HVD!

Dear Howie,


I hope you are having a great day at school. I'm celebrating valentine's day at home without you. (Yes, I finally caved on some Movenpick ice cream!)

Make me proud! (& come home soon!)
xoxo
a.

no-knead bread. (from Steiny via M. Bittman)

I really love to bake. I don't claim to be an expert, but I'm great at following recipes and generally have good results. But there has forever been this gap in my baking repertoire: BREAD. I've never attempted a proper bread (with yeast that is- quick breads I can do.)

Howie and I received a great gift of a pizza stone for our wedding and never were able to get the crust right- I just haven't had enough experience with yeast, I think. So when I emailed my bud Steiny for his famous bread recipe, I was a little nervous. Luckily, it turns out that the hardest thing about making this bread is cleaning up afterwards!

No-knead bread is really simple and gives a great result. We ate ours with the Cafe Latte chili that I made the next day. The recipe is below and you can watch the NYT video here to get an idea of the process.

No-Knead Bread (Steiny via M. Bittman, J. Lahey)

The recipe makes 1 large round loaf (Le Cruset dutch oven size) but is easily halved or doubled.  (For my tiny oven I used 1/4 the recipe and it was fine!)

7 cups flour total. *pure white flour works fine and tastes great. but, as long as 5 cups is white flour, you can replace 2 cups with other flours or grains like oats. 

1tb sea salt

1tsp instant yeast

3.25+ cups tap water (Steiny says 50/50 milk/H2O works well too!)

1) Mix flour, salt and yeast in a big bowl with a whisk. Add 3c water and mix with a spoon. The dough will be tough and look unpromising (like a shaggy wet dog) and have lots of dry spots in it. The goal is to wet it just until the dry spots are gone. It should be difficult to stir but not sticky/sticking to the side of the bowl. (both Steiny and I have added too much water- the bread turns out fine, but the dough is a little extra floppy...)

2) Once the dough is mixed, cover the bowl with a plastic bag and let it sit on the countertop for at least 12 hours, 18 is better. The dough is ready when its bubbly and shiny and looks transformed. It will be pretty sticky.

3) Place a large covered dutch oven or casserole (glass, ceramic, or cast iron seem to work) in oven and preheat oven to 450F (230C). This is the most important part of the process. You don't need any grease at all, but the cover is crucial, as is the pre-heating. You're creating a mini-steam oven. 

4) Turn out the dough onto well floured surface. Handling it gently, take the edges and fold them under the loaf itself 3-4 times, or until you've acheived a generally ball-shaped lump of dough with a uniform surface. (watch the video link above if you're confused about this!)

5) When the oven is preheated, place the dough in the preheated pan and cover immediately with the preheated top; if it stays in a ball shape that's great but if it falls apart you'll be fine. Mine fell apart. (Also its good to use easy to wash oven mitts or hot pads- after handling the dough you need to cover it and I made quite a mess of my only oven mitt...)

6) Bake 30 minutes covered, then remove the cover and bake 30 additional minutes, or until the itnernal temp is 200F. Remove to a rack and let cool for at least 4 hours; this bread does not cut well when its warm. 

but what are YOU going to do there??

o work or not to work. this is a question that has puzzled me for months. ever since Howie was accepted to IMD I knew that I would come along for the chance to live in Switzerland for the year and to help him through school. and every time we told anyone we were moving, they would ask, "so alison, what are YOU going to do there??" as if cleaning, grocery shopping, laundry, cooking, paying bills, etc. was not enough to keep me busy. (its really not...) I had so many ideas but I really didn't know what to do- get an internship? do an architecture competition? independent research project??


one night during dinner at the Markowitz household, sometime in December, I got to hear three different versions of what my family members were telling everyone that I'd be doing in Lausanne. I don't remember the details, but what I do know is that my plan was to "figure it out when I get there." 


well, I'm here now and I still haven't figured it out. I posted earlier about the partner group as both a huge emotional support and means to keep busy and active, but also it is lacking some of the mental stimulation of school or a job. I am now afraid that I will lose touch with the architecture world if I don't make an effort to get involved in some sort of work or project. I also have decreasing motivation as I continue to be lost in the decision process, the guilt of taking more "time off" and not knowing where to start. 


yesterday, after returning home from an unproductive french class (following an unproductive day,) i sat down to sort through everything i want to do this year in the hopes of making a plan and focusing on some specific goals. even that was discouraging- i ended up with a list of "things i like to do." ha. luckily my husband is waaay better at all of this, and he happened to be home studying and offered me some help. he talked me through organizing my "things i like to do" into three categories: career, hobbies & personal development. I now have some short term goals for each (~3 months out) and lists of things for each that tell me both why I should do it and what problems can I avoid by doing it. 


I'm not going into the nitty gritty of my new goals (mostly because my parents would surely be emailing me every day to check in on my progress) but I have decided a few things that will help me to be more productive and cheery in the coming weeks:

1. I am not going to continue French classes for now- I realized that this afternoon commitment was breaking up my days and making it difficult to do anything else during the daytime. Also, not that beneficial as my speaking has not caught up with my grammar skills. Will practice on my own instead. (And save $$!)

2. I will continue to search for jobs. I found out that I can actually legally work (and be paid!) so why not pursue it? Just applied for an architecture position in Lausanne... we'll see.

3. Until I find a job, I will divide my time into those three categories: career, hobbies & personal development. Might as well take the opportunity to both have fun and to say that I accomplished something this year.

this blog has become a great way for me to tell all of you both about the great times I'm having in Lausanne, but also the tough times as well. if anything, I will have learned something about myself- even if none of you made it this far it still feels great to have written and posted. I hope you all enjoy the ride of this crazy year with me!

working on one of my goals: cooking
lots of new dishes. (crepes!)

evening walks.

the winter has been so mild that we've been able to take long walks lasting into the evening, almost guaranteed a beautiful sunset. well, i've been talking some looong walks and howie has been able to join for shorter ones because he really has been studying/working. all. of. the. time. 


here is us at ouchy waterfront again, this time with the pink light of sunset.

mutato

I was thinking this print would look nice in our place. But then I realized that it resembles our couch a bit too much. Anyway, very cool!

found on swissmiss, one of my daily reads.

wam-xc.ch

Last weekend I had my first session of wam-xc, Swiss chapter. Two members, one doesn't know she's registered yet. Nora picked a relatively "easy" hike from her book of local hikes. All of the hikes are described in German, so I was pretty much a follower for the day while she was doing the translating of... "under the train station, turn immediately right, then when you see the cemetery turn left and..." which worked out quite well for the most part. One minor detour up quite a steep hill which we chalked up to "exercise" and we were able to find the little blue signs guiding us along the hiking path. 

a beautiful old tree signifying the start of our hike in Cully.

 

the streets of Cully

The hike took us generally along the shore of Lac Leman (Lake Geneva) although we did take the train out of Lausanne to the start of the hike in the small town of Cully. We hiked along a beautiful terraced hillside in the middle of endless rows of grape vines. Wintry and brown, of course, but still so beautiful! I was loving the look of all of the bark and earth, and can only imagine what this hike will be like in the summer with green and grapes all around! We passed through the teeny tiny town of Epesses, but mostly just walked up and down along the hillside. You can see the general route here, but we were on the road further up from the lake.  

sometimes we couldn't see over the walls!

quite a misty morning-
the lake could have been an ocean.

It was a great day, especially after our crazy fitness class with Iyerida the day before, it felt good to stretch our sore muscles. And when the weather gets warmer, we'll be ready for those 10 hour mountain hikes!

amazing terraces.  can you spot the architecture??  (Vinorama)

Letter vs. A4

Who actually uses feet & inches anymore?!  A4 is my new hero. So much easier that 8.5"x11". A 4. Two letters. Simple. Well, if you format your documents to that size originally, then yes.


Not in my case- coming from the US, I thought I was making everything SO easy by using standard Letter size paper for my portfolio. I even formatted it down from 11"x17" size to make it easier to email and print. Once I got here I went to print it and, hm... what? Different size paper? 


On Sunday night I was trying to print my resume which, now having learned, I had reformatted to A4 size. But the printing was still not working, cutting off bits and pieces of the document. I even tried it from one of the MBAs computers (she must have thought I was nuts and I felt horrible for bothering her) and it still came out funny. A little searching on my mac and I found a setting under "printers" where you set the default page size. Mine was obviously set to "letter" and I changed it to A4, the magic trick. 


I realized that anybody coming from N. America will have issues trying to print their own documents on the printers here. If you don't change the standard settings, everything will come out wrong or too small. Funny though, as none of the MBAs seem to care about formatting or margins or "fit to page" or anything I said in this post. But I care, a lot!


What matters is that I need to reformat my portfolio yet again and now there is one more thing to procrastinate. :)