eat and be merry

I threw together and baked this honey cranberry spice bread earlier in the week. it's a version of the great recipe friend Amelia (not me--the other Amelia. she has a blog too.) and I tried last month.

making bread used to be a daunting task in my head. it seemed so fancy, so time-consuming, and so easy to mess up. who knows where I got that idea. I started by mastering pizza dough this summer, and now breads are no longer scary. the smell of flour is marvelous. the faint bubbling and frothing of the yeast is marvelous. feeling of dough in your hands is marvelous. baking has become a very popular way to procrastinate all those important graduate school readings.

this loaf looks better in real life. I'd invite you all for brunch if I could, and slice it up for toasting, with butter and homemade jam. only I haven't any homemade jam yet. I might get around to it with some of the apples I've got in my fridge drawer. by then the bread might be eaten, but oh well.

speaking of food: I've been fairly charmed by the guys behind Sorted, a semi-wacky, mostly-awesome, slightly-gimmicky, very random British cooking show/community/thing. I briefly skimmed through their quite extensive listings of cooking videos, thinking I'd choose one to embed here for fun, as a perfect example of the show's silliness-- but there are too many. they are all too bizarrely entertaining.

so here is the latest from a series they do for a totally separate youtube channel.

I want to try frying squash like that, one of these days. and I have plenty of pumpkin for soup. maybe I'll save the lasagna project for springtime and focus on soups for the rest of autumn.

the semester is stressful. stress only gets worse if you're hungry. thinking and reading and planning lessons isn't always the most delightful set of tasks ever. baking though? and food? those are extremely popular ways of procrastinating all those semi-important graduate school readings.