Surprisingly, this is an extremely effective way of calming my very frayed nerves, since so much of my attention is diverted from what's happening in my shitty little internal universe and concentrated instead on the task at hand.
The only thing more effective than baking is swimming, but not having access to a lap pool presently, it is unfortunately not an option. Hilariously, the things that I love and find enriching on an existential level are off limits at this point only because the mental fog I'm in makes it well nigh impossible to focus very long on anything.
So instead I made a couple of baguettes from scratch with my hands since I'm poor and I have no mixer or bread hook (or baking stone). Bread still came out pretty good though. Scorched the hell out of the parchment paper which is problematic since I need it to bake apple pie cookies in a couple of weeks here and it doesn't seem to be able to withstand temperatures higher than 450 degrees longer than twenty minutes.
Pretty standard recipe. This is just bread flour, yeast, and salt.
Warm water.
Mixed everything together with my hands and a rubber spatula.
Makes your hands all old and stiff, as seen below.
Rolled it into a ball, rolled the ball in olive oil, let sit for an hour and a half.
Pushed the dough in a rectangle, folded each side of the rectangle into the center, pinched the sides and ends closed. Placed it seam side down on the cutting board, waited 30 minutes.
Whipped up some spread for the bread from stuff in the fridge. Tomatoes, onion, garlic, oregano, chives, salt and pepper.
Accidentally left the bread in the oven a little too long, but it wasn't burned. It came out very crispy, which was pleasant.
A nice bready texture!
And it was good.
Wait, so now it's like 5 months off the meds. How you feeling?
ReplyDeleteAbout the same. Working through the mental fog much better though.
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