Rolling On One

When I was a kid, my mother used to make (or at least, a few times she made) oatmeal bread. Now, I consider myself a pretty fair bread baker, but I’ve never been able to make bread I like as much as I used to like my mother’s oatmeal bread when I was a kid. Red River Cereal bread is really close, though.
Charley is making us a chowder for dinner tonight, on the condition that I bake some bread to fill out the menu. I decided to try some oatmeal bread. Here in Casco I don’t have all my recipes handy, so I just fake it when it comes to bread. It always works. The best so far was a white bread with a cup of Whole Foods cranberry trail mix thrown in. Just in case this batch is good, here’s what I did:

• 2 C water
• 1 C quick oats (generic) — boil 5 minutes

• 2 T blackstrap molasses
• 2 T granulated sugar — add to cooked oatmeal and let cool

• 1/2 C warm water
• 1 T dry yeast
• 1 t sugar — dissolve yeast and sugar in warm water

• 2 C white flour — mix with cooled oatmeal mixture
• — add the yeast mixture. Let rise while you go out to grand opening of Bridgton Hannaford’s supermarket. Hmm, won’t be able to duplicate that part of the recipe.
• — on return from shopping trip, add :
• 3 T canola oil
• 2 t salt
• 1 C more flour
• — put 1 C more flour on breadboard, knead.
• — let rise, punch down, form loaves, let rise
• — bake at 350 degrees until done

But! Don’t try this at home until you hear from me as to whether it was any good or not! I’m a little concerned about the blackstrap molasses. If it stinks, I’ll delete this post and next time try it with regular molasses instead of blackstrap + sugar.

Thompson Lake is frozen solid enough to walk on, at least in most places. We didn’t venture really far on it. There was a small village of ice fishing shacks near the far shore. People who (we hope!) knew what the limits were had driven cars and pickup trucks out on the lake. We’ll leave it to those who know more than we do, for the time being, anyway. In places the wind had swept the ice clear of snow and the ice was almost transparent, with lots of bubbles and tiny cracks showing. I tried to take a picture. I think you had to be there to appreciate the beautiful clarity.

I wrote in the Feb 22 entry about Arlene’s Aunt Lee making a big batch of potato salad. She was also knitting a sweater for her daughter Diane, from some eyelashy yarn Diane bought in Toronto, I think, in 2001. Lee doesn’t like knitting that yarn, (you can barely tell the knit side from the purl side) but it makes a very soft lovely fabric. I was working on my mittens at the same time.

This is what a stepstool I made back in January looked like before I put it together.

We had seen a stepstool just about like this in a store (Home Coming?) in Newton Centre that was going out of business in November. We asked about it, but it wasn’t for sale. I looked at it long enough to figure out how it was made, bought lots of oak lumber at Home Depot, and eventually got down to work. Somewhere there’s a picture of the finished object, because, yes, I did finish it. Even “finish” in the woodworking sense, with Minwax wood finish (golden oak color, my favorite for oak projects).

Let’s see: piano hinge to hold it together at the top. Big wooden clamp to hold the pieces to the workbench while I cut dados for the steps with a router. Angle marking gauge, essential to getting the sides cut to match. Nice folding metal ruler, maybe two feet all unfolded but very compact when folded, my best yard sale purchase ever (but there are probably a half-dozen things I’ll call my best yard sale purchase ever, depending on how I feel at the time). Xcelite screwdriver that I’ve had since I was in college. Franklin Titebond glue, yellow carpenter’s glue, makes joints about as strong as the wood.

This didn’t turn out like a real calendar picture, but for any Californians who happen to be watching, it’s authentic New England winter. It’s in downtown Bridgton, Maine, maybe December 18 ’05. The stream flows out of Highland Lake, past the site of the late lamented Magic Lantern movie theatre, and south to points unknown.

This is a picture I liked — or even more, I liked when it was taken. It’s from back in December, just after we closed on our vacation house. I’m putting our name on the mailbox in self-stick letters from Home Depot. Oh, that was the most snow we’ve seen there so far this winter.

We had a guest conductor tonight, Matti Lazar, one of the biggest names in Jewish choral music. He’s in town for an event at Temple Emanuel over the weekend. He rehearsed us in Pischu Li (the Sholom Secunda setting of some of Psalm 118), a setting of By the Waters of Babylon (ps 137), and a couple of others. His emphasis is on how the intervals in the music, and other features of the music, communicate the meaning. Also, like (darn! I can’t remember her name now! the woman from DC who worked with Koleinu a couple of years ago), he says you have to feel what you’re singing first, then sing, and it comes out with the meaning you want.

Meanwhile my mittens are have cuff ribbing and are growing the gauntlet part, I mean the part past the real cuff that Anna Zilboorg shows in Magnificent Mittens.

I went to Lexington to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned this morning. The dentist agrees with the periodontist that I need to get a tooth extracted. I’ve been trying to resist doing it, but the time seems to have come.

As long as I was in Lexington, I stopped in Wild and Woolly and got some yarn (Jo Sharp Silkroad Aran Tweed, “brindle” color, a very tweedy grey with white, warm light brown, and light yellow touches, 85% wool, 10% silk, 5% cashmere) to make a warmer cap. The one I’ve been wearing most of last winter and all this one so far just wasn’t up to the wind chill of last Monday and Tuesday.

I started re-rushing the rocking chair, and it got too late to take or process pictures. But maybe another time.

We stopped in Newburyport (waving to Julia as we went through), first at the Mass. Audubon Joppa Flats visitor center, then at the Parker River Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island, then, well, not really Newburyport but Amesbury next door at the Chain Bridge.

The Audubon place at Joppa Flats is a couple of years old by now. It’s at a wide place on the Merrimac River where there are always loads of birds. Today most of the birds were Canada geese and herring gulls, but you never know. They have a weather station there with instruments that can download their readings to a computer terminal on the front desk, so visitors have a current reading of temperature, wind, and wind chill. One of the volunteers at the desk showed me a book they keep of graphs of the temperature, etc., through the month.

On Plum Island we went to the end of the paved road through the sanctuary, where there’s a lovely boardwalk through the dunes. It goes up and down lots of steps, so it’s much more exercise than you would expect for a .6 mile trail. There are views over the ocean and the marsh on the mainland side of the island. The temperature was above freezing today, but the wind was fierce up at the top of the dunes and it was good and cold with the wind chill. We didn’t see any birds to speak of, but in the interests of completeness I’ll say mourning doves, song sparrows, whitethroats, and tree sparrows.

One of the main attractions (from the birding point of view) of Newburyport in the winter is bald eagles wintering along the end of the Merrimac. One fairly reliable place to see them is the Chain Bridge, connecting Newburyport with Amesbury. We didn’t see any adults (with the bright white heads and tails) but there was an immature eagle sitting in a tree in the backyard of a house along the side street we parked on. It just sat there, looking around, with an immense eagle beak that made you happy to be on the far side of a house from it.

We had lunch in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Salisbury and continued to Salisbury Beach State Park, right at the mouth of the Merrimac. There were lots of eiders flying from the ocean up the river, (and I didn’t say we had seen some goldeneye on the river on the way to the chain bridge) but not much else. We stayed in the car rather than walk on the beach and be sandblasted in that wind.

We stopped at the Crate and Barrel outlet in Kittery, since it was still early and we haven’t been there while they’ve been open in a while. We got lots of towels, a good table lamp, and a couple of kitchen gadgets.

We went to the church supper at the Casco Village Church last night. It’s the kind of thing Garrison Keeler talks about on the news from Lake Wobegon, with lots of noodle casseroles (“tuna pea wiggle”) and some sea foam jello molds with colored mini-marshmallows, and four kinds of baked beans. Turns out they do that the last Saturday night of every month. We won’t go every last Saturday of the month we’re there, but it will be good to remember. It was a good excuse not to cook supper, and I was hoping we could at least see some of the people in the community. We were fortunate in having a woman sit at our table who wanted to talk. She’s a chaplain at a hospital in Lewiston (20 miles from here), went to school at Andover-Newton, and recently moved to a house on The Heath, a pond that connects to the southern end of our lake. She asked, “Did you find your dream house?” I think we did.

We had a big birthday party (a big birthday, as well as a big party) for Arlene last weekend. Her sister and brother-in-law came up from New Jersey (with their daughter and a full complement of grandkids), her brother came from NJ also, and her aunt Lee flew in from Buffalo. I baked a double batch of brownies from a mix, a batch of rye bread (swedish limpe), and a batch of chocolate chip cookies. Lee made a big batch of potato salad.

Lee said she could write a whole essay about potato salad. She learned how to make it when her parents owned a delicatessen (I don’t think people called ’em ‘deli’ in those days) in Newark in the ’30s. She started with five pounds of potatos (Yukon Gold this time), boiled them in the skins, peeled them after cooking, sliced them (into slices, not chunks), and added about half a bunch of celery (chopped), two small grated onions, mayonnaise (maybe half a cup?), a couple of tablespoons of white vinegar, salt (which she normally avoids because of high blood pressure, but potato salad is one thing that you HAVE to add salt to, she says), and pepper. It was good honest potato salad. I’m hoping to see her essay someday soon and add it as a comment to this, or as a whole guest post.