When You Lose General Functionality

…naturally the best thing to do is to try to recreate recipes for breads you just bought in NYC, right?

So my mother was willing to drive us (me, one of my daughters, and my sister who happened to be up in the area) up to Riverdale to see our grandmother briefly; then we had to grab lunch and dinner.  We found a nice little upscale kosher grocery where we were able to get some fresh sushi, fish, salads, and a fresh loaf of seeded bread to go.  

As you may or may not know, right now I'm really on the verge of losing control.  So naturally this afternoon when I heard that my daughter who has been bounced back and forth between inpatient and partial outpatient hospitalization was being re-admitted to an inpatient bread, my mind turned to baking chocolate chip muffins, and making up a bread recipe to produce a loaf similar to what we had on Sunday (which of course was finished by Monday evening).

1 1/2 C water

1 tsp salt

4 C flour (use a mix of a variety; I used one cup each of plain unbleached, bread, white whole wheat, and stone ground whole wheat pastry flours)

2 1/2 tsp yeast (regular or bread machine/rapid rise; see notes below)

1 C seeds or chopped nuts, any varieties (I used 1/2 C each of sunflower and pumpkin seeds plus about 2 T each of sesame and poppy seeds)

If you're using a bread machine and bread machine/rapid rise yeast:

Put the water, salt, flour, and yeast in your bread machine on the quick dough cycle; add the seeds/nuts when the machine beeps or 5 minutes before the mixing is going to end if your machine doesn't give you a signal for that.

If you're using a bread machine or mixer and regular yeast:

Put the water, salt, flour, and yeast in your bread machine on the regular dough cycle; add the seeds/nuts when the machine beeps or 5 minutes before the mixing is going to end if your machine doesn't give you a signal for that.

If you're mixing by hand:

Use water between 115-120F.  Put the water in your mixing bowl, add the yeast and let it sit about 5 minutes to dissolve. Add about half the flour, then mix in the salt, then the rest of the flour.  This will be a pretty heavy dry dough compared to silky egg doughs, so it will take a good 10 minutes of heavy kneading, but it's worth it.  Then put a little vegetable oil at the bottom of your mixing bowl, put the dough in and roll it around to coat it, flip the dough over so that the coated side is up and the bottom which didn't get oiled is oiled, cover the whole bowl with plastic wrap, a cutting board, or a dish towel, and let it rise about 75-90 minutes. 

For all methods now continue here:

Take your heavy but happy dough, and shape it into a loaf.  You can put it in an oiled 9x5" loaf pan, on parchment paper on a baking sheet, or you can shape it into a baguette and put in a baguette loaf pan if you prefer.  Let it rise, covered, for 45-50 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Brush with warm or room temperature water just before baking for a crisper crust.

Bake for 45 minutes for a regular loaf, 35 for a baguette.

Cool on a rack completely before slicing.

The blob that ate Leesy's life

I dropped off the radar for a while again, I know.  I have been busy, but in very weird ways.  I don't even remember if I mentioned here in bloggy land about what happened right after the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival at the beginning of May, but basically I spent that whole Sunday walking around, got up the next morning to take a walk, and as I finished the walk I crouched down to pick up some dyeing lichen I saw lying in my next door neighbors' yard.  At that point I suddenly felt a burning pain in my leg which turned out once I went to the doctor two days later to be:

THE BLOB THAT ATE LEESY'S LIFE

Okay, it was a superficial venous thrombophlebitis.  In English, that means a medically non-significant blood clot and inflamed vein.  It's the kind of thing you get warned about if you're going to be sitting a lot on an airplane, except then they're more worried about the deep vein kind because that's the dangerous kind.  The thing is, I had been very active the weeks and especially the days leading up to it developing.  Plus I have been exhausted since then, and short of breath, and having fluttering feelings in my chest.  So since all my bloodwork came back pretty normal (you WISH you had my cholesterol readings), my MD set me up immediately for some cardiac testing--a Holter monitor and next a stress echocardiogram (which was going to be today but had to be rescheduled until Thursday).  So my leg is still lumpy (that pic above was taken today, a month after the blob first appeared), I have no energy, and generally I feel like I can't do anything.

But since being me I couldn't really do nothing (except of course when it comes to housework) I had to develop a new obsession.  Oh, yes, I'm still spinning and dyeing--

And I'm still baking

Sunday's bagels; we had run out of bread so baking was necessary, right?

But now I'm making CHEESE!  Mozzarella, yogurt cheese, feta, it's been a blast.  Okay, the ricotta was a bust, but I didn't know what I was going to do with that anyhow and it was just an attempt to use the leftover whey from the second batch of mozzarella.  And here is about half the mozzarella, turned into pizza Margherita and white pizza today.  

Yes, I couldn't resist eating some before I snapped the photo

I figure, hey, fresh whole local organic milk in an amount to make 1 lb of fresh mozzarella costs pretty much the same amount of money as 8 oz of kosher store-bought mozzarella (it costs more if you want cholov Yisroel, but we don't), and we eat so much mozzarella that even the cost of the kosher rennet and the citric acid needed are made up the first week.  Now I want to get a cheese press to be able to make pressed, long-cured cheeses!

So I hope to get back to speed once my leg and my general health get back to speed themselves.  My knitting and spinning are just really in slow motion.  But at least I have my bread machine and local stores which sell fresh cow and goat milks and my bottle of rennet in the fridge, so what little energy I have can be channeled to something.  Just not to house keeping, sadly.

We had a little snow

like almost 2 feet worth in one day.

It's so much that the kids really can't play out in it; Adele would get lost, Gilad can't move, Sachy barely can. Feivel of course left his mittens which I just bought last week (he's lost all of his other ones and 3 pairs of mine) at school, too.

So we spent the day losing Adele some more

and baking rolls and chocolate cookies to go with southwestern style white bean cakes, rice pilaf, and broccoli, for dessert (I mean the cookies are the dessert; the rolls are for the main part of the meal, and the broccoli we may send to Josie).

What happens when I work at home

No, don't worry, I'm not billing for the time spent on this, but the whole East Coast is basically half shut down due to the snow.  Whenever it snows, I'm compelled to bake.

I did run in to the office to pick up some materials for a conference beginning tomorrow, and to do a few other things, and I did some work for that project and another one from home.  The kids have mostly mooched around the house and complained that the snow is too powdery to play in (except, oddly enough, Tirtze, who spent an hour this morning and now a couple of hours this afternoon outside with Adina, Golda, and Adina's next-door neighbors).

Gilad thinks outside the tracks

While Zombie Addie and her monster Pibbie come to get you (Addie's the one on the right if you weren't sure):

And eventually vampire Kayla gets her:

(but Kayla made me delete the photo).

Meanwhile, in somewhat saner lands, Feivel and Jeffrey survived the Boy Scout ski trip today and had a good time.  Sachy had basketball practice, Kayla had Girl Scout Thinking Day, and Tirtze supposedly did all her homework.  Added bonus:  Kayla brought home vegetable California rolls and Sachy ate a ton of them.

Oh, and we started our Purim baking a little.

Super bowl bread, yum

With my back lousy I wasn't up to much yesterday; I'd hoped to do a lot of knitting and spinning during the Superbowl, but my brain was way too foggy for that.

Sonny and Rozzie did come over to visit for the game, we had deli subs and snacks and cookies, and I did have a loaf of incredibly good bread I'd made from the No-Knead Crusty bread recipe from Mother Earth News. It came out exactly the way it was supposed to, light and fluffy and slightly chewy inside, and beautifully crusty and crisp outside with no starch washes or anything. Definitely a keeper recipe, the timing is just a little difficult to plan out other than on weekends since I work!

I did go to the PA today, who told me to take double doses of ibuprofen during the day plus Percocet at night for my back for a while, then see how that feels. Hopefully the answer will be, "better."

Photos above are all courtesy of Morah Miriam (aka, Morah Yummy) Oberstein at MJBHA.