Another installment of everything you ever wanted to know about how Jen cooks bread! This recipe for French bread is a recipe that came in the booklet of the bread machine I received as a wedding present nearly nine years ago--the bread machine that is responsible for my love of baking homemade bread.

This bread tastes delightful, every time. Just what you want French bread to be--crispy on the outside, soft and light on the inside. I am not, however, especially skilled at shaping the dough into a baguette shape, so my bread normally tastes excellent but doesn't look that pretty. I've tried rolling the dough out flat and then rolling it up like a jelly roll, which I had been told was the way to do it, without great success. My current method is just to sort of stretch and pull and roll the lumps of dough into baguette-ish shape and hope for the best. If anyone has any tricks for dough-shaping, I'd be glad to hear them!



Here's the recipe, originally from the Welbit bread machine instruction manual, including some notes from me.

French Bread

1 2/3 cup water
2 1/2 tsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
5 cups flour
1 Tb yeast

Add ingredients, in the order listed, into a bread machine and set to "Dough" cycle. Go do something else for an hour and a half.

Come back, punch dough down and pull it out of the bread machine bucket. Set it on a lightly floured surface and let dough rest for 5 minutes (Note: I never let it rest, I just shape it immediately. I didn't remember that I was supposed to let it rest until I was typing the recipe out just now).

Divide dough into halves, form into a long rope and place in trough of a lightly greased, double trough baguette pan (maxiumum 3-inch wide trough) or on a lightly greased cookie sheet. (Note: I always use a cookie sheet and just lay the two loaves side by side, since I do not have any baguette pan, much less a double-trough one. Perhaps this is the problem with the shape of my finished baguettes).

Glaze each baguette with egg whites. Slash five times diagonally with a sharp knife. Place in a warm, draft-free spot to rise until doubled in size, about 45-60 minutes. (Note: This rising after shaping is where I run into problems with the shape of my baguettes, and now that I'm re-reading the fine print on this recipe for the first time in years I'm thinking it's because of my lack of a baguette pan. What happens to mine is that when it rises it tends to poof out and flatten a little bit, for a more oval loaf than a classic narrow French baguette look. If they were laying in a maximum 3-inch wide trough and not just on a cookie sheet, they'd probably stay narrow).

Glaze unslashed portions again with egg white. Bake in preheated oven at 400 F for 25-30 minutes, or until deep brown. (Note: if you glaze with egg whites, the crust will be a deeper brown, and shinier. I usually can't bring myself to waste an egg, because we go through eggs like crazy here, so I often glaze it with olive oil instead, for a lighter and less crunchy but very tasty crust).

Let cool on a wire rack before slicing.

Now, if you don't have a bread machine, my first advice is to try to get one, because they make bread-making so easy, and you can often find them for cheap at garage sales or craigslist. My second piece of advice is that if you have a KitchenAid or some other sturdy stand mixer, you can let it mix and knead the dough for you, and then just put it in a bowl and let it rise for probably an hour or so. My third piece of advice, if you're old fashioned and just like to do things by hand, is to just mix and then knead the dough ingredients by hand. You will have to knead the dough for quite a while, for probably 10 minutes or so, for a very smooth and stiff dough, and then put it in a bowl and let it rise for an hour or so. I've never done it by hand, but I'm sure it would work.

I have never had this recipe fail me. It is super-tasty and people will be impressed that you made French bread, even though it's really very easy. And if you figure out how to shape your dough so that it actually looks like a baguette (especially if you manage it without this mysterious baguette pan the recipe is talking about) then you have my permission to feel triumphant. And also you are ordered to share your secret with me!

If you like adorably retro aprons like this one, I'd advise you to head over to This Heavenly Life today. It's Sarah's one-year blog anniversary, and she's having a giveaway--an apron from Jessie Steele. So if you're interested, hop on over and tell her how much you like her blog, or her aprons, and maybe you'll win one!

Maybe one of these years I'll actually remember when it's my blog-iversary and do something for it. I may not give away prizes, but I always think that I will at least remember, and do a post that says: Hey look everyone! I've been blogging for such a long time! But I never do. Maybe 2010's my year. Keep reading till June (I forget what day I started, but I'm pretty sure it was in June. I know I was enormously pregnant at the time) and we'll see if I manage to remember this year.

I was not a in a sorority when I was in college, and I secretly (or maybe not so secretly) felt somewhat superior about this.

Most of my friends were in sororities, and while I thought that was fine for them, I knew it wasn't for me. I thought that friendships should just develop naturally, not be mass-produced by an outside group. And the fact that you had to pay money to join was particularly off-putting to me.

A year ago, though, I joined Mothers of Preschoolers--MOPS--a group that I have to admit, has some similarities to a sorority--except it's a sorority for moms.



Making friends when you're an adult is kind of hard. Especially when you're a stay at home mom, and you spend the majority of your days hanging out with toddlers. Even when you're a very busy mom, and you're out of the house going to storytime, playing at the playground, taking your kid to preschool--you'll see the same other parents at these places, over and over again, and you'll say hello and maybe introduce yourselves, but turning those moments of chit-chat into an actual friendship is hard. It takes boldness, and work, and time, and it doesn't happen with great frequency, in my experience.

Enter MOPS. It is admittedly, a manufactured environment for moms to connect in. A dozen moms don't generally just happen to find themselves all with babysitters for two hours on the same morning, nor do they usually have the time to arrange a location, a meeting time and food, plus some interesting speaker, activity, or topic to discuss. Those kinds of things take work. Commitment. An actual organization.

So that's why every two weeks I find myself sitting at a table drinking coffee with other women I didn't know at all two years ago. We all have at least one thing in common: we have kids about the same age. That gives a starting point for conversation, and from there it heads off in all directions. From my MOPS group has grown both a writing group and a book club. One MOPS friend is going to teach me how to compost, and another is going to teach me how to make jewelry. We swap babysitting and recipes and toys and clothes. A MOPS friend gave me tomato starts for my garden last spring; I have plans to run in a half-marathon with a different MOPS friend this spring.

I always walk away from MOPS feeling refreshed and uplifted; I love the connections that this group is bringing to my life.

And yes, I did have to pay dues to join (they weren't extravagant, and they're used for activities and childcare for the meetings). And no, this group of women I've met did not just sprout organically from the Oregon soil. There is a national organization plus a dedicated local leadership team who have decided: fostering friendships among women is valuable, and we're going to put work into it.

I'm okay with that. Friendship is worth it, no matter how you make it happen.

I am not a great runner. I am not a fast runner. But, I think it is safe to now call me a dedicated runner. Because I spent all day Saturday--all day--in the 20- and 30-degree weather, running a relay race with four men I'd never met before.

Now, it wasn't originally supposed to be me and four strangers. It was supposed to be me, my husband, and these three guys he used to work with. But at the last minute Eric had to be out of town on business. And--strangely enough--I wasn't able to convince any friends to spend their Saturday running 10 miles in the freezing cold. Don't they know how to have a good time? So instead Eric's replacement was yet another guy I'd never met.

These men were all pretty nice though. They were all engineers. If I may generalize a bit, after having been married to an engineer for eight years, I can say that your standard engineer is a loveable, mechanically-inclined mega-nerd. They love machines, computers, comic books, sci-fi, and spreadsheets. Engineers are very big on spreadsheets. This is why I wasn't really that surprised when, the day before the race, the team captain e-mailed me a spreadsheet.

He had titled it "crude estimates," but it was anything but crude. He had taken our self-reported 5k running times, coupled that information with how long the various legs of the relay were and who was assigned to which leg, and calculated out--down to the second--exactly how long each leg should take each runner to complete. So that, just in case I was curious, I could look at my spreadsheet and see that I was due to start my first leg at exactly 9:20:50 a.m. and complete it at 9:40:54 a.m. Good to know.

I was pretty nervous about the race. I'd never done a relay before, and I was afraid of a lot of things: that I would be incredibly slow and mess up the spreadsheet calculations; that something I ate wouldn't agree with me and I'd have to be dashing for a port-a-potty all day long (or worse, the side of the road); that the four engineers would not like me and it would be a long, awkward, silent day in the car whenever I wasn't running. However, I am happy to report that none of these fears came true.

Since this was a "sprint" relay, the legs were nice and short. My shortest leg was 1.8 miles, I believe, and my longest 2.6. When you know you've only got to go 1.8 miles, you can push yourself a little harder. It didn't hurt that it was in the low 20s when I started running, either--you could just whisper to yourself as you jogged along, "The faster I run, the sooner I can get back in the car." My toes were actually numb for awhile, but eventually all the running got the circulation going again. Plus, I really didn't want the guys to think I was a horrible slowpoke (some of them were pretty fast--like running a mile in under 7 minutes) so I did my best to push myself, and was able to run faster than I thought I would.

Also, the food thing didn't trip me up at all. I ate two Luna bars and a tangerine and drank some water over the course of the race, and that was it. I really wasn't hungry at all and I didn't get all crampy or anything. I was suddenly, intensely hungry once the race was over. We were driving back from Eugene to Albany and I saw the big glowing sign for the Pioneer Villa and I wanted a hamburger sooooo bad...but during the race I was fine.

And, I needn't have worried about getting along with the four sweaty guys I was riding with. They were nice, and we found things to talk about...and when we did lapse into silence, I think it was mostly just because A) they are guys, and most guys don't feel the need to chatter incessantly; and B) we had been running all day. We were all really tired.

At the end of the day, our team ("Army of Darkness"--I didn't pick the name, someone else did; I told you engineers like sci-fi) came in 15th out of 25 teams. We ran the 50-mile course in 6 hours, 58 minutes, and our average per-mile pace was 8:04. I was pretty impressed with that, but there were teams who were much more amazing than that--the winners did it with a 5:21 per-mile pace! Oh, and the down-to-the-second "crude estimates" spreadsheet? We were within two minutes of the finish time the team captain calculated. Pretty impressive. If ever you need a handy-dandy spreadsheet, just ask an engineer.

So would I do the Civil War Relay again? Yes, I definitely would. But next year I'm going to be looking for at least one other girl with the guts to run with me. And some temperatures that are above 40 would be nice. Maybe 50 degrees, sunny, no wind or rain. In Oregon. In December. Anything's possible, right? Check back next year to see if that happens.

The first night the neighbors put their Christmas lights up

Out of the darkness, a gleaming surprise
Lights mirror the glow in my daughters’ eyes


You can read more couplets from Perfectly Poetical participants at The Little Stuff of Life.

Beth, coming up to me while I'm folding laundry: Mom, you are going to be our queen.

Me, continuing to fold: Oh, sure. Thanks.

Lucy: Because we need a queen and we couldn't find anyone else.

Me: OK.

Lucy: So you need a dress.

Me: Oh, well, I'm not going to go change my clothes right now. Maybe I'm just a queen who is dressed like a common person today.

Beth, eyeing my jeans and T-shirt critically, then nodding: Yes. There are bad people after you, so you have to be hidden. So that's why you are dressed like a maid, and that's why you are doing a maid's job. So you don't get caught.

And I continue folding laundry, now with new purpose. I knew I was doing this for a good reason.

1.Proof that I am in some ways a different person than I was 10 years ago, before I started dating the man who would become my husband: last night I watched an entire football game, all by myself, and I was really into it.

Now, granted, it was the Civil War game (for you non Northwesterners, that's the annual match-up between rivals Oregon State and University of Oregon), and this year the winner got to go to the Rose Bowl (That's a really big deal).



I grew up aware of football, to be sure; my dad loves it. But I never undrstood it at all, not even a little bit, until Eric explained it to me. The Beavers are the only team I follow, and I am by no means a rabid fan--but still. The fact that I chose of my own accord to spend an evening watching football--well, that's saying something. As for the actual outcome of the game...when Beth woke up in the morning and I told her the results, she cried, "But I didn't WANT the Ducks to win!" None of us did, sweetie. But we survive.

2. And in a nice segue, here comes topic No. 2. This one will give you complete proof that I am crazy, in case you were wondering: I agreed to run in the Civil War relay, which is a race held every year on the weekend of the Oregon State/University of Oregon football game. This year the route runs from Albany to Eugene, starting at Linn-Benton Community College and ending at Autzen stadium.



It's a relay, so it's divided into legs, of course, and each leg is not too long; my longest leg is only 2.6 miles, I think. But I have to run five legs, for a total of 10 and a half miles. In what's supposed to be 30-degree weather. Gosh, this is going to be SO MUCH FUN, right? So if you happen to be driving on Seven Mile Lane, or through Brownsville, or on Gap Road or Coburg Road tomorrow, and you see an exhausted woman trudging along through the frosty air, smile and wave from the happiness of your warm car. I'll nod and wave and try not to curse out loud.

3. Speaking of running, I've never done a relay before, and it's pretty much an all-day running event. Usually I don't ever eat before a long run, or during one. But there's no way I'm going to be able to go from 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. without food. Do any runners out there read my blog? What should I eat that's not going to make me sick to my stomach while I run?

4. Can you tell I'm kind of nervous about this race thing?

5. Let's move on to happier topics: food. I made this butternut squash pasta sauce recipe from Simply Recipes today and it was divine. The butternut-cheese sauce was so yummy, I seriously think that if you made your puree thick enough, it would be tasty enough to eat on bread or crackers, like pesto or hummus. Delicious.

The only flaw in this recipe is that it does not give you an actual amount of pureed squash to use. It just says to start with a 2.5 pound squash. Well, I didn't weigh my squash before I roasted it. But it was quite large--I got it from my friend Rebekah; apparently they grow hearty squash out on their farm. I used about two cups of the puree I got from it, and I still have tons of puree left. But two cups worked well for this recipe. I must say, as I eyed all that bright orange pureed squash, I had flashbacks to the days of making baby food for my kiddos. Oh my gosh, I just dumped baby food into this nice sauce! But rest assured, it did not taste like baby food. It was good.

Oh, and also: I used onions rather than shallots, milk plus a little melted butter instead of cream, Swiss rather than Parmesan cheese (because I ate up all my fresh Parmesan because I love it so), and dried rather than fresh parsley. Does that still count as the same recipe? I think so.

6. Speaking of baby food, let's move on to topic six: babies. My husband sent me a link to what looks like a really cool documentary: "Babies: The Movie." It follows the first year in the lives of four babies, one born in the U.S., one in Japan, one in Mongolia, and one in Namibia.

Here's the trailer. Watch it. It looked really intriguing, and also sort of made me want to cry. Does that sound like a recommendation? Because it was meant to be.



7. Moving from movies to music (I'm all about the segues today), I was reminded by Jennifer and Heather this week that you can get FREE Christmas music from Amazon and iTunes at this time of year. My favorite new download so far? "Why can't it be Christmastime all year?" by Rosie Thomas. I'd never even heard of Rosie Thomas before, but I'm really digging her mellow voice and this upbeat, dancey Christmas song.

Have a good weekend, everyone. More quick takes for your enjoyment, here.

Autumn



The leaves are falling, falling as if from afar,

as if withered in the distant gardens of heaven;

with nay-saying gestures they fall.



And in the nights falls the heavy earth

from all the stars into loneliness.



We all are falling. This hand there falls.

And look at the other: it is in all of them.



And yet there is one, who holds all this

falling with infinite gentleness in his hands.




--by Rainer Maria Rilke



I am so grateful; where would we be, all of us lonely falling souls, without an infinitely gentle hand to hold us?

Forgive me for falling back on Rilke again, but I never cease to find his poetry beautiful and thought-provoking. Makes me wish I knew German so I could read it in the original. I hope you enjoy it too.

You, neighbor God, if sometimes in the night

I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so

only because I seldom hear you breathe;

I know: you are alone.

And should you need a drink, no one is there

to reach it to you, groping in the dark.

Always I hearken. Give but a small sign.

I am quite near.

Between us there is but a narrow wall,

and by sheer chance; for it would take

merely a call from your lips or from mine

to break it down,

and that without a sound.



The wall is built of your images.



They stand before you hiding you like names,

and when the light within me blazes high

that in my inmost soul I know you by,

the radiance is squandered on their frames.


And then my senses, which too soon grow lame,

exiled from you, must go their homeless ways.



--Rainer Maria Rilke

I especially like the idea here that it is our very images of God--our own human conceptions of him--that limit our understanding of all he really is.