot areas in life in which I do not excel, but I'm pretty good with the baking. Except for when it comes to baking bread. Oh, how I suck at baking bread. I once made baguettes that could have doubled as deadly weapons - it was Professor Plum, in the conservatory, with one of Hillary's baguettes, Inspector. My focaccia (Ok, I just spent five minutes trying to figure out how to spell focaccia and getting increasingly annoyed, only to realize that I am spelling it correctly and it is Word that is wrong) was flat and boring, and my rustic Italian bread was inedible. I do ok with pizza crust and calzone dough and rolls, but for some reason, I cannot produce a decent loaf of bread.

However, I recently had a craving for cinnamon bread. Irritated beyond belief that all of the bread at the grocery store had 50 different preservatives, plus high fructose corn syrup and some sort of hydrogenated oil, I decided to give making my own cinnamon bread a try. I stomped over to the baking aisle, grabbed a couple of packets of yeast, a bottle of cinnamon, and a bag of bread flour and headed home.

Imagine my surprise when I got home and realized that most cinnamon bread recipes don't use bread flour. I poked around on the internet for a while and eventually settled on this recipe, which turned out to be delicious. I'm pretty sure I found it on Serious Eats, but I can't find it now, so I can't link to it and give them credit. It is light and fluffy and cinnamon-y and fantastic. The recipe is only supposed to make one loaf, but I got two out of it. I have no idea why. My co-workers enjoyed the second loaf though (me, anxiously setting it out in the kitchen: I hope they'll like it. What if the second loaf isn't as good as the first? No one's going to want my silly bread. Oh, look, it's all gone already.) so I have proof it is a crowd pleaser.

Cinnamon Bread recipe:
1 package active dry yeast (1/4 ounce)
1 ¼ cups warm milk
1 cup sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, melted & cooled, plus more for brushing
3 large egg yolks
1 tsp salt
3 ½ cups all purpose flour, plus more for dusting
2 tablespoons cinnamon

In the bowl of a mixer with a dough hook, dissolve the yeast in ¼ cup of the warm milk. Sprinkle with a pinch of the sugar and let the mixture stand until the yeast starts to foam - about five minutes.

Turn the mixer on low and add the rest of the milk, ½ cup of the sugar, the egg yolks, the butter and the salt. Add two cups of the flour and turn the speed up to medium. Continue mixing until the flour is incorporated. Gradually add the remaining 1 ½ cups flour and mix until the dough holds together and pulls away from the sides of the bowl. The dough will be very soft.

Turn the dough out on a lightly floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic - about ten minutes. Put the kneaded dough into a large bowl. Cover with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel (I always go with a towel. It makes me feel retro) and let rise until doubled in size. That should take about 1 ½ hours. Test the dough by pressing two fingers in it. If the indents remain, the dough has risen enough.

Combine the remaining ½ cup of sugar and the two tablespoons of cinnamon in a small bowl. Brush the bottom and sides of a 9x5 loaf pan (I think this is the standard size) with melted butter.

Roll the dough into a rectangle about the size of the loaf pan. Brush the surface of the dough with melted butter and sprinkle the cinnamon and sugar evenly across. Starting on one of the long sides, roll the dough up into a long cylinder and pinch the seam closed. Place the roll in the loaf pan, seam side down. If you're me, then repeat this with the remaining dough. If you haven't mysteriously ended up with extra dough, cover the loaf pan and let the dough rise a second time, until the dough is just about level with the top of the pan. This takes about 20 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Brush the dough with more melted butter. Bake until bread is golden brown - 45 minutes to an hour. Cool in pan for five minutes, then transfer to a rack to cool completely. I wrapped my bread up very carefully in plastic wrap and then stuck it in Tupperware. It stayed good for the four days it took to eat the whole loaf, but probably would have started getting stale pretty soon after that.

Anyone have any good recipes that do call for bread flour?

My beloved puppy will be 16 this year. After scaring the crap out of me in August with his massive seizure and his infection, he seemed to have mostly settled back into being a happy, healthy hound. Until the other day, when he was sitting on the couch, moved the wrong way and started yelping in pain. We still don't know what exactly the problem was, but the vet thinks he either pulled a muscle or pinched a nerve. It took us a little while to figure out that something was wrong, because at first it didn't happen all that regularly. Then we noticed he'd stopped shaking his ears (he loves to flip his ears. In fact, he just did it right now while I was typing this) and was opening his mouth very gingerly. That combined with an incident where he hurt himself in his sleep and woke up yelping (hello confused humans and dog at 4 am) convinced us it was time for a trip to the vet.

The vet agreed that something was wrong, and gave him a shot of painkillers and an anti-inflammatory. Seamus is on physical restriction for a while and has to have more anti-inflammatory drugs each morning for ten days. Well, he started feeling better almost immediately. Ok, first he felt stoned. On the drive back to the house he was sitting in the back seat smiling and kind of nodding with his eyes half-closed. Then when we got home, he took to wandering around, staring at stuff. He'd walk over to his water dish and just stand there, like, dude, why did I come over here? Or he'd suddenly have to sit down. It was funny, although he looked a little scared a couple of times. But then, the next day he was not drugged and he felt much better. So much better that he resented the baby gates on the staircases and our attempts to keep him calm. When I explained to the vet that Seamus can open the baby gates on the stairs, he laughed and said that is typical beagle behavior. They are stubborn little guys. So we have two gates on the front stairs, and on the back stairs we have one with a chair in front of it. By the third day, Seamus had had quite enough of that, so he jumped on to the chair, over the baby gate and ran up the stairs. He was totally pleased with himself too. So we took that chair away and put a folding chair in its place. Yeah, today he figured out how to get around that too.

We've also had to switch to using a harness instead of a leash. I don't know what it is about this thing, but you practically need to have a PhD to get it on him properly. Every time I have to sit there and think it through, and I've put it on him wrong and had to start over more than once. That plus the whole baby gate thing is making me wonder if he's actually smarter than I am. I guess as long as I have thumbs I'll manage to retain the upper hand.

Seamus says: Who me? I would never do such a thing! I'm just sitting here with my bears.

Chris over at Rude Cactus has called Delurking Day, and I for one am glad. Now, there may not be anyone reading anymore after a month of no posts, and naturally, I have no time for a proper one this morning. However, I promise to delurk and comment my ass off on my lunch hour today. So if there's anyone still out there, please pop by the comments and say hello. I promise my unscheduled blog hiatus will soon be over. Need a topic to comment on? How about Conan vs. Leno? For the record, I am 100% Team Conan.

Ok, I must go make the bed before leaving for work. We're having someone over for dinner tonight who has actually met the Queen of England, and you just know her bed was tidy when he got the tour of the palace. TTFN.(see, I can hang with the British)