Big Boy Shoes

There’s something about wearing new shoes that makes you feel smarter, stand taller, salute the world with a confident smile.  Also if you’re learning to walk, hard-soled shoes give you a rigid platform to begin tottering around like the Star Trek cast when the ship was under attack and things were Going Wrong.  Number Two has been walking for a few months, but always behind a small pushcart or with his hands along the wall like Blind Pew.  With his new shoes this weekend he began taking steps on his own across the room, staggering from one parent to the other for congratulations and hugs before turning around and trying it again.  This made him so sure of his walking ability that he decided to stand up unaided in the bathtub, swaying precariously towards several unforgiving metal objects.  I realize I could be writing this about a very old man OR a toddler.  But enough about my thoughts on the matter, let’s ask Number Two if he likes his shoes:

 

 

Yes! Holes!

We all have our little victories and for me it’s getting holes in bread.  “Easy!” you say, “Just poke your finger in there!”  But were it that simple.  My recent problems with ciabatta led me to think my dough was too wet.  Think of this:  my dough was like pancake batter and when that runny wet batter hits a scalding hot baking stone the air bubbles flee to the top like cockroaches from a flashlight beam, then join together and inflate the bread into a pillow.  One big hole in bread isn’t good unless you’re making pita.

So I cranked up the oven to five hundred, made my dough a little less wet, and ended up with this:

Beautiful ciabatta with evenly dispersed bubbles, perfect for holding little ponds of herbed olive oil.  Here’s the really cool thing:  I poured this dough straight from the mixing bowl.  If you go over to the no-knead ciabatta page now you’ll see my updated directions.  I made a second loaf after this, proofed for an hour and flipped upside-down like the original directions dictated.  I found no difference in taste or structure, and the additional hassle of flipping runny dough upside-down means you have to bury it in flour, which doesn’t let the crust brown up well.  What’s the punchline?  You can make ciabatta just like this with no kneading and hardly any mixing.  Time does the work for you.  Please check out the new recipe and try it for yourself.  I promise it really works this time.

This weekend was about much more than bread, and I’ll get to that later in the week when I sort through the mountains of pictures.  In short, Toddler Harbat turned three and we spent two days cleaning, three hours taking pictures, and five seconds sitting down.  But we’ll cover that another day.

My final thought is on Anthropologie. No, it’s not a misspelling of the study of culture, it’s the clothing/home goods/lifestyle company whose catalogs may clog your mailbox.  I went into (was dragged by my wife) one of the stores a few years ago and quickly realized it was all about mood.  The store was made up like a Victorian-era conservatory that’s fallen into disrepair.  Leaves were scattered on the floor, glass cloches held decaying moss figures, and weathered wood what-nots lay jumbled in a corner.  I expected a young Miss Haversham to waft through the store in moth-eaten ballet slippers ($179) and a water-stained lace wedding veil ($480, limited-time offer) dropping dried flower petals and sighing.  The catalog is even more so—it’s a mood purveyor first, retailer second.  This time they’ve got mopey-looking stick figurines wandering the altiplano and horseback riding in stocky 1920s heels and complicated neck wraps.  The shoes pages showed the products scattered across a wet cobblestone street, with some of the shoes on their side in a puddle as if they just fell out the back of a truck.  Bravo, Anthropolgie!  Somehow you’ve made shoes depressing!

Picky or Discerning?

My whole life I’ve been particular about certain things, like footwear. 

In elementary school I lived for Field Day, a yearly mini-Olympics at our school that, with a limited number of participants and lots of events that meant you were almost guaranteed a ribbon as long as you retained basic control of your limbs.  Therefore I had a probably unrealistic sense of my own athletic accomplishment, and had a collection of colored ribbons in events ranging from long jump to 50-yard dash.  To gain a competitive edge I was convinced I needed better shoes.  Faster shoes.

Unarmed with any knowledge about running shoes, competition footwear, or surface/traction performance ratios, I became convinced I needed some sort of cleated shoe to sweep all the events at Field Day.  So I had my poor mother drag me to store after store looking for…what exactly?  Soccer and football cleats were too big, and I wouldn’t be able to wear them daily.  You see, a big part of winning Field Day is daily psychological domination of your competition by wearing your racing shoes IN CLASS!  I know we went to at least six stores.  Sometimes my mom would suggest, “How about these honey, they look fast?” 

“Umm…I’m not sure about that Velcro strap.  Let’s keep looking.”

To her credit, she didn’t push me out of a moving car or tell me just to buy the damn shoes and get over it.  Finally I found them:  white soccer shoes with black blazes on the sides and artificial turf cleats, little rubber nubs the size of pencil erasers, set in an aggressive grid in the sole.  Yes.  My domination of Field Day was so close I could feel those satin ribbons in my little third-grader fist.

I don’t remember what happened on Field Day.  I know I was fast, and skated across the playfield grass like Apollo himself.  Some kid who did [ugh!] organized sports probably won.  But those shoes were worth the search.  Picky?  No.  Discerning?  Absolutely.

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[cough cough]

Hey kids!  Here’s a tip:  when you’re feeling sick, don’t go out and exercise in cool weather.  What might’ve been a minor cold last week turned into an epic deep lung cough.  So…yeah, don’t do what I did.

However, we did manage this weekend to dig up some planter beds and begin a drip irrigation system.  That second part was my wife working while Toddler Harbat and I played in the dirt and shuffled around in the yard and coughed.  Much of the rest of the weekend I complained about how tired I was, then had Toddler Harbat climb on my head and roughhouse.  She’s very good at extreme shenanigans, which usually involve me sitting on the couch or lying down while she jumps on my abdomen, or tries to cave in my sternum with her forehead.

I did manage to carve out one hour for myself so I could rush out to the mall to buy some new shoes.  Alas, poor me, I have three pairs of shoes that have split across the sole so I can feel the pavement with my bare toes like a Flintstones car.  In my rush I bought a so-so pair of black dress shoes that turned out to have plastic soles.  And though they have a vaguely Italian name, they were made in China.  Now all I can think when I look down at my feet is, “Why am I wearing plastic Chinese shoes?”  Now that I have these shoes I need a shiny grey polyester suit and a fake Rolex and I’ll be ready to hit the karaoke bars.  Here’s a pic I took of my new shoes this morning on my way to work.

Plastic shoes

Okay, mine are a little better than that, but definitely less stylish.

 

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Genesis

No, not the plaintive band led by hair-loss champion Phil Collins.  I’m talking about the first loaf of bread I made, July 2008.  Hard to believe it’s only been a year.  I have remembered that I thought that was one of the best-looking loaves I’ve ever made, but always suspected time was casting a golden hue on my recollection.  Here’s the proof.

 

It’s even better than I remember it.  Take that, Father Time!  The crust is deeply browned, crackly, with a great ear.  I’ll be damned if I can go that well now, so I’ve been reading back over the original no-knead recipe to see how I did it.  And I’ve come to realize once again that time is the magic factor.  That first bread sat out overnight after a simple mix.  That’s like a 12-hour autolyse!  And it only gets kneaded for about 15 seconds, then one single proof and it’s into the crockpot in the oven.  Though I now scoff [haHAH] at cheating the flavor with beer and vinegar, I think the overnight room-temperature first proof is genius.  Plus the dough is like 80% hydration so it’s gonna make great structure.  Natch!

I could hardly go to sleep last night when I found these pictures.  It’s like finding the Ark of the Covenant on a freshman archaeology dig.  I’m determined to surpass that bread now, and my rustic recipe is going to get another rework, and the method will definitely change.  No guts, no glory.

Second story of the day:  my girl’s got curls.  Not sure whether it’s the humidity or some genetic marker that skipped a generation or four.  And no, to answer your question, one cannot resist playing with these curls.

If that isn’t enough, here are her new shoes.

It’s not a trick of the camera, they are that cute, and her foot is shaped like an elephant.  As Baby Harbat yells each time she sees the crowned, green-suited character of the eponymous books, “Babar!”

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