Project 365, January 15th: Fire Truck

Fire Truck

I'm supposed to take one a day. Sometimes, that means just pulling out the camera on the way home and snapping a photo of the first interesting thing you see.

I'z a baker

Bread, before and after baking.

Omaha is out of town this week, but I decided to go to her coven meeting anyway. Three other families in the coven have kids, so we let them get together when we have the chance, and I like to hang out in the socialization part before they get down to whatever it is that they do at covens.

I decided to make bread, since I have that lovely new book, and I completely and utterly screwed up. I decided to try a preferment recipe using a biga, which is simply a mixture of flour, yeast, and water which is allowed to rise for a few hours and then mixed in with the dough later, to give it more flavor. At 10:30am I started making the biga. I'm pretty sure I put in too much yeast but, far worse, is what I did next.

The recipe called for 425 grams of water. I took out a bowl and put it onto my scale, and began pouring water from a four-quart measuring cup into the bowl. When I had 425 grams, I put the bowl and the measuring cup aside, and then went through the process of making the flour and yeast mix. And then I grabbed the measuring cup and poured it into the mixing bowl. I have no idea how much water was left in the measuring cup.

But I put together the biga and hand-mixed it and it felt okay, as bready things go, so I shrugged and decided to let it ferment. The whole assemblage time took about 15 minutes.

At 12:30, I took the biga out and subdivided it into little balls, then assembled about a kilo of flour, water, yeast, salt, sugar and olive oil, then added the biga balls, and hand-mixed and kneaded the whole mess for about nine minutes. Again, I screwed up: too much salt, and I poured it right on top of the yeast, effectively killing some of them. Poor yeasties. When I was done, I had two kilos of dough, which I then let rise. That took about 15 minutes.

At 3:00, I took the fully raised dough out of my bowl (I'm still missing my couche, dammit, and I want it!), gently cut it into quarters, formed each quarter into a boule, and put two down onto pre-torn sheets of parchment. Again, about 15 minutes. That's two boules in the left-hand photo, above; the other two were in the oven already.

At 3:50, I started pre-heating the oven. I pre-heat a baking oven for 40 minutes, because that's how long it takes to get the baking stone so hot it'll stay hot when I put the bread on. I also put a cast iron skillet on the top shelf.

At 4:30, I slid two boules into the oven. I filled the cast-iron skillet with a cup of near-boiling water from the kettle, and then twice in about two minutes sprayed the walls of the oven with a garden sprayer.

At 4:50, I slid them out and put in the next two. At 5:10, they were all done. As you can see, they all came out wonderfully. The crumb was a little more moist than I would have liked, and my oven was too hot so the crust was thinner, but nobody at coven complained; heck, they made the whole five pounds of it vanish. Whatever I did "wrong" was unnoticeable.

I suppose my overconfident "bread is easy" is unwarranted; this bread is difficult. It took an hour and fifteen minutes of my time, broken up by three periods of between 90 and 150 minutes each; it doesn't take much effort to bake bread, but you effectively can't leave the house for timely errands.

As to the coven itself, I stayed for the whole thing. More to come.

On why the GTD Wilderness is sometimes a place to go

You know you're in a cult when you start to learn the secret, inner vocabulary of the cult and use it in everyday life. In the Getting Things Done cult, there's a special place you go when you've forgotten your GTD tools: we call it The Wilderness.

The other day I had left my beautiful, expensive Miquelrius notebook at home, along with my lovely (inexpensive but hard to find) Jetstream pen, when I went to the office. At a bit of a loss for what to do, I went to the company's office supply cabinet and pulled out a cheap Bic and a 5x7 pad of yellow paper. I took out my meditation timer and set it for 15 minutes, and began brainstorming everything I wanted to do that day. I filled three sheets. The alarm went off and I went to work prioritizing.

I thought to myself: why do I never do this with my usual notebook? I think there were two answers: first, these were tear-away sheets. I was going to dispose of them by the end of the day, so even though I knew that the list was much longer than everything I could accomplish in a day I also knew that, ultimately, nobody else would see the list of things I didn't get done.

I also realized that I felt inhibited by the cost of the paper. These notebooks are pricey: eight to ten bucks each for a 100-sheet notebook. It's supposed to last me three months or so, and if I go filling up page after page with things that ultimately don't get finished, I'll just feel bad for wasting all that paper and having all those unfinished things to look back on. I'm not sure how to break this habit of being afraid of wasting good paper. That's why I bought it, to be my useful tool, and my repository for all things great or small.

So, I resolve (hey, the New Year's only two weeks old) to do with my overpriced but oh-so-sexy and lightweight tools what I would do with the cheap ones: use them.

One of the tricks of going from mere proficiency to mastery over a subject is to ask yourself, at the end of every task, "What can I do to make this better?" I've found that one of the things I can do to make my skills better is to recognize where my blocks are and tear them down. This is one of them.