Day 35 - Baking
2020 April 21
Tuesday
8:30pm:
Today I baked.
I started with the “No Knead” bread I mixed up last night — it’s a recipe I’m dusting off in preparation for posting to my recipes, but I need to reacquaint myself with the process so I can write it out as clearly as possible. My notes omit all sorts of techniques and time-savers that I do out of habit, and focus primarily on the proportions of ingredients and the timing.
We devoured it with sandwiches at lunch.
We opted for leftovers for supper, so I moved on to making peanut butter cookies. I had some notes from a couple years ago, so I fleshed them out for a “Batch 1”. It was popular with the kids, so I’ll tweak it and make them again next week and see how the changes go.
I’ve started watching The Great Canadian Baking Show again because it makes me happy. Everyone is so congratulatory and supportive of each other — it has such a wholesome, uplifting feel to it. It’s the Pandemic Television I need right now. Related, I think I’m making Fondant Fancies (or a reasonable facsimile) with my 5yr old tomorrow. I will call it “school” and she will be thrilled. I’m going to cheat and do white cake instead of the sponge, but she won’t care — it’s about the one-on-one time spent together making something with her Mum that matters most.
My husband and the older two kids started moving the garden dirt from the front yard to our backyard by wheelbarrow — a cold, windy day for a task like that. I was a little disheartened to see all the snow showers through the day. It’s as though Nature is telling us to stay indoors, too.
It reminded me of a something that happened on a similar day when I was a kid:
My mom was away somewhere and it was just my Dad, my brother and me at home. I was probably around 8, because I can remember the faux leather winter boots I had on and I had those in grade 2 or 3.
I made the mistake of telling my Dad I was bored.
“I want to fly a kite but my kite is broken.”
My Dad, who probably just wanted me and my brother out of his hair for awhile so he could get something done (and, OH BOY, do I commiserate with THAT right now), tied a long piece of string through the handles of a shopping bag, said, “here you go!”, and sent us out to the field to fly our “kite”.
You know what we did?
We flew our kite. And it was fun.
It was so much fun that we decided to experiment with tying bags to strings in different ways, different numbers of bags to the same string, and figuring out what the heaviest thing was that we could lift into the air with our “kites”.
It probably kept us busy for the entire afternoon.
Adult Me thinks my Dad was a genius.
Adult Me would call the “Science Class”.
