bread x ∞

I may have mentioned this before but... I love bread. Bread is the best thing ever. You can have it with butter, or toast it. You can rip it into pieces and nom each bit individually, or you can stuff a whole slice into your mouth. You can dip it into soup, or sop gravy up with it. You can build with bread (seriously, the Chinese used rice flour as mortar).

I made some lovely bread today. Even better than last weeks scones... which were good, but not perfect. I found out that if you put a lot of baking powder into bread that it can give it a strange taste. 3 teaspoons of power to 1 cup of flour is too much baking powder for my poor sensitive taste buds. Apparently, there are 2 kinds of baking powders and one has this taste for some people, but the other never does. I'll have to change the brand I have.

I'm going for a driving lesson on Tuesday. Ahhh. I'm going to try to act all confident so that I can just do the test at the end of this lesson (and pass it, of course) so that I don't have to go for my second lesson. I'm such a social goof. Maybe I'll really love the lesson and want to do the second one.

Anyway. I don't have much other news.

hot weather

It's starting to get hot here. The apartment was at 29 degrees last night (that's partly because I'd been baking too), and today cycling to the shop I felt that another few degrees and it will be too hot for cycling. Don't know what I'll do for food then :( The climate is so mild here, that the leaves on the trees don't fall off - they are pushed off by the new growth in spring. It's really weird to see all the leaves falling now. And if you are curious, like I was: Phoenix is the second hottest city in the world. Yuma, AZ is the hottest, and somewhere in Egypt is the third hottest. And I live here. Crazy.

I don't have a whole lot of other news. I made chicken cordon bleu last night. It was amazing. The breadcrumbs were so perfect. I had some issues with the cheese - it wasn't gooey enough. It didn't melt out of the chicken when you cut into it. So if I make them again I will look for some other way to do the filling (last night was just grated swiss cheese (which I don't think I like the taste of)).

Here's a photo, because I was so proud:

disaster

Livejournal, I must lament to you. River ate my scones. I ate one, she ate eleven. I can't believe she got at them. They were on the high counter - out cooling. And they were delicious. The best scones I've ever had. So light and fluffy and crispy on the outside. And lordkilljoy didn't even get to see what they looked like, let alone taste one. I'm so annoyed.

don't bake with dead yeast

I made bread last night. Or I attempted to. I suppose I should have realised something was wrong when the dough could barely absorb half the flour it was supposed to (but having never come across a problem like this before, I just put it down to warm weather). I turned the dough out and let it rise for an hour - in which we went out for dinner - and when I checked on it, it was the exact same size it had been. Now, my brain went something like, "it /has/ risen, surely. It's just that the bowl it's in is so ridiculously over-sized that the bread just looks the same size in comparison." The bowl was not over-sized.

Anyway. Then I remembered that the package of yeast I'd used had been open for a few days. And then I realised the yeast had died sometime over those few days. Poor yeast. And poor me, who had no bread to look forward to. I shaped it into a loaf anyway and left it alone for another hour, hoping something might happen. It didn't. I used the dough as clay to make a very basic duck (which got thrown out today) and threw the rest of the dough in the bin.

Failed bread attempt #1. So, for being baking bread for a few months now, that's not bad at all.

First sunburn of 2012

It is official. The sun here is very strong. I got pretty burned across one shoulder while wandering around the ostridge festival today.

The festival was fun. We got to see a very silly ostridge race, pet a bunch of animals, watch a dog-jumping-into-water show, a monkey show, and eat some ostridge. Nom nom nom.

I don't know what else to say... I think I'm a bit tired. I might go a lie on the hammock.

The End

So. I'm officially done with Artificer :)

penelope_stone is reading it and I might make some final changes based on her feedback, but right at this moment I'm moving on to book 2 and not looking back. I've been tossing ideas about book 2 around in my head for the last few weeks, and I think I'm coming to the realisation that I've lost a lot of what made book 1 good in book 2. I need to bring it back to Zachery - it's still his story. Not Zan and Kej's (or whatever Zan will be called once I settle on a new name for her). So I'm thinking of rewriting most of what I've done from Zachery's point of view. I'm also thinking I don't have nearly enough plot to fill this book out, and that frightens me. Because there's nothing worse than filler. Anyway. That's a worry for tomorrow morning. I'm actually thinking of reworking the outline - doing it in long-version to get a really good idea for just how much content I have. But I don't know if that's just a form of procrastination.

Anyway. It's weird. I thought I'd feel more at putting Artificer away, but I guess I've been done with so many drafts at this stage, it's just another link in the chain. And I guess in the back of my mind, I know that it will be there if I want to make more changes. I guess at this stage, the hard part will be staying away from it. (Nah - not really.)

I don't have a lot of other news. Did I mention I'm playing Planescape Torment again? I have come to the realisation that this is my all time favourite game ever. Yes - it even beats the Elder Scrolls games. The story, the characters, the setting - I love everything about this game. And I love the fact that it's so thoughtful at the same time. There are bits of philosophy in this game that you can't help get caught up in, and get thinking about.

Right then. I'm off.