My nightmare

I recently met a guy who is living my nightmare…he has celiac sprue. This is a disease where the person becomes allergic to wheat!!! If there is one thing that I love it is baking bread. If I had celiac sprue I would probably lose some of this weight I’ve gained the last 2 years but I would be miserable...miserable. But I digress; this is really a post about bread, not about being allergic to bread. We have two bread cookbooks, one pastry cookbook, two pie cookbooks, and one cake cookbook. Our first bread book was The Bread Bible by Ruth Levy Beranbaum and with some reservations we really love her book. It has many fantastic breads in it and it is a great book to start with for someone wanting to make their own bread. However, she is first and foremost a dessert expert (her cake book is amazing, as is her pie & pastry book. Nothing we’ve tried has turned out anything less than amazing) and the difference between her book and our recent purchase The Bread Baker’s Assistant is evident. Peter Reinhart is a bread instructor at Johnson & Wales University and he knows bread. This book doesn’t have quite as many recipes (or formulas as he calls them) and the ones that he does have are mostly hearth breads (also called rustic breads, or artisan breads) and taste absolutely amazing. Hearth breads are breads made from flour, water, yeast, and salt and that’s essentially it, but can be manipulated to produce a wide variety of different textures, shapes, and tastes. In case you’ve never had these breads, or more likely have never made these, I would highly recommend it. They are simple to make and absolutely delicious.

Residency Decisions - Not Psych

I recently started my Psychiatry rotation, and even though I've only been doing it for a week I can pretty much say that Psych is not something I see in my future. That being said, it is very interesting. Many of these people are prisoners of their own minds. One lady on the psych ward illustrates this point. She worked for many years as a postal worker (in the back rooms somewhere, not with customers). It's unclear exactly what happened, but somehow something pushed her over the proverbial edge. She started acting funny (-ier than usual) and it got so bad that she was commited to the psych ward. So far that wasn't the interesting part, what was interesting was that she thinks that she is completely normal. She hasn't washed her hair in over 2 months (until eventually had to put doctor's orders in her chart for a deep shampoo) and this hair was something else. It almost formed a 3 inch halo perpendicular to her head and the rest just fell back after. She has the devil's own hair product because it's been exactly the same for 2 1/2 months! It's very intersting talking with her though because she doesn't think she should be there, nothing is wrong with her, she needs to get out to go back to work, they have replaced her at work with an imposter, the women that visited her aren't her real daughters because her daughters are still little, etc. I just feel badly for her, but there isn't any reasoning with her. These messages are coming from her own brain without and of the normal filters that you or I have so she has no reason to disbelieve them, they are ABSOLUTELY true to her.
I guess ultimately I don't think that Psychiatry is for me because 1) i'm not patient enough for it and 2) I like interacting with people too much and even normal conversations here are analyzed for clues into the patients' brains, you can't just sit back and have a conversation with them.

...and we're back

It's been a while since I've blogged, partly because we've been busy, but also partly because we haven't made anything brand new. All that has changed with a couple of really delicious recipes we tried and the start of my Psychiatry rotation at school providing both a new and most likely crazy source or medical stories and ample time to try new recipes as it is one of the easiest and least time intensive rotations in 3rd year.
On to the recipes that I was particularly impressed with was the Cranberry-Walnut Galette. I'd never heard of a Galette, but essentially it is a pie with out the pie pan. You roll out the dough (which in this case was a soft cream cheese crust), put the filling on it, fold over the edges and bake it. This, for me, was one of those recipes that guests will Ooh and Aah over but is deceptively simple. The filling consisted of cutting almost an entire package of cranberries in half, letting them macerate in sugar for a couple of hours, combine them with walnuts and some other stuff and then put it all together and bake the galette.
As somewhat of a post-script, one of our friends commented the other day that it takes a special talent to make pie crusts. I don't really believe that, I personally think that most people when they do make a pie crust it's only one and they make another single pie a year later and then don't get any better at making pie crusts. I think it only takes 2-3 pies in a months time or so and you'll have learned how to ride the bicycle so to speak and don't readily forget.