i am a butterfly…

Archive for the ‘ABC-Along 2009’ Category

And also for make ahead.

Chocolate chip cookies, scooped out onto a parchment covered sheet pan and ready for the freezer. When they’re frozen, I just toss them all into a zipper bag and keep them frozen. A very easy method for keeping cookie dough around, and I’m not faced with dozens of baked cookies all at once.

Ironically, as my camera has gotten better, I’ve become less likely to actually bring it to shows with me, so these photos are mostly pretty old. I don’t want to have to worry about the camera when I go out.

I didn’t learn how to bake bread until college. My college was a small, very crunchy school in Bar Harbor, ME and instead of a caffeteria, which would have been entirely out of place considering the culture of the place, we had a room in the main building, overlooking Frenchman’s Bay, called Take A Break. (As an aside, TAB worked on the honor system: food was put out with little signs with the prices, but no one manned the table collecting money. It was expected that everyone could be trusted to put the correct amount of money in the till and not to take any out except the change you were owed. This system actually worked very well, and I don’t recall there ever being a time when I was there that the TAB till came up short. In fact, it often came out over.) Being the hippie, crunchy, granola school that it was, the food served at TAB was all natural, never processed, and freshly prepared. The bread for the sandwiches was whole grain and baked daily in the fabulous TAB kitchen by a student as part of the student employment program. For a couple of years while I was there, the student in charge of the bread-baking was my boyfriend, Paul.

Bread for sandwiches had to be done the night before, so Paul would usually go into the kitchen around midnight to start working on whatever bread he’d chosen for that batch. I often accompanied him to keep him company and nibble on little bits of bread dough when I could snag them.* During rising periods, we both usually worked on something for class or we’d write or we would just sit and chat in the warm kitchen. I have really fond memories of those nights we spent together and even though Paul went on to break my heart multiple times, I can still think about him with kindness when I think about nights spent baking bread and a few other things.**

That was when I learned how to knead bread dough. Paul would usually make one more loaf than TAB needed, and we would share it, hot out of the oven. It was on those small, extra loaves that he taught me how to knead. It wasn’t all melodramtic and ridiculous like that scene with the clay in Ghost. Kneading bread dough is hard work – as is throwing pottery, which makes that scene even more stupid – and while it’s earthy and spiritual and homey and lovely, it’s definitely not sexy. But I loved it and I started making my own bread and after I was out of college, I kept it up for a few years.

And then somewhere along the way, after not baking any bread for a few months or a year or however long it was, I got the idea that it was just too much work. Somehow, I got the idea that the only way I would ever have fresh-baked bread in the house was if I had a bread machine. So I bought one and I loved it for a long, long time.

It wasn’t until earlier this year that something switched inside me and I got the yen to bake bread by hand again. From the first batch, I was hooked. My hands took up the motions of kneading so easily, remembered motion, like riding a bicycle. It was calming, and contemplative, something my hands did without the need for my brain to engage, freeing it to wander and think and ponder. A moving meditation. How was it that I ever stopped doing this and declared it too much work?

I am so glad to have rediscovered this, and if I ever again say it’s too much work, someone should just kick me.

The two photos in this post are of my variation on Susan’s Farmhouse White. My changes from her recipe are to use milk instead of water, butter instead of canola oil, and white whole wheat instead of the all purpose flour. The batch picture here also has KAF’s Harvest Grains Blend, which turns a good loaf of bread into an epic*** loaf of bread. The batch here used about 3T of the grains per cup of flour.

* I still love raw bread dough and will occasionally pop a small piece into my mouth while kneading these days. I’m also crazy for raw biscuit dough.

*** Epic. Ha.

Down but not out. I will catch up, yes I will.

This photo is sort of an embarassment to me, because the comment I get from the most from friends about my photos is some variation of “wow! your food shots are great!”

This is not one of those great food shots. It is, in fact, a very crappy photo of an amazing piece of steak. A good testament to its amazingness is that I didn’t even think to get any photos of it until I was nearly done. So don’t let this photo fool you: this was one of the most amazing steaks I’ve ever eaten.

When we got to Lyons, we stopped at a tiny little grocery store to get some food for the cottage. The main reason we stopped, aside from this place being the only option as we later found out, was the hand-lettered sign outside that said “Colorado Beef.” What you see here is the remains of an almost 2-inch thick rib steak, hand-cut in store a few hours before we purchased it.

Barbara cooked them on the grill until they were browned on the outside and bloody on the inside. I made a really simple tomato and cucumber salad to go on the side, and we dug in. This was an incredible meal, and I get hungry even looking at this terrible photo. The steak was flavorful and delicious and juicy and wonderful.

J is, indeed, for Juicy.

Yeah. So the I’s were for April 26 – May 9. I’m a little behind. But I hven’t given in just yet, and I still think I can catch up.

I’m so far behind on the ABC-Along that it’s ridiculous. I think they’re on M or N now, and here I am posting an H. But what an H he is!

We went out to NJ on the 4th for a BBQ with friends at their wonderful new house and for a visit with Hank, the most adorable dog in the world. I’m not even biased. I mean, look at him.

Hank definitely deserves pride of place as my H.

Now to find an I. And a J. After that, I have it plotted out for a while.

Sometime in 1993 or late 1992, one of my housemates, John, in the Hippie Hut – aka then and now as “the Norwood house” – got onto an online service called GEnie. He wanted to be on GEnie specifically, as opposed to Compuserve or whatever else was around back then, because he wanted to play Battletech and GEnie had it. We’re talking the way early days of online gaming, and GEnie was the place to be. I used to watch over his shoulder when he played and chat with the guys – because they were all guys – he chatted with.

After a while on GEnie, John discovered a text-based RPG call GemStone, and G is definitely for GemStone. It was when he started playing GS that I decided that I really wanted to get online, because I really wanted to play. So sometime in 1994, I rolled up my first GemStone character. Her name was Rhiana and she didn’t last long. Later that year, I rolled up my bard, Warble Singsong – go ahead, make fun of the name – and she still exists to this day.

It was because of Warble and my time in GS that I reached two of the most significant turning points in my life. First was that I met Scott there. It’s kind of funny, because John’s character got married in game, and Kyrion (aka Scott) and Warble were the best man and maid of honor at the wedding. That was where we met, and it still makes me laugh that the real world cliche of a best man and maid of honor getting together took this crazy virtual world twist for me and Scott. Our characters became pretty good friends after that meeting, and we did quite a bit of chatting as Kim and Scott, too. Eventually we met in person and the rest is history.

The second turning point was that it was because of GemStone that I became a Web developer. I made a friend in game who liked me so much that she hired me as her assistant for a gaming site she was launing. She was a mentor to me, teaching me about project management and HTML. Though the Game Grotto – two more G’s – had its plug pulled after just a year or so, that was the beginning of a career path for me.

So I owe my marriage and my work to a game. Hey, that’s another G.

And this is mine:

This photo was taken a few years ago at my Great-Aunt Migs’ 75th birthday party, and represents the entire maternal side of my family. The only surviving person missing from this photo is my Great-Aunt Kate, who estranged herself from the family some years ago for reasons I don’t understand.

The back row, from the left: my mom’s husband Denny, me, my mom holding my cousin Darrin’s daughter (who’s name I don’t recall),  Aunt Migs holding my cousin Darrin’s son (who’s name I also don’t recall), Aunt Melissa, cousin Michael
The front row, from the left: Scott, my brother Alex (known around here as the Punk Ass Kid sometimes, even though he’ll be 26 in a month), cousin Denise, her husband Glen, cousin Darrin, his wife Dawn

We used to be a much more tightly knit family than we are these days. I know my mother speaks to Aunt Migs once in a while, but I really only speak to my immediate family. Denise and I were close as kids, but don’t talk at all now. It’s kind of sad, to have such a big extended family and not really be in touch with any of them.

Is there a more versatile food than the egg? You can use it to prepare any meal of the day, and it can be fancy or plain. Anything from a quick dinner of scrambled eggs to a fancy brunch with quiche to a quick and dirty fried egg (particularly yummy if you calorie-plurge and fry it in bacon fat after cooking a couple slices of bacon).

Eggs are definitely a staple food around here, and we usually eat omelets for dinner once a week or so. Recently, thanks to Everyday Food, I discovered a new favorite way to serve eggs for dinner: Baked Eggs in Tomato-Parmesan Sauce. We tried this for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and it will definitely be staying in my repertoire.

Done, done, done! As in finished. Complete. No more!

Yesterday I got official word from my doctor that I can stop using the wound vac. It’s impossible to say how happy this makes me. Over the last 9 weeks, I have grown to despise this machine.

There’s still a small hole, but it’s not deep or long, so I just have a wet-to-dry dressing on now. I have to change it myself twice a day until the skin grows over it, which should take a couple of weeks.

I’m just going to consider this another tool in my kit for the end times or the zombie apocalypse: wound care knowledge. Between the knitting, soapmaking, and now this, I’ll have several skills to fall back on when society collapses, be it from rogue computers or zombies.

But I think I digressed a little…

D is for Done! And I couldn’t be happier.