Speaking of freakin’ enormous storm surges: My brother-in-law, skiving off architecture school by building actual houses for actual people who actually need them at the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio in Biloxi, sent up a Mardi Gras care package that included several bottles of Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan ale.
On the one hand, I want to swear that I shun beers that contain ingredients other than water, malt, hops and yeast. On the other hand, my favorite beer for years has been Spotted Cow from New Glarus Brewing Company, which is amended with corn. Still, I took one look at this pecan beer and thought, “candy beer,” but ended up wrong. Whatever they’ve got going on there, it’s subtle. It winds up being very nicely balanced: malty, toasty. I never would have picked out the rogue nut esters. Crazy delicious.
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I compounded my third-act despair from earlier this week by spending Thursday and Friday baking instead of writing: My friend and baking idol David Bauer (of the Farm and Sparrow bakery in Marshall, NC) was teaching his “Rustic Breads for the Brick Oven” class at North House, and I was delighted to be able to attend the class and learn (or begin to learn, or begin to begin to learn) some of his techniques.
However:
Despite my best efforts at self-sabotage, I set myself up at the Java Moose for a couple of hours this morning and managed to scribble out the last few scenes. Wonderfully, the characters decided to stage a completely different conclusion than the one I had outlined for them. I like theirs better.
So:
Month One Success! Hurrah!!!
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I ordinarily bake sourdough bread at least once a week, but the routine got interrupted several weeks ago and I’ve been feeling slightly subhuman ever since. I revived my starter over the weekend, weighed out and mixed the ingredients Monday afternoon, let the dough ferment until Tuesday noon, shaped, proofed and baked the loaf a few hours after that, and today I feel like myself again. It seems to be the case with me and cookingcraft that the rituals are more rewarding than the actual product– but the quality of the product is the measure of whether the rituals have been performed properly. But maybe everyone is like this?
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I finished drafting my allotted second-and-a-halfth scene late this afternoon, and then set out to use our newly-built fire pit to make a wood-fired pollo alla diavola similar to the one described in Cucina & Famiglia, a charming and useful cookbook co-written by Stanley Tucci’s mom. The diavola is supposed to refer to pepper and not to chicken-charring flames from hell. I knew this, but had to re-learn it the hard way.
I went into today thinking that the scene-drafting was going to be hard and the troll-editing was going to be easy, but I was wrong. Evidently the step between first draft and next draft is a doozy. I will now go and open a bottle of beer (homebrew, but more on that later.)
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I started a batch of whole-wheat bread and set it out to rise on the fireplace hearth. (It makes sense to do that when there’s a fire burning, but no sense at all in the summertime. I seem to do it year-round though.) Then my parents showed up and my dad and I took off for the lumberyard while my mom took care of the girls. We bought a van-load of hardware, swing set parts and treated lumber, and Dad double-bungeed the van door shut over the twelve-foot stock sticking out of the back. We started out drilling and bolting in the carport until I pointed out that the growing assemblies would soon be too heavy to actually carry out to the yard, so we stuck an extension cord out a bedroom window and set up under the big oak tree. Every half hour or so I went in to check on the lifeless dough. The girls were watching Charlotte’s Web and jumping up whenever the weather radio went off, calling out approaching storms. In fact it did look like rain, so Dad and I worked as fast as we could, trying not to drop four-by-fours on each other’s heads. We got the frame for the swing set done and rolled upright just as the rain started to fall. Mom and Dad took off to get Dad to work a seven-to-midnight shift in the emergency room. I stuck the dough in the turned-off oven with the oven light on and took over with the girls, who were engaged in an all-out grunting duel on account of the pig movie.
After grunting and dinner and half a conversation with Rachel and the girls’ bedtime, the dough had finally risen and proofed and was ready for baking. I got two scenes drafted, but there appears to be some danger that each scene, though complete, will be shorter than the last. Things will get interesting once I get down to one-word-per-scene and under. The bread turned out okay. We had to use up stale tortillas and pitas all day today for lack of regular bread, but now I’ve replenished the supply. I feel good about that.
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