A Stormy Monday

Above is a picture of my linen drawer. I somehow amassed quite a collection of kitchen linens, but I love using them so much that I really appreciate having so many. After having learned about the bacteria that like to live in sponges, I decided not to use any in my kitchen. Instead I have a large collection of dishcloths that you can see in the bottom right hand corner of the drawer. Each day I get out a new one to use for the day. At the end of the day the dirty cloth gets hung up on the oven door to dry over night. Then, in the morning, I toss it into the kitchen laundry pile. To the left of the dishcloths are the dish towels. I use a fresh one or two each day - just like the dishcloths. In the back left corner go the cleaning rags that I use for cleaning pretty much everything around the house. And in the back right corner are my aprons. Someday I hope I can find somewhere to hang them up but for now they do very well in the drawer.

Today the weather was very rainy and windy. It was a perfect day to stay inside and get things done. I didn't make it quite all the way through my to do list, but I got pretty close. Here are some notes about the list I posted earlier:

1. I did catch up with my email. It took me much longer than I had expected. But I suppose that is natural considering I had completely neglected it all of last week.

2. My loaf of bread is in the oven and should be out within a half hour. It smells good so hopefully it will taste good as well. (see photos of the process below)

3. I did gather a little bit of info about the California Use Tax. Namely, I figured out that we didn't pay sales tax for items we purchased from Amazon. Tomorrow I hope to go through our records and find out how much we spent last year through online vendors. That should be fun...

4. Yay. I washed, dried, folded, and put away all of the linens.

5. Sadly, the bathroom did not get cleaned. That will have to happen tomorrow.

6. I did plan menus for tonight, tomorrow, and Wednesday. I learned part way through the day that we will have 3 guests for dinner tomorrow and that one is a vegan. That made menu planning a little more challenging, but Epicurious came through as always. We will also have guests for dinner on Wednesday so I planned out that menu as well.

7. I didn't make it to the store. I'll have to head out early tomorrow morning. I suppose that will be a good thing though since the ingredients for tomorrow's dinner will be even fresher.

One thing I did that I hadn't planned on was updating our monthly calendar. I try to do it around the first of each month. Below is a picture of our calendar area. We have a large whiteboard calendar that I update each month. To the left of the main calendar is a monthly birthday/anniversary calendar which reminds me to send cards to our friends and relatives. To the right of the main calendar is our paper calendar which I keep on the next month that is coming up so that it is easy to write down any dates we need to keep track of for following month. At the end of each month I go back and mark down any additions to the previous month that haven't yet been recorded in the paper calendar that way I can look back at our paper calendars from each year and remember all of the things we did on the days we did them. Our main calendar is now updated for March 2009!

Below are some pictures of my bread making experience today. I followed the recipe for the Learning Loaf in "The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book" which our friend Maud had gave me a couple of weeks ago.

In the above picture I flattened out the bread to get ready to shape it into a ball for its first rise.

Above is the sphere of dough, ready for its first rise.

Above is the loaf after its third rise, in the pan, in the oven - ready to start baking!

Above is the finished loaf. It turned out very well!

We ate a few slices with dinner and they were great! It has been quite awhile since I made a 100% whole wheat bread but this turned out so well that I hope to make it several times a month!

And now, we are off to see "Our Vines Have Tender Grapes" at The Stanford Theater.

~ElizabethRose