dragonlady7

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walburgablack replied to your post “it’s cold in here. why, yes, i am snuggling the bowl containing my…”

i have absolutely done this to defrost stuff

best friend related that often when she goes to cook she realizes she’s supposed to have eggs at room temp so she puts them in her bra while she gets everything else ready and y’know

good idea

(you can also use a bowl of hot water and so could i but that is much less fun)

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fabledshadow replied to your photo “It worked! My first sourdough loaf was against all indications a…”

Yay bread! Isn’t it satisfying?

It should NOT have worked.

I started with this recipe [https://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/best-ever-sourdough-oatmeal-bread-zbcz1311] and I used some slightly soured milk for it because that’s what I had, and so I scalded the milk so that whatever was growing in it and making it sour wouldn’t take over the sourdough. Which I thought, is a technique I’ve used elsewhere, should be fine, why would it matter? you can use whatever liquid, right? Let it cool, dumped it in, made the dough. 
Supposed to be a “loose dough”, it was dry almost to the point of crumbs even though I’d used more milk than the recipe said. I was dubious, but thought, well, sometimes as things sit they loosen up? So I let it rise on the counter for an hour, and then kneaded it in a bowl and added more water because it was so dry, and then let it rise in a bowl for four more hours and then put it in the fridge because I wasn’t ready to bake it? and then took it out in the morning and it was SO DRY. I put it into two loaf pans by holding it between my hands and snapping it in half, and i was like, THIS IS TOO DRY. So I put it back into the bowl and literally held it under the tap to drip more and more water in, probably like a cup of water? it was a lot. I was fed up.

I let it rise for another two hours, then divided it again and slopped it into the two greased loaf pans and was like this is absolutely not going to work at all.

But I baked it, because I was fed up. At this point, the dough’s been going for like. 48 hours. It’s a disaster. It’s not going to work.

And I baked it and it’s fine. It’s just… it’s fine. The oats are gone, it’s kind of dense but not hard. And it is, boy, it is intensely sour, for a bread. 

So! It worked! But should not have! Next time I will try to follow the recipe more faithfully!

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So I was busy all day today too but I got all the giftwrap furoshiki done, I got all the gifts wrapped, and I got the laundry mostly done. (One more load still to dry, but it was warm and I dried sheets and rugs on the line! good for me! happy past-the-solstice sunny day!!) 

I also made piragi, which took forgoddamnever. First it called for 3 TABLESPOONS of YEAST which is a FUCKLOAD of YEAST?? fortunately I bought yeast in bulk a while back and will literally never run out and have like a pound bag in the freezer so? no big deal? 

I scalded milk for the first time as well, which went well. And I added lemon zest, and did not kill the yeast with the hot milk, and so on and so forth, it all went fine. But then I was letting it rise in the largest bowl I own and uhhhh it was up to the top of the bowl and showing no signs of slowing??? I was alarmed. 

But Dude was messing around in the kitchen and so either on its own or because he was banging around making lunch, it fell rather dramatically, and I was worried that would mean bad things for the end result but it seems not to have.

I had to add an entire extra cup of flour just to work the dough at all, though, and another cup and a half on the board to roll it out, so I might make a note of that on the recipe– which is a sort of bad Xerox of likely an even older Xerox, but it’s in English, which is a huge head start for this sort of thing. (For the pepper cookies recipe, his aunt had to translate it for us, because she couldn’t find one in English.) 

I rolled it out and cut it with a juice glass and in hindsight, the glass rim was too large; they came out huge, and the smaller they are the more you respect the cook’s skill, traditionally. Also they’re good as hell tiny, so. Next time, smaller glass, be ready to use a shitload of flour, but the filling proportions will probably be good. (Also next time: don’t have Dude help, because he’s slow and ate SO MUCH goddamn filling the whole time.)

The filling, oh, is bacon, ham, onions, and I also added carrots and watermelon radish because I had those things and was worried I’d be short on filling otherwise as my bacon was very fatty so most of it melted away. 

I baked about 85 piragi, and then had leftover dough that I made into the recommended caraway buns, and then had an unrelated batch of bread dough I made into baguettes to go with our Christmas Day cheese plate. Oh yeah– because I own a bread machine, and in the past Dude’s mom said a bread machine would be useful to make piragi dough, so I dug the thing out– most bread machines have a “dough” setting, where it just mixes it all for you, then turns on the heating element on low just to proof it, and then you’ve got beautiful risen dough, right? Well, fortunately I looked at the yeast proofing in the water and the way it was trying to take over the world and had to be stirred down twice, and looked at my tiny bread machine, and said HELL no, and did not use it. This is great because it would have overflowed literally three-quarters of its contents, which is no bueno. 

So I used the bread machine to proof thebibliosphere​‘s Communist Bread instead, which is sort of contrary to the minimalist aesthetic of that bread on one level, but on another is exactly the spirit of using what you have that I think she’d appreciate. And when I got out the breadboard to roll out the piragi, I plopped the proofed bread dough out, rolled it into a pair of baguettes, and let them proof too.

I wound up giving them an eggwash and cooking them with the last two pans of piragi, because I had eggwash left over and why the hell not. 

So anyway. That took all day, and I gave up on going to see the Star War, but then Dude pointed out there’s a 7:10 showing. So we’ve got time to go get dinner somewhere and then go see that. 

I started to load the car before it got dark. Need to dry the rest of the socks before we can finish packing the suitcase, and the cooler’s got to go in tomorrow morning. In fact most of the rest of packing is probably going to be tomorrow morning. But that’s all fine and dandy and okay. We’re leaving by noon, I hope. We’ll see!