One of my favourite recipes in Bernard Clayton Jr's Complete Book of Breads is Oatmeal Sesame Bread. The crumb is delicious and moist, from the oatmeal, and great for sandwiches. So I decided to convert it to weights and to use a sourdough starter.

I wrote it up over at the other place: Ses...

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The Blues

Program 14 of CKUA’s radio series Sounds to Grow On was built around a radio programme broadcast on WFMT Chicago in 1957. The astonishing Studs Terkel broadcast on WFMT from 1952 to 1997, and Folkways Records turned one of the programmes he made into the album Blues with Big Bill ...

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The yellow municipal tape has been up for a few days, warning drivers not to park along the street after midnight last night. And this morning, the street was almost clear, one or two stragglers being loaded onto tow vehicles. Cops of all stripes everywhere, and sniffer dogs, and important looking...

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It was a cold, raw day, which may be par for the course in northern Europe but is decidedly unpleasant here in Rome. Earlier in the week we’d agreed to go down to the Farmers’ Market in the old slaughterhouse to see if I could score more than 1 kg of flour at a time. So off we walked down across the...

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Snapped on a bus this morning. See the animal there on the left? Does it look like a sheep to you? Does cashmere come from sheep? Would you buy “cashmere“ from a manufacturer that doesn’t know what animal produces cashmere? Not even at a 50% discount?

I’ve bleated about this before, in relat...

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