Tag Archives: baking

So, I made some things in 2020

food, the day lee, writings,

Stuff I made basically fell into two categories:

1. Baking.

I restarted my sourdough starter, thanks to Seamus Blackley and the new Poilâne cookbook, perfected a puff pastry technique that takes only three hours, earned my bagel badge, and landed a cosmonaut on the surface of some dinner rolls.

I cooked almost all the meals we ate the entire year. Some of them were good, some of them were great, some of them were based on shapes.

During the great flour shortage, I managed to get flour from Central Milling, Roan Mills, and Hayden Flour Mills.
We did order take out a few times – here’s the spread from Kiriko, one of the best sushi places in LA, and thankfully, still open.

I was lucky to be able to recipe test for Nik Sharma’s new book, which was incredibly fun, including hunting down some of the ingredients. If you’ve ever marveled at why the same bottle of wine tastes different when you drink it with a great friend versus annoying neighbors, this book will help you understand some of the things you can actually control to enhance flavor. The book is also massively helpful for shortcutting recipes. Cooking this year was so often a compromise—no eggs, no bacon, no flour—and sometimes making do is an art.

2. Sewing

The year started with this:

Hedgehogs in medieval times rolled around in apples to gather them for their feasts.

and we ended up with masks, curtains, tote bags and bike bags made from Dyneema, my new favorite material, coming in at .5 oz per square yard and tough as steel. I also made produce bags out of it, and the checkers were always commenting on them at the grocery stores.

This tote bag was great for wrapping around my head when I forgot my mask.

2020 ended with latkes, and the publication of my poem in Diagram. Here’s to 2021.