Bread Failure, etc.

Alas, I’ve had my first truly hideous bread failure. There are no pictures (the bread pictured to the side was a long-ago success). The bread needed to be thrown entirely away, along with Sadie, the sourdough starter. We’ll start again after the Christmas holidays, and will hopefully go another many years without seeing something like we saw this morning.

We had Rope Bacteria in an entire batch of bread.

Rope Bacteria happens when your bread is kept too warm after baking (thanks, yes, the heater is back on in the flat for the first time since October). If it doesn’t get a chance to cool down quickly enough, you can be providing the ideal environment for a truly nasty surprise.

The bread looked … well, raw in the middle. It wasn’t – the bacteria had eaten all of the gluten in the bread, leaving the middles completely soggy and disgusting. As Baking and Baking Science says, rope bacteria has the “odor of overripe cantalope.”

On another note, entirely, we’ve decided to switch feed readers. We’d been using Google Reader, and had been quite happy. Then … Google gave Reader an overhaul. This was not just a cosmetic touch-up, but a significant change to the way we do our blog reading (and some buggy annoyances like not being able to click on a post and have it tick over to “read” status). So – we exported our feeds out and uploaded them to Bloglines.

We’re still not used to it, of course, and haven’t really begun to scratch the surface of what we can do with Bloglines. But we’re enjoying it, and particularly enjoying reading back over the history of some of our favorite blogs (We’re talking about you, Kansas). Bloglines shows you all of the feed, rather than just the last 20 posts, so we’ve just finished reading over two or three years worth of some of our friends’ blogs, and having a great time. One other cool thing about Bloglines is the fact that you can tell it to sort older posts first. Yes, you can do this for Reader – one feed at a time – but Bloglines will let you do it globally. So, we get to read things chronologically by default! Yay!

7 days from now will find us packing, shutting things down, tidying up, and making sure that nothing in the house will be in a position to spoil … because we’ll be getting ready to get on a plane to go back to the sunshine. We’ll be in California through the Christmas Holiday! While we’re there, we have all manner of things to take care of (getting new visas and biometric ID cards for the UK, visiting T’s web developer). But … we also just have plans to do “nothing much” for quite some time. Perhaps we’ll do some baking (those with bread lust, I’ll give you lists of ingredients required, and you will be doing some of the labor). Perhaps some knitting. Generally, though, we’re just going to unwind from city life.

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