Molly Goatwax

Thank you

Last week the nice people at cookware sets.com sent me a  Breadman 2 pound bread machine*  to review. Let me be up front and disclose to you readers that they gave it to me for free, no matter what I say about it. My next admission is that I spent the week running it through its paces before I give it a fair description. My first two trials involved boxed mixes whilst I acquainted myself with the machine. There are a lot of directions and it pays to follow them all closely. Like training wheels, the boxed mixes gave me a taste of possibility. Last night I hatched a loaf of potato bread from leftover mash and I fell in love.

 

The appliance itself seems sturdy enough, it does not get hot to the touch during use and - ingeniously, it has a glass window in the lid through which you can monitor the process. Yes, it's a bit noisy. Hardly noticeable with the football game on the tube. The control panel is a bit hard to decipher, but after the second loaf -with careful navigating from the manual- I was a pro. My third loaf, a potato bread  from scratch was like finding my calling. The fourth was a re-run of the potato bread, honing it to the consistancy of cake with bread flour. What a wonderful, yeasty aroma filled our house during that baking! I imagine all the breads, stollen and brioches I had never been able to make before, and now I want to push this new experience further. Really, I want to roll through cakes and quick breads and wallow in all the possibilities that the "dough" setting holds. Stay tuned. I have a feeling there are a lot of good recipes out there and I will be sure to pass them along.
 

* Bread Maker model NoTR520

A Baltimore Christmas

From The Baltimore Sun

By Richard Irwin | [email protected]

December 25, 2009

City police were seeking whoever broke into a Gardenville house Wednesday evening and stole several Christmas presents, electronic equipment, video games - and the family dog.

Keith Alioto, 41, of the 5700 block of Belle Vista Ave. said he, his wife and six children left the house about 6:30 p.m. Wednesday and returned about 11 p.m. to find the house had been broken into through a rear window and that the TV, Christmas presents, two computer monitors and other items were missing.

"The rooms were messed up, and at first I thought Max, our 4-month-old mixed-breed dog, had gotten out of the kitchen through a gate and got into things," said Alioto.

He said it suddenly occurred to him that the dog also was gone, and his children are now heartbroken.

"He's a wonderful family pet, and we hope that whoever took him will somehow make arrangement to return Max to us," said Alioto.

The dog is mostly black with brown and white chest and paws. He said the dog had no collar, having outgrown it. Alioto said fliers with a photo of the missing dog have been distributed throughout the area.

just in time

I finally found the box with the porcelain light-up basillica and Texaco filling station. It was right where I had looked a dozen times before. Sometimes I think that all the stuff in the basement shifts itself around those four rooms like cud in a ruminant's stomach. Last night I set the buildings into place and turned on the switches, our tiny town all aglow in the darkened glass porch. Ahhh....very satisfying to gaze apon with a pint of porter in hand. But wait! Do I see gaps? Can we fit in more porcelain real estate? We may need a bigger house to contain it all!

a little wallop

The smokey joe is totally buried with snow and I couldn't find the metronome-though I have a good idea about pairing it with a discarded excercycle....no, the car is dug out and the roads are good to take me to work. Worse luck. Maybe next weekend...

A chance to pause

For the past few months I have been so involved with keeping up with myself at the brokerage. There are so many different file submission and closing procedures for each wholesaler, and so many of them, and new ones all the time! And now our firm is merging with another, so the work process will be all different again! Well I can forget about all that for a few hours,at least. This is one Saturday morning I'm not going to the office. There's already a few inches of snow on the ground and it's coming in all day into tommorrow. I think I'll paint a picture. For that I need to find the metronome and the light-up basillica in the basement

Fallsway Spring Co.

 

Sometimes, when the light is right, I feel like I live in an Edward Hopper painting.
 

It's still all about the Real Estate

This week I set up 18 feet of porcelain light-up houses on a roll-out carpet of snow like fluff on the ledge in our glass porch. Our newly minted teen pulled the hat from her eyes long enough to place the ambulances, police cars, monsters and army guys pointing long guns into the light-up windows to simulate a state of seige in our porcelain village. Some traditions thrive. This one continues, in spite of my misplacing the Basillica of Saint Peter and the Texaco filling station. The basement swallowed them. We need another porcelain light-up property or so to fill in the blanks.

Smokey Joe in the snow

 Well...at the edge of the snow in my parking lot. Here I'm smoking boneless ribs for lima bean soup. I brought a plate of them inside and the younger daughter hugged me and told me I smelled good.

yummmm...

I swore, after Thanksgiving, that I wouldn't cook for a week. I spent the better part of two days at the stove. If trying a new recipe is a walk in the park, then fixing the Turkey Day feast is like running a marathon! (But just fix that green bean cassarole with fresh green beans instead of canned and convert)... So on this past Thursday I eased myself back into cooking  with a quick and familiar Sephardic red lentil soup out of necessity. Today I chopped up onions, peppers, mushrooms and Italian chicken sausage with rice and lentils for another soup to freeze into tubs because, well, canned soup has too much sodium and it tastes...uh...canned. Well today's soup was right tasty and I put it by. Now I am wondering about my next kitchen adventure because the cookware sets company wants to send me an appliance for review and I dither. What do I want to do next? Tommorrow, in spite of the falling snow, the die-hard barbeque-er in me is going out to the parking lot to Smokey Joe me some country ribs. Then the (not so) left overs will get chopped into some heavenly 15 bean chile. I think I need some nice bread to go with all those tubs of soup in the freezer...