Wild Yeast

After way too much fretting that the corners of the firebricks for my oven hearth aren’t perfectly square (and how many things in life are perfectly square?), there was only one thing to do: get over it and get on with it. So task number one yesterday was to lay the hearth no matter what. It’s a little gappy at those pesky corners, but it will do.

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Helen (Food Stories) tagged me for “7 Random Facts” a few weeks ago. Then Laura (The Spiced Life) did the same for “5 Facts.” Thanks, both of you, for thinking of me. I hope it’s not considered cheating to combine the two. And despite my educational training (see #3, below), I’m letting 7 plus 5 equal 7 today.

1. I have the world’s best dog. Yes, this is a fact.



2. I wear sandals year-round. True, I would probably not do this if I still lived in Vermont. Even so, northern California winters are rainy and cool, and people ask me if my feet aren’t cold. No, they’re not. My hands do get cold pretty easily, though.
3. My undergraduate degree is in mathematics.

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After six weeks or so of indulging my sweet tooth and my fat tooth in the name of holiday permisiveness, followed by a relaxing week-long post-Christmas vacation, I’ve been looking forward to getting back into the kitchen and on track with some nice savory, healthful breads.

My immune system, it turns out, had other plans, and the bread’s just going to have to wait until this nasty whatever-I’ve-got sees fit to decamp and I’m free to leave my bed.

In the meantime, have a meme: I was tagged for Fantastic Four by Zainab and Meedo, the sisters behind the fantastic Arabic Bites. I had a lot more than four choices for most of the answers, and why I picked the ones I did I cannot explain (I’m delirious, after all).

Four Jobs I Have Had:

• Mathematics tutor/teaching assistant (in college, when I could still differentiate between differentiating and integrating).
• Software engineer/systems analyst/academic computing consultant.
• Hand weaver.
• Nurse practitioner.

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Lewis of Table Bread tagged me for this, my first meme. Am I the only one who thought “meme” was pronounce “me-me,” as in “it’s all about me”?

My answers are completely ad lib, just the first things that popped into my head, in no particular order. If you asked me the same questions tomorrow, chances are my responses would be completely different.

What were you cooking/baking ten years ago?

I was a full-time graduate student with a long commute so I don’t think I was cooking or baking much of anything. Or if I was, I don’t remember it. The only thing I can say with 100% certainty is that I made candy cane cookies, because I know I’ve made those every holiday season for at least twenty years. Skipping them would lead to extreme domestic unrest.

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