May Day!

[elfs]

The Maypole!
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

Last Tuesday (yes, I'm catching up), Omaha and I went to the May Day celebration at Woodland Park. It was a bit overcast and cool and it threatened to rain all afternoon, but other than a brief sprinkling of drops nothing came of it. We were there with the rest of Omaha's coven, having dinner together and cavorting under the maypole.

Being on a baking kick, I made more bread. This time, in a strange way: the night before I mixed all of the ingredients together, kneaded it briefly (I mean, really briefly, no more than six minutes and it started to stretch up beautifully), dumped it into a ziplock bag and put it in the refrigerator. The next day I had Omaha take it out after lunch and let it rise. I was worried that it wouldn't come up, but it turned out very nice. I wonder if some of that was the amaranth I put in. I did the entire recipe by memory.

Sackrace
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The kids had their own sackrace. I got a movie of it, but the audio has real children's names on it so I'm not gonna YouTube it. It was very cute. The kids also had their own maypole. The women and men did the calling out, looking for the King and Queen of May, and then an oompah-band with drums and tuba played merry tunes while the Maypole was woven. We had a lot of fun. The kids hovered around under the maypole until it was too low, at which point they and the band slipped out from under the canopy of ribbon and let the men and women weave themselves up to the pole, give a cheer, and celebrate the beginning of Spring. It was all lovely and fun.

Kids under the maypole.
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

Comments

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

Throwing the dough in the refrigerator won't kill the yeast -- you can actually freeze bread dough for a month or two, and it will still rise once defrosted (as long as you let it warm to room temperature slowly, instead of doing something silly like defrost it in the microwave). Refrigerating the dough slows the metabolism of the yeast, resulting in different metabolic products, creating a richer and more varied flavor. With sourdoughs, though, it gives the lactobacilli in the dough more time to work for the same rise, increasing the sourness of the resulting bread.