izzyblog

Ah, lovely! The floors in the upstairs portion of our house are finally complete.

Now that football season is a bit less pressing in these parts, Jesse has turned his Sunday focus to renovation projects again. Of course, he's now sitting down in front of the tube, reviewing the last few minutes of the Pats vs. SD game on our DVR, but he put in a good long day of work beforehand. Days like today, I don't mind the fact that our relationship relies on largely on stereotypical gender roles. Inhaling large quantities of toxic materials isn't my cup of tea, and there were plenty of those stinking up the house today.

Today's project was bamboo flooring. Most of the floors in our house are the original boards from the 1920s construction, and these have held up rather well, though the refinisher seemed to believe that our floors couldn't be sanded down and refinished again after his job, as they were so thin. Those floors run through the house, and stained, they're a warm, inviting amber color. They were hiding under a rather repellant pelt of faded carpet when we bought the house, but they're buffed up nicely now. The trouble was with the back two rooms, which were covered in an industrial tile that my environmental geologist husband identified as 1950s asbestos tile. We hemmed and hawed about pulling up this tile to reveal the floors beneath for some time, but the intensity of the labor and the possibility of environmental hazards kept us hesitant. About two weeks ago, we decided on the bamboo and found a terrific sale at Home Depot.

My dad has been particularly helpful with these projects. Truth is, I think he's happiest tinkering. He's done home repair work quite regularly for as long as he can remember. He's owned property since he was a young adult and has held himself personally responsible for repairs the whole time. Makes sense. He's a blue collar guy, a butcher, from rural Louisiana. He should know a good bit about manual trades, and he does. And I think he really takes a shine to helping Jesse. He devotes some good long days to working here.

My mom, she's begun to bring food, and I welcomed her homemade spaghetti sauce today. Dee-licious. With the temperature finally feeling like January, warm comfy pasta felt as Sunday as an afternoon nap.

Oh dear! First thing -- Ellie, of course I'd be happy to. If it's not too late, please send an email to my school address -- tawatts@loyno.edu.

Secondly, I'm finally attaching a pic of one of my fave things I did this holiday season, which was to bake a bunch of loaves of Anise Kuchen. It's such a fun bread. When it gets to its second rising, you oil strips that you've cut from paper bags and staple them over the kneaded individual rounds that will become your bread. As the rounds rise, they grow around the strips of paper, making a cloverleaf shape of dough that you can tie ribbons into once the bread is baked. I love to make these when school gets out and then give them to my aunts. I've tried giving them to friends too, but most of my friends don't really care. As my friend Polly says, she's "undomesticated." So I keep a bunch for myself too.

In fact, today I finally ran out. In addition to the anise kuchen, this year I made some sort of eggy bread that reminds me very much of a Jewish challah -- yellow, sweet and addictive. I got both recipes from my bread bible, Bernard Clayton's book of breads. In the years I've been acquainted with this cookbook (it came with Jesse when we first consolidated some years ago now), I've only tried a couple of recipes, and I've returned to them time and again, working to perfect the method. This is unusual for me. I usually flip through a cookbook with salivating ecstasy, like an impatient little gobbly goat, trying one recipe after another. I think the difference arises from the fact that bread-making is such a time-consuming process that I usually only do it when I'm off school, so I turn to what's most tried and true. Cooking dinner can be a more regular affair, so I tend to be more risky, more fly-by-night -- and I think that my cooking often suffers from this approach!