Bread, Wine, Salt

Pre-feeding Post-feeding Pancakes, bread, english muffins, other thoughts?

Felix, Day 0 Originally uploaded by Mom_Me

“All else” here means me. There are days when I simply cannot do anything right. Sometimes a few of those days string together and I begin to wonder why anyone (kids, husband, friends, dogs) keeps me around. I could wallow on those days (weeks) or I could throw my shoulders back and do something I know will not be a disappointment. So sure, the world doesn't really need another banana bread recipe. My friend Justine just posted one the other day ( with chocolate chips! ) and if you Google “banana bread recipe” you get “about 3,330,000 hits.” But I needed something to work, and this always does. There are two basic tricks to quick breads and muffins, first, don't over mix. Once you add the dry and wet ingredients together, stir just enough to get the flour wet, and then stop. Second, watch the bread, not just the time. For reasons known only to my oven, a recipe that took 45 minutes one day will take only 35 minutes the next time, and an overbaked quick ...

Just suppose perhaps the baking powder isn't good? I used it out of the new can. And Mrs. Lynde says you can never be sure of getting good baking powder nowadays when everything is so adulterated. ~Anne of Green Gables Good intentions...crisper drawer...healthful vegetables...blah blah blah... This is a savory quick bread, so don't think zucchini bread when you look at it. Think soda-bread with vegetables included, or think quiche with integrated crust. It's tasty, with just enough honey to balance the natural bitterness of the greens. This will be breakfast tomorrow, along with eggs made to order. I used up a bunch of raw collard greens in this recipe, but you could also use it for doing something with the leftover greens from last night's dinner. Really, you could use any leftover cooked veggies, up to 2 cups worth, chopped small. If you're starting with raw greens, count on prep time to wash, chop, cook and cool the greens before you start making the bread. ...

I thought I was going to write about books, and how reading education is getting it all wrong. Certainly I was writing about reading books when I began composing this in my head. But, as is often the case with the things in my head, I didn't end up exactly where was expecting to. So this is not about books. I will write about books tomorrow, maybe. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — “Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.” ~John Steinbeck If you wish to annoy me, utter the phrase “just a story.” Mostly I hear it about the Bible, but people use it to deride almost anything with a narrative. “Just a story” is supposed to mean that we don't have to take it seriously because it's not REAL. Of course, anyone who has read The Velveteen Rabbit knows that real is a fluid construct. ...

A letter to Carol, head of Almost Heaven Golden Retriever Rescue , regarding the two foster dogs we brought home yesterday. Carol, Rhett and Ruffie behaved angelically all the way home, so still and quiet were they that we didn't notice that Rhett had also worked his way out of his harness.  So when we got home, with the car backed in to the driveway up against the back gate, I opened the hatch prepared to catch Ruffie and deal with Rhett later.  Instead both dogs bolted, one to the left and one to the right, and then raced together down the driveway and off down the sidewalk as if they knew where they were going.  Fortunately they were curious enough to explore up and down people's driveways, and my exceptionally nice next door neighbor, her daughter and daughter's boyfriend helped us corral them.  Once they were safely in our backyard we released the beagle, who wanted desperately for them to pay attention to her, to follow the proper dog protocols, but they were...

If you've been following Bread, Wine, Salt in your RSS reader you may have noticed that my last couple of posts have been poorly edited, and then disappeared if you tried to click over to the blog and post a comment. ("Learn to edit, you ignorant twit," perhaps.) There's a glitch in the widget I've been using to send posts from the word processor I use for my initial draft to Blogger which apparently also sends out the RSS feed. Bad widget! I'll be using less elegant methods until the tech department figures out what the problem is. Thank you for keeping your ignorant twit comments to yourself.