Please visit my new home at annkroeker.com.

Here at the Food on Fridays carnival, any post remotely related to food is welcome—though we love to try new dishes, your post doesn’t have to be a recipe. If you want to talk about the hunk of organic eggplant that lodged between your teeth, that’s great. Posts like that are as welcome as menus and recipes.

When your Food on Fridays contribution is ready, just grab the broccoli button (the big one above or smaller option at the bottom) to paste at the top of your post. It ties us together visually.

Here’s a Mr. Linky tutorial:

Write up a post, publish, then return here and click on Mr. Linky below. A screen will pop up where you can type in your blog name and paste in the url to your own Food on Fridays post (give us the exact link to your Food on Fridays page, not just the link to your blog).

You can also visit other people’s posts by clicking on Mr. Linky and then clicking participants’ names–you should be taken straight to their posts.

Please note: I’ll do my best to update this post by hand. In the meantime, please click on the Mister Linky logo to view the complete list.

Food on Fridays Participants

Food on Fridays with Ann

Charity and I, along with an organic farmer we’re getting to know, decided to put together an Organic Evening. The idea was that we would pitch in a variety of organically prepared dishes, eat together, watch a documentary, talk about it, and pray together about any next steps we felt led or inspired to take.

Charity is already committed to eating organically and the farmer is already growing organic food, so I guess we Kroekers are the most transitional, working toward a more organic diet little by little.

I said I would make homemade bread for the gathering. After I announced that as my menu contribution, I kept thinking I should try to make it as organic as possible, so I decided to head over to Whole Foods in search of organic flour. But before I went shopping, I dreamed a little bigger.

My friend Sonya grinds her own wheat berries and regularly bakes fresh bread for her family. Maybe I could buy some organic wheat berries and have Sonya grind them for me? But Sonya was out of town. I’ve often considered investing in one of those little hand-cranked mills, but there wasn’t time to order one before Organic Evening.

All those thoughts were flitting through my mind on the weekend, when our family went over to a friend’s house. She asked me what I liked to make, and I said that lately I’d been baking some homemade bread.

“I used to make homemade bread all the time,” she said. “I even ground my own flour, believe it or not.”

“No kidding?” I exclaimed. “I was just thinking about that! My friend Sonya grinds hers all the time in an electric mill.”

“We just used a hand mill,” she said.

“I’ve been thinking about ordering one of those,” I said.

“I’ve still got mine. We haven’t used it in years. You want to borrow it?”

And just like that, she reached up into a cabinet, pulled out a little hand mill and handed it to me!

Delighted, I stopped by Whole Foods as soon as we left my friend’s house. The store had organic wheat berries in the bulk foods section.

We bought hard red winter wheat berries:

And, hm, I think these were hard white wheat:

We came home and ground them; well, to be honest, my youngest daughter ground them.

I made a sample loaf, to be sure it would turn out okay.

Mmmm…my family will attest that it turned out just fine.

Then we ground enough for two more Organic Evening loaves. My husband and daughter ground and ground without complaint.

Thanks to their assiduous labor, we ate super-healthy organic whole wheat bread on Organic Evening.

After we sat down and filled our plates, I quickly grabbed a camera, looking for a plate with the best sampling of our menu. The farmer had the most:

• a slice of pizza topped with organically grown eggplant and yellow squash;
  
• a slice of organically grown heirloom tomato topped with a basil leaf and circle of mozzarella;
  
• a slice of Charity’s ‘Mater Pie (visit her site Friday for the recipe);
  
• and one slice of homemade, hand-milled, organic whole wheat bread.

With so much of my focus on freshly ground flour, I forgot to check on the status of butter. We had one tiny scrap left that we rationed out. You’ll see that the farmer ate his slice plain. I did eventually think to bring out some raw honey, which served as a sweet substitute to spread on it.

By the time we finished the food—which included a dessert of rich, chocolate-y zucchini cupcakes that Charity brought—and wound down our conversation, it was too late to start the documentary. So we split up the leftovers and called it a night.

Organic Evening didn’t turn out quite the way I expected, but the company was delightful and the food was delicious.

Next week, all new material will be published on a
self-hosted annkroeker.com.

We have a tribute CD that includes “Awesome God,” “Hold Me, Jesus,” and “Elijah,” among others, and my son has been playing it nonstop. In fact, the first thing he does upon waking up is flip on the stereo and press play to start off the day with “Awesome God.” He loves that particular song so much, he’ll often stop the CD somewhere in the middle of another song and restart the whole thing to hear “Awesome God” yet again. I didn’t keep an exact count, but a couple of days ago I’m sure we heard just that one song at least 15 times in a row. The girls get a little tired of it, but I honestly don’t mind.

Today my son woke up, came downstairs, walked straight to the entertainment center and clicked “play.” This time, however, after “Awesome God” was over, he let it continue deeper into the CD.

I was working in the kitchen and started thinking about Rich and his tragic death. Then “Elijah” came on. I listened to the lyrics and wondered how hard it must have been for Gary Chapman to sing it knowing Rich was gone.

Then I remembered the day I met Rich Mullins in a tiny church in a tiny town in southern Indiana.

My roommate Patty invited several friends to join her for the concert. We drove about 20 minutes or so from our university town to Ellettsville, Indiana, where he played a gigantic grand piano that filled what seemed like at least one-fourth of the small-town church. I vaguely recall someone saying it was brought in especially for the concert, and that would have been easy to believe. It didn’t feel like a grand piano kind of church.

Of the music he played that day, I remember most clearly his rendition of “Sing Your Praise to the Lord.” Amy Grant made it famous (this may be the version you remember), but Rich Mullins wrote it.

Here’s Rich performing it years after the Ellettsville concert (this is a little understated compared to his rendition that night I heard him, when he overflowed more energy and passion):

The reason the Ellettsville concert—and my attendance—took place…was a girl. I can’t remember her name, but she was a friend of Patty’s in whom Rich was romantically interested. I just read the Wikipedia page for Rich and saw this quote:

Mullins was engaged sometime between the late ’70’s and early ’80’s and had written the song “Doubly Good To You” (recorded by Amy Grant on her album “Straight Ahead”) for the wedding. However, his fiancée broke off the engagement, at which time Mullins wrote “Damascus Road.”

Was she the fiancee? Was he trying to reconnect with her and woo her back? I don’t know, but the timing would be about right. And she did seem uncomfortable. I don’t think she smiled the entire evening, but I could be wrong. It was a long time ago—probably 1987—and I may not have been paying much attention to anyone other than Rich.

After the concert, Rich was eager to talk with the girl. And the girl was with us. After he signed autographs and thanked people who came, the place cleared out and he came over to our group. We all stood around chatting with Rich Mullins.

I was an enthusiastic young believer at the time and beside myself with joy to be standing next to Rich Mullins. When we finally wrapped things up and said our goodbyes, I spontaneously leaped forward and hugged him.

I hugged Rich Mullins.

As hugs go, it could have been a bit overwhelming, because at that point in my life I didn’t give space-respecting sideways hugs. I affectionately wrapped my arms around people and squeezed tightly.

I saw him in concert several years later, but didn’t hug him. Not that time. It was only that once. And if he remembered me from that Ellettsville encounter (he probably didn’t, because he was definitely focused on Patty’s friend; but it’s remotely possible), he may have purposefully maneuvered himself around the building to avoid me.

I only hugged Rich; I didn’t really know him at all, no more or less than any of us who have appreciated his music and the heart and soul and humor and humility behind his work.

But today, listening to “Elijah” and the other songs, I felt a pang of Rich-Mullins-loss.

So today, I listened to “Creed,” which expresses the core beliefs that he and I share while I stand on this side of the Jordan and he dances on the other:

“I believe in the resurrection/I believe in a life that never ends.”

Will we give big squeezy hugs in heaven?

While sorting books, I came across Debra Bell‘s The Ultimate Guide to Homeschooling.

The following section, taken from page 23, fascinates me:

Care to hazard a guess as to the sources of each of these vocabulary lists?

LIST 1

• aggression
• divergent
• prestigious
• bizarre
• cogent
• propagate
• ambiguous
• exonerated

LIST 2

• inimitable
• epistolary
• assailed
• invidious
• assiduous
• appendages
• sagacity
• pecuniary

SOURCES:

List 1: SAT I (revised) Practice Test

List 2: Fourth-grade McGuffey Reader, in use during the late 1800s (after compulsory education was mandated). An 1897 fifth-grade reader we purchased at a library sale includes the same literary selections I studied in my undergraduate American literature courses. (Bell 23)

I showed the lists to my 12-year-old daughter. She read them both and chuckled.

“I told you not to read the sources,” I said.

“I didn’t,” she assured me. “I just thought it was interesting how much harder the words were on List 2 than on List 1.”

I pointed at the sources. “Check it out.”

She read them. “Wow! So a fourth grader back in the 1800s knew harder words than someone studying for the SAT today who is maybe 16 or 17 years old?”

“I guess teachers just expected more from their students back then.”

As I said that, I blushed. I’m not 100 percent certain what all those words mean, and I’m a bit older than a 16-year-old studying for the SAT!

Makes me want to expand my personal lexicon. How about you? If you want to launch a leisurely plan for increasing vocabulary, join me as I experiment with some of these simple ways to learn new words:

• Wordsmith.Org.  A.Word.A.Day     https://wordsmith.org/awad/index.html
• Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day https://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/mwwod.pl
• Oxford English Dictionary https://www.oed.com/cgi/display/wotd
• New York Times, Word of the Day https://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/wordofday/
• Vocabulary Vitamins  https://www.vocabvitamins.com/
• Word Think  https://www.wordthink.com/
• Play Free Rice.
  
• Read books, read challenging magazines (think The Economist rather than People), and then read more books.
• Keep a record of words learned, whether a journal, note cards, loose leaf pages in a 3-ring binder, OneNote, or a Word document. I plan to include with the word and definition a sample sentence using the word in context (I’ll copy the example from the dictionary or the sentence from the text where I found it).
• Review suffixes, prefixes and roots (found a game). Lots of sources for this.
  
• Review personal word bank often.
• Assiduously incorporate new words into blog posts, conversations, e-mails, and journal entries.

Work cited:
Bell, Debra. Ultimate Guide to Homeschooling. Nashville, TN: Tommy Nelson, 1997.

Photo: “word up! c-o-f-f-e-e…” by Debaird, available for download from Flickr through a Creative Commons license.

It’s easy to subscribe to annkroeker.com updates via email or RSS feed.
Visit NotSoFastBook.com to learn more about Ann’s book.

(smaller button below)

Here at the Food on Fridays carnival, any post remotely related to food is welcome—though we love to try new dishes, your post doesn’t have to be a recipe. If you want to talk about the blueberry seed that lodged between your teeth, that’s great. Posts like that are as welcome as menus and recipes.

When your Food on Fridays contribution is ready, just grab the broccoli button (the big one above or smaller option at the bottom) to paste at the top of your post. It ties us together visually.

Here’s a Mr. Linky tutorial:

Write up a post, publish, then return here and click on Mr. Linky below. A screen will pop up where you can type in your blog name and paste in the url to your own Food on Fridays post (give us the exact link to your Food on Fridays page, not just the link to your blog).

You can also visit other people’s posts by clicking on Mr. Linky and then clicking participants’ names–you should be taken straight to their posts.

Please note: I’ll do my best to update this post by hand. In the meantime, please click on the Mister Linky logo to view the complete list.

Food on Fridays Participants

Food on Fridays with Ann

Today is kind of a Food on Fridays “Show-and-Tell.”

First, I made Charity’s Zucchini Bread in the form of muffins. The final product tasted something like pumpkin bread, and we love pumpkin bread. I barely had time to snap the picture before these muffins were gone.

I slipped chocolate chips into some of the batter at the end. I know it’s not part of Charity’s directions, but I couldn’t resist.

Also, I don’t think I showed you my first ripe tomatoes of the season. I was late getting the garden in, so everything seemed to be ripening kind of slow. But once those first small tomatoes presented themselves, it seemed like the entire garden turned bright red with full-sized cousins to these guys.

And I have to say…there’s nothing quite like a homegrown Indiana tomato.

It’s easy to subscribe to annkroeker.com updates via email or RSS feed.
Visit NotSoFastBook.com to learn more about Ann’s book.

Yesterday at High Calling Blogs, Michelle of Graceful posted a story about how she was caught fake-listening to her son.

As the content editor for this article, I worked with Michelle on the piece and enjoyed a sneak preview. Her topic has caused me to monitor my listening skills (or lack thereof) for a few days now.

I’ve also been particularly honest and respectful in conversations with my kids, so I’m grateful for Michelle’s openness (and great storytelling ability).

I’ve tried to note several things about myself:

• How often do I tune in or out?
  
• How guilty am I of fake-listening?
  
• What are my canned responses “interjected at appropriate moments to maintain the illusion of conversation”?

How often do I tune in or out?

This is tricky, because as a work-from-home writer and editor, I don’t keep regular office hours. Worse, my desk is situated in a large shared room with the piano and comfiest couch, so someone is often in the room while I’m tapping away. The result of this arrangement? To get anything done I have to tune out!

When I need to work uninterrupted for a chunk of time, I alert the family and they have respected my need to focus.

Other times, when I’m doing light editing or answering e-mails, the kids come and go with various requests. Sometimes I’m in the midst of composing an e-mail (or blog post!) and need a few minutes to finish a thought. In those cases, I ask for five minutes to finish so that I can give them my full attention.

When they have something to say and I’m able to break away, I do try to swivel away from my laptop in order to look them straight in the eyes.

How guilty am I of fake-listening?

I grew up with a family member who told and repeated long stories. The stories dragged on and on; as a result, I developed pretty impressive fake-listening skills. I could be generating a storyline in my head and still give the illusion of listening. When I was in top form, this person seemed to believe I was completely engaged, though perhaps the speaker was also pretending—pretending I was listening to the story in order to have an excuse to continue talking. That’s possible. We humans are pretty desperate to be heard.

I’m not proud of my fake-listening skills and do not want to be practicing them with my husband and kids.

But I have moments. Two of my four kids in particular love to have an ear and can go on and on. I’ve had to snap to attention and get my brain lined up with their stream of words. At the same time, I’m trying to teach one of them to summarize and pick up on clues from others, especially adults, who are trying to break away–important “emotional intelligence” skills to develop in order to relate well to people.

What are my canned responses “interjected at appropriate moments to maintain the illusion of conversation”?

I share “Really?” “Wow!” and “Hmmmm” with Michelle as three top responses. Maybe even “That’s interesting.”

But my top response is “Oh.”

I like its versatility.

It can be expressed with a hint of surprise: “Oh!”

Or it can invite the speaker to elaborate: “Oh?”

Sometimes it’s a way to communicate that I get a person’s joke or learned something new: “Ohhhhhh” (a grin and knowing nod accompany this one). In this use, the “Ohhhhhh” occasionally morphs into an “Ahhhhhh.”

This handy word (or is it just a sound?) can also acknowledge that I heard them and there’s not much more to say in response other than a simple and earnest, “Oh” (or “Ah”); as in “Oh, I see” or “Ah, yes.”

I’ve even noticed one of my kids picking up on this use of “Ah” as a means of acknowledging that he heard and processed my response.

For example, today my youngest asked, “What does ‘promote’ mean, Mom?”

“We could look it up,” I said, “but it means to cause someone to kind of move up to a better job or position. A boss can promote someone at work.”

“Ah.”

I admit that my use of “oh” can be a way to fake-listen. But it can also be a legitimate response after truly hearing what my child (or anyone) is saying.

Yesterday afternoon I was feeling extremely tired, so I headed up to my bed to lie down for a few minutes. I was planning to let my mind wander a little in the quiet of my room.

“Mom?” my son called out to me. “Mom? Where are you?”

Sigh.

“I’m upstairs.”

He bounded up the stairs and stood in the bedroom doorway. “Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

He slipped to the side of the bed. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine. I just came upstairs to lie down for a few minutes. You can join me, if you like.” I folded back the covers and scooted over. He climbed in and lay there staring at the ceiling for a minute.

“Percy Jackson had to defeat a Hydra in some building in Nashville, Tennessee,” he began, reviewing some key scenes from the movie Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. “And then he went to some garden where he defeated Medusa.”

I was relaxed and reflective, but I was listening. “Hmmmm,” I murmured.

“I think it was in Michigan,” he continued, “but I’m not sure.”

“That’s interesting,” I replied.

“But his mom got out of Hades and he got the lightning bolt back to Zeus.”

“Really?”

“Yes, and then it ended with him practicing fighting with Athena’s daughter.”

“Ohhhhh,” I replied. “That sounds nice. Did he get to meet his dad?”

“His dad? Poseidon? Yes, he did.”

“Ah.”

Same words as my canned responses, but these weren’t canned. I was listening. And in spite of how hot it was that afternoon, I let my son snuggle close and kissed him on the cheek.

“listen to me…” photo by Michela Mongardi. Available under a Creative Commons license through Flickr.com.

It’s easy to subscribe to annkroeker.com updates via email or RSS feed.
Visit NotSoFastBook.com to learn more about Ann’s book.

This sign:

Stay alert and pay close attention while at the pump, or you’ll be stuck cleaning up your mess.

Good advice…from someone who knows.

It’s easy to subscribe to annkroeker.com updates via email or RSS feed.
Visit NotSoFastBook.com to learn more about Ann’s book.

(smaller button below)

Here at the Food on Fridays carnival, any post remotely related to food is welcome—though we love to try new dishes, your post doesn’t have to be a recipe. If you want to talk about the spinach that lodged between your teeth, that’s great. Posts like that are as welcome as menus and recipes.

When your Food on Fridays contribution is ready, just grab the broccoli button (the big one above or smaller option at the bottom) to paste at the top of your post. It ties us together visually.

Here’s a Mr. Linky tutorial:

Write up a post, publish, then return here and click on Mr. Linky below. A screen will pop up where you can type in your blog name and paste in the url to your own Food on Fridays post (give us the exact link to your Food on Fridays page, not just the link to your blog).

You can also visit other people’s posts by clicking on Mr. Linky and then clicking participants’ names–you should be taken straight to their posts.

Please note: I’ll do my best to update this post by hand. In the meantime, please click on the Mister Linky logo to view the complete list.

Food on Fridays Participants

Food on Fridays with Ann

This hasn’t been the bloggiest week for me. Sorry to be so quiet. It’s sort of ironic given all the talk of how “real” we are over at High Calling Blogs this week and last. How “real” am I, if I don’t even show up to chat here with readers?

Please forgive.

First there was a wedding…

Last weekend my son had the honor of being a ring bearer and I had the joy of reading a passage of Scripture in the wedding of a dear friend of mine.

My son took his job very seriously. His fellow ring bearer didn’t hesitate to grin, but my son felt that it was a serious occasion that called for a serious demeanor. He claims he bit the insides of his cheeks whenever he felt a smile coming on, in order to keep a straight face.

Following Saturday’s nuptials, we launched a close-to-home vacation week. This week of the summer, we normally drive north to a family camp that is ten hours away, but our involvement in the wedding made it too complicated to pull off. The Belgian Wonder had already requested time off from work, however, so we planned various outings that have kept me from blogging.

One of those outings took us to lower Michigan for blueberry picking; or, as one of my daughters put it, “Blueberry Mania”!

We picked five buckets of blueberries. Is that crazy? We enjoy them simply because they’re delicious, but you probably know that they’re on the list of superfoods. In fact, WebMD’s article on “Superfoods” places blueberries at the top of the list.

“Packed with antioxidants and phytoflavinoids,” they claim, “these berries are also high in potassium and vitamin C, making them the top choice of doctors and nutritionists. Not only can they lower your risk of heart disease and cancer, they are also anti-inflammatory…blueberries have a host of benefits…[so] have a serving (about 1/2 cup) every day.” (And they say that frozen are just as good as fresh.)

So today’s Food on Fridays features a few snapshots of our annual blueberry stock-up:

We’ll eat them fresh for the next few days, share some and freeze lots. They’re my favorite thing to mix into steel cut oatmeal or pancakes, and we add them to coffee cake, muffins, smoothies, or even another crisp.

With five buckets of blueberries sitting in our kitchen, I’d have to say that blueberries will be incorporated into every meal for the next few days (and months).

If I may tap into the incredible resources represented in my Friday visitors, would you share a favorite blueberry recipe before you go?

It’s easy to subscribe to annkroeker.com updates via email or RSS feed.
Visit NotSoFastBook.com to learn more about Ann’s book.

(smaller button below)

Here at the Food on Fridays carnival, any post remotely related to food is welcome—though we love to try new dishes, your post doesn’t have to be a recipe. If you want to tell us about the first person who taught you to cook, that’s great. Posts like that are as welcome as menus and recipes.

When your Food on Fridays contribution is ready, just grab the broccoli button (the big one above or smaller option at the bottom) to paste at the top of your post and join us through Simply Linked (a new tool I’m trying out this week).

Here’s a Mr. Linky tutorial:

Write up a post, publish, then return here and click on Mr. Linky below. A screen will pop up where you can type in your blog name and paste in the url to your own Food on Fridays post (give us the exact link to your Food on Fridays page, not just the link to your blog).

You can also visit other people’s posts by clicking on Mr. Linky and then clicking participants’ names–you should be taken straight to their posts.

Please note: I’ll do my best to update this post by hand. In the meantime, please click on the Mister Linky logo to view the complete list.

Food on Fridays Participants

Food on Fridays with Charity!

This week at High Calling Blogs (HCB), we launched a writing project called “You Are Real,” inviting network bloggers to write about connections they’ve made—real connections—with other bloggers. People throughout the HCB community are swapping posts. Charity Singleton of Wide Open Spaces is my guest blogger today for Food on Fridays, and I’m appearing at her place. Click HERE to read my post for today.

So… may I introduce to you my new and very real friend, Charity Singleton:

Long before I drove the 20 minutes to Ann Kroeker’s house, I knew we were both Hoosiers. She had told me so on Facebook.

Before I ever sat with Ann on her patio and talked about organic farming, I knew she pulled her weeds by hand. She wrote about once in an email.

And before I had the chance to sit at the dinner table with her and her children or drink a cup of her husband’s strong coffee, I knew Ann cared deeply about her family. I read about them in one of her posts on The High Calling Blogs.

By the time I actually met Ann, we were already friends.

—

Developing relationships online is relatively new for me. Until about four years ago, I thought of the internet as nothing more than a tool. I used it for researching recipes, sending emails, and occasionally buying a book or an airline ticket. But then, I started writing a blog.

Blogging gave me a way to claim a little space of my own out in cyberspace. As an aspiring writer, I had hoped it would be like hanging my virtual shingle. As it turned out, it was more like creating a home where I could invite people in. And the community that eventually developed is what this “We are Real” project is all about.

It was my very first contact in the blogging world that providentially made my online life “real.” Ironically, I met her first in person at a writing conference. But since we lived several states away, our friendship quickly took to the ‘net.

In those early days of blogging, I wasn’t always sure what to make of it, what would become of it. Back in 2006, I posted this comment on my friend’s blog: “Blogging is just another hue on the increasingly gray-scale palette of my life. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Sometimes a waste of time. Sometimes a perfectly useful way to process. Never always one way.”

Then I was diagnosed with cancer. I hadn’t been blogging much in the few months prior. I was restless and distracted. The relationships I had started to build online seemed easy to set aside in favor of the drama that was unfolding in my real life. But I knew the people I was avoiding were real, too, and were probably wondering where I was. So I told them.Two days later, I found myself in the hospital.

I know it was God’s providence that I reached out to my online community like I did just days before cancer. He knew I would need their support, would need their words of encouragement. When I finally made it home after a couple of weeks in the hospital and gathered the energy to post what I had been through, the response was overwhelming. Our relationship wasn’t just bits and bytes floating through cyberspace. It was real.

Through continued connections with this same community that supported me through the ups and downs of cancer treatment and recovery, my path eventually crossed with Ann. Because we already knew each other online and had many mutual friends there, it was only natural to meet in person when we discovered we lived only 20 minutes apart.

—

The other thing you should know about my relationship with Ann, however, is this. Long before we ever sat at my table and enjoyed zucchini brownies, and long before we sat at her table sharing a plate of cookies, I knew Ann likes food. I read about it here, on a Friday.

One of our first interactions came as a result of her now famous steel cut oatmeal recipe. And since then, every time we’ve met there’s been some type of food exchange, including the zucchini dumping (er, I mean “gifting”) that I did the morning we went running together

These online relationships, they’re real alright. Ann has the zucchini to prove it.

—

In the tradition of Food on Fridays, here’s a great recipe for artisan bread I shared with Ann recently. It is from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery that Revolutionizes Home Baking by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007).

Serves 4

Note: This recipe must be prepared in advance.

• 1-1/2 tablespoons granulated yeast (about 1-1/2 packets)
• 1-1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
• 6-1/2 cups unbleached flour, plus extra for dusting dough
• Cornmeal

In a large plastic resealable container, mix yeast and salt into 3 cups lukewarm (about 100 degrees) water. Using a large spoon, stir in flour, mixing until mixture is uniformly moist with no dry patches. Do not knead. Dough will be wet and loose enough to conform to shape of plastic container. Cover, but not with an airtight lid.

Let dough rise at room temperature, until dough begins to flatten on top or collapse, at least 2 hours and up to 5 hours. (At this point, dough can be refrigerated up to 2 weeks; refrigerated dough is easier to work with than room-temperature dough, so the authors recommend that first-time bakers refrigerate dough overnight or at least 3 hours.)

When ready to bake, sprinkle cornmeal on a pizza peel. Place a broiler pan on bottom rack of oven. Place baking stone on middle rack and preheat oven to 450 degrees, preheating baking stone for at least 20 minutes.

Sprinkle a little flour on dough and on your hands. Pull dough up and, using a serrated knife, cut off a grapefruit-size piece (about 1 pound). Working for 30 to 60 seconds (and adding flour as needed to prevent dough from sticking to hands; most dusting flour will fall off, it’s not intended to be incorporated into dough), turn dough in hands, gently stretching surface of dough, rotating ball a quarter-turn as you go, creating a rounded top and a bunched bottom.

Place shaped dough on prepared pizza peel and let rest, uncovered, for 40 minutes. Repeat with remaining dough or refrigerate it in lidded container. (Even one day’s storage improves flavor and texture of bread. Dough can also be frozen in 1-pound portions in airtight containers and defrosted overnight in refrigerator prior to baking day.) Dust dough with flour.

Using a serrated knife, slash top of dough in three parallel, 1/4-inch deep cuts (or in a tic-tac-toe pattern). Slide dough onto preheated baking stone. Pour 1 cup hot tap water into broiler pan and quickly close oven door to trap steam. Bake until crust is well-browned and firm to the touch, about 30 minutes. Remove from oven to a wire rack and cool completely.

It’s easy to subscribe to annkroeker.com updates via email or RSS feed.
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We used to live in a town with a gorgeous library that I’ve used and loved since 1988. When we moved a few miles away to our new house eleven years ago, we discovered with shock and dismay that we’re just over the line in another library’s district. We loved and used our original library so much, we actually paid an annual fee that allowed us to continue using its services.

This year, we learned that all of the libraries in our county have agreed to let patrons use any library they would like for free, as long as items are returned to the location from which they were checked out. To participate and avoid paying that steep annual fee we’d been paying, we simply had to obtain an updated card from the library that receives my taxes.

We secured those new cards and stopped by our favorite library to start the new system. I set out the new card next to my beloved old card that I’ve used for over two decades.

The librarian who waited on us was one of the sweetest ladies on staff with a big smile and bright blue eyes.

I asked, “Can I keep my old card?”

She didn’t respond to my question. Instead, she looked up and said, “I have to call and verify that you’re a patron at the other library, but just this once.” She got up to make the call, so I figured I’d ask again about the card in a few minutes.

She sat back down and said we were confirmed. She brought up my account with my old card and stared at the screen for a moment.

“You have a small fine of forty cents,” she said, “but we’ll worry about that later.”

“No, no, I hate to owe anyone anything,” I said, unzipping my wallet and digging around for change.

She swiped the new card. “You’ll use this new card from now on,” she said.

“Okay,” I said as I pulled out the coins and stacked them neatly next to the paperwork.

And then I couldn’t believe my eyes! Faster than a blue jay could snatch a peanut from the feeder and toss the shell to the ground, she whipped out a pair of scissors, snatched up my beloved old green library card and snipped it in two.

Snip.

I gasped. “But…I wanted to keep it.”

She tossed the two halves in the garbage can. “You can’t use it anymore.”

“I know, but…I still wanted to keep it.”

She moved on to my daughter’s account without saying another word about it. I looked at my daughter with my mouth wide open in disbelief…maybe horror.

“Sorry, Mom.” She patted me on the knee.

“But…”

“I know,” she murmured sympathetically, “it’ll be okay.”

“I can’t believe she did that,” I whispered. “And she’s going to do it to yours, too.”

“But that’s okay,” she said. “I don’t mind. You’re the only one who cares.”

“I care!” piped up my son. “I’m not bringing my card in for a year!“

As the librarian finished updating my daughter’s account, I saw her pick up the scissors. “Wait! Would you pause before snipping this one?” I asked. “I need a photo of this!”

“Well, sure!” And she posed like she delighted in destroying a reader’s symbol of intellectual curiosity and love of lifelong learning.

“Got it,” I said with a dramatic sigh.

“Okay!” she chirped.

Snip.

Photo credit: “Lost library card” photo by Ann Kroeker.

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