I'm On Vacation!

Today through Saturday, I am completely ignoring the green tomatoes, the yard work, the house cleaning, the kitchen, we're not having any company, no one is coming for dinner, and I don't care how nice the weather gets this week--I am not going anywhere NEAR the garden.

Of course, in order for me to feel comfortable embarking on my week of being a complete lounge-about, yesterday I got up bright and early to run to the grocery store.  Under normal circumstances, it wouldn't be too difficult to not cook for a week.  With our little experiment, however, it's a bit challenging.  I had some hope of finding something allowable in the organic soup aisle, but even organic soups had unknown polysyllabic ingredients, so no soup for us.  I was quite delighted to find

possibly the first commercial bread we've had all year.  The other breads I have looked at have all had additives, which probably explains why theirs lasts so much longer than ours but makes it illegal all the same.  This one, however, didn't even have the "dough stabilizers" that so many of the others had.  The term "dough stabilizers" has always amused me as it always makes dough sound like an explosive substance.  Now I've had some whoppers of kitchen disasters, but even I have not had exploding bread dough.  I did a bit of research on stabilizers, and I found an article which says: 

Emulsifiers and oils/shortenings are fatbased ingredients that function both as dough stabilizers when the emulsifier interacts with the gluten protein in the dough and as crumb softeners when the emulsifier complexes with the gelatinizing starch during baking. The emulsifiers with the best dough stabilizing effect (DATEM, EMG) are usually the worst crumb softeners, while the emulsifiers with the best crumb softening effect(monoglycerides) are usually inferior dough stabilizers. SSL is the most commonly used emulsifier in white pan bread, having both fair dough stabilizing and crumb softening action. Monoglycerides can be added to further improve crumb softness, while DATEM can be added in case dough stability is lacking. DATEM is therefore mainly used in frozen dough applications, in high-fiber bread where the fiber interferes with the glutendevelopment, in hearth bread where the dough is baked without the support from a pan, or in bread produced from weak flours. 

So that clears that right up.  I have no idea what crumb softness actually is, but obviously commercial bread is altered to have a longer shelf life than home-baked bread.  And, after 9 months of eating only homemade bread, I'd say it tastes like it.  It was pretty disappointing, so 

I dug out the sourdough starter and got a batch of biscuits going for dinner.  Then it was time to tackle

I had 18 pounds of tomatoes which were ripe & ready to work with and which many hours later became

23 cups of seasoned tomato sauce.  And since I was really going to take a whole 5 days off, I converted another 6 pounds of green tomatoes into

9 pints of green tomato curry sauce.  (And those little black dots are raisins, just in case you were beginning to wonder).  We will be trying it out tonight over rice as one jar refused to seal. 

And after all of that (and the biscuits turned out quite well & the leftovers are well on their way to becoming rock-hard like bread actually should), I was actually in bed asleep by 8:00 PM.  We've noticed that since my surgery, I have developed the lifestyle of the Energizer Bunny--go at full speed all day and then crash hard at night and sleep like the dead.  I think I have my old energy level back (though some friends have suggested that I got mine and 2 other people's energy level as well), but I had been having some health problems for several months prior to surgery, so it's hard to say exactly.  The greater need for sleep thing is a bit odd, but I think I am going pretty hard most days.  I may just be wearing myself out every day--which, let's face it, is perfectly possible--or I might still be dragging just a bit from surgery.


Don't you just shudder to think I might NOT be back to full steam yet?????