I made bread this morning

This time of year, I have a strong desire to cook and bake. I've been doing well with keeping things nutritious and low-fat until today. I was reaching into the deep freeze and noticed a bag of whole-wheat flour I inherited from my sister-in-law when she divorced and moved.

"I should throw that out," I thought.

Then that baking urge came upon me, and I started recalling my little-house-on-the-prairie days: We had a tiny house on twenty acres, and I raised gardens and canned the produce and washed on a wringer washer and raised hogs and milked a cow... really, I did, and all that with two babies!

And for some four or five years, I baked all our bread.

So this morning, for the first time in years, I made some bread.

There are two reasons I don't have a bread machine. First, I'm afraid that would make it so easy to make bread, we'd gain weight from eating too much of it. Second, I love to knead bread, getting it to just the right elasticity.

Honestly, I would have preferred white bread, but knowing there were three cups of whole wheat flour (fiber, you know) eased the guilt I felt for cooking something in which I knew we'd overindulge. And drench in butter, even.

It came out of the oven looking pretty decent. The pans I used, by the way, are the same ones I used in the old days when my children were babies.

I've always smeared the tops of home-made bread with butter so the crust is softer. I sliced both loaves, and I'll put them in the freezer; we'll get a couple of slices out at a time. Otherwise we'd either eat too much, or it would go stale before we ate it all.

And that's about the only useful thing I've done today.

I've played around with widgets for this blog, adding two stat-counters that I'll probably remove before long. I still like my Sitemeter best.

I've added a local temperature widget.

I find these goodies, by the way, reading YOUR blogs. I see something I like and I check it out.

I've made playlists and added them to my blog... one folk and one rock. I did not set either of them to play when someone comes to this site, because self-starting music on blogs annoys me; I'm often listening to my own music, and I don't really enjoy having somebody else's songs suddenly start playing while I have one going. If you're ever curious as to what music I like, there it is on the left (the rock one is waaaaaay down the page.) I don't listen to that much rock, and I may remove it later.

I'd be very surprised if anyone shares my taste for folk music. I like it because it's honest and down-to-earth. Most folk singers sound like they could be singing right here in my living room, and I like that.

So that's my rambling for today.

My new look

Thanks to the influx of AOL bloggers and the fact that they're learning things I had not discovered in two years of presence here, I have a new look. I replaced my old list of links with the widget, "My blog list", which is so much better. It shows when any of the bloggers I follow does a new entry. I love it!

I removed a few things that were really useless to me, and I may eventually add some other stuff... who knows? With all these talented friends moving into the neighborhood, it's hard telling what I might accomplish.

Playing around with my blog

I've been looking at all the widgets other people have on their blogs and trying them out. I'll probably do away with that "recent visitors" thing, since it never seems to show an actual person. Plus it refuses to let me move it on down the page, for some reason. If you are reading this and don't see what I'm talking about, you'll know I already trashed it.

I was over at My Spyderweb and saw a music player I liked, so I'm trying that out. I think I'm going to like it just fine. For one thing, readers don't have to listen to it if they don't want to. Nothing irritates me more than landing on a blog or home page and having somebody's music forced on me. Often, I'm already listening to my own music on my computer, and I don't need the intrusion.

So don't be surprised if you see something new on my sidebar, then come back to find it gone. After a glorious weekend, winter has returned to my part of Missouri. Yes, I'm housebound again. I could clean house, but playing around on the Internet is far more fun.