A little chatty, and bits & pieces

by admin May 16, 2020

Scenes from yesterday:

Five “baguettes” (click to see my post, Baguettes and How to Fake Them because these are perfectly satisfactory and real baguettes defeat me). There were six but we ate one before I could take the photo. It was light on the inside with nice holes (oh, sorry, forgot to take a pic of that) and a thin but crispy crust.

A tip (because I’ve been baking bread for just about 40 years the learning doesn’t stop): Add a little grated potato if you have a baked one lying around (grate it all and put the rest in little ziplocs in the fridge for next time; no one wants an old baked potato but this will transform your bread. Or save your water from making mashed.)

Also, my latest tweak is to add a little “scalded flour” (AKA tangzhong). The idea is simple: Pour boiling water over some of the flour (in this case, 1/2 cup flour, 1 cup water), whisking. Add cooler water until you can mix it in your dough, or let it cool and mix in.

Just keep in mind the amounts of flour and water so you can maintain the proportions of your dough. (So remember that you have, say, 2 cups of water in your tangzhong after adding some to cool it, and only add another cup if your recipe calls for 3 cups of water… I guess, because I annoyingly never have a recipe but just do it by feel — at most I weigh the ingredients but get distracted as the dough is mixing and end up doing my own thing. For this I apologize.)

Words cannot express what leaving the door open means right now. Pandemic + cold rainy weather has been tough. Cold and chill, bless the Lord. Dew and rain, bless the Lord!* But ah… sunshine…

I have begun hardening off some plants that I started from seed. (Well, I did give into temptation with those little numbers on the steps when I was at the Tractor Supply getting feed.)

Some of my poor little Amish Paste tomatoes that had been doing so nicely up in the bathroom got super shocked when I transplanted them, so if you’re zooming in on this photo, I freely admit that there are some pathetic-looking plants there — they may not make it. I feel like a bad mom, so guilty. My poor little darlings…

bits & pieces

My husband, in his role as director of the Center for the Restoration of Christian Culture, hosted a conference about educational freedom. Its purpose was to establish principles for understanding who gets to call the shots on children and their formation. Speakers included Princeton’s Robert George, McGill’s Douglas Farrow, New Hampshire’s Education Commissioner (and homeschooler!) Frank Edelblut, Harvard alumna and homeschooler/author Kerry McDonald, MFI’s Andrew Beckwith… a great lineup. You can watch it all or you can watch parts. Do check in and let us know what you thought!

“People start to pay attention to family culture when things go wrong” — insightful comment from the podcast Great & Main did with Deirdre on the subject of The Art of Home Culture. Do give a listen! Deirdre waxed eloquent on the virtues of home*making*.

*The Song of the Three Holy Youths is where those verses above are from, in case you didn’t recognize it. (Here are the words.)

My friend Mark Langley wrote this little piece that I found oddly compelling. Clarence, Get Me Back! I Want to Live Again!

Mute Witnesses by Elizabeth A. Mitchell:

“It is Christ who speaks through our silent witness. The only thing we should fear is ceding power to Tyrants by accepting their redefinition of the rules of witness and martyrdom.”

The Mowing of a Field — an essay by Hilaire Belloc — with some good advice for how to strike a bargain, and some thoughts about Time and Death. This is the sort of essay, by the way, that you should read with your high schooler — challenge him to unpack (as the professors like to say) the denser parts. Encourage him even to write it out, longhand; doing so will do more for helping him to learn to write an essay than telling him how to do it.