White bread

This has zero to do with the topic, but you need a picture of my hippeastrum, my husband, and the cat who owns all

I was going to get up early on this MLK holiday to start a batch of bread, but then I stayed up to view the eclipse. I bundled up and walked out of the house at midnight in 15-degree windy weather to get to a place where some of the light pollution was ameliorated (about half a block away, but that's a long way away when the wind is howling). No pictures worth sharing, but I do have one really crummy iPhone shot as a souvenir. It was so cold that I wasn't willing to take the gloves off even for a minute.

(I learned something new: wrist warmers over gloves make the gloves at least three times warmer.)

So by the time I came in, thawed out, and had a snack it was 1:30 -- way, way past my bedtime. And I slept in.

But I had a hankering to do a batch of bread, just to keep my hand in as it were, and maybe to have grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato florentine soup for dinner along with, perhaps, a ham slice.

So I dragged out my old Farm Journal cookbook and the basic white-bread-iest white bread recipe in the world, and the dough is now in my wonderful 90-degree pilot-light-warmed oven on its first rise. As soon as I've had a brisk sit I will go clean up after myself and wash off the loaf pans, which have seen zero use for years.

In other news, I've worked a bit more on my Flower Show project. I have pages set up for all the exhibitors and the areas. Now for the image map, and I'm pretty much done until they start giving me content. The infrastructure will be ready for them.

EDITED TO ADD: The dough stayed floppy and sticky, even though I added a lot of extra flour; and the first rise was awfully slow. The second and third picked up a bit but I think I may have baked it prematurely. Actually, I was afraid that if I let it rise any more it would ooze over the tops of the loaf pans and down the sides.

The loaves looked a bit peculiar, but the bread made superlative grilled cheese sandwiches for us to have for dinner with our tomato florentine soup. I decided to save the ham slice for tomorrow, to have with mashed potato and a generic vegetable.