November 8, 2006

Recipe: No-Knead Bread (The comments in Red italics are mine)

Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery

Time: About 1. hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting Sometimes I sub in ½ cup whole wheat flour.

¼ teaspoon instant yeast

1 ½ teaspoons salt I use one heaping, so it’s probably a little less than this.

Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water I only use 1 ¼ cups of water. It is way, way too sticky with all that water! You can adjust for humidity a bit, but really, 1 ¼ works perfectly. What I do though is use 1 cup of room temp water and ¼ of boiling water or very hot water mixed together. This gives your yeast a bit more to run with. You could use warm tap water, but we don’t drink our tap water, so that’s why I don’t. and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Actually, with the lesser amount of water, the dough will form a nice ball that you might have to work together a little with your hands.

Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room

temperature, about 70 degrees. I set it on the hearth, near the wood stove and go the full 18 hours. If you make it around 9-10pm at night, you’ll have it ready to bake around 5-6pm which is nice for dinner. Our house gets very cold at night, but so far it hasn’t mattered at all.

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. You’ll be amazed by how much it’s changed. It’s now quite sticky and I just dump it out of the bowl onto a floured cutting board and let it slide out on its own. It looks like a mess, but actually it’s quite easy to fold it over a few times. You don’t have to knead it at all. 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. I had trouble with it sticking to the towel no matter how much cornmeal I used or what kind of towel, so now I just leave it on the cutting board that I dumped it onto and put a towel loosely over it. I then set this back on the hearth, but if the dishwasher’s running, above it is a good place for it too. 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 Make sure if your lid has a handle that it’s ovenproof up to 450 – the plastic ones on le creuset pans are, but I don’t know about any others) 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. Here on Gabriola, it seems like it really only needs another 5-10 minutes to brown after you take off the lid. I guess it’s the elevation. Cool on a rack.

This recipe is all the rage right now since it ran in the NY Times newspaper a while back. It’s so easy you can’t believe it. I’ve never been lucky making bread before and I’ve tried a lot, but this really is foolproof. The first time we made it, we put in all the water and it was a HUGE mess and it still turned out edible..

Yield: One 1.-pound loaf.

Copyright

I haven’t posted recently for a couple of reasons. The first is I love my picture of me and Buckeroo (that’s my deer’s new name as he’s the smallest of the three bucks who visit us, unless you count Nubby, who is still just a baby) and I like having it as the first thing on my blog. But the other reason is because I’ve been writing.

Anyone who writes has heard about patience, although most of us don’t have any. Here’s what I’ve learned in the last few days of the year…

Turns out all those agents, editors, writing teachers, critique partners, articles, books, etc. were right when they said you should let a manuscript sit for a while. And I don’t mean a week, either! Last June I sent my finished manuscript off to my agent (actually I finished it in March). We were starting with a different one, so this one has been sitting around doing nothing since then while I worked on other things. My agent told me recently that I should re-read it and brush it up some because she’s thinking about submitting it in the new year.

So I sat down with it and guess what? It doesn’t suck. It really doesn’t. It’s pretty good. Something I’m really proud of, actually. But either I’ve become a better writer (probably) or in the ten months since I’ve read it, I’ve gotten some distance from it and now I see how I can make it really good (definitely). I can see where it’s strong (it still makes me tear up in a spot or two) and I can see some extremely stilted dialogue that I’m pretty sure I thought was snappy ten months ago. So, while I really can’t commit myself to letting a manuscript languish around for ten months on a regular basis before I revise it one more time and send it to my agent, it does make me think I should give a manuscript 1-3 months. Can I do it? I think knowing what I do now from this experience, I have to.

The agent, Jennifer Jackson, wrote on her blog the other day that she is already getting queries from people who participated in NaNoWriMo (write a novel in a month), which was in November! At least I know I’m not that impatient.What about you? Are you quick to send things off the second they’re finished, or are you patient?

My thoughts…

I’m using WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL WORKBOOK to help me flesh out some of my characters on a revision I’m working on right now. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this workbook (and the regular book) and credit it with much of the improvements in my writing in the last two years.

  I also re-read I’D TELL YOU I LOVE YOU BUT THEN I’D HAVE TO KILL YOU by Ally Carter, even though I just read it about six months ago. I finally gave up waiting for the library to get the sequel and ordered a copy of my own, but I’d read this one so fast the first time, I’d forgotten most of it, so I wanted to read it before the sequel arrived. Interestingly enough, I think you could call it Carter’s “breakout novel” and it illustrates on every level what Maass is trying to teach in his book. An excellent choice on my part to read right now.

I also read a MG that I absolutely loved right up until the ending, which was pretty much legally impossible. It also rubbed me the wrong way culturally at the end, so it shall remain nameless. You can’t even write and ask me (Dori!) what it is because it’s a writer whose path I cross periodically and I just don’t want to get into it. The only reason I mention it at all is because I don’t want y’all to think I’m slacking on my reading.

This deer just let me feed him carrots right out of my hand! I know what it feels like to have a deer nibble my fingers. I love our new house!!!!!! Happy Holidays, everyone!

P.S. Quite by accident, I figured out how to post these pictures so if you click on them they get bigger. I’ve changed out a couple down the way, and in the future, I’ll post my personal pictures (as opposed to clipart) that way. Enjoy!

Read ‘em all since I last posted. Here is what I think of them..

Love is a Many Trousered Thing is the eighth book in the Georgia Nicolson Confessions series by Louise Rennison. Umm…well, it’s basically exactly like the others and is foremost about who should Georgia snog next. And it’s really funny. If you’re looking for substance, keep looking, but if you’re looking for more lightheartedness and crazy characters, this is the book for you. I have to say that because I lived in England, I can imagine exactly what Georgia’s village looks like, what the houses look like inside and out, etc. but I have to wonder if there are a whole bunch of American teenagers reading these books and in their mind’s eye they are seeing U.S. suburbia. Just a random thought…not that it makes much difference, but it would be an entirely different picture.

If We Kiss by Rachel Vail is another hit for me. I really don’t think Rachel Vail can do anything wrong though. There are some authors that inspire us and some that make us want to quit because, well, “Why bother?” I think that sometimes the ones closest to how we write, or want to write, often send us in the “Why bother?” direction. I have to admit Vail does this to me. It’s not so much that our styles are the same, but her plots could easily be ones that I would come up with for my own. Not that she’s written anything that I had an idea for exactly, they just resonate with me. If We Kiss is really one of my favorites of hers. It seems so honest.

Gentle’s Holler by Kerry Madden came to me because someone sent me to her blog and I read about it there. It’s set in the early sixties in rural NC, which is close to where I just moved from a few months ago. Traditional roots music and songwriting play a large part in the story, much like the manuscript I just finished writing too (although mine is contemporary and very different in style). In this lovely, lovely book, Madden paints a picture so vivid that anyone can see, hear, smell, and even taste it. I could only dream of writing that well. Do check this one out. I’ve got her next book on hold and can hardly wait to sink my teeth into it.

Sometimes, library books leave something to be desired. I don’t meant the actual story, I mean the book. Unless you are the first reader of a new copy, chances are, someone got hot sauce on page 94 and someone else’s long black hair is tucked in between chapter 4 & 5. There are copies that have clearly taken a bath, and worst of all, that unidentifiable something squished in between the pages can lead your imagination to places you really don’t want to go. However, occasionally, readers also take it upon themselves to “fix” things, like typos or…well, things that don’t sit well with them. For example…

Continued…

So, last night I was all stretched out on the couch in front of the fire, happily reading Rachel Vail’s, IF WE KISS, when I discovered a new kind of censorship. Apparently, if you don’t like something in a library book, you can just take a felt tip pen and cross it out. Yep. Someone did that.

The characters are getting ready for a Halloween party and it goes like this: Darlene wanted to come over before the party, too, so I said sure, despite the dreading that she’d be dressed as usual, as a prostitute.

Apparently, a previous reader did not think that it was appropriate for YA readers to read a word like prostitute, so said reader drew a thick, blue line through it. The stupid thing is, not only could you guess what she was going to say from the context, but you can still see the word if you hold the book up to the light. Way to go! You successfully brought to the attention of all future readers the exact word you objected to in the first place!

I object to characters referring to others as “tards” or “retards”, but I never thought to just black it out with a Sharpie! Silly me. Just look at all the opportunities I’ve wasted. I could’ve been telling all kinds of people, especially easily influenced teens, what to think and instead I’ve just been reading along enjoying the story.

What drives you crazy in library books?