Half a loaf.

I felt baking urges this morning. Ostensibly this is to get rid of a lot of second-tier ingredients cluttering up the kitchen (like the 5lb bag of bread flour), but see also "reversion under stress".

Banana bread: old familiar turf, I scarcely need to post about it at this point; except that I'm trying half whole-wheat flour and half all-purpose white.

Standard White Loaf: This is my second Epic Fail at the same recipe (out of Nigella), and I don't know why. It just won't rise. Not a yeast problem, 'cos both times I used more from the same purchase in other recipes and it did fine. Bah.

Parmesan Herb Loaf: This, on the other hand, is working well. The recipe is from the back of the yeast package, of all things. I've shaped the loaves and they're just about done rising & ready to bake. Smells lovely so far.

more bookage.

Am packing books at the moment. I've just packed Dad's Tolkien box set, and for some reason that makes everything seem much more real and much less theoretical.

(It's this edition, which I had a devil time finding an image of. Apparently it's some kind of rarity now; who knew? But I certainly love it best of all, even though I do quite like the Alan Lee and Ted Nasmith illustrations found in more recent editions.)

Just for reference, when we last moved house, we had 40+ boxes of books between us (and a lot more have been acquired since). I'm going to keep under ten, and ideally under seven, for going forward. So far I have two of sewing and medieval-reference, and two of Other Books. Of course, I haven't started on my graphic novels yet; but they weren't in the original 40-box tally, either, SO THERE.

Edit: Oh, and a box of RPG books, chiefly Champions. Though the D&D stuff has not begun to be divided (if it even matters, since it's mostly 3.0 and 3.5 edition, and 4th is coming out next month) (not to mention a lot of it is Forgotten Realms sourcebooks gotten for a now-defunct campaign, and neither of us is hugely interested in that particular setting).

Yet More Kitchenosity

Pollo con Peperoni Rossi e Gialli alla Panna, motherfuckers.

(There are also supposed to be peperoni verdi, but I hate hate HATE green peppers. I used orange instead, but cannot be arsed to look up how to say that in Italian.)

It is amazingly tasty and, to quote Platina, no one should eat it. Like most of the dishes in my Giftmas cookbook, an astonishing array of fats are involved.