My Silly Season

One of you out there (you know who you are) likes to nag me when I haven't been posting frequently enough. Now, I find this quite flattering (my blog matters to someone!) but also kind of stressful (what do I have to write about? Why is my life so boring? Do I even have a life?). And the other day, fretting about this, I happened to be looking through a dictionary and came across the entry "silly season." It means a period when there isn't any real news so there's only filler in the media (like the Christmas season and all those stories about families going to pick out their trees). And was coined in 1871.

By the way, I'd like you to know that I wasn't just reading the dictionary for fun. I was working. Specifically, I was looking up 'singeing' because I didn't believe it had an 'e' in it. Which is kind of dumb, because 'singing' is a pretty different thing. But the dictionary was right there, and it was easier to look it up than think about it. Besides, looking in the dictionary is fun. It has pictures, unlike most of the books I read. For example:



But back to my story. So I thought, ha! Now I know this cool term, and I'll write a blog post about it, and it'll be so clever, because it doesn't have to be about anything! Okay, it's been done before. But I was desperate.

And then, what do you know, "silly season" shows up on the news. I mean, it's nice to have a presidential candidate who reads his dictionary, but it kind of ruined my plan, you know? Thanks a lot, Obama.

Well, let's see. Yesterday I baked some bread.




This is Anadama bread, my family's favorite. It has cornmeal and molasses in it, which is why it looks kind of brown and healthy. And I throw in some wheat flour because I feel guilty about eating bread without any wheat flour (or at least oatmeal or something; cornmeal doesn't count). Jeff makes fun of me for this, but he eats the bread.

I've been on a bread-baking kick for the past couple months. It's kind of because I'm a bread snob. I was spoiled as a kid by having an amazing bread bakery right in town, and then in Portland we had Standard, but in most places, it seems not too easy to get bread that's actually good. I also recently learned some unsavory facts about mass-produced bread, namely that it isn't made like bread, with yeast and rising and all; instead, "mechanical dough developers and chemical maturing agents" can fake the holes, and they add yeast just for the flavor. "The flavor of manufactured bread can sometimes be marked by such unpleasant aroma compounds as sour, sweat-like isovaleric and isobutryic acids, which are produced by flour and yeast enzymes in unbalanced amounts during intensive mixing and high-temperature proofing." Ew.

(This is from Andrea's copy of On Food and Cooking, which we've been borrowing for quite awhile now. Sorry--we'll return it soon! And the stuff about gross bread is here, pp. 543-4. Google books rocks.)

I hope this isn't sounding all I-bake-my-own-bread-holier-than-thou. Generally I think bread is on the list of things that you might as well buy, because it takes a long time to make and half the time doesn't come out that well. It's just my hobby lately. Every couple of weeks I say to myself, "I'm going to go home early and bake some bread. I'll take this book with me, and do work while it's rising." So I go home early and bake some bread and watch TV while it's rising. I make a big batch, and get Jeff to slice most of it up and put it in the freezer (I don't do slicing of bread. Straight lines are not my forte). Then I am happy about my toast for a week or so. Then we go to Walgreens and buy the mass-produced kind again (we're currently in a grocery-store crisis, but that's another story).

Here's another picture of my bread. I was afraid to show you this one because I feel insecure about my crumb. But I do think it's pretty.


This is making me hungry...and gee, there's some of this nice bread, plus peanut butter, in my bag! Happy lunchtime!