I was at home this afternoon, practicing the fiddle, and what should cross my mind but the best phở in Vietnam.
I enjoyed this bowl in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, served with heaps of herbs, limes, and sliced red chilies. Serious soup.
I’ve been participating in the “tune of the month” at a Facebook group called Clawhammer Rules. This month’s tune is called Sandy River Belle. It’s a tune I used to play quite a bit in a specialized tuning known as, what else, Sandy River Belle tuning. Along the way I stopped playing the tune. I think this was because I only changed to that tuning for this one tune. Over the past few days, I re-learned the tune in standard G tuning and it turns out I really enjoy playing it.
It’s been 5 days since her surgery and Ruby continues to recover well. Her incision looks good, and she’s starting to put some weight on her hind left – that’s the knee which has been surgically fixed up. Her appetite is getting better too. She’s still on antibiotics and an anti-inflammatory. Next week she goes back to the surgeon for a check. At some point, she will have to get the other knee done too, as she’s torn both cruciate ligaments, but I’m not sure yet when that will happen. Ideally, it will be after the first one fully heals.
The other day I bought some rye flour and decided I would try making a sourdough rye. The intelligent thing to do would have been to lever the knowledge of someone with a little expertise and follow a formula. Did I do that? Nope. For no particular reason I decided to use 1/3 rye flour and 2/3 unbleached bread flour. I’m gaining a fair idea of how wheat flour works in the this process so I thought adding some rye flour for flavour without overwhelming the mix with it would be the way to go. In the future I’ll mess around with some different ratios to see what happens.
This dough 
had plenty of fermentation going on (first fermentation this time about 9 hours and proofing about an hour and a half), but the dough lacked structural stability. While it multiplied nicely during the first fermentation, it didn’t hold height when I shaped it. Had I researched a little before diving headlong into bread baking, I might have tried gently folding the dough a few times during the fermentation to build up the structural strength I was looking for. Next time I’ll try that. While the bread didn’t achieve the vertical height I had hoped for, it was otherwise excellent. I coated the towel I wrapped the dough in for the proofing with bran this time rather than corn meal. It’s decidedly different and quite nice on this loaf. The crust is not too thick but nice and crunchy and the crumb is softer than my previous breads. As usual I baked this loaf at 500F in my Dutch oven, 30 minutes covered and 15 minutes uncovered. The crust came out a nice deep brown colour.
Most importantly, this is a super-delicious bread.
Ruby is resting quietly today. I’ve taken the Elizabethan collar off as long as I’m here to supervise and make sure she doesn’t lick or scratch her incision. I put it back on anytime I have to leave her or can’t watch her. She’s taking a painkiller + an anti-inflammatory + antibiotics. She hasn’t got much appetite today. Hopefully that will come back soon.
Chip Taylor is a phony name, to use his expression. He made it up when he was in the rock ‘n’ roll business. James Wesley Voight grew up Yonkers NY, but his family had radio and he discovered country music, which became his love. We’re familiar with the period of his work when he performed with Carrie Rodriguez, records like The New Bye & Bye and Let’s Leave this Town. Maybe you know him because he’s the guy who wrote Wild Thing and Angel of the Morning or maybe because he has a famous actor brother.
Chip Taylor played a wonderful show at Hugh’s Room tonight, accompanied by bass player Tony Mercadante, along with Taylor’s own guitar, a harmonica in a rack, and loads of stories about the songs and his own life as a songwriter, performer, and for a time, professional gambler –
Sometimes the songs start as stories and they’re songs before you realize it happened. Taylor’s approach to performing is understated, often laid back, often tender. He’s 77 now and has just released a great new collection of songs called Fix Your Words. Tonight’s show featured a mix of new and old, famous and obscure.
Here’s a video from YouTube – one of the songs Chip Taylor performed at the Hugh’s Room show.
Great show.
Ruby is recovering very well so far from her knee surgery. You can see that she has a swanky new “help em up” harness which will help us help her as she recovers. The harness has two handles which will be particularly helpful in helping her in and out of the car tomorrow when she comes home.
Today I baked the seventh loaf from my current sourdough monster. Until this loaf I’ve been exclusively using the “no-knead” Lahey method and the results have been consistently fabulous. I neglected to get a dough going last night and mid-morning today I decided it would be good to have a loaf at dinner-time. The only thing to do was change up my approach and make a kneaded bread.
For no-knead bread, I use very little starter, and a long rising time (usually around 12 hours), and I only mess with the dough enough to make it come together in a very sticky dough. For this loaf I used quite a bit more starter, then I kneaded the bread for 10 minutes or so. I should say I kept my dough as sticky as possible while still being able to knead it. I suspect that I need a wetter dough to get a loaf with great internal character.
After an hour proofing, it didn’t look like much was happening with the dough at all. In fact it took about 3 hours to get a good rise. I punched it down, folded it and gave it a second short rise, about 25 minutes.
I baked it using the usual protocol – an extremely hot oven (500F), baked in a Dutch oven for half an hour with the lid on and another 15 minutes with the lid off.
The result was a loaf which had plenty of big holes, but overall a tighter texture than my no-knead bread, a little more like your basic French stick, except chewier. I’d say it was somewhere in between a french stick and my usual no-knead bread. The crust was beautiful, nicely developed but perhaps not quite as deeply developed as my previous loaves.
This was a damned fine loaf. Any bread baker would be more than satisfied with the result. Still, I’m going to say the no-knead loaves were just a wee bit better overall. There are lots of variables and I haven’t experimented enough yet to know how a single change in approach will affect the quality of the final loaf. I wouldn’t hesitate to make another kneaded sourdough like the one I baked today, but knowing I can get slightly better quality with more time and less work, I’ll continue to use “no-knead” as my default method.
….good God Almighty he’s the poor man’s friend
We live in an area with a remarkable amount of bird-life, which is why you can often see bird-watching enthusiasts out in one of our local parks, sporting fancy cameras, tripods and 3-foot long lenses. Early one morning I was out in the park with The Partners and came across two people (who must have been very cold) hunkered down on one of the beaches, wearing full camo gear, squatting, cameras at the ready, waiting for some bird or another to appear.
I appreciate the obsessiveness of the activity. There was a time I was equally obsessive about casting for trout with a fly rod, identifying insects at their various life-stages and creating imitations using bits of feathers and so on. I was up on the Latin names of umpteen different insects, and I’ve waded hip deep in trout streams flowing through out of the way spots in various provinces and states. How many times have I been transfixed by the specter of a rising trout? I’m fascinated by the relationship between the bugs and the trout and the birds and so on, although these days I only get out on a trout stream a few times each season.
I can also be found in various forests through the summer, foraging for mushrooms. I never used to see the mushrooms, because I wasn’t looking for them. Now I see a whole world of fungi, from tasty edibles to deadly poisonous Amanitas and Gallerinas to very difficult to identify “little brown mushrooms”. I do spore prints, smell the mushrooms, even bruise them in the hopes of making an identification and there are usually a couple tattered field guides driving around with me in the car.
I enjoy observing nature in the park on a much more casual basis. Yesterday, though, when I saw the snowy owl, I wished my little point-and-shoot camera had a much more serious zoom.
Snowy owls have been visiting the park each winter for years. If you didn’t know an owl was around, it is unlikely you would see one. A visiting owl will find a spot to hang out and often stay put for a long time without moving much at all. Some people have been fortunate enough to see one in flight, but I’ve only seen them sitting around, usually a good distance from any human interlopers.
I hadn’t seen an owl all winter, although I looked around for them several times. I had figured they had left by now, flown back to their northern habitat. Early in the week I heard from two or three friends that the snowy was still around, and yesterday afternoon, George the Newf and I went out for a look. Sure enough, there it was.
When I first heard about the snowy owls visiting our part of the Lakeshore, somebody in the neighbourhood told me they started venturing this far south when the population of lemmings crashed a number of years ago. I nodded my head, actually knowing not a thing about lemmings. In fact I really have no idea how long the owls have been visiting. I’m sure there are some bird experts around here who know all the details. I only know that they are regularly seen around here come wintertime, usually in the same area.
In 2016, we celebrated the coming of the snowy owls by making a couple larger than life snowy owl mosaics, made from a variety of items from tiles to broken crockery to plastic poker chips.
27th Street 