The Midweek Hump

It's that time of the year. Thanksgiving marks the start of the Holiday Season, at least for us Americans. I love this time of the year - you get that special, tingly feeling fueled by the smells and sounds of Christmas. True to form, there are celebrations that occur every year, such as the Nutcracker Ballet at Kennedy Center and the Tree Lighting Ceremony.

If you happen to be in DC during this time, you should stop by the Union Station for Norwegian Christmas. Every year they put up the train model, and feature a Norwegian region. It's the Arctic Circle this year. And they hold a bazaar where you can buy food, clothes, and so forth. Hopefully I'll get a chance to go to the bazaar.

For years, I've wanted to take spinning classes with Judith MacKenzie McCuin, but always events conspired against me, lack of funding, time conflict, and other reasons. It was to my surprise that I discovered that she is working on "Teach Yourself VISUALLY Spinning". This is certainly welcome. What would be even more nice is if she'd produce a spinning video to go along with it.

Here's a really good site - Brillant Button Maker - where you can create buttons, if you can't find what you like. You can preview what your button will look like, and make changes until you're satisfied. You can even add images to it, although I can't guarantee that your images will come out looking great on the button. You'll just have to tinker around with it.

From time to time, I see people walking around with Che Guevara t-shirts. I wonder what they know about what he really was like. In short, he was a sadistic, murderous thug, who, after Castro had taken over Cuba and revealed his true self, ran a prison where people were tortured and killed, and who ruined a lot of people's life. Here's the truth, at Anti-Che Guevara website, run by a Cuban-American. I have to shake my head at people who don't bother to take the time to learn his history. Yes, he's supposedly a symbol of rebellion against authority. Well. There's rebellion and then there's rebellion. Such as Ghandi, for instance.

There's a recipe that's apparently spread like a wildfire on the net - Lahey's No-Knead Bread. Unfortunately, the NYT article has now expired and you'll have to pay an exorbitant sum to retrieve it. Fortunately, there are countless sources that have reprinted the recipe - The Wednesday Chef, for instance. And the video can still apparently be viewed by the general public. When I found out about this, I was stoked, as I love artisan bread, but right now I'm not working near a bakery (no, Safeway and Giant don't cut it) and it costs too much to buy on a regular basis.

However. My experiments, thus far, have not turned out so well. The first batch I made was so wet that there was actually some liquid on the bottom. I may have used too much water - apparently there's a discrepancy - in the printed recipe, it says 1 5/8 cups (now, how am I supposed to measure 5/8 cups when the standard measuring cups only have quarter and third measurements???); in the video he states 1 1/2 cups. I have a sneaking suspicion that either it was a typo, or Bittman twiddled with the recipe a bit to put his personal touch on it.

My second experiment - dough wasn't so wet, but it barely rose, and it was too salty as I'd added a bit more salt after some online research. No, I didn't get that chewy, holey inside. It came out heavy as lead, and according to Hubby, rather tough. Sigh.

I'm on my 3rd experiment. This time, I went and found Fleischmann's Instant Yeast at the grocery store (for some reason they're selling this with the holiday food on that table that they use for promotional items). By the way, Safeway, could you please put the price into your database, so that I don't have to wait forever during a price check call while the employee, whose task is apparently to collect shopping carts and move boxes, looks in the wrong aisle for this product?

I got it mixed up nice, after reviewing pictures at Flickr, so it was shaggy and sticky. I put it in the oven with the pilot light on, but then Hubby said temperature was 80 degrees or so, which I thought was too high (recipe says to have temperature at least 70 degrees F). So, I moved it to the other bedroom, where the temperature is about 77 degrees. Hopefully 3rd time is the charm . . .

Oh, knitting . . . err, umm, what knitting? Well, working on sleeve #2 and we all know how exciting it is to see pictures of sleeves in progress. I really should push to get it finished so I can get this pullover out of the way.