No, it’s not the name of a new bakery in town. What follows happened the night before last. Tuesday night I made my second sourdough. The dough was more hydrated than before, so it spread out when I got ready to put it in the oven. But God bless America, it came out nice.
There’s something about the peppering of blisters on sourdough crust that makes me feel like I really know how to make bread now. Not that it’s very hard to make bread, but sourdough adds an extra level of unpredictability. I’ve been crossing a rope bridge with handles when I used commercial yeast. With sourdough, I’m on a tightrope. Is my starter active enough? Will the rising time be long enough? This loaf had incredible oven spring and a nice thick crust. I’ll take pics of the inside tonight when I finally get to eat it. My only complaint is the poor scoring. This time I’ll attribute it to wet dough and a REALLY dull knife. I can’t keep my stainless knives sharp enough for scoring. So on my last trip to Starbucks, I stole helped myself to a handful of wooden stirrers. Now I just need some double-edged razor blades and I’ll be ready for the most painful Halloween treat ever! Ha ha, just kidding area moms! I’ll actually be making my own lames. So maybe my scoring won’t be so lame. Get it? GET IT?!! Aw, forget it.
Now on to the destruction. Last night in my dream, my wife and I were relaxing in bed. In a park in a big city. I was happy, relaxed, and watching planes form contrails up in the milky blue sky. Hmm, that’s odd. One of the contrails was twisty and warped. Then I saw the plane making it was tumbling through the air in a sick cartwheel. “Where’s the camera?!” I yelled. I found it and started shooting video as the plane began to fall from the sky. Zoomed in, I could see the panels of the plane were disintegrating, and it fell backwards, tail first in a flaming wreck just over a horizon of buildings. Silence for a second then a massive boom. The buildings themselves jumped up briefly then fell back in with a crash, steel structures akimbo. The city was a wreck, half construction-zone and half post-apocalyptic labyrinth. I tried to lead my wife and other family members across streets and through the tangled forest of collapsed buildings, but steel was falling, and cars raced out of the city inches away from us, escaping the plane crash disaster.
Then I got to start my morning with the Stage Five diaper blowout. See, things have a way of working themselves out! Wait, that’s not the right phrase. Maybe it’s, “What goes around comes…” No, that’s not it either.
Writer, architect, father, husband.