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sour flour power
The flour makes all the difference to the end product… at least according to my daughter, who will devour a half loaf of bread in a sitting when I use 100% white bread flour to make my weekly breads versus a slice here and there when I substitute even as little as 10% for rye, whole wheat or some other blend into the mix.
I prefer the grainy breads and the darker results.
But there is something captivatingly powerful to the teenage mind for white bread, it seems.
This is doubly strange when one considers that we never buy white bread. Not that we buy bread much (or ever really) now anyhow but back when loaves of sliced bread were still on our shopping list we would always go for the grainy, wheat-ish, non-white bread every time.
Hamburger and hot dog buns, sure. White bread.
But sliced loaves? Never.
So, all this means that I’ve had to limit my flour experimenting to alternate bakes, white one week, blend the next, repeat, to surrender to the allure and power of white bread flour.
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squirrel versus magpie
I was walking the dog in the park and was reminded that despite all the paths and fences and nicely insulated houses all around, nature continues on.
Just a little thing, but it’s always there.
As we were walking along a little brown squirrel was hopping along the top of the fences keeping pace with us, eyeing my dog with deep suspicion and chittering every now and then in protest at our relative closeness to him.
After about a hundred meters of this we passed a tree with two resting magpies.
The magpies spoke up in protest, then one of them took off and immediately started chasing and divebombing our friend the squirrel. The squirrel started yelling at the magpie and the magpie’s mate (still in the tree) started cawing at us for apparently standing there in the cold watching the whole drama. The squirrel didn’t seem to want to come down on the ground because that’s where the dog was, and was struggling to avoid the magpie while navigating the handful of trees. All of it quickly became a whirlwind of sound and fury and nature being nature.
I tried to take some photos, but the whole thing was a blur and the cold was numbing my fingers, so we left. I’m sure they worked it out… or something.
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planning for travel.
What’s your favourite part of a trip?
I enjoy the idea of being somewhere. The sights are great, the people are fun, and the adventure is tremendously exciting. But my favourite part is soaking in the mood of a place and imagining what it would be like to live there longer than just the few days that we happen to be passing through, what it would be like to work and shop and play and exist in a new city or country.
For my wife, I sometimes think her favourite part of travel is the planning.
She spends two hours planning for every hour of vacation.
I help out, of course, I book pieces and organize bits, but I’m often shooed out of the way so that she can find a better deal or sort out some logistical nuance of the trip.
It’s all great fun, but everyone has the part they revel in the most, right?
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local crime
Living in the suburbs of a small Canadian city you (a) like to think you live somewhere relatively safe and (b) don’t want to become a cliche by saying “I can’t believe it happened here.”
Crime always happens somewhere.
For the third time since we’ve lived here, almost twenty years now, our street has showed up in the local news with the headline including something like “homicide detectives are investigating.”
Yesterday was the third.
There’s never enough information in the news to push you back into that zone of relative innocence, tho. Was it random or did someone get in over their head? Was it hard crime or a domestic situation gone wrong? Did it happen here specifically, or did is just happen somewhere and that somewhere happened to be here?
Or am I just paying more attention today because my street was in the news?
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iron vegan.
A few of my running friends are vegan (or vegan adjacent) which has it’s challenges for running, iron deficiency being one of the big ones.
“What do you cook on?” I asked casually at coffee this morning, when the topic came up.
“The usual kinds of things.” She answered.
“So… aluminum and teflon?”
“Yeah.” She replies.
“I’m not a nutritionist or an expert, but apparently one of the benefits of cast iron is that enough iron leaches into your food that iron deficiency becomes less of a problem.” I offer. “Probably even more true for acidic foods like tomatoes or other veggies.”
“If that’s true it sure beats taking a pill every day.”
“Yeah.” I reply.
