Plain Brown Loaf

Several months ago I discovered that the bread I had been buying as "whole wheat bread" was not what it appeared to be. After wheat flour, its next primary ingredient was soy flour!

I cannot eat soy, since it is incompatible with the thyroid medicine that I take. It explained why I had not been feeling well.

I opened the Safeway online website and began to examine labels. Too much soy. Not good.

Time to begin baking again. I have a wonderful beer-batter bread recipe, but beer has yeast, which in turn is on the list of things that may cause one to break out in hives, which has been a problem for several years. I have been trying to devise a diet that would lessen the occurrence of hives.

Soda bread seemed appropriate. St. Patrick's Day was approaching so that made it even more timely to make soda bread. I found a nice, tasty Irish Soda bread with raisins and made it several times. This most certainly was not what my ancestors made before they immigrated, though and I really wanted a whole wheat loaf.

 Finally, I found this recipe, http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/irish-brown-bread-10000000522965/"

 So yummy!  Highest recommendation to all of you who bake.  I have also made it with 1 1/4 c buttermilk substituted for the yogurt.  (And sweet milk soured with vinegar, I believe it would take one tablespoon, could be substituted for the buttermilk.)

It is becoming my house bread.  I am filled with gratitude for my plain brown loaf, my ancestors who surely made something similar and the Internet for making the recipe available.  It is a good, even wondrous time to be alive and I am glad.

Success!

With St Patrick's Day just two weeks away, I have been adding new products to my Cafepress store. (Click on the cafepress link in the links list to the right and there are sections for "St Patrick's Day" and "Everything Irish" to see the array of products.)

The slideshow that wouldn't load the other day, loaded beautifully just now and I am especially pleased to see the steins showing up. They look like they are pretty and I am tempted to buy one to use as a flower vase--I no longer drink beer, or much of anything alcoholic for that matter, since the neurological disorder of post-polio syndrome is enough to cope with.

So far the design that is selling best is Feliz dia de San Patricio!

Another success that has pleased me very much is that my friend C, she who is a professional organizer, found my small metal bowl that had lost itself in the kitchen cupboard. I don't know how it put itself there (and I was quite put out with it for hiding) but it is good to find it again.

I am thinking about two recipes from King Arthur Flour, one of my all time favorite businesses. One is for Chocolate Stout Cake. The other is for a carrot cake that needs a sour dough starter. Oh the calories! Oh the temptation! What to do with the leftover Guinness, which Safeway online does carry? Maybe these will stay in the day-dreaming stage--it is Lent after all--and I will settle with satisfaction for pumpkin muffins.

It is so easy to come up with more projects than I can possibly do in a day or week, or what is left of my life, for that matter, that sometimes I wish I could just wiggle my nose and see the projects materialize.

After a goodly amount of rain, the sun is trying to poke through. More rain, more rain, we need and want more rain.

I am grateful for the rain. (I would be even happier if I could remember to use the preview feature and catch my more egregious typos before I publish them. I never did much like typing.)

Rejoicing over Something Geeky

Last night I went to bed happy, truly happy for the first time in a very long time. I actually got something geeky that I had been trying to make work for months to work! Hurrah! Wheelchair version of a happy dance! I can, I can, yes I can!

So after all of that you may be wondering what it was. How to place a code in such a way that it will affiliate link to my cafepress shop so that someone can become an affiliate and ask all their family and friends to come see what I have to offer, thus bringing them income along with me. Hurrah!

This is different from the link on the right which goes to my shop and just makes money for me--not enough traffic this way. So I am hoping, hoping and hoping and now I have to figure out the next steps.

It was cold this morning and the only reason that I finally got up was that it wasn't even very warm in my bed, so I had to get up and turn up the heat. I am not looking forward to winter despite the fact that I basically like it. I like drawing in, having the privacy that comes with closing the windows and not hearing what everyone else is doing. I love the winter baking warmth and smells in my house and the smells of soups and chili cooking.

I totally love Christmas and the preparation for it that is Advent. Valentine's day is fun too and of course, by then in my part of the country, spring will be on it's way.

So having done my geeky thing, I am resting on my laurels today. I go to play with plants and to inventory pots for the bulbs that have been waiting to be potted. Over the weekend basil will be harvested and I hope that pumpkin muffins will be baked--if I can find my recipe.

I am grateful.

Sunday Blessings

My house is perfumed with the smell of drying basil. One more bush has been cut out. Above the smell of the basil is the lovely smell of carrot bread cooling on the open oven door. This is a mix that a friend gave me for my birthday. It looks like it should be pumpkin and it is the time of the year for pumpkin. It definitely doesn't taste like pumpkin. I can hardly wait to cut a slice.

Yesterday was a misspent day. I have a fabulous recipe for pumpkin muffins that I cannot find. I have looked everywhere. It is not there, or there or anywhere and yet it must be somewhere in my house! Thinking to reinvent it, I went to the web. Pumpkin muffins with chocolate chips; pumpkin muffins with raisins and currents; no plain, light, fluffy pumpkin muffins. Well, I will just have to keep looking.

Being outdoors to survey and tend the plants was a decided blessing. Taking it for granted all summer has made it a blessing today, for it is clear by the weather that winter is coming. The tomato plants are gorgeous and even have a small number of tiny tomatoes. So far none have matured to the point where I could pick them and use them for green tomato pie--something I have been wanting to make for six years since I first found the recipe on the web.

Baking is another blessing for a Sunday. It makes the routine different. Of course, I wish that I could go to Mass and hear the chant and chat with my friends afterward, but since I can't I want to make rituals that set Sunday apart from other days.

Monday will come soon enough with all of its tasks. For now I am grateful for Sunday, for the basil and the pumpkin bread and for the sun shining in as I type.

third Sunday of Advent

The third Sunday of Advent is also known as the "pink" Sunday because of its traditional rose-colored vestments. Today three candles are lighted on the Advent wreath, the third one is the pink candle. This change in color signals that our waiting is nearly over, that only one more Sunday of Advent is left and then our Christmas joy will be complete, our expectation and hope fulfilled as we commemorate anew the Birth of our Savior, Jesus at Bethlehem all those years ago.

My Christmas tree is up and I am feeling happy about the coming holiday even though it will be, as all of my holidays are, a simple one. As all of my days are, actually! I will try to write some Christmas cards this year, I think.

This year, in honor of my new resolve to attempt to diet, I am not baking the marvelous goodies of yore. (I was one of those people who made a list of all the cookies I was going to bake and then made the grocery list and went out and hauled home enough butter to feed the neighborhood for a year. One year this extravaganza included eighteen kinds of cookies. Some of the recipes would be doubled and I frequently ended the baking at 11:00 pm dropping into bed exhausted and dreaming of more. I only stopped doing this when for several years running we had infestations of ants in the walk-in closet pantry in our kitchen. A mouth full of ants instead of a mouth full of favorite cookie was not my idea of fun. Now all those cookies would truly be extravagant considering how we are all trying to keep our carb and fat consumption low.)

Eighteen kinds of Christmas cookies! It's hard to believe. But we did share them. They went to the church coffee hour and as presents to many people. There are a few that I do miss. A wonderful recipe from a vintage Gourmet for Viennese Marzipan Stars. I made the marzipan too from an old cookbook of my mother's. A delicate lemon and pistachio cookie from Italy. Springerle, made with my great-grandmother's springerle board. These have no fat, but a great many eggs. In the last few years I have made only two: gingerbread and cappuccino flats. Chocolate!

By the third Sunday in Advent the baking would have been in full swing. This year it is sufficient to reminisce and I hope pick up my old missal and absorb myself in the texts.