February Bread Challenge: Day 29

Boy. Am I glad that's over. I baked 2 loaves this morning, gave one to the school receptionist, and I was done!

What did I learn? Well, the whole project was meant to push my limits in terms of bread baking and in terms of connecting with people. It sort of pushed my limits in terms of bread baking. I found a REALLY EASY system to pump out bread with little effort that completely fit into my schedule and reliably produced two loaves of sandwich bread per day. Not the best bread, maybe, but pretty darn good when it was hot out of the oven. The requirement to give away bread each day, however, did not promote the experimentation and recipe innovation I had thought would be part of the project. I just wanted to make something that people would want to eat, so I played it pretty safe much of the time.

Another thing I found is that there are two kinds of pushing limits. One is pushing limits with something you are comfortable with, but upping the intensity. Baking bread every single day for one month. It took some work, and, I have to say, I feel giddy with not having to mix up any dough tonight. I feel good that I did it, and I now know that if the need arises, I can bake a lot of bread.

The other is pushing limits with something you aren't comfortable with. Throwing yourself into the deep end of the pool and making yourself swim to the side. Giving bread away to people I don't see on a daily basis was a continuing source of stress, concern, and confusion. But it was also a bigger source of satisfaction on some days than the baking was.

Giving bread to neighbors and friends whom I don't see all the time really did make me feel like I strengthened a bond with them, even though I did not magically become a master of the social interaction.

Then there is the category, maybe my favorite, that included the pediatrician, the OB/GYN, the banker who helped the kids open accounts, and the physical therapist. They seemed genuinely touched that someone took the time to express their appreciation for what they do. As my OB said, "Nobody EVER give me ANYTHING!"

Then there is the "going out on a limb category" that included the Ronald McDonald House, the Fire Station, and the bunny lady. At the first it went great, at the second they seemed unsure what to make of someone bringing them a giant boule, and at the third, well, you can read about that here. Those I was glad I did because I had set a goal and then I tried, but they were not really at all fun.

The project got a little old over the past week. In retrospect, my husband identified the 22nd as the day the project "jumped the shark."You may remember that Sunday the 18th I tried making bread with milk and honey and found it to be delicious. You may also remember that on Wednesday the 22nd I was hit with a mild but very queasy stomach bug that resulted in a feeling of disgust being associated with bread dough. Well, in between there I went a little crazy, so taken with the milk-honey mixture that I couldn't believe I hadn't done it sooner. This experimentation reached a fever pitch on Wednesday, when, egged on by my husband, I made a loaf with not only milk, but sugar, cocoa, mashed banana, and vanilla. This not-especially-chocolatey attempt at a chocolate bread is what I ate right before I got sick. I don't think it was actually bad-tasting, but bread dough made with milk started turning my stomach as it sat there in the bowl rising.

So that's it. I have pictures. I timed myself a few of the days. I have insights about the mechanics of bread making. And, of course, I have recipes that I hope to share in the coming days. But now I'm off to enjoy not making any bread.

Bread giveaway FAIL

We're getting down to the end of the month! I am behind by a couple of loaves to give away, so this morning I took two loaves of piping hot bread with me in the car when I dropped off the kids at school. On the way, I knocked on our neighbors' door. They are runners, up early, and I thought they'd appreciate some whole-grain bread. Well, I guess they had already gone to work. Oh, well.

So I dropped off the kids, and then headed over to the house of the woman who fosters bunnies and who gave me bunny poop for my garden last year. I have been torn about this all month. She was someone I wanted to thank, but only met once for a few minutes while we shoveled poop into a bucket and the kids met the bunnies she was fostering at the time. I decided not to email her, because I didn't want it to turn into a weird, complicated scheduling thing that would inconvenience her. So I stopped by a couple of weeks ago at about 9 am on a weekday and no one was home, so I decided that she must get up and go to work on weekdays before that time, based on, really, no information at all. So at around 8:30 this morning I pull up, and there's a car in the driveway, so I go to the door and knock timidly on the storm door. Nothing. So I try the bell, but my finger sort of slips off, and I don't hear anything, so I have no idea if it rang. So I wait. But I don't give up. I decide to just knock decisively on the door. I do, then immediately decide I'll leave, when she opens the door.

I don't know if I woke her up, forcing her to get dressed and answer the door, but I am afraid that on this day I had arrived, unannounced, a little too early. Or maybe she was just wondering what the heck I was doing at her door. I re-introduced myself and told her I had made her bread, whereupon she told me that she can't eat bread.

"No gluten?" I asked. Oh, no. I told her that I know how to make peanut butter cookies without gluten, and I could bring her some of those sometime. She insisted that it wasn't necessary, and asked if I wanted some poop, which made me afraid she thought I had just come over to get poop, rather than to strengthen neighborly bonds. I was determined to turn my gesture into something less weird. Apparently, I decided the best course of action would be to refuse to give up. "Are peanuts ok?"

"Yeah...but it's really not necessary."

"Well, I can bring them sometime when I come to get some poop."

"And no eggs."

"Oh."

I was beaten. She insisted that she really didn't need any baked goods from me, and that what she really needed was someone to take away poop. I don't really remember how we ended it. I'm sure I apologized, but, typically, I didn't think to find out when would be a convenient time for me to come and get the bunny poop.

Cha. Ching.

Our street has about 15 houses on it that were all built in the second half of the 80s by the same builder. At one time, there were 17 kids on the street and, it sounds like, everyone knew everyone. There was a block party every fall, and occasional progressive dinners. A lot of the same people still live here and haven't retired yet, but they have empty nests and not a ton of motivation to get out and make new friends. Pretty much everyone is pleasant, but we don't hang out or anything.

I haven't given away any bread since Friday, so today, as part of February Bread Challenge, I managed to give away 2 loaves. One was to a friend around the corner, who was delighted, and the other was to our next door neighbor, who we sort of know, but don't see much.

She held the warm bread, which was wrapped in a kitchen towel and smelled it. After initially seeming like she maybe was in the middle of something when she first answered the door, she seemed really excited about the bread. Then she said, "Have you talked to [the neighbor who knows everyone]?"

Me: No, not recently.

Neighbor: Well, we've been talking about doing a progressive dinner, like we used to...

Me (interrupting): Oh, that would be great!

N: ...and if you'd like to be included...

Me: We would definitely love to be included!

N: We will probably get together  sometime to plan it, I can let you know when that will be. It should be really fun...

I got back in the car so excited. That was just what I hoped would happen if I gave bread to the neighbors! A chance to socialize. Priceless.

Oh, the bread.

Yes, I am still making bread. And still not telling you a thing about it. Sorry about that. It's really not my intention to keep you in the dark.

The hard parts of the project remain, in ascending order of difficulty:
1) make bread every day = easy
2) give bread away every day = medium to hard
3) blog about the bread project = apparently impossible

Every day so far this month until yesterday, I have given away bread. Twice it was eating some part of a loaf with a guest here at my house, so those are maybe a little lame, and once I had to freeze a loaf and give it to my target the next day, but yesterday was the first day I just did not manage to give away any bread. Ridiculously, we spent quite a while baking cookies to bring to a friend's house for dinner, but did not bring any bread with us. It was the house of my friend Jennifer, who is the one who got me baking bread in the first place, so I was sure she would have made some fresh bread for the occasion and thought it would be silly to bring bread. Well, she hadn't, and they had some store-bought artisanal bread that was delicious, but very similar to my boule, so I totally could have brought some, but missed my chance. I still have some of yesterday's bread in the freezer, so maybe I can still give some away sometime.

But. Every day so far this month until yesterday, I mixed up dough at night and baked it the next day. Until last night, when we got back from Jennifer's, and I was tired, and I figured, it's Sunday tomorrow, I'll just make some pita bread or something. Well, I never got around to deciding what to do, and we were trying to get a few things done around the house, and finally, at 2:30 I decided to just mix something up, just so I could say I had made bread.

Now, when you are planning to give away the bread you make, you don't have a lot of incentive to really try new things. But today I guess I was liberated by having failed to give away bread yesterday. Plus, I was already cutting the rising time down by about half, so I didn't know how it would come out anyway. So I tried a couple of things I had never done before: used milk instead of water to add some fat, and added honey, thinking that the sugar from the honey might get the yeast going faster than normal. The dough started to rise and smell yeasty, and I thought about leaving it overnight to really do its thing, but then, I thought, No, then I won't have baked bread today. So it's due out of the oven in 2 minutes. I'll tell you at the end of the post how it came out.

I will tell you now, though, that I mixed up a similar mixture tonight, to let it rise overnight and see how that is. And then I licked some dough off my finger. It. was. horrible. So bitter and terrible and punishing. I have no idea why it would taste like that, and I can't really remember if I've ever tasted the dough before, so I don't know if it always tastes like that, or what.

Timer's going off; I'll report back in a minute about the bread coming out of the oven now...

Here it is.

It's kind of short.

Came right out of the pan, though. Sounds hollow when I thump the bottom, that's a good sign.

Seems to be cooked...oh, yum. Not bitter.

Definitely kind of different. Hmmmmm. Better have another piece with butter and honey to really evaluate it properly.

Boule-y boule-y

Challenge Update: I took this picture the other day and now can't remember what I was going to say about it. But I am still baking bread! And tomorrow is the middle of the month! The Challenge is not as challenging as I was afraid it would be. It is just the right amount of challenge. The challenge really has been having a chance to blog about it or anything else. 

The computer is back with a new hard drive, but the challenge with that is that we upgraded the OS, and so it also has a new personality to go with its new brain, and so everything I try to do (merge mailing labels for a school mailing, sync the phone, etc.) takes about 50 times longer than I think it should. 

Seems like pictures on other people's blogs always look better than this one that I took with my phone. Oh, well. At least you can see that's it's bread. 

Giving

So as I think I said before, baking bread everyday has turned out to be the easy part. The hard part is the giving away. I now realize that I'm always afraid that even something intended as a kind gesture will be seen as intrusive or inappropriate.

I have had to fight my tendency to scuttle up to my target, ashamedly hand them a loaf of bread while muttering something about having extra bread, and running off. Not exactly in line with my intention of making friends, strengthening ties, and learning about Syracuse. For example, my idea for bringing bread to the Ronald McDonald House came from friends who had brought strawberries there once after picking more than they could eat themselves. But I don't know anything about the RMH AT ALL, other than that it seems like the parents staying there might need all the homebaked bread and freshly picked strawberries they can get. The lady at the Ronald McDonald House seemed very happy to receive the bread, but my husband and I are both surprised that a place like that, which I assume is run by a large organization with lawyers, etc., would accept bread from a stranger showing up at the door. I mean, what if I had poisoned it, and then a guest there ate some! I can't imagine why anyone would do that to people staying at the RMH, but corporations don't like to take chances. But did I ask, while I was there, if they could accept these kinds of donations and if it was actually something they encouraged so I would know next time I wanted to bring them something? I did not.

I have decided that "I made you some bread" is probably a better opening, even if I feel that it's not strictly true since I usually don't know who is going to get it when I'm making it. I'm not really telling people about my Challenge or the blog; not taking pictures of people I'm giving bread to. Just keeping track every day of what kind I make and who gets it.

In another post I'll list who's been given bread as well as my recipe, because it's wicked easy, and you should totally try it.

February Bread Challenge, Day 1

I'm not going to post about this day-by-day, I don't think, because then I'd never post about anything else. But since it's the first day...

I mixed up dough for 2 loaves last night and figured out how I could come down at 5:50 when the alarm goes off, put the dough into pans and stick it in the oven. Then, using the "time bake" feature on our 1988 oven, not have to do anything else until taking it out of the oven at 7:30. This is a new routine, and that is one thing I hope to get out of this project: incentive to try new ways to bake bread--improvements, shortcuts, etc.--to see what works and what doesn't, thereby expanding my skills and knowledge. One thing I learned is that it can be hard to know if the oven's on when you're using "time bake", but if you start twiddling knobs in a panic, you are likely to turn off the oven and not realize it until later, at which point you will have no idea how long your bread has baked at what temperature. Another thing I learned is that you can turn the oven back on and guess about the time and the bread will still come out yummy.

Now, the other part of the challenge is what to do with all the bread. My lovely, generous, deserving friend Tina, whom I have mentioned before in regards to laundry, came over for tea and a visit this morning, and I thought giving her a loaf of bread would be the perfect start to this project, since the first time I met her and her partner and her daughter was when they signed up through the local mom's listserve and brought a meal to us after we had our baby after we moved here and knew no one. They are stunningly giving and ready to help other people in need. I am working on being more like them, but I have an awfully long way to go. Long story short: Tina's partner has celiac disease, and Tina thought it would take her forever to eat a loaf of bread, so we ate some together, and I'm going to give the other loaf to...someone else. 

Unresolved questions re: goals and procedures for FBC: is it that I'm making bread (loosely defined as either something with yeast OR a flatbread) every day? Or is it that I am giving away bread every day? Or both? I'm not sure. And I am thinking right now I will do it every day of the month, but we'll see how I feel on the weekend. Or tomorrow. I'm not making any promises here.

And, what the heck. I'll post a picture of the bread.

Crazy Idea?: February Bread Challenge

In The Happiness Project, the Gretchen Rubin occasionally gives herself a challenge, such as the Week of Extreme Nice. Here is her explanation:

What is “Extreme Nice”? It’s an extreme sport like bungee jumping or skydiving—pushing the envelope, exerting myself beyond my ordinary efforts, finding new depths in myself to meet the hardest challenges. And I can do it in my own home.

So this week I intend to be utterly nice to [my husband]. No criticism. No pestering. No bickering. Jumping up to do whatever he asks me to do, responding enthusiastically to his every suggestion.

Maybe I need a challenge like this? According to GR, being happier requires you to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth. I have grown in many ways since becoming a mom 5 1/2 years ago, but these ways were largely chosen for me and out of necessity, by this or that Parenting Challenge. Now I finally feel like I can attempt a little growth for myself. I have a few areas of my life in mind that could use some attention, and this challenge would address a couple of them. Here's my idea: make bread every day for a month.

In order to get really good at something, in order to become an expert, you need to do it A LOT. Like, for 10,000 hours. I'm not proposing spending 20 hours/week for 10 years making bread. I don't need to do it that well. But it's certainly something I'd like to get better at, and I think a lot of baking for a few weeks would take me to the next level.

Gretchen Rubin also says that it's easier to do something EVERY DAY than to do it every other day or every few days. I have definitely noticed this with exercise. And with this blog.

But that would result in a lot of bread, especially considering that I am currently working on ways to increase efficiency by baking more than one loaf at a time and freezing the extra. Even though we have a pretty big freezer, 1 or 2 loaves a day for 29 days--or 21 days if I do only week days--or 25 days if I were to only take one day a week off--that would be a lot of bread. So there's another component to the Bread Challenge.

A friend from Cleveland, Emily, has been making pies (a. lot. of. pies.) since last summer, and blogging about it at her blog, Pie Eyed. A couple of months ago, she started giving away pie once a week to someone she encountered in her daily life who brightened her day: the oil-change guy; the lady at the convenience store; the guy who works as Subway. She calls it Pie It Forward. Maybe I could give away fresh-baked bread?

We have only lived in this area for 4 years, and the first couple I was either pregnant or taking care of a baby, and I don't tend to learn new areas very well, and I am not always one to jump in and meet someone new because I do a lot of second-guessing myself, and I always want to find ways to help the community but it can be a project to figure out where, say, Ronald McDonald House is and do they take used toys, or do they have a rule against it, etc.

So I think this would

1. Get me out in the community, meeting neighbors on our street as well as learning where a place like the Ronald McDonald House is;
2. Give me a chance to do something nice for other people, which will hopefully lift their spirits as well as my own;
3. Give me a chance to thank people who have helped me out in the past, like the Bunny Foster Home Lady who gave me a bucket of bunny poop for my garden and who works really hard helping bunnies find homes--gratitude is an important way to help you appreciate the Abundance in your life;
4. Get me chatting and connecting with new people--who knows? I may even make a friend, which would help me feel more Abundance; and
5. Help me to share what I have, which I believe is a big way to feel Abundance.

I don't know if or how I'm going to do it. If I do it, I will definitely post about it on my blog. I will leave you now with a quote I found on the Internet yesterday that probably doesn't really apply, but here it is anyway:

"Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one."  -- Nikolai Berdyaev

Bread

The wonder of taking flour, yeast, salt, and water and turning it into a beautiful, good-smelling, delicious, and nourishing loaf of bread is some kind of magic.

And I know that it seems like it will be hard and take a long time and could not possibly be worth the trouble. But I am a bread evangelist, a term I heard from my friend Jennifer, who is also a bread evangelist, and I am here to tell you that it is definitely worth doing. (Here is where I try really hard to convince you to try making bread, but with a modified recipe for sandwich bread, made a easy as I could possibly make it.) This recipe has no kneading or water-temperature-checking. The amount of time you will actually spend fiddling with the bread is maybe 15 minutes, spread out over 20 hours. And the bread you make will drive you mad with desire, and your guests will talk about it with longing long after they have gone home.

This is the recipe I currently follow to make a rustic boule:
No-Knead Bread: So Easy a Four-Year-Old Can Make It

Here is the original Mark Bittman recipe that the above is closely based on, but I think the above one is easier to follow.

And here is the video of Jim Lahey showing Mark Bittman how to do it.

Now. Go forth and bake bread!

Good But Not Perfect Home Baked Bread on Church Avenue Chomp

Here is a guest post I did for my great friend Meredith's blog last spring. It was the wrong time of year for bread, and it didn't inspire many comments, except for my cousin, who pretty much refuted the idea that it would work (the recipe she had used was, in fact, a different, but very similar, one). BUT, when I first started to write it, it seemed like it was going to be about how to get a feeling of Plenty in your life. Plus, it was a chance for me to think about just doing something, not waiting for the perfect time and the perfect bread, but just starting. Good bread that gets made is a helluva lot more tasty than perfect bread that never gets made.
Guest Post: Good But Not Perfect Home Baked Bread on Church Avenue Chomp