Farine

Crazy for Bread

Sliced in half!


Golden Gardens Park

A quick update:
The cast was really bothering me and I knew I would end up utterly exhausted if I had to live with it until the post-op appointment in two-and-a-half weeks. So we called the hospital on our way to the city yesterday morning and left a message. Since we hadn’t heard back by the time my daily cancer treatment was over and it seemed silly to drive home only to come back later, we decided to go straight there.
I explained to the receptionist how the weight and bulk were starting to hurt my shoulder and I couldn’t even use a sling because the thickest part was located under my armpit and pressing painfully against my chest whenever I tried to hold my arm against my body. She called a nurse.
A few minutes later we were ushered into the cast room.
There we waited and waited. Medical staff came and went, all very kind and understanding but in the absence of my surgeon, nobody seemed to be in a position to decide what to do.
A young nurse finally said she would fit me with a sling and make sure I knew how to use it. I pointed out that I had been using a sling from the day I broke my wrist to the day of the surgery and that a new one wouldn’t solve the bulge problem. She seemed at a loss for ideas.
I then mused aloud that the post-op cast-maker had most likely been a man since the necessity of leaving room for a breast had clearly not entered his mind (I had still been under sedation and never saw who did it). The nurse murmured that she didn’t know about that, but by that time all the female patients in the room were chuckling, nodding and sharing their opinions of men (rather disparaging, I am sorry to report, although they took great pain to exclude my husband whom they all agreed seemed very helpful), and the staff knew surrender was the only option.
The surgeon was contacted and next thing I knew someone was slicing below my elbow with what looked like a crazed pizza cutter. Oh! The relief…

Fremont Canal Park

I am including these two pictures of Seattle parks because I feel very lucky to be receiving medical care in a city where there are so many places to rest both one’s mind and a broken wrist…

Repaired!

Remember the open drawbridge in my last post? Well, I am happy to report that my wrist no longer looks like it, but rather like the stone bridge I once photographed in Southwestern France. Even stonier. They put a humongous cast on it, so heavy that I feel like I am wearing a statue’s hollow arm. I can barely drag it along (I wish I could set it on an arm-level wheeled platform and push it in front of me). The good news is that because  it keeps my arm up in a permanent salute, it does wonders to minimize swelling.
The surgeon didn’t have to do a bone graft but he put in two plates, including a very long one which will need to be surgically removed after two or three months. If they left it in, I wouldn’t be able to bend my wrist again. Ever.
I broached the subject of typing: yes, probably after they put in the permanent cast sometimes in early August. Photography? Sure, if I can operate the camera with one hand. Mixing dough? The surgeon laughed. He probably thought I was trying to be funny. When he saw I was serious, he said no way. Then he asked how much my camera weighed. His mouth formed an “O” when he heard. He said: rule of thumb, nothing heavier than a cup of coffee!
This summer is definitely marching to a different drummer…

Breaking news…

I broke my left wrist during a hike in the mountains last Sunday. From what the surgeon said during the pre-op visit, the break goes through the joint and looks pretty nasty. He even had me sign a consent form allowing him to harvest bone elsewhere on my body in case I require a bone graft! Surgery is scheduled for tomorrow. I have the x-rays but I don’t want to look at them. I prefer to think of the bones in my wrist snapping serenely back into place like the bridge that spans the ship canal in Seattle. That’s the image I will hold firmly in my mind as I go under.

A cast isn’t what I had in my mind for this summer, especially with several kids, grandkids and friends expected for nice long visits over the next few weeks. Plus it means I won’t be able to go back to bread-baking anytime soon. Bummer! I had just built a new levain and was looking forward to putting it to the test. If I still had ten fingers at my disposal, I would probably expand on the theme of life not being a long and quiet river but I find that pecking at the keyboard with one hand is not conducive to flights of inspiration. So you will be spared my disgruntled grumblings! That’s the silver lining…

Seriously though I am doing fine and I am already looking forward to having two arms again in a few weeks, probably by mid-September. The cast that will replace the post-op one next month might even allow me to use my fingers. Too bad the one I have on now doesn’t or I’d keep them tightly crossed!

Of bread and bridges: a baking weekend in San Antonio

The Bread Bakers Guild of America (BBGA) held another of its outstanding regional events this past weekend in San Antonio, Texas, and I was lucky enough to be able to attend it. The topic was “All About Ciabatta.” I already knew the instructor, Didier Rosada, for having taken a couple of memorable classes with him at the San Francisco Baking Institute, a few years back.
I had seen how simple mixtures of flour, salt, yeast and water morph under his care into voluptuously silky and bubbling organisms that almost seem to purr as they spring to life. I knew him for a natural born teacher whose knowledge of dough chemistry and physics and all things bread is encyclopedic.  I fondly remembered his sunny Southwestern-France accent and his easy laughter, not to mention his gift for languages (Didier switches effortlessly from English to French to Spanish and back) and I knew the class was going to be a unique experience. I wasn’t disappointed.
We did indeed learn all about ciabatta and made several different ones, using various preferments and methods. My two favorites were probably the poolish-based one with double hydration (the first one I will try to make when I get back home) and the power ciabatta (loaded with “good for you” nutrients) which we loosely shaped and baked into twists. I am usually not a huge fan of commercial yeast: I like the taste of levain, especially when it is both mild and complex but the class convinced that with proper pre-fermentation one can indeed make wondrously tasty breads using instant yeast. The Man’s pick was the breakfast ciabatta, also poolish-based and studded with dark chocolate chunks and pieces of candied orange peel. The formula includes eggs and butter, everything he loves and is supposed to eat only exceptionally. Luckily his birthday is right around the corner…

We had arrived one day early to take in the sights, mostly the Alamo, the cathedral, the Mexican market and the River Walk. Coming from 58°F and overcast skies in Seattle however, the 97°F Texas weather was a bit of a shock. We baked in more way than one all weekend and didn’t get to see or do all we had planned but we still fell under the spell of the city, its winding river and its many bridges.


Although we took back with us the best ciabattas of our lives, I am under no illusion that I will be able to emulate Didier’s talent anytime soon, if ever. But I’ll certainly do my best to apply what he taught us and share it on this blog. I just need to find out first how much time and energy I will have for baking and blogging once my treatment for breast cancer starts in earnest (we are still waiting for some test results), and get organized.

Didier’s next BBGA event is scheduled for this fall at the International Baking Industry Exposition in Las Vegas. It will be a lecture on Las Buenas Practicas de Panificación (The Best Practices of Bread Baking) and he will deliver it in Spanish, together with Juan Manuel Martinez, a talented and passionate artisan baker from Bogotá, Colombia, who taught a popular class at WheatStalk last year. Considering the growing number of Spanish-speakers employed in artisan bakeries across America, I suspect the event will be mobbed.
Didier and Juan Manuel have co-authored Pan, Sabor y Tradición, a bread book which will hopefully be soon translated into English and made available in this country, and together with Miguel Galdós, another master baker (or “bread boy” as they like to call themselves), he has founded El Club del Pan (The Bread Club). I especially like El Club del Pan’s videos. Such is the power of images that even non-Spanish speakers might find them instructive. Check them out and some of the magic may rub off onto your baking hands. I certainly hope it will onto mine!

Mother’s Day 2013

Mother’s Day is hard on all the families who ever lost a child, especially the twenty-six Sandy Hook families. No words can express their sorrow and the huge gaps in their lives where theirs kids should be.
As I have so many times over the years, today I am turning to my mother for comfort. She passed away in early 2010 and I like to think of her alive in another world fussing over our grandson. She never met him in real life (they lived an ocean apart and he was only three when she died) but she had been plied with pictures of him and his siblings since the day they were born and she was very familiar with their faces and antics.
We had bought her a digital photo frame and she had put it on a chest of drawers near her TV set. It was always on, even at night. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether she was watching a show or watching her family although pictures of her great-grandchildren always made her eyes shine in a way TV never did.

My dad took the top picture in 1948: my mom was 34. I took the bottom one in the summer of 2009: she was 95. In between the two, a lifetime of love. On this very difficult Mother’s Day, I draw my strength from my mother’s continuing and loving presence in my  heart. Merci, maman!