Making Bagels: Day 1

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/bookreviews/bba

  Today was the day! Time to learn to make bagels. The grocery store bagels have gotten so expensive ($7-9 a dozen) and all that are available are the soft, squishy Wonder Bread kind soooo, it was time. I got out my amazing bread cook book The Bread Baker's Apprentice Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread  by Peter Reinhold and got busy.  These bagels are going to rock (well I hope anyway because they take long time to make).

The bagels mostly take the usual ingredients---I am using unbleached bread flour today, next time I will experiment with whole grains. One thing I have learned in my bread baking this year is to weigh the ingredients, it is more accurate and I don't need quite so many measuring devices.

The stuff--- the little black thing is my scale, best baking purchase I made this year

sponge

 These bagels start with a sponge. Mix it up and let it sit for a couple hours until it is bubbly. This part is just flour, water and yeast this step lets some of the flavor develop.

After the sponge is ready just add in the rest of the ingredients; more flour,yeast, salt and one thing I have never worked with before, Barley Malt the recipe says it is the magic ingredient to add the perfect taste. I don't know, the stuff is really thick and sticky, kind of hard to get out of the bottle and tastes like bitter molasses. So the jury is still out on it. After adding the rest of the ingredients I kneaded it like forever. Ok not exactly forever but probably about 1/2 an hour. This dough is very firm so it can hold the bagel shape so it takes a lot of power. After kneading I shaped it into rolls and let it rest for twenty minutes.....

Pre-bagels resting --each weighs a little more then 4 oz.

  

floating bagel

After the 20 minutes I made holes in the center of each and let them rest for 20 more minutes. Then I threw one into a bowl of water, it floated so it was ready for the next step. I covered them all up and threw them in the fridge for The Long, Slow,Cold Fermentation that no self respecting bagel shop will skip...Now they are in fridge just a chillin--- waiting for  Making Bagels: Day 2, baking day.



Well that is it for today---
 Make it a good one,


Karen

Playing with Wool

Outlaw's Playday 1 from Judy's Novelty Wools Centerville , UT

Today I spent a lot of time playing with the drop spindle---

I got a new Spin-Off a couple weeks ago and that always leads to a couple days of trying out new things. Two years ago at the fiber fair I got two 4 ounce rovings and I am still playing with them. I spun the first spindle straight off the roving, then I Navajo plied it as I wound it onto the spindle . Doing it this way keeps the colors pretty clear, it will form stripes. The second one I am separating into different colors and making them into rolag things then spinning off the fold followed by Navajo plying. The colors are blending together more. I don't know how it is going to turn out yet but so far the skeins look different. Since they are all in the same colorway all the skeins should go together regardless, when I decide what to do with them. It will really be interesting to see in a couple of days how they compare (I will post pix).

The Snake River Fiber Fair is in a few weeks and that is going to be fun. I think I am going to look at some solid colors this year and try some other color blending techniques, instead of getting the hand painted rovings. Maybe something in silk would be good to combine too. I don't know---but I will post pix.

Make it a good one---

Karen

Catching Fire

Marissa finished reading both Catching Fire and Mockingjay. I have finished with Catching Fire, and it was as good as The Hunger Games. Marissa and I spent an hour talking about the second one too. The themes are similar to the first one, the government, the president, in these books is so controlling. So, shall we say evil , I just hope that we are watching our own government and don't ever even let it come close to what is happening in these Mockingjay stories. I have started Mockingjay I will finish it in the next couple days, maybe I will comment on it too. So far it is going to end up on my favorites list too.

The Hunger Games was recommended to us by a friend of Ris's at the bake sale last week. During the same discussion other girls were asked if they were readers too. One of the girls said she liked to read but she doesn't have time for personal reading anymore (I think that is sad). I sat and listened to the other parents talk about the things their daughters were doing in their first year of middle school.  A couple of things they did were: making posters about Indians (most had to do that as homework) and they had to do a wax museum acting thing about a famous person in history. There were others things but they seemed so silly I didn't pay much attention but it all got me thinking. These girls don't really have time for personal reading but they have to make posters? I wonder if we aren't really losing site of the important things...

I am right now trying to decide where I should be going with Marissa and her homeschooling. I don't know for sure what I need to be doing but I do know that making posters would just be busy work. It would be something that would just be thrown away in a month or two...(and I am sure it would be met with a protest too) I do know that Marissa's best teaching and learning moments come out of her personal reading time. And she has been inspired to dig deeper into many things (medicinal plants from The warriors series and Archery from The Hunger Games for instance) because her reading started her imagination on fire better then any number of things I could have insisted she do. I feel very strongly about this too. She needs to be reading all the time! (we used Sonlight this year and I will probably still use at least their core which is literature based next year too)

I don't remember much from my days in school  (I view that as a blessing by the way). My learning came from my OWN PERSONAL reading and studying and it still does. I just hope that when we are done with this homeschool journey Marissa will find the things we do relevant to her life and that she will be able to always find the answers to the other  important questions she has.

The Hunger Games 2

Marissa and I both finished The Hunger Games today. We had a really great discussion about it . There were a lot of themes that made for great discussions everything from reality TV to how to be kind in adverse conditions. I think the take home lessons for both of us were great and for her were even better. We talked about what things might be good to learn for survival conditions (she thinks she needs to get a bow hunting license now and spent an hour out practicing with her bow, I will have to get her a few more arrows I guess, but we will have fun this summer when I get mine out and shoot with her). The author took some flack for the violence in the story but if an involved adult is there to talk about it I think it is something that needs to be addressed sometime anyway.

One problem I found in our discussion-- Marissa doesn't have much idea of what reality TV is. She doesn't know about Survivor or American Idol. She does know about Fetch with Ruff Ruffman on PBS (was canceled this season) so it wasn't completely with out hope but---- I guess we have socially deprived our child she, doesn't "get" reality TV very well. Reading this book was a good school thing to do with my daughter though.

We ordered the sequel Catching Fire this afternoon (we got them as e-books for Nook and they are lend able if someone wants to borrow them for Nook just let me know). I will let you know how this one is too as soon as I get it read. I think we are going to have to read all three during the next five days. I wanted to get my next month's book group book done before we really got serious but I guess Marissa has other plans for us.

Make it a good one--- Karen

The Hunger Games

I have been hearing a lot about the book The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins for quite awhile now. I have also been ignoring the good things I have heard--the same noise was made about the Twilight series and in my opinion they were not even worth bothering with ( I did make it through 1/2 of the first book before I gave up). Well yesterday at the dance company bake sale one of Marissa's friends told us The Hunger Games was very good ( I trust this friends opinion) and since Marissa has been asking to read it I looked into it. The book was not what I expected and I thought it might be ok so I bought the ebook and let her go to it. Then I decided I would read it with her, so here I am 3 chapters into it and glad that I am.

A few years ago I read both The Giver and Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry both books very well done and among my favorites. So far The Hunger Games is very similar to both of these stories (I personally think that Suzanne Collins doesn't write as well as Lois Lowry however). All three talk of a time in the future when things have gone very wrong and the children suffer for it very much.

Today The Hunger Games is haunting me. We live in a time right now when these stories of dystopian society could begin and sometimes I feel a little sad, frustrated, angry at my inability to DO anything about it. "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have." this quote often attributed to Thomas Jefferson really came from Gerald Ford in an address to a joint session of Congress on August 12, 1974. Regardless of where it came from I think it is true. Big Government is what keeps the Hunger Games going in this story and it isn't a government that is giving very much anymore. The Hunger Games are just a way for the ruling class to remind the lower classes of WHO IS IN CHARGE and they are using THE CHILDREN to do it. It just makes me think and at a time when our government, Republicans and Democrats alike will not give us what we need because it is counterproductive to their own power grabs. I think it could be worse then the stories portray because of the technology available to those that wish to rule. I don't know maybe I think too much.

Marissa and I have some interesting discussions coming up on this story and maybe we will explore a few more stories like it (I am thinking Animal Farm). I am sure happy that she is a good reader. We have a lot of stories to get going on. As for The Hunger Games I will let you know when I finish it what my final opinion about it is.

Tired of Government

I am sitting here watching the news wondering what the crap is wrong with those that are in charge in Washington. The budget cuts that the Republicans are asking for ARE NOT enough to begin with--- what is wrong with the stupid Democrats. I keep hearing all these people worrying about government employees not having their jobs on Monday morning. WHY exactly should government works be immune to job loss or layoffs. No one else gets that kind of security, the only government employees that should have security like that are military personnel . The rest should be subject to the same risks all the rest of us have too. I don't know. But I am so tired of hearing all the democrat whining though. SOMETHING has to go. We the people, We the taxpayers can only support so much spending and our children are going to have to foot a huge amount of the current debt we are racking up.

Stargazing with a 9 3/4 year old

I took Marissa on a stargazing field trip in Grandpa's pasture last night. What an experience that was. We got the telescope on Saturn but it is so low on the western horizon now when it is dark enough to see, it is hard to really get a good look at anyway and forget trying to find Titan.

Then after much debate and finally making her sit on my lap so she could see we were looking at the same things we identified Libra, Virgo and Scorpio. Scorpio which sits toward the center of the galaxy is usually an amazing sight with a pair of binocs but it sits to the south right over The City of Driggs from our pasture location and for those of you who haven't noticed Driggs suffers from a deplorable case of light pollution now--- who would have ever thought. Oh well maybe I will need to go to our bulk plant to stargaze some night.

Marissa thought she needed to name a star last night,so she laid back, looked up and chose a very bright, almost- blue directly over head. We are reading the book , The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman aloud right now, so she decided to name that blue Lyra after the main character in the story. For those of you that aren't familiar with this stuff the big, bright, almost- blue directly over head at this time of the year is Vega, it was the pole star a few thousand years ago and will be again in a few thousand more and it sits in the constellation Lyra. We had a good laugh about the whole thing and named a different star Lyra but I bet she doesn't soon forget that lesson.

Our main quarry for the evening was suppose to be Jupiter which cleared the Eastern horizon at about 10:30 pm. But we had to wait for it to get a little higher so it would clear some of the atmospheric distortion---it is amazing how cold 59 degrees can feel after a day spent at 90 degrees---we got too cold so we gave up and came in before we looked at Jupiter. But it is rising a little earlier every evening, in a week we won't have to wait for it to rise high enough before we freeze. And I will get to spend another amazing evening stargazing with my daughter.