WIP meme

As seen from heartofoshun and applegnat, and possibly elsewhere:
Post a single sentence from each WIP you have (or as many as you want to pick). No context, no explanations.

I am feeling somewhat wretched physically, what with my ladyparts deciding abruptly this afternoon to go from temperamental and intermittent spotting to a sudden full-on heavy-cramping splosion of BRINGING THE PAIN. It's like I'm 12, and new at this. I've spent from about 4pm onward sitting curled in various locations sulking and whingeing and eating fatty things and reading Failblog and watching streaming episodes of Mythbusters over Fi's shoulder on Netflix. (For the record: Netflix's Watch It Now feature TOTALLY SUCKS. I'm really not just saying that because I feel like my lower abdomen is in a wringer.)

So I am going to do this meme, and chase around the nooks and crannies and crevices of my hard drive. It's a little bit masturbatory, only in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with my currently-somewhat-malfunctioning nethers, which is nice, because I'd rather not think about them, thanks.

Some fanfic, some original. Guess which!
( Starting with the currently-open documents )

bread experiment day

So, Baby Sister, the surprise-married one who lives in Chicago, is a baker. While she was interning for the Chicago Botanical Gardens, she took up baking as a hobby, since she had few friends in the area and thus had a lot of time to kill. She was raised in our mother's house with good foods being cooked all the time, and so knew by high school how to construct a meal; in college they cooked by rota to feed their household. So she was already experienced at cooking. So in Chicago she moved on to things like, making her own cheese, and pastries, and fermenting and other complex things.
Over the summer she was a farmhand and lived with my parents she extended this interest. The organic farm where she worked had goats, as an experiment by the high-school-age daughter; Ann took the milk, which they weren't licensed to sell, and made cheese for herself and to barter with the other farmhands. She also got very interested in sourdough and bread-making, and did experiment after experiment in Mom's well-stocked kitchen.

So upon her return to Chicago, she stumbled, by reputation from acquaintances alone, into a job at a bakery. Their primary bread-baker was going home to her family in Mexico, and had only a short time to train her replacement. So Baby Sister stepped in, learned everything this woman could teach, and began to innovate.

I had her send me some recipes recently, and so I am going to attempt them today. She discovered, somewhat accidentally, a new trend that professional bakeries have begun to use in their increasingly-in-demand whole wheat breads: overnight fermentation. Out of a desire to sleep in one Saturday morning, she made the dough on Friday night and put it in the fridge after it was done rising. The resulting dough had more sugar and less starch, was better-risen but not too collapsey, and in general was superior to her normal technique.
So now most of her whole-wheat stuff is prepared the day before. She says between 8 and 20 hours is a fine range, if the fridge isn't too warm or cool.

So I'm going to mix up some bread dough to bake tomorrow, and see how it goes.