"Homestyle" Bread

First, a big birthday shout-out to Cousin Jesse; hope you have a fantastic day!

Now, to start the bread, stir together 2 1/2 teaspoons of yeast with 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1/2 a cup of warm milk in a bowl and set aside. In a mixing bowl combine 1 1/2 cups of warm milk with 1 tablespoon of salt and 4 tablespoons of melted butter. Add three cups of all-purpose flour to this and mix it to a sludge-like consistency. Add in the yeast mixture, stir, and then add in another 2 or so cups of flour.

Turn out on a floured board and start kneading. This turns out to be a bizarrely difficult dough to knead, but not because the dough itself is tough. Quite the opposite. In fact, the dough is so pliable that when kneading it feels like your hand simply pushes through the entire dough (like, of course, a hot knife through butter...out of curiosity, does anybody ever actually do that? Heat up a knife and then cut butter with it?), so instead of kneading you might get the impression that you are just pushing the ingredients around. No matter, keep adding flour and kneading until the dough is no longer sticky. Put in a buttered bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and set in a warm place during the


First Rising (1 hour and 10 minutes)
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Well, this last week was easily one of the very toughest (work-wise, of course) since I've been here in Illinois. It all started Wednesday morning, having to wake up at 6:00 to be ready to teach that morning...usually I can sleep in a little bit more than that, but I'd forgotten to do some prep work (running over the mini-lecture, photocopying quizzes, that sort of thing) the night before, so I had to be up early. Anyway, then the rest of the day was spent working on a week-long take-home exam, with a pair of quick breaks for lunch and then dinner. And then, working away and not paying attention, before I knew what had happened I checked and my watch claimed that it was 4:00 in the morning. So, I started walking home, but when I got there I realized, somewhat in horror and somewhat in bemusement, that I had repeated exactly the same mistakes as the night before in forgetting to prepare for the discussion section which I have on Thursday as well as Wednesday mornings. I realized that, given how long it takes me to fall asleep, odds were that I would get at most an hour of sleep if I tried. So, I said, forget that.

A rookie mistake. So anyway, instead of trying to catch some sleep, I took a quick shower, ate a bowl of cereal, fixed myself a sandwich for later in the day, and started walking right back to the physics building. Unfortunately, now that it was Thursday and the exam was due the next day, I had no choice but to stay awake and work on it until it was finished. But that didn't happen, on account of interruptions throughout the day (teaching, classes...such silly stuff) until about 2 a.m. Now, I know that many people are perfectly able pull extended all-nighters like that, but I'm not such a fan. And those 44+ hours of uninterrupted wakefulness not only crushed but came perilously close to actually doubling my previous record for time spent continuously awake (which, curiously, was also set during a week immediately following a vacation). Well, let's just say that while I was less out-of-sorts than I might have expected myself to be by the end of it, I was still plenty loopy.
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Punch the dough down and knead it for another few minutes. Cut roughly in half, shape into loaves, and put into buttered 9x5 and 8x4 bread tins. Cover with plastic wrap and return to a warm spot for the

Second Rising (50 minutes)
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Well, after a week like that, perhaps you aren't that surprised that I don't have anything terribly interesting to add here. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that, in fact, the thing that changes the most from week to week in my life revolves around food. So, for instance, this week to bookend that painful exam experience I tried my hand at two new dishes for the first time! Pad Thai (an unmitigated disaster involving the noodles fusing together into one impenetrable fortress, surrounded by an army a tiny cooked shrimp, egg, and bean sprouts trying to get in) and Chicken Parmigianna (a success! a triumph of cooking almost certainly unparalleled in the history of civilization). I think I need a new hobby.
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Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Just before putting the bread in, brush with a lightly beaten mixture of 1 egg and about 1 tablespoon of cold water. Bake for 40 minutes.

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Tasting verdict: Well, one the one hand the flavor is nothing to write home about, in that it tastes fine but pretty unexceptional. It reminds me slightly of the loaves of bread Mom used to make when she was preparing her particularly dense style of garlic bread. On the other hand, the crust on this bread is excellent! I love the deep brown color (which, I suspect, is actually a combination of the egg wash and leaving it in the oven for maybe a minute or two too long), and it is phenomenally crispy. I might have to use the brush-with-beaten-egg technique more frequently...

Currently reading: "On Mencken" - a collection of essays, some by and some about, H.L. Mencken. He is, as I am just discovering, and absurdly good writer.

Next week: Rumor has it that I might soon be receiving my first mailed in recipe to try....very exciting!