Iveyrock

I tried some bread-baking  again yesterday, although this time I doubled the recipe. I wanted a loaf to freeze, but I was a bit worried about kneading all that dough. Turns out I was justified – that was not a fun process at all. However, as I was kneading bread with every muscle in my body, I thought back over the times that I’ve made bread before. I was thinking about various bread ingredients, and suddenly I remembered about potato water. Before I was pregnant with Micah, I used to make bread using potato water. The yeasties love the starch.

I made a mental note to try potato water next time, although I wasn’t sure when that would happen. I usually just boil up a potato that is clearly past it’s prime; but we are doing pretty well with our potatoes currently.

However, today the kids were getting squirrely, and I happened to remember the ink pads that I had stashed away in the laundry room. The kids haven’t done stamping before, and Ian has asked about it several times. I got the ink intending to cut up (you guessed it) potatoes to use as stamps. So I happily went to our pantry, found our smallest potato, and chopped it up.

The kids had a great time, and I was a little surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I had toyed around with the idea of carving a stamp into the potato, but gave that up as too complicated. So I just gave them a couple of different shaped slices.

I was intrigued by how many different ways you can actually stamp with a potato. For some reason I was startled to find that they are textured inside. How many times have I cut up a potato, and never noticed that? I would have said they were smooth. The skin has a different texture of it’s own.

Ian and I discovered that you can make lines with the edges. Chava discovered that you can use the stamp pad itself to stamp the paper; at which point I called a stop to the whole experiment and sent the kids to the bath. They had fun, I had fun, and I got to use a couple of pieces of potato to make my potato water. Which means more bread making in my future.

(since I had my camera out, here is a free picture of potatoes boiling)

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.