Baking vs. Biking

Oh what a difference a vowel makes . . . but seriously, I do know where my bike is, I just have to put it together and get out on it. Yesterday was supposed to be a spin in the park kind of day, but since it was 55 and cloudy, I opted for a run with the dog instead. That gave me time to get to the grocery store to buy a much needed commodity called "food" . . . there wasn't much in my house. I also wanted to get some supplies to get back to baking.

Last night I made a batch of the peanut butter cookies from the Smitten Kitchen site, as all reviews spoke highly of them. They were pretty easy to make, nothing surprising in the recipe, but also nothing too terribly surprising in the result. I will hold out until I get together with Mike Bufton in the near future and get his recipes. Mike is/was North Star Bakery, my source for cookies and Sunday evening entertainment a couple years ago. Mike would bake at Cafe Europa in the evenings back when they weren't open after 4:00 and I'd stroll in to make a few pounds of dough in exchange for social time and a few cookies.

I also put together one last experimental batch of the no knead bread before moving on to other recipes in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day. In anticipation of doing a lot of baking this winter, I pulled the trigger on some Red Star yeast online since it is slightly expensive at the grocery store.


It is just like the vacuum packets of yeast you buy at the store, made of foil and whatnot and like the 4 oz. jars you can get for $5.00 a pop, except that it is 8x the yeast for only 2x the price. As long as the oven doesn't melt, I should be set for the winter bread season.

Back to biking . . . I had a few more pictures from Tour of Germany on the camera as opposed to the phone. Here they are in no particular order:

Sure this looks like a dead end, but they come out through the building onto some cobbles and into a turn carrying some ridiculous speed.

Just another day at the office for the devil . . .

Doin' his thing, while not being a university professor.

Robbie McEwan soft pedaling the prologue.


It was kind of funny watching guys at the finish. They really had no idea where they were supposed to go and ended up just hanging out. Nobody was there to give them a towel or take their bike or anything. Some riders went back to one of the corners to hang out with friends and watch other riders come through. Tour of Germany or D-Tour as it's known is sort of a 2nd tier event with the Vuelta going on at the same time.