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The 5 stages of grief^H^H^H^H^H pandemic:
1- panic buying toilet paper
2- spending a trillion dollars on your staycation
3 – panic buying flour, yeast, butter, & eggs
4 – baking bread
5- acceptance

Today I ate the best sourdough I’ve ever had, and it came out of my own oven, from sourdough I cultivated from outside my back porch! It’s a REAL San Francisco Sourdough!

Crusty (but not too crusty!) crust, moist, supple interior, a perfect “tear it in your mouth” crumb, and the sourdough flavor was… indescribable! Dare I say that it tastes more “healthful” than other breads I’ve made and had!

Instructions:

Briefly:

Make a wet dough with flour, water, salt, and sourdough starter. Let it rise 14 hours-ish, cook hot (475… 500) for 50 minutes with a pan of hot water in the oven.

Detailed:

Make sourdough starter, I started with this recipe from King Arthur Flour. What I actually did was: in a mason jar, mix about 3 parts flour, 2 parts water and stir it til it’s all wet. Leave it on the back porch for a couple hours to catch yeasties. Cover it and let it sit in a consistent temperatured, warm part of the house (my kitchen counter). Each day, pour off 1/2 the mixture and add more flour & water. Do this every day for 7 days. Done!

To make the bread:
Put in a big bowl 3 cups water, 1 1/2 cups water, a big o’ gloop of sourdough starter (maybe 1/2 a cup?). Mix with a stick until it’s a big gloopy mess (about 30 seconds?) Cover and let sit for an hour. Pour in 1 1/2 tbsp salt and mix with the stick for 30 seconds. Cover and let sit overnight (I left it from 5pm to 10am.

Preheat oven to 500 (all the better to brown your crust, my dear!). Using sprinklings of flour to keep things from being too gloopy and sticky, shape the dough into… I don’t know… a shape!

Put a pan of hot water in the oven (I’m still not convinced it helps but hey). Cook at 500 for 20 minutes, 425 for 30 minutes, oven off for 20 minutes (I could have left it in for another few minutes but it was coming on lunchtime!)

Followup:

One remarkable thing is that after eating it, I don’t feel that slightly addiction-y feeling of NEEDing another slice of it. I’m guessing the yeast have done their job so well that I’m eating more yeast and less of all the other stuff that’s in wheat.

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Yesterday afternoon I was in the middle of trying to make this bread and I became SOOOO frustrated! I had looked up all kinds of recipes for sourdough… trying to get the percentages of ingredients right, the time and temperature, the kneeding schedule. And I was literally at my wits end! I gave up. All I knew was that some people do a long rise (Hi Jen! Sarah!) and all these recipes had these elaborate strategies for making perfect bread.  (try googling “sourdough bread percentages”, or “best sourdough bread”). I had watched a video the other night from Pro Home Cooks called 15 Mistakes Most Beginner Sourdough Bakers Make and while I was watching it, I was thinking how beautiful and rewarding artisanal bread was. The moment I turned off the video and thought about applying the hundred or so bread-making tips he offered, I knew in my heart that I could never make good bread at home. Never. I knew that it was important, nay, essential that I forget everything he said. I knew I had to just bake. And it worked!

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It was wonderful hearing Megan and Abigail chime in with oo’s and ah’s as they ate it!

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I was really into bread a few years ago. So much so that I taught bread making classes all over! It was a blast! I stick by my original philosophy of making bread easily (but wow, it’s easy to forget when you watch enough Youtube videos of people making bread!)

Here is the cheat-sheet I made for my class. It’s a terrific primer on bread making: Real Bread in 10 Minutes Cheat Sheet

8-16-20: A friend asked about the Molekule filter, this is what I had to say:

TL;DR: Scam.

I don’t own one but I had a conversation with them about the quality of their product after getting facebook bombed by their product a zillion times. They came up empty in all regards. It’s louder, moves less air, and is MUCH more expensive than any other air filter on the market. Their “unique pollutant destroying technology” is an activated carbon filter. The molekule guy said he has a report “coming out soon” showing how their filter was better than blah blah blah. I googled and found the “upcoming” report on the molekule website itself! I grabbed it and put it the report here. Performance of the filter is IDENTICAL to reasonably good filtration + an activated carbon filter.

If you want a good air filter, the best start is to get a good furnace filter from the hardware store. Spend $20 on a filter instead of the usual $8 and you’re rocking it. That worked very well for recent wildfires.

scam alert for reals.

We just paid off our 6 year car loan. Hurray!

This 6,400-word, well written article can be distilled down to “quarantine for the COVID-19 pandemic!” It’ll save lives!

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca

A month after Abigail was born, we finally settled on what we wanted her legal name to be. But the paperwork had already been filed… So here we are, 5 years later, finally getting around to making it right.

Today I went to the courthouse, spoke to the judge and got a Decree of Name Change. Tomorrow I’m mailing out paperwork to the Social Security office for a new Social Security card and to the Vital Records office for a new birth certificate! In another month, we’ll have her passport fixed. Hurray!

It would have been easier (several evenings and 2 half-days off work so far) and cheaper ($700 or so in fees) if we had decided on her name right away but I wouldn’t have had it any other way!

I have 2 monitors on my laptop computer. It’s nice. Here’s info about my second monitor:

– AOC 15.6″ USB powered monitor
– ClickMonitorDDC (12-8-20 that link is broken now, see here)
– Displaylink driver (12-8-20: not any more, see below)

I set up ClickMonitorDDC so I could change the brightness of both monitors easily. Info here. I also set it up to change the volume easily.

I had an, apparently common problem where sometimes the screen would restart repeatedly. To fix it, I disabled “USB Selective Suspend” and upgraded to the December 2019 Displaylink drivers. That fixed it. There’s more tips on fixing that problem here in case my fix doesn’t do it.

I bought 2 of those USB-powered monitors so I don’t have to drag it from home to work each day. That was nice.

Update 12-8-20: To get my second monitor to work well, I used to run the Displaylink drivers but with a recent update to… something… I don’t know… they weren’t working well but the Intel drivers started working. I used the Intel Driver & Support Assistant to automagically install and update the right drivers.