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Showing posts with label baking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baking. Show all posts

Friday, February 23, 2018

Late February


I had the good fortune to be accepted into a study abroad program in college. It was more than twenty years ago, and through some miracle I found myself in Ireland, England, Scotland and then turned loose upon the European continent for six weeks. Having had the opportunity to see Germany and Ireland, Scotland and France, I now wonder more at the capacity to diminish travel accessories than the panacea of architecture, art and culinary experiences I missed out on.

I brought a portable CD player that only worked on level ground, needed two AA batteries for three hours of music and a carrying case with 40 compact discs, and if traveling with a few books was not enough, I bought more books from a Parisian bookstore called Gibert Jeune and carried them home to gather dust on a bookshelf for twenty years. Last summer I finally got around to reading one of them, and let me tell you Leo Tolstoy had it right, "We can know only that we know nothing..." but you can skip everything but the last fifty pages and it still makes sense.

I don't do a lot of fishing in the winter, and while I initially made efforts to ride my bicycle as frequently as possible, my winter cycling is woefully thin compared to many, many regular cyclists commuting throughout the winter in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. What I have noticed from previous mileage is the tendency for roadways to become narrower as the snow accumulates along the peripheries. Bicycle trails are well maintained however, so negotiating debris fields along certain stretches of roadway between moving traffic and parked cars seems unnecessary by comparison.

Last year's total mileage was about a third of where I was four years ago, I appreciate the fancy Velo Viewer infograph telling me I climbed Mount Everest once, but it is not as comforting as not having foot pain. As such I spend more time riding Metro Transit buses and trains, watching the consistent diaspora of bicycle styles between Minneapolis and Saint Paul. On the same day a casual observer will see skinny-tired steel frame single speed fixies with leather strapped pedals being ridden through the same snow, slush and ice as a person on a carbon fat bike with monolithic tires set to 9 psi. The benefit of there being ample snow means the cross country ski trails are more usable, where it is more likely to see a fat biker negotiating single track mountain bike trails than a rebuilt single speed.

Speaking of ample snow, it just snowed again and it sounds like it will snow some more before March. By April it might still be around, but hopefully the transition between road tires and studded tires will not include too many instances of the former on ice or the latter on asphalt. 


Early season skiing on man-made snow, Minneapolis . Photo by Michael McKinney


Finding the bike lane, Minneapolis. Photo by Michael McKinney

Art Shanty Projects on Lake Harriet, Minneapolis. Photo by Michael McKinney

2017 Velo Viewer Infograph, Michael McKinney

December Sunset, Saint Paul. Photo by Michael McKinney



Skiers racing along Nicollet Mall, February 2018. Photo by Michael McKinney



After finishing War and Peace around Mid-Summer, the remainder of my Goodreads Reading Challenge was mostly non-fiction books, with a couple of Tom Clancy and John Grisham books in there too.



Tight lines.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

November Update

Walter Donovan: Where are these missing pages? We must have them back!

Elsa Schneider: You're wasting your breath. He won't tell us, and he doesn't have to. It's pretty obvious where the pages are... He's given them to Marcus Brody.

Henry Jones Sr.: Marcus!? You didn't bring him along, did you? He's not up for the challenge.

Walter Donovan: Brody sticks out like a sore thumb. We'll find him!

Indiana Jones: The hell you will! He's got a two-day head start on you, which is more than he needs. Brody's got friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan. He speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom. He'll blend in, disappear, you'll never see him again. With any luck, he's got the Grail already.

[Cut to Marcus in İskenderun]

Marcus Brody: Does anyone here speak English? Or even Ancient Greek?

- Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade

That quote reminds me of It's a Wonderful Life, and the uncle who keeps a pet crow. The holidays are approaching, the weather has cooled off and fishing season has wound down for me. Three weeks ago the bail spring on my fishing reel broke, so I contacted Daiwa and their customer service department kindly forwarded me two new ones.

It took a little elbow grease but the new spring works, the reel is again functional and next year I'll hopefully get back to enjoying the distance from Minnehaha Falls to Lake Calhoun, which has formally had a name change to its original Dakota name, Mde Maka Ska.

As far as baking, biking and books goes, here are some recent efforts:
A couple loaves of bread from my Half Ass Kitchen;




My Goodreads reading list for the 2016 Reading Challenge; 



 

   


      2016 Reading Challenge
   
       

          2016 Reading Challenge
       
     

        Michael has
            completed his goal of reading
            40 books in
            2016!
     
     

       
hide

     
     

        44 of 40 (100%)
     
       

          view books
       
 



...a recent bike ride from Saint Paul to Lake Minnetonka, about 46 miles on a sunny afternoon;



Sometime over the summer I happened to see a number of beautiful sunsets over Lake Hiawatha, so I thought I would add a photo of that in here too.

Tight lines, rubber side down, don't forget the salt, adieu, ciao, whatever.

Happy holidays.

Lake Hiawatha Summer sunset 2016, Minneapolis. photo by Michael McKinney.

I apologize for the sloppy formatting and inaccessible hyper links.








Saturday, March 19, 2016

Baking update


Believe it or not, I have worked as baker. I did some time over the deep fat fryers you might find in fast food restaurants, dropping raised doughnuts in by the dozen, for hours at a time, day after day; I picked cake doughnuts off of a conveyor belt; admired the mechanizations of industry that made it possible to produce maximum quantities with minimum effort, mixed fifty pound bags of flour together by the ton before 8 AM and also once made a créme brûlée recipe with Tablespoons of sugar, rather than Teaspoons.

Hundreds of dozens of finished product, being carried out double doors, box by box, started at six in the morning, being escorted to urban businesses by vans and trucks...the sort of mass produced quality gas stations and hospital cafeterias are famous for, but there you have it. Four years of frying, sheeting, baking, cutting, mixing, picking, packing and watching the cake decorators painfully constructing magnificently complicated works of art, while I and three or four other bakers hammered out chocolate coated biscuits by the thousands.

Other experience, if you needed to know, came from three or four other bakeries, where I learned about cutting butter into scones, shaping boules, making croissants, the relevance of salt in bread, the amount of time it takes different flours to become active starters in a sourdough recipe and how to listen to bread to make sure it is done. It takes less time to blink though, to trace down a wealth of information on the internet. The thing I draw on more and more, is those days working over a fryer making the lowest common denominator, than the few months I spent in a kitchen making chocolate croissants from scratch.

So, if anybody I ever worked with reads this, thanks for the help. I'm no expert, as you probably recall.

Here are some pictures of the bread I have been baking lately, almost all made with honey, nuts and cranberries, high quality flour from my local Co-op and dry active yeast. I haven't tried making a sourdough recipe since 2009, a Thom Leonard recipe I found in Artisan Baking Across America by Maggie Glezer, which I highly recommend.



Nut and Berry bread, photo by michael McKinney

Cedar Lake Minneapolis balancing act, photo by Michael McKinney

Nut and Berry bread, photo by Michael McKinney

Nut and berry bread, photo by Michael McKinney



Thursday, January 21, 2016

Recapitulation, 2015

I didn't get much accomplished with the extra reading time I had sitting around with two broken bones in my foot, according to my 2015 books list on Goodreads...four or five of the books I didn't even finish.

Oh well. Adding to the gift of hindsight seems redundant, but according to a witty blog post I saw this morning on the bus, there are at least twenty words in foreign languages that do not occur in English that express a universal sentiment. The feeling expressed when two people make eye contact and both feel impelled to take action but do nothing; "Mamihlapinatapei", the pleasure of seeing your friend in pain; "Schadenfreude", for example. "L'espirit d'escalier" translates to "Staircase Wit" but it is a french expression for knowing exactly what to say after re-hashing an exchange subconsciously, perhaps humiliatingly, a thousand times.

I'm sure The Simpsons character Comic Book Guy would have a Klingon word to contribute to the Argschnaddle.

So 2015, in Book Breads and Bikes had less to do with baking, reading and getting around on my bicycle than accommodating a moderate injury that hampered my ability to pursue the healthy activities I have taken for granted since quitting smoking 15 years ago.

I did get a few good photos here and there of whatever Minnesota Nice Ride I happened to be riding and a few decent loaves of bread were produced in between limping to and from my three separate part time occupations.

I read a really good article about the extreme athlete Dean Potter, a Patagonia Sponsored rock climber, wing suit flyer and BASE jumper when he died. He did a lot of things I wouldn't try. High lining, wing suit flying, free solo climbing and BASE jumping seem pretty far beyond the reach of the average person, and thankfully, according to the New York Times article I read, the mentors have a nose for the unworthy.

The word that has stuck with me from that article was one that a French associate of Potters used to describe the appeal of BASE jumping, or wing suit flying; "Impuissance", which translates poorly to "impotence" but has more to do with powerlessness, ("It's More Like a Suicide Than a Sport" by Ed Caesar, The New York Times, 7-26-2013). This avid wing suit flyer likened the first few moments of free fall to powerlessness, an abject surrender to whatever preparations you have made, to your experience and your understanding of physics. Something gets lost in the translation.

A single specific favorite bike ride of 2015...probably one of many including a Minnesota NiceRide, a fishing pole and some intermittent success pursuing fish along Minnehaha Creek and the Minneapolis chain of lakes.

Willow River, WI. July 2015. Photo by Michael McKinney

Saint John's University Arboretum Stick House, February 2015. Photo by Michael McKinney.

Minnehaha Falls, February 2015. Photo by Michael McKinney.

Minneapolis Sunrise, May 2015. Photo by Michael McKinney

Pottery Greenware, St. Paul MN, April 2015

Rush river, WI, August 2015. Photo by Michael McKinney

Minnesota Nice Ride at Minnehaha Creek, Minneapolis, September 2015. Photo by Michael McKinney

Bread, Photo by Michael McKinney

Minnesota Nice Ride at Sunrise, Hamline Avenue Green Line Station, September 2015. Photo by Michael McKinney


Selfie at the Walker Sculpture Garden, December 2015.



Minnehaha Falls, December 2015.


Wells Fargo Tower, Minneapolis. December 2015.









Thursday, April 3, 2014

*Crickets Chirping*

I haven't written any blog posts here for awhile, I have been busy adding to a series of daily iPhone photos to my Flickr site, updating at Twitter, riding my bike and recording the routes with my Garmin 210 GPS, then uploading that data to MapMyRide, Strava and Garmin Connects...among other things, (reading, baking and still struggling with my drivetrain).

You might think it would be easy to sum up in a few hundred words a few blog posts to pass the days with, a favorite bike ride from last year, a particularly egregious set of circumstances precipitating an epiphany of some kind while riding, a typo in a novel that changed my opinion of that particular writer, (paging Harry Tuttle), even a few quick pictures of any bread I have successfully baked recently.

Instead, I come to this, the 81 digits of sudoku that have been directing my time for hours on end, every day, for years. I think I have not shared adequately, the amount of effort these things pull out of me, and so, I will open the vault and share a small set of photos, previously shared on Twitter with the hashtag, 30 Days of Sudoku.

That's all I got.
30 Days of Sudoku, November 2013.  Photo by Michael McKinney
30 Days of Sudoku, December 2013.  Photo by Michael McKinney.
30 Days of Sudoku, January 2014.  Photo by Michael McKinney.
30 Days of Sudoku, February 2014.  Photo by Michael McKinney.
30 Days of Sudoku, March 2014.  Photo by Michael McKinney.

Friday, December 6, 2013

Dig in and growl.

Photo by Michael McKinney

Photo by Michael McKinney

Photo by Michael McKinney

Photo by Michael McKinney

Photo by Michael McKinney

Photo by Michael McKinney

Photo by Michael McKinney

Photo by Michael McKinney
"...and every time you drive that ski forward in the track, you launch yourself out onto it, gliding until you compress your weight down on that kick zone, push that ski flat and kick out onto the next ski, driving that one parallel and gliding until you compress and kick that ski...like tiger claws, gripping into the snow and pulling you down the track...just think of tigers claws...gripping...kicking..."
- Jake Moody

Imagine a math teacher, standing in front of a ski team, raking his fingers through the air, climbing an invisible ladder to describe the physical act of compressing a Petex ski on snow and ice, utilizing a special soft wax for grip, and creating forward propulsion out of that glide, compression and kick - if you do it wrong, you slip, fall down and no matter how many times you re-wax those plastic bases, your ski will always be too slippery to gain any traction. 

I think about that speech every year when the snow and ice become omnipresent - a person can not get through their day without at least once slowing their gait, gingerly weighting their steps and re-balancing their progression on a sidewalk, a driveway or a parking lot.  On a bicycle, it is dangerous to whisk over those patches on road tires.  I've used cyclocross tires the past couple of years, riding occasionally through the winter, but always dreading the next patch of hard packed snow and ice, or just glare ice, waiting for my knobby tires.

Suomi Tyres are made in Finland, and I bought a pair with my Felt F75X, back in January of this year.  They work.  They work so well I'd like to gush about them.  Done...they're just that effective.

I completed another pottery course, and held my first official showing, with fantastic sales to friends and family - for Thanksgiving, I made some bread and tried making Belgian brownies, which had a lot of flour and were too long in the oven...they wound up closer to a bitter truffle than a scrumptious brownie,  Oh well. 

I am currently reading A Civil Action, about a TCE water contamination case in Woburn, MA, made into a movie starring John Travolta.  Lots of legal proceedings, broke lawyers driving Porsches with multiple credit card debts, bankruptcies and Leukemia. 

I did capture a few decent pictures the past week, and posted them on a couple social media feeds.  I hope not having them "daisy chained" is less frustrating for anybody interested in reading this blog and seeing the photos as dealing with another hacked account would be for me. 

Tight lines, Rubber side down, Ciao, Take care, Peace love and happiness, happy holidays.

(Adieu, adieu, to you and you and you.)