Rising

Yesterday was another bread day. It came out wonderful, as usual. It is so nice to have artisanal bread at home. The boule is dark tan and the texture and chew are wonderful.
The only complication with making it is that it takes twenty hours to rise. Then crank the oven up to five hundred degrees and get out the dutch oven and one hour later you are in heaven. The other problem is to wait two hours for it to cool. That never happens. I am into the butter after one hour and the crust breaks into large shatteringly crisp flakes as the loaf is sliced and the butter melts into the holes and pretty soon the loaf is almost gone. It keeps well for about two days and then is good for dunking.
Bread, cheese, wine, and a little sausage. Life is good!
I am amazed at the number of birds that are in the cedar tree out front each morning. Yesterday I am sure there was a very large flock of robins eating the berries. I have never seen robins in so large a flock, have never seen them eating berries, and have never seen robins in the middle of January. Their breasts were very bright orange, almost red, so I think that they were all males. I must be wrong, they can't have been robins. If they were, that fraternity of robins is going to be very lonely for several months as the females know that you can't incubate eggs in an igloo. I did notice that the weather was very, very mild yesterday. We are in the January thaw. Still, February looms on the horizon.