Just busy!

Last weekend (I keep doing this, it's friday again already?!)  One of my good friends came up for a visit.  It was lots of fun, we had knitting time (one of my favorite kinds of time) and boating time, and swimming time, and pretty much had a very relaxing weekend.  She took lots of pretty pictures of vermont (another thing I love to do!)  Although some of my favorite photos were of the immature loon and its parent:



Although the photo of the mama hen who somehow managed to get her baby up on the pearch are pretty fabulous too:



That pearch is over 4ft off the ground, there are some in between things for jumping on, but I had no idea a baby chicken could jump 2 or more feet at a time and land on a perch!

This weekend there's a sterling college reunion (which I'm really looking forward too!)  and a LOT of veggies to put up.  I picked 16 ears of corn from my garden yesterday (some are a bit small, but with the beginning of the growing season the way it was the plants are small too) and we've got 2 or 3 quarts of beens to freeze between the purple beans in my garden and the green and yellow ones from the CSA.  We got a lot of brocolli this week too which I might freeze, my fridge barely shuts properly right now there's so many veggies stuffed in it - and the corn and big summer squashes are living on the counter!

Oh and yarn:

I have more!  This lovely batch is from Knitpicks (the green in front is gloss sock, the mossy green/dark brown in back are classic wool of the andes worsted, and the tan/chocolate brown on the side are stroll sport) and they're all destined for new designs!  I'm quite excited!  I love knitpicks - their yarns are very nice and very reasonably priced.  The Gloss has lovely sheen and is very smooth - wonderful to knit with!  I'm also really excited about their stroll (used to be essential) coming in other sizes then just plain sock yarn - the socks I've made with it in the past have held up really well to wear and tear - which is really important in a sock!

I also made bread Wednesday evening.  It was the one evening of the week when it cooled off below 60 - I'm glad I grabbed the chance to bake while I had it!  Anyway, I added some aramanth flour to the dough and it was delicious!  I picked it up because I wanted to try something new and the bag said it added a nice malty flavor to bread - and I like malty flavors!
I've slowly grown to baking bread by feel.  I used to follow the recipe exactly, then I started changing or substituting 1 or 2 things, now I don't even bother pulling out the recipe book.  Making bread goes something like this:
Mix some yeast in warm water with a touch of sugar in my bread bowl.  Is it foaming? check.
Ingredient checklist (in my head) fat? flour? liquid? salt?  Mix it together and start kneeding until it feels right.
For a single sandwich sized loaf I generally start with 2ish tsp yeast in 1/4c of water.  Generally I want at least 1 but not more then 5 Tbsp oil (yes, it is that flexible, depending on how rustic/soft you want your bread)  Then I add the flour - 2 heaping handfuls of flour and 1 of something else.  Each handful being somwhere between 1/2 and 1C flour and something else can be almost anything - rolled oats, oat flour, rice flour, cornmeal, sunflower/flax/sesame seeds, strange grains flour, etc...  And the bulk of the bread needs to be between 2/3 and 3/4 real flour when I'm all done (for the gluten!)
Once the fat and flour are in (sometimes I add an egg with the fat, if i feel like it) I'll sprinkle in some salt (I really can't say how much, and under-salting things is one error I still make regularly)  The poor yeast cells should always be buffered from the salt addition by flour/oil/egg/something.
Then I add some more liquid - milk, whey if I've made cheese recently, beer, water if I have nothing else.  Then I just keep adding flour until it's bread-like.  I suspect I end up with somewhere between 4-5 cups of flour and enough liquid for it to stick together the way bread dough should.  It takes a bit to get it right, but I really enjoy just throwing together some bread based on my whims!

Oh, and now that I finally have pictures up feel free to go back and see a photo of me trying to eat a smore half the size of my head - it's pretty funny...