It's been a very "exciting" few days here in Northern, Virginia. The DC area has been ground zero for the winter storm of the century, with back to back blizzards making this the snowiest winter on record for the Mid-Atlantic area.
The landscape around my house is... well snowpocalyptic, with giant drifts of snow overcoming fences, a totally collapsed roofed trellis in my neighbor's backyard, and a relentless wind whipping powder to white-out conditions. I have to admit, it's a little scary. I had to muscle my way through drifts against both of my front and back storm doors Wednesday morning, just to get them open. I haven't been near a grocery story since the first drubbing, but friends who have say it looks like something from a post-apocalyptic zombie film, with largely empty shelves and people running around grabbing anything edible they can gather into their arms.
If this keeps up, I might end up as one of the hungry horde anxious for food. I'm running low on supplies. I ran out of bread a few days ago (which took french toast, tuna sandwiches, and peanut butter and jelly off my menu). Last night, I'm sitting here thinking: Wait, I might be able to bake bread. I doubt I have all the ingredients, but I can check.
The available supplies were sad. I found one bag of flour that was impressively rancid, but then miraculously found another, in an airtight bag, that smelled okay (even though it was at least a year old). Then I found some yeast packets stuck to some sticky goo on the door of the fridge. Three years old. And some crystallized hunks of honey in a sad-looking plastic bear with his nose punched in. I dug out my old copy of the Tassajara Bread Book. Back in the day, in my communal youth, I knew the bread recipes in this book nearly by heart and did some mean baking for a hundred hungry hippies. I figured the bread would likely be a dense brick-like disaster, but it wouldn't hurt to try. I combined the flour, the yeast and warm water, the honey (after I'd dissolved it), and some oil. A bunch of kneading, rising, punching down, and more rising later, and I had high hopes for the two respectable loaves I was popping into the oven. As they baked, and I blogged, and the wind whistled around and under my sun-porch home office, the smell of the bread was indescribable. Maybe it was driven by the unusual sense of need, stuck here in my cottage on ice, or the fact that I hadn't baked bread in close to a decade (outside of a bread machine), but these loaves smelled amazing. If there's truth in wine, there's home-comfort in bread.
And as you can see from the above... crummy phonecam image, the results didn't look half bad, and tasted even better. I speak in the past tense because way too much of one loaf is already gone (I froze the other). Now I'm antsy to make something else with the limited provisions I have left. Tonight, looking through Tassajara, I realized I have everything I need to make cinnamon rolls. That'll be tomorrow night's cabin-fevered entertainment. So, grab a shovel, hop onto your snowmobile (snowboard for you, Goli) and come on over for sweet rolls! Please. It's getting really lonely here and the wind is creaking the snow-loaded roof of my house in a new and mildly unsettling way.
More:
- Did he say "cheesemakers?"
- My Dad's Bread (on CRAFT)
Makeda Stephenson in the Providence Fab Lab
