• Retreat

    September 22, 2008

    This past weekend our church had its annual retreat at a camp that’s located about twenty minutes from town. Lots of the church members set up their tents and campers for the weekend, but we opted to drive home every evening for the luxury of sleeping in our own beds. And because I hate camping. And because I know that the kids wouldn’t sleep well and then they would get grumpy and then I would be miserable.

    Church retreat has the potential to be an awful lot of fun… or not. This year it was definitely an Or Not experience for us.

    This was mostly due to the stage of life that we are in right now. You know, the Four Young Children Stage which is compounded when the two small ones have an intense aversion to being babysat or going to sessions with their peers without a parental figure hinged to their side.

    On the other hand, the theme of meditation was not a good one for families with young children. Meditation is a good and worthy theme, certainly, but it doesn’t sit too well with little kids because little kids don’t sit. Yes, there was childcare (some of the time), but as I said before, my kids have issues with that.

    The dear people on the retreat committee planned Taize services (which I normally love) and long times of quiet and a Labyrinth and evening prayers and Yoga and so on. All good things, and very needed for some people (especially us?), I’m sure. But for Mr. Handsome and I, they were only good for raising our blood pressure and making us want to swear.

    For example, there was a lot of outdoor worship—we were at a camp, after all. That meant that there was a large group of adults sitting down in the woods in the midst of all the trails that linked the cabins to the dining hall to the chapel, and every single noise that anyone made while walking on those paths could be heard by the quiet, meditative adults. Most of the kids were with their different activity groups, except for my two little ones. So one of us had to chase them about while the other person got to attend a session. The chasing person was totally stressed and lonely and miserable, so the person who was having a break was not able to fully relax and enjoy the experience. I think this is what you call a lose-lose situation.

    Saturday morning it was my turn to attend a session and Mr. Handsome had The Baby Nickel and Sweetsie. All us adults were sitting there, down in the woods, thinking our ethereal thoughts (and freezing our tails off) when I heard Nickel’s voice, clear as a bell, telling Mr. Handsome he wanted to go that way. And Mr. Handsome answering, “No!” and then Nickel insisting and then Mr. Handsome insisting more firmly and then Sweetsie and The Baby Nickel screaming.

    The guest speaker said some nice and true things about how children are life and we should not be bothered by the noises they make and I’m sure most everyone agreed and didn’t mind too much. Except for me. I mean, he’s certainly right, but when you are in charge of controlling the noise volume of the little full-of-life squirts so that others may pray, it does not feel very life-giving.

    Then on Sunday morning it was my turn to take care of the little ones. The congregation met down in a huge field by the pond and everyone sat on blankets and chairs and there was beautiful instrumental music and Scripture readings but I only got to listen for about two minutes and sixteen seconds because The Baby Nickel and Sweetsie were fussy and ritchie, and they wanted to leave. And then they got louder and louder and LOUDER, so I picked them both up and hauled them away.

    Except there was no “away”. We were stuck in this big field, no building to run into and close the door and no car to slip inside (at least not ours),and even when we were on the dirt road heading up to the playground, everyone could still hear my children shrieking as though they were being murdered. Occasionally I clapped a hand over Sweetsie’s wide-open screeching mouth, but I couldn’t do that for very long because then I would have to let go of The Baby Nickel and he would turn and try to make a dash back to the service. There was nothing I could do but keep going, so I marched along with a steely look on my face and an iron grip on their little wrists, half of the time lifting their arms high so they had to dance along on their tippy-toes and the other half of the time, when my arms needed a break, dragging them along beside me, mentally hurling curses at church retreat. I wanted to get out of there so badly that I could feel my skin crawl. I wanted to jump out of my body and just leave.

    Mr. Handsome eventually rode up behind us on a bicycle (they really could still hear the kids). I told him to go get the van, and he met us back at the park which we had finally reached and where I promptly collapsed on the swing. Mr. Handsome went back to the service (where the other kids were supposedly waiting calmly and quietly) and Nickel and Sweetsie eventually stopped fussing and started playing and I read my book.

    That was nice.

    After Sunday’s noon meal we stuffed the kids and bikes and helmets and sweatshirts in the car and tore out of there. The kids had had a great time and were fussy, already missing the camp. Yo-Yo and Becca Boo asked when the next retreat would be, and we both answered, “In a year.” And then under our breath, “Thank goodness!”

    Mr. Handsome muttered to me that we were “retreating from retreat”, and we both laughed, so enormously relieved to be done with the weekend and heading home.

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  • My Baby’s Bread

    September 19, 2008

    I made bread with the bread baby! It worked! Yippee, yee-haw, and whoo-hoo!


    The kids and I tore into one of the loaves while it was still hot from the oven. We spread the warm, crusty pieces with lots of butter and tore off huge mouthfuls.


    Since it was getting close to noon, I just cut up apples and sliced off some chunks of cheese and called it lunch. Supper was sandwiches. I toasted thick slices of the bread and spread one slice with pesto and one slice with mayonnaise and then put oven-roasted tomatoes and slices of Provolone cheese in between the two.

    Like I said, we’re going to be eating a lot of bread from now on.

    Country White
    Adapted from Breads from the La Brea Bakery by Nancy Silverton, and briefly summarized.

    I do not normally measure my ingredients in pounds and ounces, but I discovered how easy it is to put my Kitchen Aid mixing bowl on the scale, zero it, add the starter, zero it, and so forth. There’s hardly any mess, and it’s very exact.

    Note the nice hole structure—it looks just like the holes in the bubbly starter. Nifty, huh?


    1 1/3 cups (12 ounces) white starter
    7 cups (2 pounds and 2 ounces) white bread flour
    2 1/4 cups (1 pound and 2 ounces) tepid water
    ½ cup raw wheat germ
    4 ½ teaspoons sea salt
    a little oil

    Day One
    In the morning I mixed up my ingredients (the process includes kneading it in the mixer for 5 minutes, letting it rest for 20, and then adding the salt and kneading it for another 5 minutes, and so on—little details that I don’t want to bore you with).


    I put the dough in a lightly greased plastic bowl and let it rise for several hours. Then I dumped it out on a lightly floured counter and cut it into two pieces.


    I lightly kneaded it to get all the air bubbles out,


    and there were a lot—do you see them?


    I left it to rest on the counter for 20 minutes. Then I shaped the dough into two boules.


    I lined two glass bowls with cheese cloths (you’re supposed to use bread baskets, but I don’t have any), sprinkled some flour over the cloths and set the boules in, smooth side down.


    I covered them with a shower cap/plastic wrap and let them proof on the counter for one hour before slipping them into the fridge.

    Day Two
    I took the dough out of the fridge first thing in the morning (actually, Mr. Handsome did that for me because The Baby Nickel woke up at some obscene hour, like 4:30, and so as Mr. Handsome left the room to go fetch the non-sleeping twit, I croaked to him to please take the bread out of the fridge, which he kindly did) and took off the shower cap/plastic wrap,


    and let them sit on the counter till they were about 62 degrees.

    (not quite ready)

    I put my big pizza stone on the bottom rack of the oven and preheated the oven to 450 degrees. I gently turned one of the loaves out on to my floured cutting board,


    docked the top with a knife (it’s a backwards C cut for the Country White) (a razor blade works way better than a knife, but this being the first time baking sourdough in a year or two I wasn’t fully prepared), and slipped the loaf off the board and onto the hot pizza stone in the oven. (There are no pictures of that process because I had to work quickly.)

    I spritzed the oven thoroughly with water right before putting the loaf in the oven, right after I put it in, 2 ½ minutes later, and again 2 ½ minutes later. Then I set the timer for 20 minutes and did not open the oven during that time. When the timer went off, I rotated the loaf 180 degrees and continued baking it for another 10 minutes. Then it was done and I baked the next loaf the same way.

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  • Sustainability

    September 19, 2008

    Some of you have probably figured out that there is a problem with starter. A quantity problem, as in too much. I’m feeding this baby three times a day, each time doubling the amount of starter that is already in the jar. So, for example, if I have one cup of starter, I add ½ cup of water and ½ cup of flour. Then I have two cups of starter, so at lunch time I add one cup of water and one cup of flour. Then I have four cups of starter. See? There’s potential for some serious issues.

    I only have three ways to use up all that starter: bake with it, give it away, throw it out. If I used all that starter in baking I would never leave the kitchen, and so far no one has come knocking at my door, empty jar in hand. That means that I mostly just throw it out. It’s careless and wasteful, I know, but I do have to take care of My Sanity.

    One thing I have done to help cut down on the waste is to make only the minimum amount of starter that I need in order to keep it my baby healthy; I’m now only reserving ½ cup of starter every morning. That means I can keep the baby in a half-gallon jar now, instead of a gallon jar, and I have just enough for one (maybe two, depending) recipe of bread each day, if I were to want to bake each day. Which I don’t. But, in any case, I’m not tossing such copious amounts of flour and water onto the compost pile.

    Here is my baby in it’s half-gallon jar. It’s ready for it’s lunch. Notice how bubbly and alive it is.


    Here it is after I’ve added water and flour. The bubbles have been smoothed out, but by suppertime it will be just as bubbly as it was before lunch.


    And so it goes.

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