Patience is a Virtue

We're having to be patient here at the Three Cats Ranch. Smitty is trying to be patient with the crappy weather, but it's hard for little cats. It was bad enough having snow on the ground. As I'm writing this, freezing rain is falling. What's a cat to do, but spend his time working in the sewing room. Yesterday, he spent most of the day securing the finishing instructions for Wind in the Whiskers. Occasional readjustment of the cat makes it possible to actually read the instructions.

And who else is going to do this? Huh? Sadie is a total slacker...sleeping on the job, as usual.

My patience was tested all day yesterday and this morning while I waited for my bread dough. It's a sourdough cinnamon raisin bread dough, and I used my newly finished whole-wheat sourdough starter to make it. When it was all mixed up and ready for proofing, it looked like this. With a tablespoon of cinnamon and sweetened with some maple syrup, you can bet that it smelled wonderful.

It was supposed to rise for eight hours, and so I put it in my warming drawer.  The warming drawer is standing in for the proofing box that is off being repaired. I figured out that a heating pad set on low in the bottom of the warming drawer makes a nice environment for bread to rise. When the dough was mixed up, I got to work on Wind in the Whiskers.

Yesterday, I sewed the final two sections onto the bottom of the quilt.

Then I sewed the first border on. That took most of the day, and so when I left it at the end of the day, it looked like this.

Actually, it looked like this.

There he is...doing all the work...again. With the inner border sewn on, I was able finally to fuse down the coneflowers there on the left side.

The bread dough hadn't really done much by the time eight hours was up, and so I let it rise overnight. When I got up this morning, my patience had been rewarded. I'm realizing that with bread-baking, patience is a virtue. In my house, extreme patience is required. Everything seems to take twice as long as stated because of our cold weather. Even in the warm environment of the warming drawer, the ingredients still take their sweet time rising to the occasion. Sluggish yeast, maybe? Hard to say.

When I got up this morning, I didn't even wait to drink my first cup of coffee. With the dough ready to go, I shaped it and put it into one of the bannetons for another hour-long rise.

You can see the ridges of the cane basket there. If all goes well, the bread releases from the basket when it's flipped upside down. The dough goes into whatever baking vessel is appropriate. In this case, it was a Dutch oven, preheated to 500°F. It flipped into the Dutch oven just fine, except that it flopped over onto its side a little. The ridges only appear on one side of the loaf, but I was pretty happy when I took this out of the oven. It's the most beautiful loaf I've baked so far.

From there, patience got another workout because I had to wait one full hour to cut into it. In order to do something with my hands other than drum my fingers on the table top, I embroidered the first stitches onto the next Wine Country block.

When I was able to cut into the bread...oh, my, my. Is that gorgeous, or what?

And wow. Is it ever tasty! 

This is a recipe I found on the Breadtopia website. If you'd like to give it a try, you can find the recipe right here. You'd first have to make a whole wheat sourdough starter, and the instructions for that can be found right here. This is the starter made with whole-wheat flour and pineapple juice. It isn't hard...just do exactly as the instructions tell you, and you'll end up with a nice starter before the week is up. And then...the bread will be fantastic. He says in the video that the same technique can be used to make a white sourdough starter, and so I have one of those just getting under way as of yesterday. It's made from bread flour and pineapple juice. It isn't doing much yet, but I don't expect to see any bubbles until tomorrow or the next day.

For now, we're slowly being encased in ice. Icicles are forming under the eaves, and the world outside is turning into a crystalline fairyscape as we watch. 

Today my goals are to put the last border on Wind in the Whiskers, resist eating the entire loaf of bread, and if it stops raining, I'll strap on my Yaktrax and get outside to take some pictures.