The cooking hour(s)

I'm, erm, 22 hours into making onion-dill bread. Most of those hours were not actually spend on the bread, you understand, just on letting the bread do its thing. The onion-dill bread from Jungle Jim's still lives in our memories as Crack Bread--delicious and addicting and expensive, and now that Jungle Jim's is three and a half hours away it's not really practical to go buy it, even if gas is down to $2.32 a gallon where I work. (Down. It wasn't that long ago that I was lamenting that gas had finally reached $2. It wasn't long ago that it was $3, either.) So I'm attempting to replicate it, based on this and the BH&G Cookbook's Artisan French Bread recipe. I attempted it earlier this week but messed up the directions and added too much water and too little dill. Still good, but not Crack Bread. So we'll see. Right now it's rising for the first time. (Most of the previous 22 hours have been spent letting the preferment sit.)

In the meantime, I'm finishing up the Froggy Hat (except in stockinette instead of reverse stockinette, because I'm making it out of Bernat CottonTots and it looks lousy on the reverse side) and working on PV. I'm about 10% into it, which doesn't bode well, except that I had to rewrite a scene yesterday and also we did a bunch of shopping and laundry and such. We also watched a couple of Alton Brown DVDs--Eric has become a devoted adherent; I'm going to have to get him a cast-iron pan and a sifter for Christmas--and decided to make up mint cocoa mix, since I recently ran out of Trader Joe's. We found that food-processed Starlight Mints are extremely hygroscopic, but if you add the powdered sugar to the bowl before processing them it helps. We'll see how well the mix keeps. I also wanted to make Mexican hot chocolate mix, but we only bought the one box of cocoa (Dutched, as per Alton Brown's instructions). Ah well. There will be plenty of time for hot cocoa, and we're now in the season to do it. I didn't much enjoy the summer, but I think I'm going to love this fall.