Category: minutiae

It’s 5:20am and I’m at work. I was supposed to come in at seven and work for four hours, but I woke up at 4:34am and couldn’t get back to sleep. I figured, “Well, I could just take two hours off today.” I’m meeting my friend Ysabel in San Francisco at noon. Yay! I haven’t seen her in ages. It’s either been since Christmas or last summer. Ridiculous.

I had a lovely dinner with my parents last night. I sliced my thumb open on the foil seal of a container of olive oil. That was less lovely.

I should actually get to work, since I’m here.

(Okay, it’s weird watching the sun rise at work.)

The picture at the top of Salon today- the morphing John Edwards into Albert Einstein- is terrible. I mean, there’s worse examples of “what not to do with Photoshop,” but this one’s pretty bad.

Annoying weekend. I made soup that was too spicy and bread that was too salty. Curses!

Oh, sad. If I remember correctly, this was the bread that Dad used to bring back from California when we lived in North Carolina. A company had been courting him, and whenever he returned from a trip, he brought back Parisian sourdough bread. We called (and call it, actually) DSB – Delicious Sourdough Bread. However, I don’t think I’ve bought a loaf since we moved out here twelve years ago. I remember it being good… it’s just that as I got older, sourdough wasn’t really my thing. I guess it’s my fault they’re closing.

Oh, Tivo. It’s so cute when you think you can offer me suggestions.

It’s been about a year since the last time my Tivo recorded something as a suggestion that I hadn’t previously given a thumbs-up to. I had a problem with it suggesting wacky things, like quilting programs and fishing. I took a few hours one day and went through everything in the program guide, thumbs upping and downing every program I saw. Apparently, enough time has passed since then so my Tivo thinks it can start suggesting things again that I haven’t okayed. I guess it got confused since I just promoted a bunch of shows from suggestion status to Season Passville.

Still: “No, Tivo! I do not want to watch a show about plastic surgery gone wrong! Bad Tivo! Bad!”

I’m going to have to train it again. Gr.

I’m caught up on Yakitate. The latest subtitled episode (35) presents the characters with a challenge- create a bread in under an hour. What’s that, you say? Make a quick bread? No dice. This has to be a yeast bread (well, they said it had to be “fermented,” which I’m guessing means yeast, not chemical leaveners). What could they make? I’ve been thinking about this. I really have no clue. Instant yeast means you can cut out the five to ten minutes of blooming. The “solar hands” thing cuts down on… I guess some of the rising time. (“Solar hands” and “solar gauntlets” never seemed to be a big advantage to me, personally. It seems particularly ill-suited for pastries in which the butter has to stay cold, like biscuits, scones, pie crusts, and croissants. [Although Suwabara negated that effect by plunging his hands into dry ice, the big weirdo.]) I wonder if using beer would be allowed. I mean, it’s natural yeast.

Here are a couple of relatively quick fermented breads found in Mediterranean Street Cooking, which I took out earlier from the library.

Ramadan Bread with Dates. It takes seventy minutes and uses active dry yeast. Take out the ten minutes of blooming, and you have a sixty minute bread. The description, however, says it “ends up more like a cookie than a bread,” which I guess would throw it out. Smaller seems better for this time limit though. Smaller things bake faster.

Moroccan Flat Bread. Prep time for the dough is fifteen minutes, and then they are shaped and filled. Cooking takes 6-8 minutes in a frying pan. That’s totally under an hour-able. Sadly, I think this also doesn’t work. Naan, tortillas, crepes… do these count as breads?

Argh! What is it?!

Zucchini Bread
Cook’s Illustrated

1 pound zucchini, ends trimmed
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground allspice
1 tsp kosher salt
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/4 cup plain yogurt
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 Tbsp lemon juice
6 Tbsp (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled

Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 375 degrees. Generously coat 9 by 5-inch loaf pan with vegetable oil spray.

Shred and squeeze zucchini to remove excess liquid. Whisk flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, allspice, and salt together in large bowl. Whisk sugar, yogurt, eggs, lemon juice, and melted butter together in medium bowl until combined.

Gently fold yogurt mixture and zucchini into flour mixture using rubber spatula until just combined. Transfer batter to prepared pan and smooth surface.

Bake until loaf is golden brown and skewer inserted in center comes out with few crumbs attached, 45 to 55 minutes. Cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto wire rack to cool at least 1 hour before serving. (Zucchini bread can be wrapped in plastic and stored at room temperature for up to 3 days).

I finally moved the microwave from my car to atop my refrigerator. I was able to get it hooked up- the problem was not that the socket had been painted over, but that it was only a two-pronged socket. Luckily, I had a couple adaptors that I had bought for my old apartment, so that’s all good. Yay! Now I can make popcorn. And defrost stuff if I haven’t thought about doing it enough in advance for the counter or refrigerator to work.

I’m going over to Lydia’s tonight. I’m bringing the rest of my zucchini bread (there’s about half of it left), along with some munchy-type things I didn’t make. And possibly the gingersnap cookies that are in Jon and Ryan’s freezer (if I feel like stopping at their house on the way to the East Bay- probably a 30% chance of that happening). Lydia has promised drink concoctions. She’s having a clothing exchange thingy with some friends. The other lasses are bringing clothes and fabric, but not me. My donation to this shindig is food, because ain’t no way I would ever, EVER fit into her clothes. And mine would fall off of her.

I fail at loaf shaping. I made french bread (from Mastering the Art of French Cooking) over the weekend. It’s a bread with a high water content. I ended up kneading it with a bench scraper because it was so sticky. I just… I don’t have the skills (yet) to make loaves. I make amoebas that taste like bread. Good bread, though. The smell might have been a little too yeasty, but I really liked the flavor of the bread. I’m annoyed by the loaf problem and intend to work on it.

In other bread news, I made a decent zucchini bread. I used the recipe in the latest issue of Cook’s Country, from the people who brought you Cook’s Illustrated, but instead of just putting out twelve issues of that a year, they want you to buy two subscriptions. Gr. Anyway, although I didn’t whisk together the dry ingredients before mixing them into the wet, I still think it turned out okay. There may be places where the cinnamon and allspice concentration is a bit higher than others. I’ll whisk the dry ingredients next time. I didn’t really have enough space. It’s quite a bit harder to work in my new kitchen. Very little counter space.

The recipe for the zucchini bread will go up sometime in the next week. As for the french bread, that’ll go up when I’m satisfied with all aspects of it.

Wow. I am now the owner of the world’s largest microwave. Seriously. It’s ginormous. It will be going on top of my refrigerator as soon as I am able to pull the fridge out from the wall a bit and see what the heck seems to be covering the other electrical socket back there. This may require me talking to my landlord, but I’m going to see her on Sunday, anyway.

I made granita! It was good! (It actually worked, which was the surprising thing. I don’t expect granita to work, but it does.)