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Life Edit

Over the years I have displayed an obsession with the idea of owning less stuff, all the while accumulating more and more stuff.

About two years ago I had read something about a project called The 100 Thing Challenge by Dave Bruno.  The challenge, to reduce (get rid of some of your stuff), refuse (to get more new stuff) and rejigger (your priorities) had goal to "break free from the confining habits of American-style consumerism."

Here it is two years later and not only have I abandoned The 100 Things Challenge, but I have accumulated even more stuff.  Today while catching up on the news I came across Graham Hill's 2011 TED talk.  Hill is the founder of TreeHugger.com.  In his TED talk Hill tries to put STUFF in perspective.  Sitting on a box all taped up, he said, "What's in the box? Whatever it is must be pretty important, because I've traveled with it, moved it, from apartment to apartment to apartment."

What happened to cause me to lose my laser-like focus?  Life.  So now I intend to try a Mulligan and manage things in smaller bite sized bits.  I am calling this my Life Edit.  How will this time be different?  I intend to post a picture of the before and after Life Edits.  I do not intend to just clean things up,but reduce, refuse and rejigger.  Wish me luck!

no-knead bread

Making no-knead bread is not as simple as it sounds.  Silly me thinking you throw flour, water, salt and yeast together and mix it all up and bake it.  I tried all kinds of recipes from bread books, the New York Times and both text and video based recipes on the internet.

Some of those recipes required precise measurements, spelt flour, casserole dishes or dutch ovens, silicon mats, bannetons (rising baskets - yeah, I had to look that up too), floured cloth napkins, containers to hold water to humidify the oven, baking stones, pizza peels, scales, baking parchment, oven temperature changes and all kinds of special handling techniques.

What I found is this; no-knead bread can be made by throwing flour, water, salt and yeast into a bowel, mixing it up and then baking the results.  Of course the results are not quite that instantaneous, but after trying a bunch of recipes and reading many more, this is what I came up with:

Ingredients

500 grams/15 ounces/3 cups bread flour

430 grams/13 ounces/1.5 cups + 2 tablespoons water

15 grams/1/2 ounce/2 tablespoons vital wheat gluten 

10 grams/2 teaspoons salt

4 grams/1/2 teaspoon yeast (active dry or instant)

corn meal, spelt flour or bread flour for coating work surface, cooking surface, forming the loaf and final proofing

This from http://www.dictionary.com:

proof - verb (used with object) Cookery. to cause (especially bread dough) to rise due to the addition of baker's yeast or other leavening.

Mix water, flour, salt and yeast — no kneading necessary. Wait a day.  Put the dough in the refrigerator until the day you want some fresh bread. Form a loaf (boule, batard, baguette, ficelle or what ever shape you want) and place it on a floured baking sheet; then, after another short rise, say 1 1/2 to 2 hours, bake the bread in a preheated oven at 450 degrees for about 40-60 minutes until it is golden and yummy looking.

Want an easier cleanup?

Put parchment paper on the baking sheet before you put the shaped loaf on the pan.

Want the finished bread to come off the pan/paper more easily?

Coat the parchment paper or baking sheet with bread flour, spelt flour or corn meal prior to placing the loaf on the baking sheet

Want a spectacular crust?

Jim Lahey baked bread in a cast iron enamel Dutch oven to develop a great crust - it works when I do it too.  I formed a boule and placed it on a sling of parchment I used to lower the boule into the preheated Dutch oven.  Walmart has a great Tramontina cast iron Dutch oven for a fraction of the “normal” price ( you might want to pick up a metal knob - on without a varnish - up from the hardware store to replace the bakelite type knob on the lid.  It does not stand up to the high temperatures used in baking bread well).  Bake the loaf for 30 minutes with the lid on then remove the lid and bake an additional 10-15 minutes.

No Dutch oven?

Brush the risen loaf with water prior to baking.

Want to make the loaf better looking/tasting?

After the load has risen and just prior to baking use a sharp knife to cut slits or patterns that will help the loaf rise uniformly as it bakes and provide good texture and looks.

If you brush on a coat of water just prior to baking that would be a good time to add all manner of seeds.

Swapping out a cup of bread flour for a cup of whole wheat in the recipe makes some yummy bread also.

In my reading it seems Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery got people thinking about this, Mark Ruhlman blogged about the whole thing, while MARK BITTMAN was writing a NY Times Article on no-knead bread.

Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois wrote Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day to help us all get a grip on some of the options for no-knead bread.  They recommend a great 6 qt bowel with a lid and I do too.  And they have a great video I wish I had seen prior to starting this whole thing.  You will have to find the links for that yourself.  I am a busy, busy man - eating bread.

mondays

• Having decided the discipline of writing down my thoughts as a matter of routine every Monday sounded good in practice.  I wanted to take the time to reflect on everything that had passed the previous week. What had happened however was a beautiful day.  I raked leaves.  It needed doing and has been raining.  My son once said he needed to shovel his yard to rake his leaves and I did not want to join that small and exclusive group.  It is December after all.  But the clean fresh FALL air has cleared my head out and I don't recall much of last week.
• I baked bread.  I had through I was doing it so my wife, Sally,  would have hot bread when she came home from work, but what had happened was a nap, for her.  I worked on a web site.  Ate a little bread with butter (I bet it would have taste better if I made my own butter.  Perhaps I can find someone with a milk cow they no longer need or want.  You can make using a no-knead method I learned online.  I adapted their recipe a bit, I'll post it later.  Along with a link to get the handy "tub" I mix the dough in (with a spoon I might add).
• I read the news.  It has been some days since I had bothered to find out what has been going on in the world at large, so I assumed my civic duties and read the news.  Who knew Scott Adams was still writing the Dilbert strip.  I digress.  It was a small diversion, don't worry, the world is fine - last I checked.
• I was supposed to run today.  My goal of a triathlon next fall seems distant enough to allow some procrastination still on the especially nice days.
• I found a ream of paper and loaded the printer.  it has been out for days.  I was hand feeding it odd pieces of paper and card stock prior to finding the ream of paper.  It was high time I used some of that stuff up and spared a few trees.
• I have more work to do on www.metuchenfirstbptist.com.  That is what I will be doing for the rest of the evening.  Either that or read some old Dilbert comics.