4-foot-square garden - Current Status

• Flopped over chives (two types!)
• Untamed oregano. Pollinators love its flowers.
• Hopeless tomatoes - Will they grow before frost?
• Hopeful lavender - The tallest one has a flower.
• Some sugar snap peas still hanging on. 

Cuisinart CBK-110 Breadmaker Review

I love this bread maker. I've had a lot of fun and eaten a lot of bread.

Easy-bake

It's a cool way to bake--you just put everything into one container, and then you don't have to worry about forgetting it, or timing the baking, etc.

I've baked way more bread than anything else since it arrived. The machine makes baking bread easier than baking brownies or cookies or whatever it was I used to bake.

It first arrived the Friday before Labor Day weekend 2020. I made so many loaves my kids were complaining that they were tired of the smell of fresh-baked bread.

You do need to experiment a bit to get good results.

Don't follow the recipes that come with the machine

The worst thing about this breadmaker is the recipe booklet. If you purchased this machine and only tried to follow the recipes in the booklet, you would think it was a terrible machine.

I don't know why the booklet only calls for all-purpose flour. The two recipes I tried following the booklet resulted in "cratering", that is did not come out well.

The King Arthur Flour website has a recipe that does work with all-purpose flour:

• English Muffin Bread for the Bread Machine

And see my previous blog entry for more recipe advice.

I tried the booklet's French bread recipe again, but this time with bread flour:

• The 1.5 lb recipe came out small, so I tried the 2 lb recipe the next day.
• The 2 lb recipe also did not rise to the top of the pan, but it was better.
• I didn't have kosher salt, so used a smaller amount of regular salt.
• It worked reasonably well with the delay-timer.
• My family complained that the crust is too tough, but the bread ready by 8am disappeared by late afternoon nonetheless. It isn't perfect, but it is decent and convenient.

Crust Color Setting is Only for White Bread Program

The booklet talks about setting the crust color for French bread, but crust color is not an option when using the French Bread setting. Could my machine be defective in that way?

I can't set it for the Whole Wheat program either. It really doesn't matter. 

2-poud loaf?

It's best to make the 1.5 pound version of a recipe to see how high it rises in the machine before you try its 2-pound version. Some 2-pound versions work in the machine. Other ones rise in the baking so much that they lift the lid and look like a monster dough scene from a movie.

If you'll be around in the kitchen, you can experiment with a 2-pound recipe: just be ready to pull the loaf out to bake in the oven. If the bread is very high at the "take out the paddle" stage, you may want to pull out half the dough to bake in the oven. You can make them into rolls or something fun.

Never use the delay timer for a 2-pound loaf recipe you haven't tested first.

Cleaning

In the many experiments, sometimes the bread rose and cooked against the window of the bread machine. The easiest way to clean the machine is to put some water in the bottom of the bread pan and leave it inside the machine. The water will evaporate onto the window, which makes any crust that stuck there easy to wipe off. The bread pan is also easier to clean after that soaking.

I use a small brush (possibly a test-tube cleaner?) to clean the hole in the paddle.

Paddle is Metal. Metal retains heat.

When not using the delay timer, it is very useful to be able to hear the beep and take the paddle out. You still have the hole from the paddle pivot pole in the bottom of the loaf, but not the paddle shape or the paddle.

Sometimes the paddle remains in the machine when you dump out the bread. This happened more often after I used the machine for several months.

When the paddle is still in the bread: 

1) Cut very carefully around so as not to wreck your bread knife or score a line on the paddle.

2) Remember that the metal paddle stays hot longer than the bread around it has cooled. Don't touch the paddle even if you've already been safely grabbing pieces of the warm bread around it. 

Wire to pull out handle

The machine came with a weird wire loopy thingy to pull the bread pan handle up when it is hot. I found this hard to keep track of until I started hanging it on the knob of a cabinet near the machine. You can use a fork anyway for the same purpose.

It would be good if they built in a holder for this, if they're going to provide such a thing.

Fresh bread pan is hot

I was very glad for my silicone pot-holder mitts for pulling out the bread-pan and holding it sideways to dump out the bread onto the cutting board. Highly recommended. The fresh baked bread, pan, and paddle are very hot.

Loaf shape

The bread is the bread-machine upright non-standard shaped loaf. But the machine's countertop footprint is compact, and the machine is less expensive than the horizontal bakers.

I think the optimum way to cut it is to start at the flat end until the length of the loaf is about the height of a standard slice of bread. Then rotate the bread and slice from the puffy top to the sliced-off bottom. Others disagree.

Whatever the shape, fresh-baked bread tastes wonderful.

Recommended Recipes and Ingredients for Bread Machine Bread

 My brother-in-law gave me his old bread machine, along with a recipe book by Beth Hensperger. This worked great until we broke the bread machine. I still used the recipes in the Hensperger book, figuring that if they worked jumbled in a machine, they'd also work mixed up in a bowl and baked in the oven.

Years later, I finally bought a new bread machine. I used the Hensperger book again.

I still use it, but my two standby bread machine recipes are on the King Arthur Flour Website:

• 100% Whole Wheat Bread for the Bread Machine
• English Muffin Bread for the Bread Machine

The whole wheat recipe calls for optional flax seed or similar, so it's worth buying some flax seed. 

I've used acorn flour instead of the flax seed and it tasted really good.*

I've recently added a tablespoon of flax seed to two of the white bread recipes in Hensperger; it did no harm, and gave the bread a friendly speckle.

The English Muffin bread uses all-purpose flour, so it might be a good first recipe for you, if you haven't gotten around to buying bread flour. It's called English Muffin bread, but you can just call it bread. You can add raisins to this one if you'd like. It also works well with the cinnamon swirl feature shown in the Cuisinart Bread Machine video:

Take out the dough at the "Remove the Paddle" beep, stretch it out, sprinkle on sugar and cinnamon (and raisins) then roll it back up and put it into the machine to bake.

Suggested purchases:

• Bread Flour
  
• Bread Machine (Instant) Yeast:  because the King Arthur bread machine recipes calls for it. If you can only find the regular Active Dry Yeast, that will be fine, don't worry. The non-instant yeast is probably better for the long Artisan bread cycle, but that's just my guess.
  
• Nonfat Dry Milk powder: Sometimes the bread recipe calls for this. Sometimes the bread recipe calls for milk, but either you don't want to use up your milk, or you want to use the delay timer. You can use the delay timer when a recipe calls for milk if you leave the milk powder on top of the flour in the machine. It doesn't become milk until the machine turns on and begins mixing.
  
• Buttermilk Powder: Hensperger sometimes calls for buttermilk powder, sometimes actual buttermilk. Either way, you can use the powder (and the delay timer). The Saco Buttermilk powder also has a great pancake recipe on the back, so you should buy it even if you don't have a bread machine.
  
• Flax Seed
• Gluten, sometimes called Gluten Flour 

Gluten and flax seed can be tricky to find at first. Try carefully scanning the large display of something-Mills** specialty grains in the middle of the baking aisle. Other groceries stock them with the "natural" foods baking ingredients.

If you only have All-Purpose Flour but want to bake a recipe that calls for Bread Flour, just add a tablespoon or two of Gluten. Not a perfect substitute, but it works OK.

More advice:

Never put the salt in with the liquid at the bottom of the bread machine, especially with the delay timer. It kills the yeast too fast and the bread doesn't rise well.

With recipes calling for oil and honey or molasses, measure out the oil in the tablespoon first, then measure the honey or molasses with the oily tablespoon. The honey or molasses drips off the oiled tablespoon much better than off of a dry one. Remember that 1/4 cup is 4 tablespoons, so you don't have to get your quarter-cup measuring cup sticky.

Intergenerational Parenting

Today I found myself saying to my daughter:

"If his mother taught him to hold the door open for women, then you need to let him do it. It's just something you remember about people, like their preferred pronoun." 

 

University of Chicago sends too much recruitment mail to high schooler students

Today my high-school kid received another postcard from the University of Chicago. She has received more recruiting snail-mail from them than from any other institution.

The University of Chicago is far away, and scary, and there are plenty of good schools in New England to choose from. Schools that won't need airfare.

She is not going to apply to University of Chicago. She would not be admitted. If she went there, she would flunk out. (Though, hey, maybe by grad school, things will be different!)

If I were a University of Chicago alumna or paying tuition to University of Chicago, I would be annoyed at the money wasted on these futile mailings.

There should be an easy way to opt out of receiving any more.

Of-course-you-remember-me Spam

 In my Inbox this morning:

self-doubt

Why

do you rely

on my

Time Travel

You can't fix yesterday.

You can't fix last weekend.

You can't fix five minutes ago.

You can only go forward.

 

14 types of mushroom, on rice

 The Vitamin Shop is advertising a capsule good for your immune system: 

https://www.vitaminshoppe.com/p/mushroom-immune-formula-60-vegetarian-capsules/vs-3282

It contains 14 different types of mushrooms, in a capsule that also contains "Organic Myceliated Brown Rice." I'd hate to just swallow it in a capsule. It sounds so much better as sautéed mushrooms on organic brown rice. 

Or why not market the 14-mushroom mix as a flavor enhancer that's also good for your immune system?

My robot dog

When I'm a very old lady, I would like a robot dog to follow me around. The dog will replace the cell phone. The dog will keep my tea mug. If there's tea in it, it will keep it warm. If it's empty, it will ask me what kind of tea I want. Before I go into the kitchen, I will tell it why I'm going there. It will follow and when I get to the kitchen, it will tell me why I'm there.

When I start trying to sing an old song, it will supply the music and lyrics.

When I try to remember a poem, it will look it up and correct me, quote the poem.

It will connect to IMDB or its successor, so when I'm trying to remember old movies, I can say what I remember about it, and it will provide possibilities.

I should be able to ask it historical facts too. And who's currently who in local politics.

It will recognize faces and remind me of their names.

It will generate thank you notes that I will only have to jot a few things down on, then it will add envelope, stamp, address, and mail it. Ditto for birthday cards, holidays. I'll finally be a properly polite old lady.

The robot dog will be great pals with the letter carrier.

It will vacuum the carpets and mop the floor. It will leap onto the furniture to be social, and also to vacuum or dust.

It will snuggle, be warm in the winter, and (optionally) spray me with water in the summer when we're outside. And wag its tail and bark playfully when it does so.

It may need an inside configuration to handle vacuuming and tea-warming and then easily convert to an outside configuration that's lighter and more suited to outdoors.

It will help with the gardening. It can dig. 

It will protect me in crowded city streets. It will wag its tail very swiftly as if to say, "Make way! Old lady is right behind me!" If needed, it will politely whine or woof. 

In emergencies it will directly signal ambulance, police, fire, whatever, as well as be able to call for helpful passers-by.

I'll tell it where I'm headed: It will walk ahead of me so I don't forget the way, because it has GPS.

I can even go on hiking trails and it can keep track of how fast I'm moving and give me options as to which trail to take and how soon we'd be likely to get to the end or get home depending on which route we take.

Good dog.

If Trump wins a second term...

"If Trump wins a second term, and you hear your friends or neighbors plotting a violent overthrow--"

"I'd turn them in," says my spouse without waiting for me to finish. "Once the revolution starts, it's up against the wall. Or 'It's safe to go home now'--but that's so they can find you, and take you out to the desert and shoot you."

Spouse is from Chile.

2020 Ironic Song Playlist

 It started early in the Covid-19 quarantine, with Petula Clark singing Downtown.

When you're alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go - downtown
When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know - downtown
Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?

The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares

Lyrics 

That got sadder as stupid people really did start going back downtown without masks and making this whole thing worse.

This morning, talking about politics, my spouse quoted "an allegedly corrupt mayor" but couldn't remember the name. "Jimmy Walker?" I asked, and yes, that was it. 

I explained, "I know him from Fiorello. It was one of the albums of show tunes my mother used to play." I wondered at the disappearance of Fiorello, and remembered a Saturday Night skit when one of the characters sang a song from Fiorello - "I love a Cop". 

That goes on the 2020 Ironic Song Playlist. Though maybe only the title is ironic. The song is about falling in love with a cop who arrested you and being embarrassed to introduce him to your friends. Then again, that meet-cute scenario does seem entirely ironic in looking at the violence displayed by the cops against protesters. Don't these cops realize they're losing all hope of meeting cute? 

With two songs on the list I remembered there was a third: another ironic song I heard yesterday, but couldn't remember which. I've been letting SoundCloud play me music as I work from home. I looked through my SoundCloud history. The most likely is this one sung by Sammy Davis Jr.: 

I like the fun of reaching for a gun and going bang bang...
Cause no one,
I know,
Gets oh such a glow.
Out of bang bang!
Like me!

 Lyrics 

Triggered by an LDAP error at work, not even my problem

At what point do the complexities of technology become too much and you say, 'That's it. I'm going off to live in a yurt.'

iPhone vs Android charging

If you need to leave soon and want to charge up your Android before you go, you can turn it off and plug it in.

In contrast, as soon as you plug in an iPhone, it turns itself on. As soon as an iPhone reaches a certain level of charge, it turns off low-power mode. This is just one way the iPhone tries to out-think you.

But smartphones really aren't that smart yet.

Turn Silent Mode Off

I suppose that long-time users of iPhones are used to this by now, but to an iPhone neophyte, the idea that you turn the noise OFF by turning "Silent Mode" ON was counter-intuitive. It required parsing double negatives, and confused me at first. Several months in, I still find myself consciously parsing:
"Silent Mode On, OK, turn off the loud alert... Silent Mode Off, so I can get my on-call alert. That's right. Right? OK."

Apple always had an arrogant skewed sense of usability. From the start, the interfaces always looked simple, but they could give new users a quiet desperation sense that they must be stupid to not understand them right away.

Roccbox

How many pizzas would we have to make during a blackout to rationalize the $700?

https://www.gozney.com/us/products/home-pizza-ovens/roccbox/

Guillermo Andres Zeballos 1933-2019

Guillermo Andres Zeballos did what grandparents do best: spoil my kids rotten.

He indulged them, always--feeding them from his inexhaustible supply of Pepperidge Farm cookies, taking them out to Barnes and Noble for yet another book they didn't need. Even when Alzheimer's robbed most of his abilities, his face lit up when he saw his grandchildren, and they knew they were loved.

This, perhaps, is not unusual among grandparents. What was unusual about him was his incredible patience.

He came to visit us when Zoe was a toddler. He sat with her while she played. He walked with her among the dull grounds of our apartment complex. He waited while she examined every twig and weed and piece of gravel. He stayed by her side, faithfully, as she wandered in whatever direction she cared to go. He let her take her time--take his time--far past the point when I would have dragged her to play inside so mommy could do something less boring.

This was a true gift to an exploring mind.

My father-in-law was a scientist, a professor, a teacher. We all know that the best teachers teach through example. I'll never forget what he taught me in that walk he took with a tiny little girl: his simple demonstration of true devotion, and true love.

tuna fish sandwich transcendent

It's my longstanding policy not to buy potato chips. Too many calories per pleasure compared to, for example, chocolate. And too expensive per pound.

I do like dark, "Kettle Roasted" chips. And I love potato chips with tuna fish. I almost never have that pleasure, because I almost never buy chips. But last weekend, I had a potato chip craving, and bought a bag of Cape Cod Kettle Roasted chips. Market Basket even kindly had them On Sale.

This morning, my loving spouse made tuna fish with chopped celery. I slid some onto Tuscan Wheat bread (also On Sale.) There were still potato chips left, so I packed them too.

Driving to work, I was looking forward to that ultimate lunch: tuna fish sandwich--with potato chips!
It's a long commute. I listened to my current library audiobook: "A Wrinkle in Time". Meg is in the kitchen. She is making a tuna fish sandwich. She gets sweet pickles out from the refrigerator.

Pickles! Damn it! We had pickles too! I could have put them in my sandwich.

Oh well.

I shall have to wait for another day for perfection.

Scotland

In my brain I want to go to Scotland. It would be a more affordable vacation than Hawaii, or going back to visit in-laws in Chile, especially during the eclipse. It would be less affordable than another New England camping trip--and we didn't even manage that last summer.

Scotland would have some similar scenery to Iceland without being quite as expensive or having the inconvenience of learning another language.

I like single malt Scotch.

I have a cousin living in Edinburgh, though she might be moving back to the States soon.

I went to nursery school in London. I listen to the BBC a lot. I watched a TV show and some movies that were set in Scotland. People in Scotland have a cool-sounding accent.

Are they called Scots?

They have pretty islands in Scotland. In fairness, there are some pretty islands off the Maine coast.

There are castles in Scotland.

Scotland would be a more fun reason to renew my passport than simply knowing we might want to drive to Canada someday.

On Instagram, my friends and relatives post photos of California and other various beautiful spots in the Americas, of Europe and Asia. I post photos taken when I'm stuck in traffic on Route 3 South. There are some pretty wetlands visible from the highway, and interesting shadows in the cement barriers and underpasses, and plucky weeds--some with purple flowers--sprouting up through the asphalt. Still, it would be nice to have, I don't know, actual scenery.

I have a kid about to go to college, next September. She'll need financial aid.
And another kid who'll go to college after that.
I'll probably have to wait 10 years to go to Scotland.
My cousin probably won't be living there then.

It is good to be frugal, and earn a decent salary, and not to have any serious worries about money.

Still. I wish I could travel.

To Paris, to see the Louvre: I may have been there when I was 3 years old, but I don't remember. I'd like to go back to Venice, to find out what that painting was that I saw in the 1990's and can't find on any Internet archive. Supposedly of Saint Rocco, but the cherub had a lewd knowing look in its eye--the scene had wisps of a fancy bordello. To Tuscany to eat another savory chickpea-flour pancake. To Africa--Botswana, or Camaroon, or Some Place--Some Place Very Different. To climb Mt Fuji and tour Kyoto. I want to see the Alps, if not the Himalayas.

But Scotland would be nice. Scotland would do. Could I rationalize it? Could it fit into my budget?

Why I'm not spending money on that

I have children and a house.
I have children and a house.
I have children and a house.

I love my children.

I like my house.