when you're making the bread...

I baked some midweek bread on Wednesday...


Before the last twenty minute rise...


After the last twenty minute rise...


In the pans immediately after the hour long bake...


Freed from the pans...

Almost everything I know about baking bread, so far, I learned from The Tassajara Bread Book by Ed Espe Brown, a zen monk who for a long time ran a monastery kitchen, and then Green's restaurant in San Francisco. I found out from a friend of my wife today that he stumbled into the cooking and baking somewhat by accident shortly before encountering Zen...the resort he had started in as a dishwasher was taken over to be a monastery and he decided to stay. I like his books a lot and have learned a bit about slowing down from them - not sure what it says about me but mantras like, 'When you are washing the rice, you are washing the rice' help me try to thankfully do what I am doing, which I need more of. I am caught up in the fastness of modern life as much as anyone, with a very skewed sense of time - this spills out into right and wrong, values, friendships, thinking, lack of love, everything. The blog might help with this as I go on. The writing and baking do. Right now I am waiting for the dough from what will be my first pie crust to chill. I don't think of my time on the computer as multi-tasking, while the dough cools. I stopped the baking activity, started the blogging activity, will post the post, and then start the baking again.

My drawing of Ed Espe Brown is very bad. Here's the picture I drew from, which is in the back of this book...