Rabbit Holes

I stumbled on a book sale at the grocery store over the weekend. I was maintaining my puritanical pauper resolve to not buy a book but, when I was informed all I had to do was make a donation in order to help myself to whatever books I liked, any hope of financial or aesthetic discipline was utterly ruined.

And so I came to be in possession of James Joyce's "Dubliners" and Jane Austen's "Pride & Prejudice" both of which have lead me to ask the same question I always ask when duped into buying and reading "classics". How did this come to be defined as a "classic"? Who decides these things? Because they really ought to be fired. I am admittedly not very far into either of them but it's the sort of reading that I will do only because I have time right now and, I suppose, because it will be good for me, in the way that eating fibre and playing team sports are good for one. I'll do it but I doubt I'll enjoy it. I'm consoling myself that neither can be worse than "A Farewell to Arms" which was, in my opinion, the literary equivalent of eating hay bales while simultaneously playing outfield on a boggy baseball diamond with a cigar smoking monkey flagellating you between pitches. No, wait, the monkey makes that scenario far too interesting; a cigar smoking dentist performing a root canal on you between plays. Growing a beard for three chapters indeed.

The fact that I fall for this 'but it's a "classic"' schtick everytime does nothing to improve my opinion of my own intellect and the fact that I only scored 110 on the test in the "Boost Your IQ" book I bought at the sale, isn't helping either. Admittedly, you probably shouldn't try to test your IQ after half a bottle of wine but I've been holed up due to injuries and rain so I thought it might alleviate the boredom. I suppose it has, in an unexpected way. It's hard to be bored when you're neurotically developing a complex.

Missed It Mistik In Prague

I found this poetic snapshot of my time in Prague when I was cleaning my purse at the hospital yesterday:

Missed It Mistik in Prague

Fowl, he cried outside the
fairytale castle
  Fenestrated for certain
this time
  Foul indeed.

Along with this one also inspired by my experience of that dark, macabre place:

The Propsal

New bride unwrapped
Shiny new, squeaky clean
skin.
Please, he said, I am tired
Every night until she died.

Then he loved her to the bone.

Smurftastic

Spent the bulk of a beautiful sunny afternoon in the ER due to a minor mishap. Fortunately my foot is not broken, much to both mine and the doctor's surprise, but now I have to figure out a way to (not) break something else so I can meet the handsome, kind and blushing X-ray technician again. Only next time I will be prepared by showering and having nicely pedicured feet instead of looking like a hobo and smelling like a swamp creature. In the meantime though I am the proud owner of a pair of pewter gray crutches and my lack of mobility should be very good news for my writing schedule.

Even more exciting I discovered the smurf village right outside my kitchen window! No smurf sightings as of yet but I'll keep you posted.

Beautiful Life

Happy Birthday to me!

I am officially settled in at the lake for the next couple of months, warm and dry despite the stormy weather.

Mom took me out for a late lunch at the Sawney Bean, my last hope for curry. The menu very clearly states it’s authentic British curry which, once I’ve tasted it, I gather means it’s the same colour as curry and is served over rice but is otherwise not particularly curry like. Still, unless I manage to snag a job in India, or a country with a reasonable Indian population, it will have to do, I’m settled somewhere and can try my hand at making my own.

When the waitress asks me what size wine I’d like, I order the big glass with the excuse it’s my birthday. “Congratualtions,” she says. Apparently a birthday entitles me to free dessert –without the humiliation of a bizzare birthday song- and, while they haven’t anything gluten free, they do have GF ice cream and strawberry sauce. I don’t believe i’ve ever said no to strawberries and I’m not about to satrt now.

After that we hit the highway, straight towards the ominous skies to the east, leaving reported funnel clouds behind us.

Once we’ve unloaded the car and unpacked the boxes we open the wine and the card comes out. It contains enough money to pay for my newly ordered laptop bag and these words of wisdom:

Buddha Laughing

Last night I dreamed I was trying to carry a large buddha statue across a river. It was too heavy and the current too strong. So, worrying, I left the buddha on the bank and struggled across the river without it. It took me all night and when I finally made it across the buddha statue was there. I thought I had been turned around midstream and almost started to cry but the buddha laughed, which caused me to remember myself, so I laughed along.

Summer Pantry

I finally finished baking but I`m left wondering how I`ll ever manage to eat:

Grocery Inventory

3 Bags Italian Sausage (6 links total)
2 Bags Bacon (3 servings each)
2 Bags Bison Smokies (6 links total)
1 Bag of lots of Pepperoni

Baking

1 Loaf of Cinnamon Bread
1 Bag Hamburger Buns (9)
1 Bag large Hamburger buns (6)
9 Hemp Banana Muffins
11 Rhubarb Muffins
1 loaf Hemp Bread
1 loaf Teff Bread
1 loaf Sorghum Bread
1 loaf Teff Banana Bread
2 Bags Granola
12 Rhubarb Teff Muffins (2 bags-6 each)
6 Monster Quinoa “Peanut” Butter Cookies
8 Banana Quinoa Muffins

Pre- Mixes

2 Bags Pizza Mix (1 pizza per bag)
6-1 serving bags Teff pancake mix


in the next 8-10 weeks. Ridiculous. Especially when you consider I rarely bake more than two loaves of bread a month.

I`m not even going to get into the fact that half of it`s burned and gluten free baking often doesn`t hold up in the freezer. Too much.

Squirrelly

I am officially an alcoholic. In my defense, if the bottle hadn't already been open I wouldn't have poured a glass and found myself drinking away my frustration, alone, in the middle of the afternoon.

But I have been mixing and stirring and whirring like a baking tornado these last 48 hours, trying to use up the last of my gluten free flours so I will have muffins and bread this summer and not be throwing any out before I leave the continent.

Yesterday went really well. I made, cinnamon bread, hamburger buns (soooo good, I can't wait to have an actual meat-on-bread burger this summer!), banana hemp muffins (they're reminiscent of bran muffins actually-not exciting but filling and nourishing and great for breakfast in my kayak), teff banana bread and, my new favourite, rhubarb muffins. Preliminary samples indicate everything turned out well so I had no reason to believe today would not be a smashing success. The fact that I was planning yeast breads for today was undaunting. After all, I made buns yesterday without a hint of trouble. I am getting better at this.

Instead of sticking with my tried and true Sorghum bread recipe, the rhubarb muffins were such a success I decided to try the beautiful looking teff and hemp sandwich breads. I proofed my yeast for both breads before mixing so I know it wasn't the yeast but neither turned out well at all.

The hemp bread was ridiculous even last night when I was reading it. It seemed like far too much flour for the amount of liquid but nobody mentioned having any problems in the comment section so I fearlessly forged ahead. After adding the liquid to the flours however it became frighteningly evident my flour was parched. I ended up adding another 2 cups and finally had a lump of dough that handled like a very stiff bread dough but my experience with gluten free baking tells me bread batter should be more like cake batter. The fact that the recipe itself uses the phrase "spoon into a prepared pan" tells me that a stiff dough was not the goal but I foolishly decided that, having already doubled the amount of water, I could not possibly add more. I also now had enough dough for two loaves.

Needless to say neither of them turned out although I've decided I can make them palatable, at least while they're fresh, with a nice soft mozzarella cheese.

I haven't tried the teff loaf yet but it also looks nothing like the picture.

This, of course, is why there are no baking shows on the Food Network. Cooking shows abound, but baking? It's too risky. You may have baked something ten times without trouble and then, one day- maybe you slept wrong, maybe you had a fight, maybe you fell in love and your mind is wandering- whatever the reason and you may never know, it will flop. And there is no room for failure on the chattering box. TV is no place for reality.

But this is something I had to accept when I had to learn to bake without gluten. It was hard at first. Not only did it contradict my perfectionist nature, a trait that had previously manifest itself neatly in my reliably edible baking, but it defied my innate Mennonite cheapness. Gluten free flours are high maintenance diva ingredients- outrageously expensive and demanding- and when you're used to being adept at something but find yourself failing more than you succeed, it's tempting to give up.

Today I decided to make one more batch of (bigger) buns rather than admit defeat and, once my yeast was proofing, I mixed my flours then set out to mix the wet ingredients. I cracked the first egg open and watched the yolk splat satisfactorily when it hit the bottom of the bowl. I was already reaching for the second egg before I realized the recipe called for egg whites not eggs. (I actually tried to separate it out of that bowl, go on picture it, before accepting it was a lost cause.

This is when I went back to the fridge to make sure that these really were the last three eggs and noticed the bottle of wine that had been opened but not nearly finished on Saturday night. There were definitely no more eggs so I poured myself a glass of wine. It did, after all, need to be drunk before the weekend and couldn't really be brought to the lake. I was taking my first sip when I spotted the yeast atop the warming oven, grown so high it was about to spill over the bowl.

Already feeling fortified, I separated half the egg and carried on. My brother dropped in for a visit just as I was popping the finished product in the oven and he kept me company while I finished the bottle. Does finishing the bottle in good company mean I'm not really a lush? Because if the beautiful buns can be entered into evidence, it certainly helped my baking mojo.