A Busy Week for the Boy = A Busy Week for the Faudie

Yes, Gentle Reader, I realize it's been a while since I posted, but that's life. A very busy life, in fact, and time's a' flyin'. Just a moment ago, we were barely into October and now Halloween's a week away. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, for you know what a Halloween lover I am. Time only flies when every moment of every day has been spoken for.

This blink-of-an-eye week focused a lot on the boy. He was on school holiday Monday and cheerfully--yes, Gentle Reader, cheerfully--helped me clean the house. I can't tell you how thrilled I am to have a kiddo who's thrilled by the idea of cleaning and who's keen to learn another chore. I taught him how to scrub sinks, bathtubs and bathtub walls. He had a ball. I have one less backache-inducing chore to do!

The Littlest Faudie
Tuesday and Wednesday are a blur, but Thursday proved to be quite memorable. After wrapping up his homework, the boy cheerfully helped me not only make him a loaf of bread for his lunch sandwiches, but he was very eager to try a new recipe--one of his choosing. After passing over some options I thought surely would appeal to him, he settled on one from Rathmell German's The Bread Machine Cookbook that let him do a lot of the measuring and let his 'ol mom do a little bit of experimenting.

Wheat Flake Bread3/4 C water
1 T butter
2 t brown sugar
1/4 t salt
1/3 C rolled wheat flakes
2/3 C whole wheat flour
1 C bread flour
2 t vital gluten (optional)
1 1/2 t yeast

1. Add the ingredients to the bread machine in the order recommended by the machine's manufacturer.
   
2. Select the Wheat or Basic cycle on the machine.
   
3. If available, select the crust color.
   
4. Press Start.

Yield: One one-pound loaf

Nutritional Info
I guess I should write Donna Rathmell German and request she revise and update her books into one handy volume that includes nutritional info. Of course, having all the recipes in one book might make some of them--maybe a lot of them--seem superfluous.

The Faudie's Futzings
Well, Gentle Reader, I finally did it: I used an artificial sweetener in a loaf of bread. It was....

Okay, it wasn't really anything. I wasn't racked with anxiety about the result, nor was I exhilarated by doing the deed at long last. But I wasn't disappointed either. I guess...well, I guess I really had no expectations. How very Buddhist of me.

"So what the hell is she talking about?" you ask, Gentle Reader? Allow me to satisfy your curiosity. In lieu of two teaspoons of brown sugar, I used one teaspoon of Splenda brown sugar blend. Okay, yes, I admit that the product isn't solely composed of the artificial sweetener: It does have some real brown sugar in it. But I've yet to find (and, truthfully, search for) information about how artificial sweeteners impact the action of yeast in bread-making, so perhaps using the Splenda brown sugar blend was a baby step in doing my own research and reaching my own conclusions.

The use of the artificial sweetener blend might be the reason why the loaf deflated slightly about 15 minutes before the baking cycle started. Before then, it had risen with a peak almost level with the top of the pan. Given the heft of the rolled wheat flakes, that's some fairly impressive rising--or at least it is to me. Maybe my expectations for the height to which bread can climb are too low.

When the husband and I cut off one end to sample the loaf, which had finished baking long after the boy's bedtime, we found it had the slightly nutty taste we've come to expect from whole wheat flour-containing baked goods. The presence of the wheat flakes added extra chewiness, and the husband put a dollop of crunchy peanut butter atop his morsel of crust and declared this bread was just the thing he'd been searching for to pair with said crunchy peanut butter.

I'm not sure if the artificial sweetener had a hand in this or not, but the entire crust was very light, crisp and melodious. "Melodious?" you ask incredulously, Gentle Reader? Yes, melodious--for lack of a better term. It's said that bakers in France know a good loaf from a bum loaf by the sound it makes when rubbed against another loaf. The sound I imagine a good loaf makes when rubbed against another is the sound the boy's loaf made when I lightly brushed my knuckles over it, back and forth and back and forth. Ahh, that's music to a carb lover's ears!

Strangely, the boy wasn't interested in trying his loaf at breakfast the following morning. Instead, he informed me, "I want it to be a surprise at lunch." Such an idea held little appeal to me since I knew the boy'd go hungry if he took a few bites and decided he didn't like the bread. Fortunately, that didn't happen. As he unpacked his lunchbox Friday, the boy happily reported he found the bread very tasty.

What? No 30-minute Delivery Guarantee?
Not only did the boy get to choose his own bread recipe Thursday, he had another special treat in store for that afternoon.

Unbeknownst to him but beknownst to me, my elder sister had sent the boy a Chicago-style pizza from her favorite pizza place as a reward for his stellar first report card. We'd thought it was to arrive Wednesday, which has now become Pizza Night--but that didn't happen because I didn't look at the delivery confirmation information closely enough. So I spent the better part of Thursday hovering near and listening for the doorbell that works only when it wants to, for I didn't want to the UPS dude to leave a pizza packed in dry ice just sitting on my doorstep.

I waited and waited. I picked up the boy from school and waited and waited.

The husband arrived home from the office, and I scooted off to take the bike ride I'd had to delay earlier because of the torrential rain.

Naturally, 10 minutes after I pedaled off, the box arrived.

I came home to the mouth-watering aroma of baking Chicago-style pizza. While the husband has had some snatched-from-the-jaws-of-defeat successes with making his own Chicago-style pizza, there was something a little different about one direct from Chicago baking happily in Lumpy.

Perhaps it was the presence of real pepperoni, not turkey pepperoni. Maybe it was the real cheese, not the fat-free stuff that's more chemical than dairy. Maybe it was the mounds of chunky tomato sauce, not the thin stuff we make here at Chez Boeckman-Walker. Whatever it was, that pizza was damn good.
And there's nothing better than teaching the boy about the joys of real, stringy cheese.

Well, There Is a Novelization
While the bread machine was doing its thing late Thursday afternoon, I had one more task on hand before I could slip off to take that nice bike ride into a steady headwind: I had to transform a khaki jacket with chocolate corduroy-lined collar into a Rebel Alliance flak jacket.

While I do know how to sew--badly, I might add, I'm not a fan of whipping out the sewing machine. Even Mum admits the Singer model I have (a gift from her) isn't a great one, and I knew already the collar was far too thick to be sewn as I needed using any of the sewing machine needles I had on hand. That's why I picked up some iron-on no-sew double-sided adhesive ribbon at Wally World earlier that day.

While I have an inner Martha Stewart when it comes to things culinary, I have no inner Martha Stewart when it comes to couture things. That's why I assumed going in that I'd royally fuck up, leaving the boy with a crudely altered jacket to wear to school on the one day he and his classmates were allowed to come dressed as a favorite literary character. (Like the header says, Empire Strikes Back has a novelization, so Bespin Luke is technically a literary character.)

But to my amazement, that didn't happen. The collar tucked down just the way I wanted and stayed in place just the way I wanted with the iron-on adhesive tape. The points of the collar folded in and stayed in place just the way I wanted. The boy ended up with a nice Mandarin collar, even if it wasn't the color of the collar on Luke's jacket.

Paired with yet another pair of little girl's boots I scored him from eBay and the belt we bought him last year for his Jedi costume, the boy made for a pretty respectable Bespin Luke when he trotted off to school Friday morning.