Lee.org

Where will Real Bread in 10 Minutes be taught? Click me!

I’ll be doing a brief 30 minute version of my “Real Bread in 10 Minutes” class at Maker Faire on both Saturday and Sunday!

Find me at the Maker Square Demo Tent (located in the Homegrown Village, West Lot)
Saturday, noon to 12:30pm
Sunday, noon to 12:30pm

Real Bread in 10 Minutes Lee Sonko
Making bread is easier, faster and more flexible than you thought. You can make fantastic bread every day inexpensively with less than 10 minutes effort, including cleanup! Lee will talk about and demonstrate techniques minimizing the ordinary and maximize the extraordinary parts of making bread at home. We’ll talk about: instant yeast vs sourdough, refrigerated dough, crust, crumb, shaping, amendments, the chemistry and biology of bread, and the thousands of varieties of this staple food. Once you have the foundations, you’ll see bread recipes as suggestions instead of steps to be followed. The sky is the limit!

Real Bread in 10 Minutes on the Calendar

See My Maker Profile

Last night I taught my “Real Bread in 10 Minutes” class at the Institute of Urban Homesteading. It went splendidly. At the beginning, not one of the 9 students felt comfortable baking bread. At the end Ruby, the owner of the school asked, “Do you think you can bake bread now?” There was a rousing, smiling “YES!” from every student!

If you use WPBook to push your WordPress posts to Facebook, this is for you.

I followed these instructions and it worked in no time.

But just to be brief, here is what I did:

I added the following text to the functions.php file of my WordPress theme:

add_theme_support( ‘post-thumbnails’ );
set_post_thumbnail_size( 50, 50 ); // 50 pixels wide by 50 pixels tall, box resize mode

Then, whenever I upload an image, there is a little button next to the “Insert Post” button that is labelled “Use as featured image”. I click that on the image I want to show as the thumbnail in Facebook.

:-)

It would be nice if it just automatically selected the first image in the post as the Featured Image, but it doesn’t. I have to do it manually. If I forget, it uses an image from the sidebar of my post. :-(

It’s official, La Lengua is a neighborhood in San Francisco.
The full story

Google Maps link

There are no limits to what you can accomplish when you are supposed to be doing something else.

– Words to live by – stolen from Someecards.com when I should have been working on something else.

I wrote and sent this off today:

Mystic Pizza Food Company
PO Box 427
Mystic CT 06355

Dear Pizzapeople,

Fantasy

I bought a Mystic Pizza 3 Pack Mediterranean Style from Costco in San Francisco on about May 1st, 2011. It reads “Best if used by Dec 24 11 12:40”
I wanted to enjoy your pizza, but I’m sad to say it was very disappointing.

The directions say to bake for 10-12 minutes at 450. Clearly a pie this thick won’t be done in 10 minutes. We were further surprised that the pie still wasn’t cooked through after 24 minutes. After all that time, the bottom still wasn’t brown or crisp, and the center of the pie was still gummy and underdone. My oven is well calibrated, it was cooked on the middle rack with no cookie sheet under it.

Reality

The toppings were spread very poorly. The comments from my roommate say it well, “The vegetables are all lumped in a frozen pile in the middle. Who wants lumps of soggy spinach on their pizza?” One slice had a pile of peppers, another slice had a pile of olives that should have been chopped more. None of the toppings were mixed in with the pizza, they sat on top in great heaps. My roommate and I differed about the feta cheese; she enjoyed it but I thought it tasted and had the mouth feel of cream cheese, which does not belong on a pizza.

Maybe it was just the poor toppings, but after a few bites, I wanted to go out and buy some real pizza to wash the taste out of my mouth.

Keep trying!
Lee Sonko
San Francisco, CA 94110

Here’s my current go-to list of finding fun activities in the Bay Area.

• Squidlist
• SF FunCheap
• ZVents
• BACDS — The Bay Area Country Dance Society Website
• The Starry Plough Pub and Nightclub
• Events | Books Inc. – The West’s Oldest Independent Bookseller
• Events | Viracocha SF
• San Francisco Bay Guardian
• SOMArts – Calendar
• HappyCortex – Event Listings – Home
• Ashkenaz Music & Dance Community Center
• SFGate Entertainment

To keep up with the kids, I’ve been pushing my blog to my facebook page. WPBook worked well for a while. Then Facebook updated their something or another and WPBook didn’t work anymore. NetworkedBlogs works well, but everything gets syndicated through their site. For example, if you look at one of my Facebook posts, it’ll say, “Click here to link to my site” and it’ll actually be a shortlink to my site via NetworkedBlogs.

Well, I got WPBook working again, so… well, that is all.

Bay Area Lost Horizon Night Market April 30, 2011. On a deserted street in Oakland.

Bay Area Lost Horizon Night Market. This truck had padding on the walls. A person would enter with protective gear and a big hammer. They'd have some time to smash all the objects in the truck as hard as they could. Awesome.

Billy Hiebert at the Crucible's Fireside Lounge

Billy Heibert smashed this amazing ceramic sphere he built in 1983 on stage. There was a moment when the hot hammer was going through the ceramic, and it had shattered into a hundred pieces but it was still roughly in the same shape. I could see bits of the wall behind it in slivers. It looked a lot like a water balloon that had just been popped, a tumultuous ball of water that had just forgotten what shape it was supposed to be. One moment it existed. The next, it didn’t. Wow.

Crucible Hot Hammer

And when I say “hot hammer”, I mean it! On stage, they poured bronze into a sand mold and made a hammer before our eyes! I was really surprised how fast the metal of the head cooled. They first pulled it after maybe 45 seconds but the bronze was slushy and only some of the hammer was formed. They smooshed it it back in and pulled out a red hot hammer after another 30 seconds. They handed it to Billy and he smashed the sphere!

Flower at Civic Center

I was walking up Market St last week and came across this giant flower near Civic Center.

Modern Times Bookstore moving

Walking home last Monday night, May 2nd, I watched as the Modern Times Bookstore closed it’s doors for the last time at it’s current location. I overheard phrases like, “I can’t believe this is it.” The vacancy rate of storefronts in my neighborhood always scares me. Modern Times is reopening on 24th St in a month so says their website.

The Mysterious Valencia Periscope

On my same walk home, I ran into an intriguing periscope-like contraption dangling from an apartment! Here is some great other coverage of the house on MissionMission, and. :-)

Competitive Swinging! That is Jen and I swinging.

On Sunday I went to the Headlands Center for the Arts with a better friend to see Paolo Salvagione’s “Competitive Swinging“. A set of totally grownup swings. It was cool. His girl Jen showed me Paolo’s art catalog from the Headlands Center, he has a bunch of pretty awesome pieces! From a Magic 8 Ball that always says “Yes”, to hopscotch that makes you light as a feather, brush bristle shoes, an eclipse machine, a crazy spinning mirror/window… I’m recalling these from memory because they all stuck with me!

Bowling at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Oo, gutter ball!

Did you know there is a bowling alley in the basement of the gymnasium of the Headlands Center for the Arts? Rumor has it that it has the oldest mechanically set pin machine west of the Mississippi. I took this photo from the position behind the pins because that’s where you stand as the pin setter. Groovy.