I have to say, the Swiss government really got my hopes up – I thought the McCanns were going to be here indefinitely!  Why do they have to get all efficient now?  I know you guys were in limbo, which is no fun — but it worked out nicely for the rest of us!  I had been hoping that you’d be here just a little bit longer, the those computer systems or whatever the hold up was would last just til the end of my quarter or so…  then I would have more time to spend with you in your few remaining days.  So, don’t take it personally that I won’t see you as often as others over the next week, it happens to be probably the fullest time in the quarter with being in schools and finishing up classes and projects and papers.  I love you all dearly and will miss you an awful lot.  (Feels a little like college again when Emily was about to head off on her adventures in Israel…)  I suppose that is all for now. 

I think I might want one…

The man  in the picture is Jacques Leroux who lives up near Escourt Station and has  always had work horses, first for actual work and then for show at Maine’s’ many  summer fairs.
 I think  he had two matched pairs, one Clydesdales and the other
 Belgiums. He would turn  them out to pasture each morning and then
 work them in the afternoon dragging  the sled around the fields.
 Three  springs ago, he noticed a female moose coming to the pasture
 and helping herself  of the hay and what grain the work horses didn’t
 pick up off the ground. Jacques  said he could get within 10 feet of
 the moose before it would  turn and move off.
 Two springs ago, the  moose foaled(?)at the edge of the work horse
 pasture and upon getting to it’s  feet had not only the mother in
 attendance but the four horses. The young  moose grew up around the
 horses and each afternoon when  Mr. Leroux took the  teams for their daily exercise the yearling moose  would  trail along the entire  route next to the near horse.
 At some point, the  yearling got so accustomed to Mr. Leroux that,
 After  he  had brushed each horse  after a workout, he started brushing down the  moose.  The moose tolerated this  quite well so Mr. Leroux started draping harness  parts  over the yearling to see  how he would tolerate these objects. The  yearling  was soon harness broken and  now came the question of what could you do  with  a  harness broke moose.
 As you may or may  not know, a great deal of Maine is being bought up
 by folks “from away” and some  of them understand principles of forest
 management. Well the folks buying small parcels of land up in the
 area of the Allagash  have  it in their mind that they  don’t want big skidders and processors and  forwarders on their small wood  lots. Enter Mr. Leroux with his teams of  horses.
Every morning, when  Mr.. Leroux loaded the teams into the horse
 Trailer  to  go off to the days job,  the yearling moose got quite riled up and one day  loaded himself right into the  trailer with the horses. At the job site,  Jacques  unloaded the horses and as the  moose stayed right with them, he would take  the  Clydesdales and his brother  Gaston would take the Belgians and off into the  woods they would go with the  moose trailing behind. They would put the  harness on the moose in case they  encountered someone who they could kid
 with the  explanation that the moose was a  spare in case something happened to one of  the horses. The work required them to  skid cut, limbed and topped stems to  the  landing where the stems could be loaded  onto a truck for the pulp mill.
 All morning long the  two brothers brought out twitch after twitch of
 Stems  with the moose following  the Belgian team for the most part. At lunch  break  Jacques had the bright idea  of putting trace chains and a whiffle tree on  the  moose’s harness and all  afternoon the moose went back and forth following  the  Belgians in and out of the  woods dragging his whiffletree along the  ground.  As there were no stumps in the  skid trail, the whiffle tree never hung up on  anything and that first day in  harness went great. So next day, they hitched
 on first a small stem and the  moose brought it out just fine following the Belgians.
 Mr. Leroux told me  they were up to four small stems now and the moose
 was doing just great. He  cautioned however that there were a few
 problems with using a bull moose. Come  June, when the new antlers
 start, the new bone is “in velvet” and must itch like  crazy as the moose stops every once in awhile  and  rubs his rack against just  about anything to appease the itch. Once, before  the  brothers learned to tie him  of by himself while they had lunch, moose was  rubbing his antlers against the  hame on the Clydesdale called Jack and   got it wedged there for a bit. Jacques said he wished he had a camera as it  looked  like moose was trying to push Jack  over.
 The  other problem is the rutting season. The brothers learned quickly
 to leave moose  in the barn as he was constantly on red alert in the
 woods during this time. The  brothers are also considering trying this
 with two females to  make a matched  pair which would become an instant hit at the Maine Fairs.
 The trouble with the  bulls is their racks. They would be constantly rubbing  and  hitting each other  and yes they would have to be gelded as I just  couldn’t  imagine getting the two  bulls anywhere near each other, let alone in  harness.
 So now that this  picture is going all over the place, the surprise
 Has been  let out of the  proverbial bag. The Leroux’s want to continue the work of  trying to get a pair  of females in harness but they may have to end up  breeding  moose to do this and  that’s where they will run into trouble with the   State  of  Maine IF & W. I’m sure they don’t like the idea of the brothers “keeping”  wild animals.
 

i’m tired.

charmed.  it’s really good.  how could it not be?  it’s got witches.  and magic.  and girls kicking ass all the time.

i received seasons 3 and 4 for my birthday and i am quite pleased.  if anyone wants to borrow seasons 1 and 2 just let me know.

I’ve heard from multiple people that I should be watching Veronica Mars. How good a show is it?

a) Buy the DVD (it is an excellent show – even better than the A-Team)

b) Rent the DVD (it is a good show, but you probably won’t watch it multiple times

c) Buy it via iTunes (it is a good show, but you can watch it on a 17 inch laptop screen

d) Use Bittorent (it isn’t worth paying for)

my husband’s boss just had a baby.  well, the wife had the baby.  at any rate, it’s a girl.  and her name is freya. 

kinda strange. 

I learned a number of things last night and I know I’d forget some of them if I didn’t write them down.  I’m sure this isn’t a comprehensive list, but it is at least a good start.  These aren’t in any particular order.

• Even some math teachers think geometry is a waste of time.
• Today’s high school students have poor math skills
• I can’t be nice to my wife for more than 40 minutes when playing a board game
• Pirates suck!
• The Seafarers board is not considered setup until the undiscovered tiles are placed face down on the board
• We shouldn’t have given our table to Goodwill yet
• Jody is super slutty
• Either MS Word or I don’t know how to spell slutty (I learned this today and not last night.)
• Eve and Jody can’t share maternity clothes
• Sesame Chicken is good
• Some people like one huge bowl of ice cream and others like multiple small bowls
• Chocolate is a vitamin
• Sarah used to be Andrew’s roommate
• The dinner train is closing down and might relocate
• Minimum ice cream purchase at the Husky Deli is 1.5 gallons.  I’m not sure if this is enforced by the deli or Emily
• The Mayfair Company needs to rethink their expansion pack strategy
• Always get a take out menu from a good restaurant. 
• Do it even if you think you are leaving the country soon
• Jay’s dad works near Jody’s right boob (Not nearly as creepy as it sounds)
• I can get Niamh to sleep without my wife
• Emily and Jody occasionally cheat at board games
• The month of September typically has the best (not necessarily the warmest) weather in the Seattle area
• Student loan solicitors use loopholes to continue to call even if my number is on the do not call list
• The A-Team is on DVD
• The A-Team was on TV for 5 seasons
• I should watch Veronica Mars
• There were 7 seasons of Charmed
• The 7^th season just came out on DVD
• Melissa doesn’t think I have much “street cred”
• Smoking pot in high school would have increased my “street cred”
• Getting a Slingbox might be a good idea
• Sixes don’t roll as often as you’d expect
• The local coed soccer league rules state the maximum number of players of any specific gender is 6.
• Melissa will not have a double hyphenated name after getting married
• Getting an MBA is less work than a Masters in Education
• The UN determined that the US and the UK are not good places to raise children
• Jody becomes funnier as she gets tired
• Different people get drastically different results when using just conditioner for a week.
• Jody plans to pump

Please let me know what I missed.

HAHA!  just teasing eve.  i love ya! 

anyway, seriously, this bread is amazingly easy and amazingly good.  no kneading required at all!  i’ll just violate copywrite laws and post the entire article from the NY times.  it’s pretty cool. 

THE MINIMALIST; The Secret of Great Bread: Let Time Do the Work 

.By MARK BITTMAN 

Published: November 8, 2006 

INNOVATIONS in bread baking are rare. In fact, the 6,000-year-old process hasn’t changed much since Pasteur made the commercial production of standardized yeast possible in 1859. The introduction of the gas stove, the electric mixer and the food processor made the process easier, faster and more reliable. 

I’m not counting sliced bread as a positive step, but Jim Lahey’s method may be the greatest thing since. 

This story began in late September when Mr. Lahey sent an e-mail message inviting me to attend a session of a class he was giving at Sullivan Street Bakery, which he owns, at

in Manhattan. His wording was irresistible: ”I’ll be teaching a truly minimalist breadmaking technique that allows people to make excellent bread at home with very little effort. The method is surprisingly simple — I think a 4-year-old could master it — and the results are fantastic.” 

I set up a time to visit Mr. Lahey, and we baked together, and the only bad news is that you cannot put your 4-year-old to work producing bread for you. The method is complicated enough that you would need a very ambitious 8-year-old. But the results are indeed fantastic. 

Mr. Lahey’s method is striking on several levels. It requires no kneading. (Repeat: none.) It uses no special ingredients, equipment or techniques. It takes very little effort. 

It accomplishes all of this by combining a number of unusual though not unheard of features. Most notable is that you’ll need about 24 hours to create a loaf; time does almost all the work. Mr. Lahey’s dough uses very little yeast, a quarter teaspoon (you almost never see a recipe with less than a teaspoon), and he compensates for this tiny amount by fermenting the dough very slowly. He mixes a very wet dough, about 42 percent water, which is at the extreme high end of the range that professional bakers use to create crisp crust and large, well-structured crumb, both of which are evident in this loaf. 

The dough is so sticky that you couldn’t knead it if you wanted to. It is mixed in less than a minute, then sits in a covered bowl, undisturbed, for about 18 hours. It is then turned out onto a board for 15 minutes, quickly shaped (I mean in 30 seconds), and allowed to rise again, for a couple of hours. Then it’s baked. That’s it. 

I asked Harold McGee, who is an amateur breadmaker and best known as the author of ”On Food and Cooking” (Scribner, 2004), what he thought of this method. His response: ”It makes sense. The long, slow rise does over hours what intensive kneading does in minutes: it brings the gluten molecules into side-by-side alignment to maximize their opportunity to bind to each other and produce a strong, elastic network. The wetness of the dough is an important piece of this because the gluten molecules are more mobile in a high proportion of water, and so can move into alignment easier and faster than if the dough were stiff.” 

That’s as technical an explanation as I care to have, enough to validate what I already knew: Mr. Lahey’s method is creative and smart. 

But until this point, it’s not revolutionary. Mr. McGee said he had been kneading less and less as the years have gone by, relying on time to do the work for him. Charles Van Over, author of the authoritative book on food-processor dough making, ”The Best Bread Ever” (Broadway, 1997), long ago taught me to make a very wet dough (the food processor is great at this) and let it rise slowly. And, as Mr. Lahey himself notes, ”The Egyptians mixed their batches of dough with a hoe.” 

What makes Mr. Lahey’s process revolutionary is the resulting combination of great crumb, lightness, incredible flavor — long fermentation gives you that — and an enviable, crackling crust, the feature of bread that most frequently separates the amateurs from the pros. My bread has often had thick, hard crusts, not at all bad, but not the kind that shatter when you bite into them. Producing those has been a bane of the amateur for years, because it requires getting moisture onto the bread as the crust develops. 

To get that kind of a crust, professionals use steam-injected ovens. At home I have tried brushing the dough with water (a hassle and ineffective); spraying it (almost as ineffective and requiring frequent attention); throwing ice cubes on the floor of the oven (not good for the oven, and not far from ineffective); and filling a pot with stones and preheating it, then pouring boiling water over the stones to create a wet sauna (quite effective but dangerous, physically challenging and space-consuming). I was discouraged from using La Cloche, a covered stoneware dish, by my long-standing disinclination to crowd my kitchen with inessential items that accomplish only one chore. I was discouraged from buying a $5,000 steam-injected oven by its price. 

It turns out there’s no need for any of this. Mr. Lahey solves the problem by putting the dough in a preheated covered pot — a common one, a heavy one, but nothing fancy. For one loaf he used an old Le Creuset enameled cast iron pot; for another, a heavy ceramic pot. (I have used cast iron with great success.) By starting this very wet dough in a hot, covered pot, Mr. Lahey lets the crust develop in a moist, enclosed environment. The pot is in effect the oven, and that oven has plenty of steam in it. Once uncovered, a half-hour later, the crust has time to harden and brown, still in the pot, and the bread is done. (Fear not. The dough does not stick to the pot any more than it would to a preheated bread stone.) 

The entire process is incredibly simple, and, in the three weeks I’ve been using it, absolutely reliable. Though professional bakers work with consistent flour, water, yeast and temperatures, and measure by weight, we amateurs have mostly inconsistent ingredients and measure by volume, which can make things unpredictable. Mr. Lahey thinks imprecision isn’t much of a handicap and, indeed, his method seems to iron out the wrinkles: ”I encourage a somewhat careless approach,” he says, ”and figure this may even be a disappointment to those who expect something more difficult. The proof is in the loaf.” 

The loaf is incredible, a fine-bakery quality, European-style boule that is produced more easily than by any other technique I’ve used, and will blow your mind. (It may yet change the industry. Mr. Lahey is experimenting with using it on a large scale, but although it requires far less electricity than conventional baking, it takes a lot of space and time.) It is best made with bread flour, but all-purpose flour works fine. (I’ve played with whole-wheat and rye flours, too; the results are fantastic.) 

You or your 8-year-old may hit this perfectly on the first try, or you may not. Judgment is involved; with practice you’ll get it right every time. 

The baking itself is virtually foolproof, so the most important aspect is patience. Long, slow fermentation is critical. Mr. Lahey puts the time at 12 to 18 hours, but I have had much greater success at the longer time. If you are in a hurry, more yeast (three-eighths of a teaspoon) or a warmer room temperature may move things along, but really, once you’re waiting 12 hours why not wait 18? Similarly, Mr. Lahey’s second rising can take as little as an hour, but two hours, or even a little longer, works better. 

Although even my ”failed” loaves were as good as those from most bakeries, to make the loaf really sensational requires a bit of a commitment. But with just a little patience, you will be rewarded with the best no-work bread you have ever made. And that’s no small thing.

No-Knead Bread
Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Time: About 1 1/2 hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.
2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.
3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.
4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Yield: One 1 1/2-pound loaf

Normally I’m not a huge fan of Valentine’s cards (even though I get a ton of them every year, wonder why….) but I got this one from my mom and I found it quite hilarious.

My sweetie left for work this morning. And then a half hour later he was back with a big bouquet of flowers, sour cream and onion chips, Besalu pastries and coffee. I’m telling you, I married well.

So the Birthday’s been off to a great start with that and of course some morning gossiping with Miz emilyfrances and all the morning ecards and birthday wishes i’ve gotten. I should turn 30 every day!