'a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough'

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...

apartment bread

We have been baking for seven months or so. Because of our cats I need a room with a door, where I can leave the bread to cool. This being a New York City studio apartment, my choices as to where I leave the bread to cool are limited to the bathroom and our 'office'. This being a New York City studio apartment, our office is one of the cupboards in the hall.



We have a painting on our wall of St. Pasqual (the patron saint of the kitchen) contemplating the night air from his kitchen doorway. Cats sit next to him and, further back in the picture, eat food from bowls on the floor. On a large bench there is bread laid out to cool. On a table there are pies fresh from the oven. There are no cats on the bench or the table

This is not the way things work in our home.

Gus, one of our 3 cats, has the mandatory curiosity and is a healthy disrespecter of convention. I like to think the bread benefits from his attention.

posting

Well, that's just over a week of 'blogging' and I have to say that even this short post format output has been quite hard. [And several/most/all of my posts consist of little more than quotes and/or drawings with one or two words from me.]
The difficulty comes from not knowing exactly what I want to do with the blog and from a self consciousness that descends every time I want to post something (to try and escape that this time I drafted this post on a post-it note - several post it notes, actually). There are two main results arising from the self consciousness:
1) I sound very pretentious (maybe its that I am very pretentious). This is best illustrated in the post on economics - going for pithy insight I spout incomprehensible twaddle. See also my film posts, though I like them better.
2) Nothing is expressed very clearly. It is only now sinking in that I need to think about what I write before I post it.
That said, I like blogging (the process of putting something up), having a place to store things I have made or like, a diary, a journal, a record, media center, whatever I might want it to be or become. It would be nice to be less self conscious about it all. Maybe even to reach the point where I tell other people that this exists.
I want to have some original thoughts (is this sounding pretentious again?) and to write about drawing and baking (or at least post pictures and photos), link to films and things that move me and make me think, that give me hope, to write some personal theology (isn't all theology ultimately personal?).
Right now I want to get better at this, the drawing and the baking, not to mention the relating, loving, befirending, contributing, etc.
Phew.
So, here's a picture of two loaves of bread. These are among the first, from June, 2008 (we have not bought bread since then).
It's beautiful; made by me collaborating with time, yeast, Ed Espe Brown's recipe, the sustained world and its maker.