JorpBlog

Tom Waits Press Conference

We should really be past the point of cutting down trees just to stick them in your house for a month and then toss on the lawn or in the alley like broken furniture. Renting Christmas trees is a great idea. I think we should do the same thing with turkeys on Thanksgiving.

What are all those little colorful bits in this bread? The big yellowish chunks are cottage cheese curds! Then there’s the fennel seeds, of course. The red flakes must be the dried garlic. Yeah, not your usual bread ingredients.

I got this batter bread recipe from my “bread bible” so, weird as it seemed (and as the batter looked before rising), I knew it would be good. It called for dried onion, but I didn’t have that. And it called for dill seed…but I didn’t have that either. Maybe next time, but maybe not.

This was all that was left after three of us had this bread with dinner (or you might say we had the dinner with this bread). It was quite delicious and not too hard to make. I can imagine countless variations. The most difficult part is that in the initial mixing it gets so sticky that you have to squeeze it in your hand to build up the gluten. Fun if you like making a mess.

I’ve made this spiral bread recipe a couple times lately, and since you get three loaves per recipe, I’ve actually made 5 “loaves” (one to go).

2 of the “loaves” have been pizza crusts. It’s great to have a pizza crust 20 minutes from being ready in the fridge. And it works pretty damn well for pizza…but I’m more interested in the bread.

It’s pretty simple–you make dough, roll it into a long rectangle, put stuff on top, then roll it up into a loaf. This one is herb bread: oregano, basil, fennel seeds and a little bit of sauted garlic. Parmesan works well too. You don’t really see the spiral unless you toast it. You should toast it though, because it looks cooler with the spiral marks.

One of the loaves was filled with honey and cinnamon. That was promising, but it needs some refining.

It’s supposed to be a good recipe for kaiser rolls too, so that’s what I’ll make with the last batch. If they are worth mentioning, I will report on them here.

I’ve been looking for something new to start baking and this seems like a good foundation. Eventually I will go back and try to conquer brownies, but for now, I will stick with something I understand a little better.

This is the part 2 of the Sister Cities performance. I lost the end as usual, but that’s what you get for using a caving camera to take video. Someone else was filming but I don’t know if I’ll ever see that video.

We had 17 people at this one and would have had 18 but for a bike accident (poor Tim)! Afterwards one of the organizers said she thought we were going to play 30 minutes. We’d have preferred to play more–getting all that momentum going in 15 minutes and then suddenly stopping is not ideal. But we were told we had 15 minutes and so that’s how long we played.

Check out the reflection of the Picasso in the background!

These are some of our teachers and the top Aissawa musicians in Meknes–the real best of the best.

Check it out, we’re playing in Daley Plaza. Our 15 minutes of fame is scheduled, but I have a hard time seeing how we can keep it that short…

June 17th, 5pm, Daley Plaza

Anyway, I think it’ll be great just to play for all the loopsters and to hear us bouncing off all the big buildings. I’ve heard the ghytta bouncing off the distant peaks of the atlas mountains, but never off the Smurfit-Stone building. (Note: I know that isn’t actually near Daley Plaza, but that is the name of an actual building in the loop.)