Making Ciabatta

Ciabatta is made with the same dough as for boule, except handled with wet hands instead of flour. It is also placed on flour and flattened to the thickness of 3/4 inch before baking. 

First the dough is mixed, producing a wet dough that conforms to the container.

Two hours' worth of rising. 

Refrigerate for a day, during which time a hint of sourdough flavor will develop, more so for longer times. Then shape and flatten.

After baking in a humid oven at 450 F for 20 minutes or so, the bread is ready. At work these were demolished in about an hour.

Effects of Gibberellic acid on garden plants

Barely a week ago, I decided to make use of my 20 grams of gibberellic acid, and mixed up what hopefully was a 200 ppm solution. GA increases plant internode lengths, and is commonly used to roughly double commercial grape and sugarcane yields.

To test the solution, I sprayed it on one Ichiban Eggplant, one wide pot of five Spicy Globe Basil plants, one Mentha spicata plant, and one sorrel plant. Here are the results, one week in:

It appears that only one or two basil plants have begun to show any signs of increasing height. The plants were growing vigorously as it is.

Here is where the difference is most noticeable, and especially in the picture below. The eggplant has doubled in height and growth in one week, especially in the top half. 

Notice how tall the plant has gotten. It's not necessarily spindly (though it definitely could use fertilizer),  it is simply being stretched, so that normal growth becomes elongated, like taffy.

Most of the top four inches of growth on the stalks of this mint occurred over the week. 

Updates will continue, especially as the eggplant begins to produce on very elongated stems.

How time flies

My, has it really been nearly a month since the last post? Amazing. And so it's another Friday at the office, where we're watching three movies in a row. Last week was Pineapple Express, God Bless America, and Wanderlust. God Bless America was the best, with Pineapple Express ("stoner movie) a middling second. This week it's Men in Tights, some TV show movie, and now Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

About the last one I've realized just now that shorts of Monty Python are hilarious, just not the whole movie consecutively. So now the sound of David Oistrakh playing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with Gennady Rozhdestvensky and the USSR State Symphony Orchestra plays in surround sound around me.

This is my Holy Grail - First recipe down, many more to come.

Decameron - Ninth Day - Third Story

Master Simone, at the instance of Bruno and Buffalmacco and Nello, makes Calandrino believe that he is pregnant. Calandrino, accordingly, gives them capons and money for medicines, and is cured without being delivered.

Anthropomorphic turtles

Shut-up, woman!

Ray Bradbury has passed away

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18345350

One of my favorite science fiction authors passed away yesterday evening. Chapter 9 of the Martian Chronicles, "The Green Morning", is possibly the most meaningful science fiction pieces ever for me, which I read multiple times over during youth. The specter of thousands of trees growing overnight thoroughly enchants the imagination.



It was a green morning.
As far as he could see, the trees were standing up against the sky. Not one tree,
not two, not a dozen, but the thousands he had planted in seed and sprout. And not little
trees, no, not saplings, not little tender shoots, but great trees, huge trees, trees as tall as
ten men, green and green and huge and round and full, trees shimmering their metallic
leaves, trees whispering, trees in a line over hills, lemon-trees, redwoods and mimosas
and oaks and elms and aspens, cherry, maple, ash, apple, orange, eucalyptus, stung by a
tumultuous rain, nourished by alien and magical soil and, even as he watched, throwing
out new branches, popping open new buds.
"Impossible!" cried Mr. Benjamin Driscoll.
But the valley and the morning were green.
And the air!
All about, like a moving current, a mountain river, came the new air, the oxygen
blowing from the green trees. You could see it shimmer high in crystal billows. Oxygen,
fresh, pure, green, cold oxygen turning the valley into a river delta. In a moment the town
doors would flip wide, people would run through the new miracle of oxygen, sniffing,
gusting in lungfuls of it, cheeks pinking with it, noses frozen with it, lungs revivified,
hearts leaping, and worn bodies lifted into a dance.
Mr. Benjamin Driscoll took one long deep drink of green water air and fainted.
Before he woke again five thousand new trees had climbed up into the yellow
sun.

The Green Morning

Requiescat in pace