Meow

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Above: Possibly the most photogenic bread I’ve ever baked on Flickr.

From the household: the easiest bread recipe with really good results

This is the bread I make when I need plain white bread for everyday sandwich or toast purposes. It has a lovely crumb and is a substantial bread, not an airy-fairy “pan loaf” of the type too damn common in British and Irish supermarkets. (Which is not to mean that it’s one of those loaves you make that refuses to rise and which you therefore desperately characterize as “substantial” so people will think you meant it to come out that way.)

The basic recipe came from the (now-closed) Bäckerei Sieber in Au, a town in Canton St. Gallen in Switzerland. The recipe itself is for Tessinerbrot or “bread from Ticino”; down in that southern canton the Roman breadmaking techniques have persisted unusually tenaciously. Since Roman bread had a deserved reputation for being very high-end indeed – a reputation which Spanish-bred bakers brought to it – this is a good thing.

The peculiarity about this recipe (from the North American home baker’s point of view, anyway) is that the recipe manages its ingredients by mass rather than volume, even for the liquid. This is how professional bakers do things, though, at least in Switzerland: it seems to get around the problem of how much moisture your local flour is in a mood to absorb today. One caveat: this dough tends toward the wet and sticky end of the bread dough spectrum, so it’s really easier made in a mixer with a dough hook.  Also, I sometimes bake this using the bake-it-in-a-preheated-pot technique which derives from the famous Lahey no-knead bread recipe. Pot baking produces a good high rise with little work, and with a really nice crust. (Though sometimes the old-fashioned loaf pan technique produces very superior results, as above. The Bread Fairy was really sitting on my shoulder that day.)

This recipe makes one big loaf. I’ve baked this in anything from a Romertopf to a single US-style loaf pan to a 3-liter lidded casserole of enamelled cast iron. This recipe branches several times: think of it as a Choose-Your-Own-Bread story.

The ingredients:

Did you know, that you can make an AWESOME journal for your adventures ALL ON YOUR OWN from a cereal box and paper/scraps that you likely have at home/can get from friends or family/you may find around your environment?

They’re called Junk Journals and they’re my entire life.

Im gonna do my best to walk you through how to make one! First, get you a mini cereal box! I use boxes from those cool multipacks of cereal that you can find at Walmart!

And then cut it out so it looks like this! (I already had one cut, so I’m gonna use that)

That “nutrition facts” side is gone become your spine!

Next, find some paper to use to decorate your cover! I was lucky enough to be gifted a bunch of scrapbooking paper, so I’m gonna use that, but you can also use newspaper, paper from books/magazines, junk mail, napkins, paper towels (excellent texture), etc!

Go ahead and glue that paper to your box (to cover the cereal logo) and cut it out! It’ll look like this;

Next you need to find your pages! Again these can be anything! Junk mail, envelopes, receipts, food wrappers, magazine/book pages, scrapbook paper, computer paper, construction paper, ANYTHING. Just grab a whole bunch!

You’re gonna want to fold them in half and cut them to the size of one of the covers of your box, and layer other pages inside of it to make your signatures, like this!

Each signature should be about 7-10 pages. You don’t want them too thick, otherwise the inner pages start sticking out when folded in half. You’re gonna have a LOT of these signatures, as you wanna fill the area in the spine as best as possible. For this one I’m using 7 page signatures. Here’s a pic to show just how much paper you’ll need

Each of these signatures are 7 pages, 6 signatures have only filled about half of the spine, so I’ll need probably 6 more.

Next you gotta figure out how you want them in your journal. Personally, I like to sew them into the spine, but you can also keep them in the spine with rubber bands, so you can have removable pages! (Be weary that rubber bands may break over time! So you may want to always keep extra bands near it to replace in case one snaps. This is why I prefer sewing them in) I find it best to look up on YouTube how to sew in signatures, just because having someone walk you through it where you can see what they’re doing is easiest. If you can’t access YouTube, there’s plenty of text tutorials on how to sew in signatures online, or you can message me! I’m not gonna go too into detail, but here’s the jist;

Okay so I’m a forgetful gob and I hecken forgot to take pictures as I was going along kahshshshsh

But essentially, I sewed in the pattern similar to the one I drew. The dots are where the needle goes all the way through to the back. I also like to use rubber band as an extra mode of support but you can do one or the other. I also like both cuz I can tuck stuff in em between the pages. Since I didn’t take more pictures; I’d really recommend looking up a how-to on YouTube or w/e if my badly drawn diagram isn’t clear enough (heh sorry about that)

Next, I glue fabric to the spine. It spruces it up quite a lot and holds the rubber bands in place, plus it give more support to the spine since there’s gonna be a lot of strain on it.

Here’s the journal with the fabric on the spine, I decided to go ahead and glue the excess to the rest of the cover too, cuz I liked how it looked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Next step?

DECORATE the pages! I haven’t decorated this one yet, but here’s some pages I have completed!

Have fun with it! Make tuck spots and hideaways. Add folders and envelopes and make tags and things that dangle. Decorate the covers and the spine and make it your own! Add things as you find them! Anything! Even candy wrappers! This is really the ultimate goblin journal!

Honestly @gayestgoth I’m not sure how you don’t think it’s goblin. In my opinion, using garbage to make something cool is very goblin. And not only that, you can make these with ANYTHING.

Here’s one where I decorated the cover with actual leaves

I regularly use materials and litter that I find while out in the woods. I pick up all sorts of paper, receipts, scraps, cloth, advertisements, broken beer bottles, etc to use in my journals. And because I’m picking these things up, there’s less litter in the woods. PLUS I’m recycling. And I press plants into them.

Half chewed papers? Go for it! I set the corners of pages on fire before cuz I liked the burnt look! (Do with caution) chew ya own papers! Make it unique!

And shinies?

I’ve got plenty! I use all kinds of clips, wire, beads, buttons, pins, coins, etc in my journals. Half of which, I find in the garbage.

Hell,

I found the upholstery fabric I used for the cover of this journal in the garbage!

So how is this goblin?

The cousin explainer

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Heres to all the things you do even though they scare you to death.

Fearless is feeling the fear and doing it anyway.