Strings, Rings, and Other Things

It's Kim's birthday today, and in lieu of a cake she asked me to make her the decadent Quiche Lorraine recipe that we got from Cooks Illustrated a few years ago. It's absolutely delicious, with multiple yummy cheeses (some in the crust) and home-cooked bacon bits and a custard made with more half & half and sour cream than egg. It comes out looking pretty, too:


Meanwhile, we've been mostly focused on our pregnancy recently, so we haven't said much about our cats lately. They continue to be adorable, and they're growing up quite nicely. Here are a couple of pictures of the three of them lounging on the radiator together:


(From left to right, that's Nia, Callie, and Polly. Little Callie is almost as big as her sisters now!)
The cats' latest achievement around the house is the discovery that various cupboard and closet doors around the house can be opened if you maneuver your nose and claws just right. Kim woke up this morning to find the linen closet door open (a first!) and the three catnip toys that we keep there scattered around the hallway, all completely soaked with kitty drool.

Oh, and in case you've wondered, we did finally get rid of that fallen tree in our yard. The neighbor called a friend with a chainsaw, and we took the thing apart and left it on the curb for the city's yard waste pickup. (Though in fact, someone randomly drove by later and picked up a lot of it for firewood.) It came out pretty thoroughly, too: the split in the trunk went low enough to break through the main roots, so we don't even have a stump!

Kim and I made a loaf of whole wheat sandwich bread yesterday (testing a recipe for Cooks Illustrated). It's delicious, but despite my efforts I didn't slice it quite thin enough today. This is particularly apparent because of my odd habit of making my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with three slices of bread: bread-PB-bread-jelly-bread. (It's usually a bit less messy, maybe.)

Say "ahhhh"! :)

Risotto alla Milanese is absolutely delicious.

That is all.


(Ok, one question: Anyone out there know what "1/4 teaspoon" of saffron threads actually means? I generally measure a heaping 1/4 teaspoon of threads without compressing them at all and that works out fine, but I've always wondered what my recipes are actually trying to tell me. Surely there's a way to convert that to some rough number of threads?)

I've been experimenting to increase the sour flavor in my homemade sourdough bread, but today's experiment went a bit awry and failed to rise at all. I felt surprisingly disappointed; I'm not sure if that was more because of all the wasted work, because I wouldn't get tasty bread, or because I'd sort of killed a pet.

My underlying mistake was to transfer too much water out of the main dough into the starter. Beginning from the basic sourdough recipe in The Bread Bible, I increased the fraction of starter and used a liquid starter (with a higher water:flour ratio). The main dough ended up exceedingly dry to compensate, and when I added the liquid starter the two didn't so much "blend" as "form a lumpy soup". It took a lot of mixing and kneading before that was even mostly fixed. I think the dough must have gotten quite warm in the process, and wild yeast can't handle temperatures above 100 degrees F. A few hours later, there was almost no sign of it rising at all.

That's how you learn, I guess. My plan for next week should work much better.

With Kim's help, I've been cultivating a shoggoth for the past couple of weeks. Or rather, a from-scratch sourdough starter: Kim saw the comparison in some online fiction, and it feels strangely appropriate. (I'm following instructions in The Bread Bible to make use of the wild yeast and bacteria found on organic flour.) It's been more of a challenge than I expected, but I think it's finally fully active and ready to go.[1] This is pretty cool.

Now that it seems to be going strong, the next step in the instructions is to give it a name. :) It occurs to me that this isn't the first pet shoggoth that I've had: in one college IL game ("They Said It Couldn't Be Done", maybe?), my mad scientist character had a shoggoth named Alice Shiney. I can't remember for the life of me who was playing that character, but she did a great job of role playing (too good, in fact: I was so uncomfortable about her that I just ran away when she was finally attacked). Anyone out there remember who it might have been? Anyway, I'm considering "Alice" as a name, but Kim had pictured it as a male. Any other suggestions?


[1] One difficulty along the way was mold: the proto-starter itself always resisted mold growth, but dried out bits of bready stuff stuck higher up on the sides of the container got moldy a couple of times. I suspect that some sort of penicillin-like effect may have been keeping the starter from rising properly at those times.

I may have finally figured out a good use for this blog thing: a platform for my habit of sharing random funny or interesting stories. (The best part is that this way, you don't get to complain about them! Well, really, the best part for you is probably that you won't have to listen to me tell them twice.) Not that I plan to post regularly, mind you, but it gives me another outlet for such things.

At any rate, this particular story took place Monday night. I was at a potluck dinner hosted by the ARCS Foundation, a charitable organization that's been giving me a scholarship for the past several years. It was a pleasant evening: the people there were very interested in what I'm doing, and we had good conversations (some of which weren't even about string theory).

I had brought a dish of my own to the dinner even though they insisted I was just a guest: cooking has been a bit of a hobby of mine, and I welcome the chance to show off my specialties. In this case, I'd brought some pork tenderloin cooked according to one of my favorite homemade recipes. The amount turned out to be just about perfect: it lasted through the whole evening, but even as people were getting ready to leave they were stopping by the table to eat the last few pieces.

Naturally, I appreciated the implicit compliment in that, so when I saw one woman in particular taking a third piece, I said, "I'm glad you like it!" She replied, "Oh, yes, it's wonderful! What is it?" I explained, "It's pork tenderloin baked with garlic slivers in it and a bit of balsamic vinegar on top, and the sauce is a sort of molasses barbecue sauce that I came up with myself." At that, she got a rather odd look on her face, something between surprise and embarrassment. Still perfectly friendly, she said, "Oh! It's very good... ...I'm not supposed to eat it. I'm Jewish."

I knew I should have included a little sign that said: "Warning! Not kosher! Pork!" (I really did consider it, though I convinced myself that doing so would just be silly.) She didn't seem too upset (certainly not with me, and not particularly with herself, either), but I still can't shake the unsettling feeling that Yahweh is terribly cross with me. : )