Bread Weapon Making 101

Start with a clean slate - know nothing about making bread. It might be even better if you don't even like bread and wish for nothing better than inflicting bread upon your unsuspecting enemies. Next, find a cookbook with lots of pictures. Peruse the instructions to see if it goes into enough detail to seem helpful - you don't know how to make bread, how do you know what's actually helpful? Page through the bread recipes to find a type of bread that seems suitable for a weapon. I decided on baguettes due to their elongated shape - that way there's a handhold and still plenty of surface for bludgeoning. Perhaps a batard could be used as a projectile from a very high place, but I thought I'd start simple.

Now gather your ingredients, making sure you have the oldest ingredients possible. If it's aged, it has withstood the test of time and is worthy of being a part of a bread weapon. It's very important to read the instructions carefully. Make sure to keep the instructions handy at all times as you prepare your bread weapon so that you can cross-reference at will. This is a tricky process that requires careful calculation, patience only up to a point and endurance.

Another key trick is to only follow some of the durations in the instructions. If it says to knead the dough for 5-7 minutes, do it for as long as physically possible. 2 or 3 days should do it. And when it says to let it rise for 1.5 to 2 hours, do exactly that. Even though it tells you that the dough should double in bulk. They really mean that any change that you sorta, maybe notice is good enough.

Oh, and don't slash the bread right before baking. It becomes a weak point in the final product. Best to keep it an unbroken surface. Your weapon is done when your sharpest bread knife, cleaver, axe, won't even ding the surface of the bread. Take it from me.

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Granola, Now With Yogurt!

Apparently the problem with the yogurt wasn't that I messed up the heating/cooling/bacteria growing process. It was just that I didn't wait long enough. The instructions said 3-4 hours to set. Other internet sources said that the longer I let it sit, the more tart it gets and that depending on the number of live cultures in the starter, it might take 6 hours.

I started the incubation around 4:30pm. I checked it at 7:30. Milk. Well okay, that was only 3 hours. I'll check it again later. I fought some zombies on the PS3, so I didn't check again until 10:30 (total elapsed time: 6 hours). Still milk. Not even a hint of thicker milk. Just milk. I give up, figure I have another failure on my hands, swaddle up the jar again and shove it back into the dark turned-off oven and decide to deal with it in the morning.

I remember and pull it out the following morning at about 9:30. Lo and behold: Not Milk! (total elapsed time 17 hours) I shove it into the fridge, let it cool down for an hour and ask Lee to taste test. When he didn't immediately spit it back out, I tried it myself. It was thick, close to the consistency of Greek yogurt and not even that tart, just yogurty goodness.

Success!

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Granola Living

I read an article about saving money by making your own grocery staples a few weeks ago. It evaluated the cost-saving, efficiency, and taste of making bagels, jam, yogurt, crackers, granola, and cream cheese at home.

We'd previously experimented with this idea when we got Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" cookbook several years ago. We learned that we're happier making our own pasta sauce than buying - it's amazingly simple and we can customize the spices. (I find most store bought pasta sauces too sweet). We also learned that store bought pancake mix is much better than any concoction we could make. Our homemade pancake mix tended towards heavy, frisbee-like texture and taste. We never did figure out just what was different.

This time, I was intrigued by the prospect of homemade granola and yogurt. Lee is a big fan. Me, not so much. And I even spent several weeks eating it for breakfast in an effort to acquire a taste for it. I'm also intrigued by the bagels, but I haven't had a chance to try that yet.

So last weekend, I gave granola and yogurt manufacturing a try. Yogurt requires milk and a starter yogurt culture with live bacteria in it. Granola needs rolled oats, maple syrup, brown sugar, vegetable oil and other stuff you want in it, which in our case ended up being dried cranberries and slivered almonds. I used Alton Brown's recipe for the granola. For the yogurt, I referenced a recent New York Times article for what sounded like relatively straightforward instructions.

The granola was a clear win. It took a few minutes to mix the ingredients together, and an hour and 15 minutes to bake in the oven. The result was a crunchy, tasty granola that Lee was very happy with. I've even willingly had it for breakfast twice this week. Next time, I'll put a little less brown sugar and add another kind of nut, perhaps cashew, to the mix.

The yogurt experiment did not live up to expectation. It was relatively simple, but I got paranoid over the directive of sterile instruments about halfway through the process. I felt a little rushed with the waiting times (waiting for the milk to heat to the right temperature, then waiting for it to cool) because we wanted to start a fish dinner about the same time and I held dinner off with the idea that preparing both at the same time would impart a fishy taste to the yogurt. By the next morning, I ended up with yogurt-tasting milk. I think there were some miniscule globules at the bottom of the jar that may have actually been the right consistency of yogurt.

My internet research tells me that maybe the milk I used came from cows fed antibiotics that would kill the yogurt producing bacteria. Perhaps the yogurt starter I used didn't actually have the advertised live cultures in it. But the milk did indeed taste yogurty, so I'm not sure about that hypothesis. I might give this another try with different yogurt and milk brands.

My day with kitchen experimentation didn't end up a complete disaster. We've gone through half the batch of granola already and I'm looking forward to the next batch. I'm not sure when I'm trying the yogurt again. Maybe I'll switch to trying bagels next and come back to that.

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Witchy, Witchy Night

We took my youngest sister, Jessica to see Wicked for her birthday a week ago. I bought the tickets sometime in January so we had a few months of anticipation. I tried to see Wicked on Broadway when I was at a conference in NYC several years ago but it was always sold out. I'm happy to report that Wicked didn't disappoint. I laughed, I cried. I'm going to see it again and again (well maybe my checkbook won't let me).


Wicked is a stage adaptation of Gregory Maguire's book of the same title. I picked up the book because I grew up watching The Wizard of Oz and was intrigued with the premise of seeing the other side of Oz. In short, the book was a mess; a meandering plot that picked up complexities as if it were a collector with a cat's attention span. The musical plot line was cleaner, straightforward and well-suited for a stage presentation. The musical focused on the relationship between Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West and G(a)linda, the Good Witch of the North. Although Elphaba is the main character, the story did a good job of making Glinda more than just the opposite foil to Elphaba's goals. She had her own valid point of view even if I didn't particularly relate to her.

To my mind, the success of the performance really came down to the quality of Elphaba's and Glinda's actresses. I was a little nervous when our program notified us that the standby actress would be playing Elphaba's role. Vicki Noon had some big shoes to fill because I'm a huge fan of Idina Menzel, who played the role on Broadway. But my doubts went away when she sang her first notes of "The Wizard and I." Kendra Kassebaum played Glinda adorably. She had the lion's share of funny lines through the show and she delivered hilariously. I managed to get seats in the fourth row so we really got to see the actors' expressions and the details of their costumes. While the rest of the cast enriched the story (and we had some wonderful actors for the other parts - Patty Duke played Madame Morrible and David Garrison played the Wizard), it was only when either of the witches were on stage that the performance felt gravity defying.

Speaking of which, "Defying Gravity" closed out the first act and was the highlight of the whole show. Jess made fun of me for tearing up as that song closed but it's not as if I could have helped it. As Elphaba rose above the stage, haloed by a star of lights, her soaring voice brought with it such an overwhelming sense of triumph and hope that one can't help but respond.

A fantastic, magical event overall. Go see it! Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go listen to "Defying Gravity" again. And again.

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