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...Cognitively speaking. (Not a real finger, don't panic....) But writers' brains are such strange places sometimes. Here's today's example.
My short-term memory is a constant joke around here. You can (as happened this morning) tell me that the weather station's batteries are kaput and can't be charged in the normal battery recharger, meaning they have to be put into one of the more technologically challenged ones... and I will still, two hours later, look at the weather station and remark, "Oh look, its batteries have finally gone south" -- to the sound of ironic laughter from Himself Upstairs. (And I'll then recall the whole previous conversation perfectly well, but will have mislaid it between times.) Some of this is Not Paying Attention, but other aspects of it are just Sixtyish Brain Fail.
However. Ask me for a quote from a book I read forty years ago, and no problem, there it is. As you shall hear...
So I'm working with this recipe from Raymond Blanc for the first time, because the other evening I went to sleep with the TV running (I sometimes do) and it was showing an episode of Blanc's "Kitchen Secrets" series from last year, the one about bread. Now, bread is a passion with me. (A master post about this will turn up in a day or three so I don't keep losing some of the links I keep looking for.) Bad bread is everywhere -- I can't think of another place where Sturgeon's Law applies so rigorously; in bread's case it's because of the pestilent ubiquity of something called the Chorleywood Bread Process. (More about this in another post, but originally this process was devised as a way to make decent bread in large quantities from the soft wheats that are all that will grow in the British Isles. It uses yeast as a flavoring rather than as a way to develop the bread naturally: gluten is developed in this process by violent physical agitation and the addition of ever-increasing types and amounts of additives. Ick.)
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