Whole Wheat Bread

Have I finally done it? I think I have finally done it!

Perfect crumb, perfect rise, great texture and taste. I think I am finally ready to stop with the endless tweaking of the bread recipe, and just stick with this one.

Whole Wheat Bread

3 cups whole wheat bread flour (hard)
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup powdered milk
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 TBS yeast
2 1/2 cups water
1 egg, beaten
sesame seeds to sprinkle on top

Combine all dry ingredients, including yeast.

Make a well in the centre, and add water and egg. Stir to combine.

Dump out onto counter and knead 15 minutes. Do not add any additional flour, even if it's really sticky.

Return to bowl, cover (I use a butter paper), and let rise one hour.

Preheat oven to 500 F. Butter a 4" x 4" x 16" bread pan.

Dump dough onto counter. Knead lightly and roll out into a large oval about 1/2" thick.

Fold in ends so it is the same length as bread pan, then roll up jelly-roll style. it will be a bit thicker at the ends but that is just fine.

Lift the dough into the pan. Let rise 45 minutes-1 hour. Brush the top with a little milk or beaten egg, and sprinkle with sesame seeds.

As soon as you put it into the oven, drop the temperature to 350 F. Bake 25 minutes, turning once.

Let cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then unmold and let cool on rack.

oaks and acorns

the pastry for the pumpkin pies is resting, the toffee sauce for the sticky toffee pudding is made, the pumpkins have been roasted, all that's left is some stirring, assembly, and baking.

and knitting.

i started both of these at the cottage, but only just finished the little oak hoodie this week! needed to get it done in time to give at thanksgiving, and before the baby outgrows it!

i wanted to get this one done in time too, but i think i'm out of luck. i lost the pattern i originally drew up, and then had to recreate it. today, of all days, i found the original pattern! sigh.

here are some finished acorns:

and a squirrel taking shape!

what i did on my summer vacation day seven: a fond farewell

our final day, in between packing and cleaning, i had to finish up the raft.

there were just a few finishing touches to add - a hitching ring:

and a ladder:

then away we go! we loaded on the anchors, paddled out 50 feet, and dropped anchor. then rested in the sun, while the kid swam back and forth to the dock a few times.

so nice to look out from the cottage and see our raft floating in the sun!

what i did on my summer vacation day six: afloat!

on saturday we were threatened with rain, so decided to try to get as much done as possible on the raft before the deluge, and then go in to the fair in the late afternoon after the skies cleared.

there was a lot of hammering to do...

but fortunately i had help! my strong kid is pretty proficient with a hammer.

one of the things on the list for this day was to buy chain for the anchors. i had looked at chain on previous shopping trips, but wondered - how much to get? prices ranged from 69¢ to $2.29 a foot, so if i bought 100 feet of chain, that could add up to a lot of money. so, i measured out 50 feet of rope, brought a ball of yarn with a sinker tied on one end, and swam out to see how deep it was.

holding on to the length of rope (to measure distance) and ball of yarn (to measure depth) was a bit futzy, and i instinctively reached for the ground with my foot.

guess what? i touched bottom.

lake depth 50 feet from shore: about five feet. i don't know why in the world i thought it might be deep enough to require a hundred feet of chain, but i am very glad i measured before buying! i ended up getting two 10-foot lengths - one to connect the anchors, one to loop through it and connect to opposite sides of the raft. this way, the chains stay well under the raft, so no worries about banging one's feet in the water.

then it was off to the fenelon fair to see how we had done, eat mini doughnuts, and send the kid on some rides.

there were ribbons!

the ghostbusters costume won a $25 fabricland gift certficate! just in time for me to start this year's hallowe'en costume!

and, who'da thunk? my sorry little cukes took first place!

helps that no one else entered pickling cucumbers. whew.

we topped the evening off with a final open-fire dinner (sausage and corn), and a trip to the demolition derby. not my usual fare, but we had loads of fun - and the fair at night feels much more exciting!

what i did on my summer vacation day five: fair entry day

friday morning is always the busiest of our cottage week - getting entries ready for the fair!

i didn't have quite as many as usual, but didn't have time to spend finishing any needlework at the cottage with a raft to build. also i was sad to see that my squirrel pattern did not include any instructions at all for the tail! that's the second time that's happened to me with cottage knitting, grr.

anyway, i did have a fairly hefty bag of stuff to take in: a ghostbusters costume, my scissors shirt (yay len's mill for giving me another snippet of the fabric!) maple leaf forever cardigan, linen middy pullover, double-leaf saroyan scarf, end of year leaf cloth, pyjamas...

and some cookies, and brownies, and (not great) jams, and really awful cucumbers:

(those aren't the world's worst cucumbers; i left the world's worst cucumbers on the vine, because they looked more like avocados.)

then it was back for lunch. having a big roast chicken for dinner on the first night was a very strategic decision; the rest of the week, lunch was salad with various leftover veg (peas and beets, here) and then topped with chicken breast. lots of protein and nutrients for the carpenter.

speaking of, frame all done! all that's left is to flip it upright into the water, nail on the top boards, and then float it out 50 feet where we'll anchor it.

what i did on my summer vacation day four: anchors aweigh

thursday we spent basically the entire day on the water!

first up was making the second anchor. these things weigh 200 lbs each! it may have been for the best that i didn't get enough cement to do both on tuesday, as carrying and mixing the cement was exhausting - really feeling my age and lack of exercise.

so we took a little swim break.

and relaxed in the sun with some knitting! i think i want to re-work the shaping on the mighty oaks baby cardigan, so i switched to knit one squirrel two:

then, back to work. i was a bit bummed to find that handley's is not terribly accurate with their cutting - my 8-foot cedar planks varied from 95 to 97 inches, not great for making a square frame! so i had to cut some down to size.

also bummed to find the screws that came with my L-braces were phillips head. i hate phillips, and didn't have a phillips bit for my drill, so did a lot of driving my hand. wah. between that and the cement, i was pretty sore by the end of the day.

i decided getting the outer frame together would be my goal for the day. and i achieved it!

to celebrate, we had hamburgers and corn cooked over an open fire. i love cooking over a real fire - something you can't really do in the city.

what i did on my summer vacation day three: movie time!

we usually make a trip up to the highland cinemas in kinmount to see a movie during our cottage week, and this year we saw pixels.

this was the kid's choice, clearly.

and the kid enjoyed it.

the grownups, on the other hand, thought the crude language and endless sexism was a bit off-putting, especially in a kids' film.

the plot was incredibly predictable. the special effects were fun (turning everything into pixels makes cg easy!) and the kid was happy to see giant pac man. but adam sandler is getting a bit old to pull off this kind of juvenile stuff. and i am so very very bored with the trite "ugly guy gets hot chick" thing. blecch. no thank you.

feh. i have many annoyed opinions on the hero genre, which this falls into. generally, the hero does absolutely nothing but sit around picking his nose or lurking in his lair until the world is almost about to end, and then he swoops in at the last possible moment and everyone thinks he is so very amazing, although in fact he (and it's pretty much always a he, isn't it) is a lazy slob until he rouses himself in the nick of time, and no doubt goes back to being a lazy slob after the credits roll. is it any wonder we have a generation of permanent adolescents, no doubt waiting for an asteroid hit so they can show off their mad skillz? stay in your basements, heroes. the rest of us are busy doing the real work of keeping the world from going to hell in a handbasket.

okay, off soapbox now!

peter dinklage was great as a badass with a badass mullet (and andrew bambridge, playing his childhood self, was also pretty amazing), and i wish we'd seen more of jane krakowski as the first lady. the others were just phoning it in for the most part, playing the version of their own selves that they usually play.

in other news, i got more cement, and did some work with a handsaw cutting a cedar 4x4 into short lengths to brace the corners of the raft frame.

and, i got started baking the best chocolate chip cookies. or at least starting the dough, which wants to rest in the fridge overnight or up to three days.

there are many steps to this recipe, but just the typical ingredients.

what i did on my summer vacation day two: lumber & cookies

the lumberyard wasn't open on the holiday monday, so it was back to town to pick up supplies for a raft and anchors.

i also had to pick up additional chocolate chips - the ones we got at the country cupboard tasted worse than a brown crayon! the yeast we got there was deader than a doornail, too - so i baked a loaf of bread and hamburger buns that we could have used as paperweights! my plan had been to bake more later in the week for the fair, but that flew out the window.

and unfortunately i made a tactical error with my anchors - i thought i needed 3 bags cement total, but i needed 3 per tire! whoops. i was a bit bummed, as the concrete needs 3 days to cure before you can use the anchors, and by the time i realised it, it was too late to get more. sigh. at least i got one done.

and of course there is always time for knitting on the dock!

what i did on my summer vacation day one: mighty oaks & pancakes

just back from the cottage! where we had a lovely time indeed, cooking, crafting, and just relaxing.

i'm always the first up, so i got in the habit of sitting on the porch, watching the sun rise over the lake, and knitting. i started a hooded baby cardigan before we left the city, hoping to get it done in time for the fair. here's how it looked monday morning:

you can see the pattern taking shape! then the troops roused themselves, and it was time to make pancakes.

we made a quick trip to the farm stalls to pick up food for the week, and then a trip into town to get some baking supplies - for bread, pie, cakes, cookies... you name it! peaches are in season here, so we got a basket to make pie. yum. after a big roast chicken dinner though, we were too full for dessert.

summertime

and the living is busy! i have been completely ignoring this blog basically since i took on a new project at work. suddenly there is no time for anything!

but since we have entered the season of wonderful fresh local produce, i have found time for things like making cherry pie and lemonade for lunch:

also, our cottage week is coming up soon, and that means the fenelon fair! and that means, get crafting.

i have a couple of things that i got done over the course of the year that just need tagging. unfortunately, i also need to find sample materials (scraps of yarn or fabric) to attach to the tags. i feel like i am swimming in scraps, but do you think i can find a scrap of scissors fabric? grr.

i do have a back-up "any clothing article (sewn)" to submit - this pencil skirt i am working on:

just needs to be hemmed and pressed. but i feel like a shirt is more impressive (it's certainly more work!)

i'm also working on a hooded baby cardigan, but i needed to order needles for it, and then this happened:

sad! fortunately i ordered from webs, and they said they'd send out a new set right away! just hope they arrive before we leave for the cottage.

i've also used the fair as a good excuse to get the kid's traditional xmas eve pyjamas done:

well, almost done, i need to do button holes and some top-stitching. i also made some pyjama bottoms for me:

i love this fabric! only problem is, the fair category is "ladies sleep pants," which is great because the bottoms are much less work than the tops, but it also means i have the top half of the pyjamas i started last year, still pinned but not sewn. i think the top half of the pyjama bottoms from 2013 haven't even been cut yet. oops.

wondering what i should bring along with me to work on at the cottage. mittens for the kid's teacher? a tea towel to embroider? the big project i'll be working on is this raft, so i may not have time for much else.

sick day knitting

ugh. i am blaming the current round of ugh on the swims i took in the lake over the weekend. there was a dead fish in the water and i guess i didn't stay far enough away? i don't know.

worse luck, it didn't occur to me until too late in the afternoon that this would have been a perfect opportunity to watch the final episodes of mad men! sigh.

anyway, i have been plugging away at the dreaded fine-gauge splitty dark linen middy top, reading brideshead revisited and imagining myself in a more glamorous past.

this thing is taking forever. i joined the second ball at the cottage yesterday:

dark colours are so hard to photograph! it is producing a nice fabric though, you can see a bit better in this one how the linen and cotton contrast softly against one another:

this project will kill me, i swear!

thanksgiving baking

just got back from our annual thanksgiving trip to the cottage! i made my usual desserts (pumpkin pie and sticky toffee pudding), by popular demand.

and since we were at the cottage, i took the opportunity to get a snap of the embroidered tea towel i entered in the fair! i sketched the oak leaf based on illustrations in a book on identifying trees. from getting started to getting finished was over a year. which reminds me, if i intend to enter that category next year, i ought to start now.

and because you can never have too many (or even enough!) cookies, here's a snap of some snickerdoodles i made the other day.

a trip to the fair, or, how to block your knitting without any pins or anything.

just back from another lovely week at the lake, our summer tradition. swimming, knitting, baking, eating, and re-reading evelyn waugh (a new obsession since re-watching the amazing 1981 production of brideshead revisited).

this trip, i pioneered a couple of new methods for blocking!

with no blocking boards, or pins, or any tools at all really, i came up with two methods. for a washcloth: wet it, smoothed it out on a cutting board, covered it with a tea towel, and flattened it with a stack of magazines. later i set it out on a picnic table in the sun to dry completely.

method two, for an alpaca scarf: i was already sitting by the lake when i finished it, so we went for a swim together. then i laid it out along the length of one of the boards - it was the perfect width! - and weighted the corner down with stones, to make sure it wouldn't blow away and be lost forever.

then i treated myself to my annual pedicure while it dried in the sun!

with that done, it was time to get all of our fair entries together. there were many tags to be filled out - i made sure to bring a pile of blanks home, so that next year i can write them in at my leisure. my hand was sore after filling in all the tags.

i did have quite a few entries.

but all's well that ends well. the blocking techniques seem to have worked okay - the designed-in-canada knitalong dishcloth came in second, and the scarf won first prize.

my gloves came in first, too!

here's a better picture:

my pyjama pants won, too! haven't made the top yet, no rush on that as the category is "ladies' sleep pants."

the kid has a full set of prize-winning pyjamas. these will go under the tree on xmas eve.

the argylette cardigan took top prize as well! one of the women accepting the entries joked she might walk off with it!

my "ladies' pullover" was also a hit.

i finished this tea towel at the cottage... a year after starting... can't believe i didn't get a better photo of the finished object! and i left it up at the cottage to fulfil its destiny as a dishdryer, so no photo is likely to be forthcoming. ah well.

i also got a couple of seconds in baking - brownies and shortbread - but no photos.

my mitts took a prize as well.

not everything did though! this hat to go with the mitts? nothing.

and my strawberry jam and pepper jelly were a bust, too.

honestly though? that was entirely expected. i usually overcook jam; this time i overcompensated and undercooked it. and the pepper jelly? well, have a look - the pepper bits are all at the top instead of evenly distributed throughout!

none of my photos won either. but, i did achieve my goal of spreading my wings and entering categories i hadn't tried before. maybe next year!