February 2010 Archives

The thing that sucks about being a Christian is that God actually lives in other people.

-- Sara Miles in Jesus Freak:Feeding Healing Raising the Dead

The community I am a part of is giving up God for Lent.  No, we haven't all decided to give up church for hedonistic pleasures.  What we are doing is giving up our notions of who (or what) God is.  The goal?  To be open to new ways God can manifest in our lives.  As part of this exercise, our 10:15 community (along with the rest of the parish) is reading the book quoted above.  Unfortunately, because of a prior commitment, I won't be able to participate in the discussions.  It's going to be an interesting read (and Lent) based on the quote above from the books introduction.

Diving back into the BBA Challenge, I started a biga on Monday night.  This was the only one of the 3 pre-ferments in the BBA that I had not used yet.  As this is an Italian style pre-ferment, I chose to make the Italian Bread.

Italian Bread is similar to a French Bread, but with a few extra ingredients.  This dough is enriched with oil, sugar, and dry malt extract (which I happened to have due to my trip to the home brew supply store for beer ingredients last weekend).

As always, I kneaded by hand.  I'm really starting to want to take a class on breadmaking.  I feel like I'm always adding a bunch of extra flour to my dough to get to a tacky but not sticky dough.  I also don't think I'm always passing the "window pane" test.  I do get a little window pane...but it also tears pretty easily as well.  The dough was within the right temperature range when I left it to ferment.  The other reason I'd like to take a class, is to work on my shaping.  One of these loaves ended up pretty close to what it was supposed to look like, but the other i didn't quite get my edge sealed so I had a little edge on one side of the loaf.

What a great game! Sure I was excited that the Saints won, but even if the Colts had won, it would have been an enjoyable game to watch. 

One thing that surprised me was how disappointing the commercials were this year.  Not really a stand out among any of them.  For as much money as these companies are spending on these things, put a little work into them.  I did however have two interesting connections to commercials this year.

First, the main guy in this Budweiser spot goes to my church...in fact my girlfriend and I sat next to him and his wife this morning:



And in this spot, one of my friends from church in High School is mentioned by name (turns out the writer of the spot is a buddy of his):