Anne Lamott

We’re all in the same boat.It’s a relief for people to hear a little truth, or the best truth I know. There’s so little truth in the popular culture, and even sometimes in our own families. I celebrate that we’re all crazy and damaged and we’re all sort of floundering and flailing, and yet we stick together. We take care of each other the best we can. And that is so touching it fills me with hope. It takes people a lot of decades to realize that we’re all in the same boat, dealing with death and Trump and upper arms. And we’re more or less ok, most of the time. And that’s kind of a miracle.
-Anne Lamott

Honest

“I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”
― John Updike

Why

“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”
― John Updike, Self-Consciousness

Love

“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”
― John Updike, My Father's Tears and Other Stories

A Mask

“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”
― John Updike, Self-Consciousness

Suspect

“Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.”
― John Updike, A Month Of Sundays

The Guts

“If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

Survive

“We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.”
― John Updike

Space

“What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.”
― John Updike

Any Activity...

“Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”
― John Updike

Everybody

“Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

The Artist

“The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. ”
― John Updike

The World Keeps Ending

“The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

John Updike

So writing is my sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world. It happens to everybody. In the morning light, one can write breezily, without the slightest acceleration of one's pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning, in panic, to God. In the dark, one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture, and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy-weighted, as they are, with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light – in codifying, distorting, prettifying or verbalizing it – approaches blasphemy.

JOHN UPDIKE

Dalai Lama

@DalaiLama
Jan 1
Time’s always moving on. Nothing can stop it. The question is whether we use our time well or not. We can't do anything about the past, but what happens in the future depends on what we do now. We can create a happier future by remembering that in being human we are all the same.
-Dalai Lama

More Crazy Soup

I made another batch of crazy soup using the cabbage carrot rice puree from my freezer (from last month) and newly chopped cabbage and carrots, 2 cubes of chicken bullion, Chianti, olive oil, knob of ginger root, Sriracha sauce, soy sauce, water, cubed smoked kielbasa. It was 20 minutes in the instant pot and tasted like it simmered all day. Excellent.

now reading:

https://www.fromachefskitchen.com/russian-cabbage-soup-shchi/
https://www.fromachefskitchen.com/potato-cabbage-kielbasa-soup/

do what you love

“Write. Start writing today. Start writing right now. Don’t write it right, just write it –and then make it right later. Give yourself the mental freedom to enjoy the process, because the process of writing is a long one. Be wary of “writing rules” and advice. Do it your way.”
― Tara Moss

“It is better to do what you love for work, but if it is your day job that enables an unpaid passion, then your life is still sweeter. What is important is that you make time for your dreams, not whether or not you get paid for it.”
― Tara Moss

Woodie Guthrie's New Years Rulin's

https://www.woodyguthrie.org/newyearsrulins.htm

Different Types of Flour

https://bakerpedia.com/different-amounts-gluten-flour/

All flours have the same amounts of gluten, right? Wrong. The level of gluten varies greatly between different types of flour.

You can tell how much gluten is in your flour by looking at how much protein is in your flour. How do you do this? All flour mills produce Certificates of Analysis (COA). If you don’t have one, ask for it from your miller. You can look for the protein level on the COA. The higher the percentage of protein in your flour, the more gluten there is in it.

The amount of gluten in flour is determined by what type of wheat is used to make the flour. For example, soft wheat will have less gluten in it than hard wheat, and spring wheat generally has higher protein than winter wheat (though this does not indicate a better quality protein). How much gluten there is in the flour determines what that flour can be used for.

The protein level in gluten plays a crucial role in products keeping their shape. So, the ideal amount of gluten in flour is going to change with what you’re baking. The flour with the lowest amount of gluten in it is cake flour containing only 7-9% gluten. It is of course used in cake, but also muffins and delicate cookies. All-purpose flour has 8-11% gluten in it. It can be used to make things like waffles, pie crusts, pastries, and cookies. Bread flour has the highest amounts of gluten at 12-14%, and works well in yeast products.

Country Bread, City Bread

Bread flour has a higher concentration of gluten in it so it will produce the strongest loaf with the most rise. All-purpose flour has less gluten but will still produce a beautiful loaf of bread. In either case the dough is strong enough to hold lots of multi-grain bits so, in the Country Bread, for a multi-grain mix, you may use a blend such as Red River cereal or a 12-grain cereal breakfast blend. You may also use plain oatmeal, cornmeal or even potato flakes.
-Chef Michael Smith