Baking Bread While Waiting For My Delano Pickups...

So on September 11, 2008, I ordered a set of Delano pickups for my bass from Fearless Guitars out in Portland Oregon... Sometime in early November, Chance Walte of Fearless Guitars told me that Delano screwed up some of the orders, and had to remake some of them... My order was one of them... Anyways, it's December 8th now, almost 3 months, and still no word on the progress of my order... Funny thing is that Delano is from Germany... ETS is also from Germany... My custom order from ETS also suffered the same fate, but was much longer... Almost double what I am waiting for my Delano pickups... Anyways, there isn't much I can do other than wait, and send emails to Fearless Guitars, or try to contact then over the phone... It's almost like watching grass grow... But here in NYC, it's a luxury to have a lawn, so I bake bread instead...

So leading up to Thanksgiving, I decided to start up baking bread again, since the weather is cooler, or colder, so I can fire up the old oven without much worry... Pre-Thanksgiving, I decided to see what I could do in 5 hours, but that was a distaster that went straight to the trash... For Thanksgiving, I allowed myself much more time and had a pretty successful run baking 4 loaves, 2 plain loaves, and 2 caraway seed w/raisins, dried blueberries & cranberries... I will repeat the caraway dried fruit loaves very soon, however, I'm always up for trying something new...

So today, on Dec. 8th, I am working on the following:
3 loaves of a simple crusty bread
3 loaves of ciabatta

Each of the loaves I'm hoping will be about 500g.

Please see preceeding blog entries for the recipes...

For more in artisan bread baking, please check out the following books:
Artisan Baking Across America by Maggie Glezer
and
The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Rheinhart

I highly recommend these books, but what is most important including following the recipes is time and patience... If you rush, you will surely fail...

Updates...

Sorry for the long break between posts... Here's a quick list of what's happening on my end:

1. Rehearsing with my band Har Ik Zehr, and preparing for our 1st recording session on December 20th at Mother West Studios in NYC. We are working on our 1st full length album.

2. Waiting for Clint Searcy of Searcy String Works to put the finishing touches on a custom pickup for my next custom bass to be built by Matt Schmill of FBB Custom Bass Works.

3. Still waiting for my Delano SBC-6 pickups from Fearless Guitars for my main 6 string bass... I ordered them on Sept 11th of this year...

4. Doing some home improvement...

5. Having an itch to build stuff: speaker cabinet, bench, electric upright bass, anything I can dream up... Next stop, Amazon.com for some power tools...

6. Dealing with my injured back... It is slowly getting better...

Stay tuned for more posts...