GlossyVeneer

I went to a 14-grain bread class yesterday. For the bread they used 3 kinds of flour; whole wheat, spelt and kamut. All of the flour was freshly milled using a Nutrimill.

In the dough they also mixed in a 9-grain cereal and some amaranth. Just to make the bread a little more interesting, they included sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, flax seeds and millet. It was a pretty complex recipe!

But the bread was so good. The recipe they gave us makes 8 loaves of bread. I don’t have that many loaf pans, so I need to scale it down to make it a more manageable size for my baking capacity.

These classes have been really good, I’ve learned a lot about improving the texture and consistency of my own bread dough. I was so inspired after going to the class that I came home and made my own batch of bread dough. I made buttermilk bread, since I had a little bit of buttermilk leftover. I made it in these baby loaf pans that I have, so I made 8 tiny little loaves of bread. I didn’t think loaves of bread could be ‘cute’, but these were cute.

I froze most of them because things spoil really fast in my house during the summer because of the heat. Homemade bread isn’t good when it’s kept in the refrigerator and if I leave it out on the counter, it gets moldy in just a few days. Even if I’m eating it on a regular basis.

I hate that aspect of the heat here.

Weather Check: 103°

At my job we are only allowed to carry 240 hours of accrued vacation over into the new fiscal year. (That’s 30 days for those of you who don’t like math.) The current fiscal year ends on June 30, this Friday. I have been taking every Friday off this entire month. I have claimed 3 hours of vacation leave tomorrow to go to a 1 1/2 hour class (that happens to fall during my lunch hour) on making 14 grain bread. I claimed 3 hours last week to go to the 1 1/2 hour hamburger bun class. I took a week off at the end of May.

Yet I still discovered that I somehow have two more hours to take off, and that has to happen sometime tomorrow or on Thursday.

I have coworkers that use all their hours as they earn them, but not me. I have trouble using all of the days. Last year I carried 239 hours over into the new fiscal year. That meant that I basically had to use everything that I earned this year. Plus, this January I passed the five year mark of being with my employer which meant that I moved from earning 15 days of vacation each year to earning 18 days.

With my husband starting a new job this past year, he didn’t have a lot of vacation to use. Plus we just don’t go anywhere, we’re so boring. But I will be damned if I just lose these last 2 hours. I EARNED those vacation hours and I will use them. I just need to figure out how to cram all the work I had planned on getting done into two fewer hours this week.

And make a goal to use my vacation more equitably throughout the year during the next fiscal year.

Weather Check: 101°