Baking bread, part 2

The morning I posted my first bread baking post, my mom called to let me know that my grandma had passed away. She'd been in failing health for some number of years and had recently moved to the nursing home, so it wasn't a huge surprise. I'm not exactly in a mood to write, so I am hoping to fill most of the rest of this week with guest posts. Grandma was amazing. Here is her obituary if you're curious.

Still, here I was with a loaf of fresh bread and a bummed out attitude, so I ate half of it with butter while sitting at my computer. It was yummy, but moister than I thought it should have been.

Homeslices

I decided to pop another pound of dough into the crock pot for Dan. He was pretty disappointed that I wouldn't let him cut open the first loaf while it was still hot. This time I decided to let it cook until I was convinced the bottom was fully browned. Seventy minutes, another twenty, another thirty, another fifteen and it was finally golden enough that I felt comfortable popping it in the broiler.

Good enough

Four minutes later, it was done...though you can see from this shot why I hate my oven so much.

Not exactly even, but...

Then, I waited all day long to cut into it, until Dan got home. He said it was delicious and ate about half of the loaf. I tried a slice with my evening pills and it was a little dense but in a way that you expect a sourdough to be. The crusts were crisp enough and the insides weren't too chewy, with lots of air bubbles, so I don't think I killed the yeast or over-kneaded. I decided to make a little sandwich with part of the remainder of this loaf for lunch on Friday.

Heaven on a plate

Omigosh you guys. I had to make a second one with the last of the bread, because it was so delicious. This is just two slices of my bread, a little butter, three thin slices of hard salami, a little bit of shredded monterrey jack cheese, and ten seconds in the microwave. Cut in half and voila! You will freak out. I am calling homemade bread a "win" just based on my lunch. Mmmmm. This is now high on my list for comfort foods. (On a related note I will be delivering home baked bread to my mom ASAP.)

Video Friday: "Tessellate", Alt-J

So this is just one of those weird songs that gets stuck in my head whenever I hear it. The video is bizarre, like all of their videos. But whatever. At least it's interesting. It also reminds me of 10th grade geometry class. (The song, not the video!)

Baking bread

I decided to do something very silly, that is, very new to me and not something I ever thought I'd want to do. I decided to try to bake a "real" loaf of bread. I've made lots of quick-breads in the past, but they don't keep and don't really work for sandwiches.

So here I am. I managed to keep the kitchen mostly under control after I deep cleaned all the surfaces on Saturday. I decided to do a crock pot artisan loaf, just because it sounds neat. Dan had mentioned it several times, and I wouldn't be at the mercy of my slightly unpredictable oven. It tends to burn things, even when I follow directions. My crock pot, on the other hand, has been behaving itself particularly well. (This is amazingly easy and delicious. I used a chuck roast and made stock with the bones and trimmings. Then a couple days later I made chili using the stock as my liquid. Mmm.)

I started by whipping up a batch of this dough. At first I wasn't sure if I'd have quite enough flour for the big batch, which will make 4 loaves. It also took me a minute to find a container big enough to hold the dough as it rose. Luckily I remembered the gigantic metal bowl we bought ages ago. Here is how it looked when I set it on the oven to rise:

Covered in cling wrap

I used cooler water than I probably needed to; I wanted to use filtered water and I just nuked it for about 20 seconds to get it to room temperature or so. Therefore, I decided I would need to let it rise for about 3 hours, instead of 2. Here is how it looked after 90 minutes:

A little condensation; not much growth

And after several more hours, since it was taking its sweet time to rise (it was cold in my house):

Doubled in size? Close enough.

Then it was ready to be put in the fridge for later (3/4 of it) and formed into a loaf and put in the crock pot (1/4 of it).

For the fridge. Another 2-3 loaves in there, woo!

My cute little 1 lb lump of dough

The neat part about this recipe is that you don't have to wait for the dough to rise a second time. You just pop it in the crock pot and it rises there. Here it is after about 15 minutes on high:

Plumping!

The recipe said to start checking on the loaf around the 45 minute mark, so that's what I set my timer for. Here's how it looked:

Not quite there yet

It was just barely starting to crisp up on the bottom, but the top was nowhere near done. I set the timer for another 15 minutes. Also, it smelled AMAZING. After the 15 was up, I checked again and it looked more done, but not totally done. I poked at the top and it bubbled at me a little bit. It was like it was alive. Weird. So I left it for another 5, after which it looked like this:

Smells. So. Good.

You can see that there is a little bit of color starting around the sides, but the middle of the top is all bubbles and goo. I left it for another 5 minutes, with the same results. I set the timer for 10 after that, and got my baking sheet ready for the broiler. The top finally seemed firm enough, but when I took it out of the crock pot I felt that the bottom crust was not quite crispy enough, so I set the timer for another 10 minutes. When it went off, that was a total of 90 minutes in the slow cooker. Next time, now that I sort of "know" my slow cooker, I'm going to wait until the 70 minute mark to check it the first time, and go in 10 minute increments after that. I think all the opening and closing of the crock pot was making things take longer. I just didn't want to burn it. Oh well. Now I know. Here's the bottom crust at the 90 minute mark:

And we're popping it in the oven. 5 minutes on broil on the middle rack. I conveniently forgot that my oven tends to burn things...should have checked at the 3 minute mark, I think. It still came out pretty well, though.

Hello gorgeous.

By this time it was nearly 11 at night. The bread needed to cool completely before I could cut into it, so I can't show it to you sliced just yet. Plus, I can't tell you how it tasted. It smelled like heaven, though. I'll post next week about how it came out. (I'll comment below with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, though, as soon as I can.)

Just when I think there's only bad news...

...Facebook surprises me with three posts from three separate entities heralding good news for same-sex couples.
1. Project 515 (and later OutFront MN and Unfundamentalist Christians) shared Freedom to Marry's photo announcing that the British House of Commons had approved the freedom to marry, and by a wide margin. Still has to go to the House of Lords, but still. That's a big deal.
2. Believe Out Loud shared an article about how the Pentagon is extending some benefits to same-sex spouses.
3. Unfundamentalist Christians shared an article about how Duff from Ace of Cakes is going to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple who were refused service by their local bakery.

The tide has turned. Sooner rather than later, the objections to same-sex relationships on religious grounds are going to sound as silly, stupid, and hateful as the thing I read the other night on my Nook: an ad at the end of Anne of Green Gables, presumably by the publisher, for another title called The Call of the South, by Robert Lee Dunham, for $1.50. "A very strong novel dealing with the race problem in this country. The principal theme is the danger to society from the increasing miscegenation of the black and white races, and the encouragement it receives in the social amenities extended to negroes of distinction by persons prominent in politics, philanthropy and educational endeavor; and the author, a Southern lawyer, hopes to call the attention of the whole country to the need of earnest work toward its discouragement." Yeeeah. It goes on, but you get the idea. Ugliness. My generation's not buying it, either. In my state, which recently defeated a ballot measure for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage (which was already not allowed, but whatever), is now in the process of legalizing same-sex marriage as well. Love wins.

So I got a new phone.

And I used it to write this post. The one shortcoming the Blogger app has is that you can't schedule posts for the future. Other than that, I really like it. Also, I took this dorky picture of myself. Uploading pictures to the blog is much easier now.

Things I like: GudonyaToo hair products

There are so many products out there that I think are just amazing, so I decided to start sharing them with you. I am making $0 from this blog, and all opinions are my own. Nobody sent me any free stuff, I promise.

Regular liquid shampoo tends to make my scalp itch and give me dandruff. The worst offender is Pantene, but lately Herbal Essences and even Fructis have been doing the same thing. (Plus, I'm trying so hard with my Nestle boycott, which also means no more Garnier.) A few years ago I discovered solid shampoo, which works well if you have particularly dry, frizzy coarse hair. It is apparently fantastic on natural african type hair or any of the very tightly curled hair (think jew-fro). Unfortunately for me, my very fine, thin, slightly wavy hair would be so weighed down by it that it'd look like I never washed it at all.

Then I found Gudonya Too on Etsy. They have a creme shampoo that sort of splits the difference. It lathers and rinses well, but it feels like a thick scrub when you scoop it out of the container. It has sea salt! You use a lot of water and the salt dissolves which makes bubbles. (Look on the back of your shampoo bottle: if it lathers, it'll have some sort of salt in it.) It gets my scalp and hair clean without overly drying, and I use it with their intense hair conditioner. The conditioner is amazing, too. It feels thinner than you'd expect but a little bit goes a long way, and you don't need to use it every day.

I now have the softest, silkiest hair I've ever had. Plus, it smells amazing. I prefer the spa fusion scent, but they have all kinds, including unscented conditioner for the sensitive folks. (I didn't see unscented shampoo but I'm sure you could ask.) For those who would need to know, the shampoo is vegan but the conditioner is not (silk extract).

Soon I'll be trying something new to try and regrow my hair a bit--it's supposedly better than rogaine and safer for mamas. If it doesn't pan out, I'll be ordering more of my favorite Etsy hair products!

Video Friday: "Threw It On the Ground", Lonely Island

Oh, Lonely Island. I love you guys so much. Most of these are NSFW, in case you didn't know. This song is one of our favorites to quote when Sam (or any child, or any person, really) throws something on the ground.

Dan and I will just say "I'm an adult!" or "Happy Birthday to the ground!" whenever it's funny. Another favorite: Jack Sparrow feat. Michael Bolton (yes, you read that right). And of course the classic, Like a Boss.