RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

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Long ago, I conceived of dovate.com as a platform for my photography. As time went on I added writing. As the hard-coded site became more cumbersome and difficult to maintain, I begrudgingly installed “blog” software.

Complaining about the idea of blogs on your own blog is kind of like complaining about the brutality of hunting while eating a big mac… but still. It’s taken a long time for me to come to terms with the fact that yes, this is a blog.

Recently I had a conversation about this dilemma with Brad over at phillyskyline.com. Brad’s site is still in a hard-coded state, but will have to move to some MySQL based, RSS enabled, permalink having, comment-friendly format if it wants to survive under the weight of its own swelling archives.

But even if it makes sense, going blog is a hard move. First off, it’s a stupid word. Blog. Secondly, it’s conceited and self-important. Why would anyone want to read about me or you or anyone else? Why would I want to tell you? I mean seriously, who are you?

All in all, that’s why I write about things like octogenarians flashing their implants, crazy search hits or human neoteny: the theory that human evolution was driven in part by the retention – into adulthood – of juvenile traits in some early hominid species.

You see none of these things is about me personally. I have no emoticon mood indicators. I hardly mention politics. I rarely talk about music or movies or love or fear as they relate to my subjective experience. And I never post recipes.

I talked with Brad about the recipe thing. For him it’s not as big a deal, but for me it’s a bellwether. Recipe posting is one small step away from looking at myself in the mirror just to remind myself how beautiful I am. I love to cook, I love to share food. Sharing food here though? I’m just not comfortable with all that. It’s sort of weird and I don’t exactly know why.

But anyway, what was I talking about?

I was at a superbowl party the other night when conversation turned to the no-knead bread made so popular by a recent New York Times article. Although I didn’t bring it up, I had just days before made a variation of the bread from a recipe I saw in Cooks Illustrated. In the CI version, less water is added. To prevent the texture from deteriorating as a result, about a minutes worth of kneading is required. Why only a minute? Because between making the dough and kneading the dough 8-18 hours is required. Letting the dough sit this long allows autolysis to occur without kneading.

To add flavor a little lager and some white vinegar is used in place of a starter. (use only a lager, I of course used ‘lager’) The bread is then baked in a preheated dutch oven. I made my second loaf on Sunday/Monday and it tasted even better than it looked:

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…and for a special surprise, click on the first picture.

beh.