Stone, Sprouts & Birds

Last weekend during the blizzard I stirred up a half-batch of Italian Semolina bread dough

from the book, Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, only to remember after it was rising that my baking stone had cracked and been thrown away.  I suppose I could have formed the bread in a pan and baked it that way but I like the freeform loaves, sliding the risen dough off a cornmeal covered pizza peel onto the hot baking stone, flinging a cup of hot water in on the floor of the oven (to make crispy crust), and... well, I just like it.  So I surfed the web to see if Walmart or Target have baking stones in stock.  Walmart doesn't, Target does but those got awful reviews that they cracked after only a few uses.  That led me to the commercial kitchen store up Military Ave. today.  They had one, a nice one on the shelf for SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLARS.  Once I recovered my equilibrium I went over to look at the scoops and was paying for the one I decided on when I asked if there was any other place that sold them for not that much money.  The guy behind the counter said, "Did you look at the clearance racks?  We had some there."  Over we went and there were three of them for $15, much more my price range.  I bought one. This afternoon I slowly heated the stone per the directions until it spent an hour at 500 degrees and should be sufficiently dry to start baking stuff on it.  I think it'll have to live in the oven because it's heavy and I don't want to haul it around and I don't want it to break.  Early next week it'll get it's first chance to bake some bread.  I'll report.

I got a rotisserie chicken, boned it, chopped up the meat for the freezer, and tossed the bones and the dark parts of the skin into a pot of water with a carrot, a celery rib, and part of an onion with salt and pepper for homemade chicken broth.  It's so much tastier than the store-bought stuff and making it makes me feel virtuous, like I'm not wasting food.  Plus Durwood gets to pick over the bones when I've strained off the broth and he loves that.


The snow is starting to melt--big time.  It got over 50 degrees today and I saw that the daylily sprouts against the north side of the house are shrugging off last weekend's blizzard piles of snow and poking their little heads up again.  I am amazed at the resilience of those little green shoots.  You watch, once the snow in front of the house melts there'll be the hyacinths, daffodils, crocuses, tulips, and squills all perky and ready to bloom like two feet of snow never happened.  Crazy.






Birds!  Today a pair of bluejays rediscovered the peanuts and came and went a dozen times--and it took a dozen times for me to finally get one in-focus picture of one of them.  Mrs. Cardinal spent some time crunching seeds on the platform feeder.  This house finch was happy to find the seeds that the melting snow revealed.

 








I'm making progress on the Montparnasse sleeve.  I need to calculate how many stitches I need to end up with and figure out if I need to space out the increases so that the sleeve length and stitch count coincide.  All this math.  Who knew that knitting involved so much math?  BTW, our lesson teaching a bunch of the Guild members how to knit with Magic Loop went well and it seems like they all got it and like the new-to-them technique.  *pats self on the back*

April 19--Robert Delaunay, Passage with Disc.  

Bricks of brushstrokes
morph from foreground garden
shuffle to the horizon
spiral into the bright passage
from this dimension
to the next.
~~~~~

Coming home from Guild tonight I saw the crescent moon peering down at me through the tree branches.  I'm a sucker for that shot so here you go.  I need to be up early tomorrow so I have to sleep fast.  Night.
--Barbara