sunday's bread

a reason to spend time in the sunny kitchen this late winter afternoon.
baking some bread. finding nourishment in the time & outcome.

the oatmeal bread from the more-with-less cookbook.
a cookbook that is like a secret password, if you know what it is, then you know what it is to grow up eating with mennonites.

a good bread, with only a little sugar & butter, and this time I upped the whole wheat flour a bit. ever on my quest to make sure what we eat tastes good, but is healthy for us too.

now for the high-altitude part. keeping it from rising too fast. getting the oven real hot. wondering if it is done, even when it looks done.

when we first moved in, I had a hard time with the lime-green paint job done by a previous tenant. I had plans to paint.
i realize now how I've gotten used to it, along with this old adobe. it has become our cozy first home.

but it will be fun to find the next home. hopefully with more sunny rooms than just the kitchen.

sunday note

landscape, an adobe, an overturned car

not really kansas

grandma on a car, in the zinnias & with family

I learned recently that not only did my great-grandmother enjoy being a photographer, but that she & I share a birthday.

I know that her parents came from Tennessee. And I know that she never knew her own mother. She was said to be sad, and often anxious, she only had one child survive, so she adopted others. And she may have been happier in her second marriage than in her first.

She died when I was still a baby. I like to think she must have held me once or twice. I like to think that she wondered who I was going to be, or thought I looked a little like her own daughter as a baby.

But I don't know. I know that she liked taking pictures of her daughter. I know that she took a trip outside of Kansas once, and she put pictures of her trip into a little black-paged scrapbook. And visited a place with an adobe building. And from these pictures I can feel like I have a few moments of who she was.

sunday note

a view after dinner friday night.
our week ended with a few nights with d's folks, warm times in the bitter cold.

this morning a drive out to the trees & foothills, so see a maybe-place-to-rent. a cute place in the quiet country, but we have some questions yet before our hopes get too high & our rent goes up.

rolling out some peppernut/pfeffernusse dough, and it crumbled all to pieces. casualty of the dry high air. so now to try and make another batch.

this winter has given me a true appreciation of long underwear and wooly socks & sweaters.

in a week we'll be hosting a Faspa for friends.