Happy Monday!

I know that it's Monday . . . but since everything is in bloom and the air is getting warm, the weeks go by faster and faster, making it easier to tolerate these quick weeks filled with work and days spent inside.

This weekend, I did two things I've never done before: ran 13.1 miles (a half marathon) and I made French bread from scratch - admittedly, an odd pair of hobbies, but I've been trying to make the most of my weekends and my work/life balance.  The 13.1 wasn't pretty, but I did it.  I feel far more confident about the actual marathon I'm registered to run next Sunday in Chicago.  I'm actually starting to get very excited.  It also didn't hurt that the weather today was perfect for running - moments of sun interspersed with lots of fog and mist close to Lake Michigan.  My new iPhone app is great, too.  I don't have to use an adapter to track my distance/calories/pace.  Instead, GPS keeps up with my location.  My only wish is that I could run Spotify in conjunction with the app, rather than running them separately.  In short, looking forward to getting after it next weekend.

As far as the bread goes, I get tired of buying bread from the store all of the time and love the fresh bread that we get from Bennison's bakery at the farmers' market each week during the summer.  However, as I was flipping through my go-to cookbook: I decided that the bread chapter - often under-utilized - was worth a second look.  I will save you the boring parts and the ridiculous stickiness and messiness associated with baking French bread - although, it is supposed to be one of the easier ones - and suffice it to say, that my favorite part will be eating the bread.  Though, I did love when the bread went from the size of a softball to something more like this:

 Which I then got to "punch" down.  Way fun.  Of course, the 90 seconds of fun that I had punching it down did not compare to the half an hour of cleaning flour off of every surface in my kitchen when my Kitchen Aid mixer decided to reject the enormous ball of dough.  "Ruby," as I like to call her, needs to toughen up.  No hard feelings, Ruby.  I just didn't appreciate being covered in flour. I digress. 

So after the punching and dividing and rising, etc., the loaves looked like this: 

That's cornmeal (well, actually it is bread crumbs because I am out of corn meal) on the pan.  After more rising, the loaves looked like this: 

 

Okay, enough with the pre-bread documentation. 

Anyway, so the bread ended up looking like this.

I hope it tastes good . . .  I must admit that halfway through this process, I was ready to call my dad and ask if we could borrow his bread maker, as this process is tedious.  However, I will not stop until I learn how to make pretzel bread - my personal favorite. All in all, a very successful weekend.