Eleen has not been getting up much before 10 the last two days. So this morning while I was waiting for her to get up I went a little nuts and made two different recipes of bread. Lustig recommends making your own bread, so I tried his recipe. When I added the final amount of flour I knew I had done something wrong. The dough wasn’t dough at all. It was more like a mush. So I added flour until it was a bit more manageable. I must have put in the wrong amount of water.

I set this aside to rise, but didn’t have much hope that it would work. I was so frustrated at that point that I went on and started a recipe from 100 Days of Real Food by Lisa Leake.

This is one of the cookbooks I checked out of the library recently.  She also has a website. Neither of these recipes recommends much kneading which I found odd. I tried to do it their way to see how these recipes would work. After I finished the first step of the Lisa Leaks recipe, I noticed that the first recipe was rising nicely. Eventually I cooked up all of the bread recipes and ended up with four fresh loaves. The kitchen smells pretty good right now.

After making bread, Eileen and I went to the Post Office to finally mail off a package to the California Jenkins household. The cancer thing threw us off our usual prep for Christmas.. Now we are scrambling to get stuff done in time. Oddly the Post Office was not that crowded. We stopped by Cranes to buy some frozen pies for next week. Then we hit Reader’s World, picked up some books I had ordered and  came home.

My feet hurt because I didn’t wear shoes this morning for cooking. I usually do.

Yesterday I discovered the music of Roy Hargrove.

I am not usually drawn in to many Jazz musicians that are not in  my own little canon (Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and so on). But this recording blew me away.

And If you’re at all in the mood for Jazz I recommend this recording as well.

Hargrove died last month. Bummer. But I do like his music.