Finally, a loaf to be proud of!

For the past couple of months I've been experimenting with recipes from the book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois. I've made several basic boules, which definitely don't go to waste in our carb-loving household, but I was looking for something more. I wanted to be able to make a good loaf for sandwiches, and the small boules just weren't enough. So I turned to the white sandwich bread recipe in the book, which was good, but my loaves just weren't turning out big enough for sandwiches, or at least they weren't looking like what I used to buy at the store. Now, the dough recipe says it's enough to make 3 loaves. Well, my first attempts to piece the dough into thirds yielded smallish loaves that did not fill my loaf pan more than halfway like the recipe said. So, this last time I decided to take the remaining 2/3 of the dough and bake it all at once. I also finally got myself an oven thermometer, and lo and behold, yes, my oven temp was off too. Had to dial the oven up to 355 to get the thermometer to register 350. The result? Yes, it's good, but not so good that I need the pic to be this big. Darn you dropbox!

2 Weeks In

So, it's been 2 weeks. Among other things, I've completed an accident and incident report, for a patron who fell outside of the building, asked a teenager to leave for the day because of his unacceptable behavior, and set off an alarm for a fire exit. I've also performed 4 storytimes, which I must confess is more than I did at my old branch in the past few months (and Children's Services was my responsiblity!) I'm really enjoying the baby storytimes. It's amazing the wealth of information I've found online in planning. I need to give a huge shoutout to Storytime Katie, whose blog I discovered sometime last year when researching flannel board stories. I never did get a chance to make a collection of flannel stories at my old branch, so I plan to remedy that here. Maybe one day I'll be able to make a contribution to Flannel Fridays! In addition to flannel stories, Storytime Katie is a great gateway to other storytime blogs. Seriously, there's several years-worth of planning in these blogs! We just hired several new Youth Services Librarians and so I will definitely share this wealth of knowledge with them.