I'd like more weekends like this.

Mostly, I played with my trains.

That comes from an episode of Chef! - Lenny Henry's character has the day off, but spends it in the kitchen anyway trying to perfect a recipe.

This weekend I:

• baked a batch of sourdough bread using (mostly) Lammas Fayre medieval blend flour (a blend of heritage wheat and barley). This would have been a basic lower-class bread. The loaves looked good as the slashes separated dramatically but as expected, the bread did not rise much. Barley is very low gluten. The flavor is like a basic whole wheat loaf, but with a Grape-Nuts aftertaste. Interesting and I still have most of the 5-lb bag of flour left, so I will clearly be making more. (The mill recommends about 50/50 with strong white flour to get a lighter loaf but with similar taste; I probably used 1/3 white.)
• used a dinner plate-sized piece of beef shank to make osso buco in one of our Dutch ovens. It was delicious and I will be eating that all week for lunch.
• made three 12^th c. sauces to go with leftover beef steak.  I plan to teach a class at next year's West Coast Culinary Symposium on these sauces, so I want to experiment with them.  They'll show up in the next couple weeks as Resolution Recipes.
• Played a bunch of computer games.  It was fun and brainless.

Now, back to work.

Two recent movies

We had sneak preview tickets last week to see Jexi, because they closed down our street to film a stunt. It didn't sound like our usual type of movie, but what the hey, free. We decided we could walk out if we didn't like it. Then the wife saw a commercial, and it sounded really bad. I got an e-mail that the city had a waiting list for the sneak preview -- so we just cancelled our tickets.

The SF Comicle's review was dreadful. It wasn't even worth a savage review, just a "this was two hours I will never get back". Clearly we made the right call.

We recently watched Stan & Ollie - a biopic about Laurel & Hardy touring Britain in the late stages of their career. It was quite good but very sad, watching them continually get taken advantage of. By studios mostly, but also promoters. They were comic geniuses who sold many millions of movie tickets worldwide, but they never got paid much.