Today I'm prepping the dough for five different loaves of bread. Tomorrow I'm going to bake and take those loaves to some potential buyers. It seems sensible to start the bread business small: selling a few loaves per week to people I know. I need to find commercial kitchen space before I can sell to the general public, but hope to make that happen soon--there's a farmers' market in the neighborhood that would be a great place to sell bread and make dough. Pun heartily intended.
Perhaps fittingly, just as I am starting to get serious about the bread-making business, our 4.5-quart KitchenAid mixer may be headed for the grave. It's been wobbly for months now, but kneading dough for six loaves today it began making some truly dreadful grinding sounds. It didn't smoke, but the motor casing got pretty hot. Ah well. It had a good run. We should probably replace it with a 60-quart Hobart HL662 (a steal at $14,000!). It can live in the bathroom.
I've spent the ten-to-thirty minute intervals between breadmaking activities today by strolling across the street to the garden plot, which has been showing signs of life. The snow peas are going gangbusters, but so are the weeds. I've been weeding in a somewhat lackadaisical manner, figuring that the weeds will be easier to pull when they're not tiny. Maybe that's a bad idea. In any event, there are definitely peas on the way, and my scallions are sending up tiny shoots as well. The volunteer strawberries take up more space every time I see them, and I can't wait for them to bear fruit so I can A)eat the fruit and B)cut back the plants. I put in the pole beans today, and hope they work out. No sign of any squash or okra plants yet, though. However, given the early success of the peas, I am feeling confident that I will meet my New Year's resolution to grow something and eat it. Yum!
This weekend I participated in a neighborhood-wide cleanup organized by the West Broadway Neighborhood Association. About eighty of us met in the local park where there were dozens of shovels, brooms and rakes. After a brief visit from the mayor (who rolled up in a shiny black hybrid SUV), we broke into teams and set to work cleaning up the streets. Myself and three neighbors started on our own block, sweeping up and bagging leaves and trash, and raking out the planters in the streets. It was surprisingly time-consuming work; one block took the four of us an hour and a half. Some of the planters were layered with heavy piles of decaying matter. In one particularly unfortunate box I uncovered a plaque that said "Award for Keeping Providence Beautiful 1988", which seemed to confirm our estimate for the last time these planters had been cleaned out. I had some leftover watermelon and cantaloupe seeds from my melon patch at the farm, and surreptitiously added a few to each planter. Guerrilla gardening. Aw yeeah.
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