Notes

It’s Saturday, and I’m baking bread again. Or at least I’m making bread; its on its first rising now, so we’re at least four hours away from anything edible. I got up relatively early and made some poolish. I’m still not comfortable doing that; it didn’t turn out as I thought it should – it does have the fermenting aroma, but its not all that soupy – from what I gather, poolish is supposed to be mostly water and a little flour. I may have misread the directions. But what the hell, its mixed. I’m in a bit of a grumpy mood today, grumpy enough that I didn’t want to go through the ritual of kneading the dough by hand, so I did it with the mixer. Part of that is that my arm hurts – actually, my wrist, but I think its referred pain or something like that from my shoulder, which has been stiff, last couple of days – but part was that I just wanted to sulk quietly somewhere, so I wanted to get the bread in and rising. I know that the books say that kneading the dough is one of the fun parts, and I’ve seen people say that kneading it helps them work out tension and whatnot, but I’ve never seen the charm of it. So I got that part done, and now I’m in here in the bedroom, munching on potato chips (which we got for my daughters birthday party; I’d better not eat too many or I’ll have to go out to get more) and doing some reading. And writing, obviously.

Potato chips – I know that its traditional to think that certain foods were better when you were a kid, but I really do think that potato chips were tastier then – saltier, for one thing, thoughts of blood pressure be damned. I remember the first time I had what were called ‘Hawaiian’ potato chips – thick, salty ones. Those were amazing – so much so that I don’t think I could eat a bunch of them, just a couple at a time. Not that stopped me from going back to them fairly often. I’ve seen articles where people talk about their favorites from across the country. None of them ever sounded all that amazing that I’ve wanted to order some up. Part of that, too, is inherent cheapness; I’d likely have to pay almost as much for the shipping as for the actual chips themselves. We do order some foods through the mail – Ghiradelli chocolate coffees, teas from Stash Tea, Goldwater’s Salsa – but that’s about it. For some reason we’ve been drinking more coffee of late, so we’re going through the stack of neat blue bags with the Ghiradelli logo fairly quickly. The people we buy from ship so that it gets to us in two or three days, so we don’t run the danger of finding ourselves without any. Having to survive on Starbucks Breakfast Blend, oh, the ignominy!

The one food that we’ve tried to order on occasion and never been satisfied with is jam – in particular, strawberry jam and elderberry jam. When we moved into this house, a neighbor gave us a jar of strawberry jam that they’d made, which was amazingly good (so good that when they brought some over a few years later as a Christmas gift, one jar for us and one for my mother, I gave passing thought to not giving my mother hers). And my wife’s father made elderberry jam from bushes in his yard which was also amazingly good – tart but sweet. We have a jar of elderberry jam in the cupboard that comes from a Trappist monastery; I haven’t tasted it yet but my wife’s sister, who recommended it, says it’s the closest to her father’s that she has ever tasted. So if that works out, we just have to find a truly excellent strawberry jam– one that tastes of sunlight.

Not that mail-order means we've short changed Giant, our local supermarket, whose unofficial motto is 'gee, they seem to like that -- we'd better stop carrying it'. We made our usual run to the store this morning and found hordes of people doing a BM&TP stockup before the Great Blizzard of 2006 that’s arriving tonight -- or so they say. Oh the travails of the weather. People around here really do space out about it. I have no feeling for how much snow we'll get -- the prediction is 5-7 inches, and we normally get half to two thirds of the low end of the spectrum. People at my office were actually freaking out and running to Lowes to pick up snowblowers that were on sale -- impulse buys! Whatever we get, the timing is poor -- not only will it likely affect my daughter's birthday party (such as it is) tomorrow, but it a) won't affect me going in to work, because I'm working from home on Monday, but b) might affect my bringing the van in for service, Sunday night. Somehow we'll survive. I do notice, though -- don't know if this is a growing-older thing or not -- that I tend to notice cold weather more. I like cold weather, but now, if the temp drops quickly, the first thing I think of is that disaster movie 'The Day After Tomorrow', about the virtually instant deep-freezing of the Northern Hemisphere.

Shiver. Maybe I'll go put on a sweater.