At home I make a lot of the bread we eat, I use a very simple recipe and unbleached floor from Upper Canada Village. It turns out nicely, but I always make a mess in the kitchen and the clean up is as much work as making the bread.  Clearly a new method is called for.  In-Leng, a running friend from Ottawa recommended a no-knead approach and I have decided to give it a go.  I roughly based what I did on this recipe no-knead dutch oven bread  The basic idea is that you mix up a sticky dough and let it rise for 8-18 hours, knock it back, proof for 30 minutes and then put it in to a preheated dutch oven/large covered pan or casserole for 45 minutes covered and 15 with the lid off at 450F/230C.

To minimize the mess I used a plastic box to mix the dough and just put the cover on the box to let it raise and mature.

 I  used a proofing basket to proof the dough and just tipped it into the pot.  This seemed to go badly, but the results where good.

The bread turned out nicely, the bottom was a bit burnt as the pot was in direct contact with bottom of the oven, I have picked up a trivet to prevent this the next time. 

The crumb was great at the edges, but the centre was a little dense.  This was due to my lack of planning, I gave it 5 hours to raise, 8 or more will solve the problem.

Overall, a great success, for our first attempt, we did not have much of a mess to clean up and a few tweaks will make this easy to do on-board, even at sea.

My proportions were:

600g white unbleached “Super Fine” from Upper Canada Village

Large teaspoon Instant Yeast

Teaspoon Salt

 450-500ml warm water

I will play with adding in wholewheat and granary floors and see how it works. 

Kinship and Matthew are still in Annapolis while Kathleen spends a few days in Ottawa visiting a friend who is sick.

Annapolis is a good place to hang out, the mooring ball is cheap – $35 a night and there is a lot going on.  The city is full of well preserved 18th and 19th century buildings. Annapolis was the temporary capital of the US following the Treaty of Paris in 1783.  Today Annapolis is capital of Maryland.  There has been a concerted effort to maintain the look of the city, modern buildings use brick and design cues to mirror the architecture of the existing buildings.

Our time at the sailboat show was productive and we got a lot done.  We have our new cockpit cushions, navigation lights for the dinghy, sorted out and ordered the parts for the lifelines,  ordered AIS SARTs for our life jackets, visited with Viking to take a look at our life-raft inflated – hopefully the only place we will see this.  We talked to lots of suppliers and found a lot of new products, but we stayed focused on our list and we stayed on budget.

The cruising community is quite small and the authors and film makers that fuel the dream that turns wannabes to cruisers are enthusiastic and keen to meet and chat.  We talked to the Shards of the Distant Shores TV show, about the process of designing their new boat – Distant Shores III and their plans for the next year while they are boat-less.

We found Lin Pardey, selling her latest boat and we talked about our idea of sail the Pacific on our third trip, she was, as expected, very encouraging and she invited us for her cruisers Thanksgiving dinner when we get to New Zealand.  Kathleen was impressed enough to buy the book, but perhaps not the Pacific trip just yet.

During our passage down the New Jersey coast Kathleen was assaulted by a collection of Nigel Calder books we forgot to secure.  I told her to give Nigel a hard time when we see him. Well, standing at the wine area at a World Cruising Club event, who should turn up but Nigel himself.  We got to have a good chat, a laugh about the attack of the books.  He is a fan of the Saga 43 and he had Allan Poole stories.  He was attending the show with Sail magazine so he had a handler by the name of Ali. Poor Ali was just about dying with embarrassment as Nigel told us stories about Allan and others that will never make the magazine.

During the boat show the dinghy dock moves from the end of Ego Ally to the police dock on Prince George Street.  The capacity is a lot less, and this leads to a certain amount of congestion at the dock.  Crawling over dinghies to get to shore becomes the norm.

No trip to Annapolis is complete without a visit to Bacon Sails.  Bacons is an Annapolis institution, focusing on reselling and consigning used sails and other equipement  We made a trip last week and found a few little gems, a star finder for $20, a pin wrench for $10.  I took my bike over later and bought line for a new main sheet and the main traveler.  As I got to the store I spotted 2 more Bromptons, these ones belonging to Jean and Yolène on Caffe Latte, they are also on the Caribbean 1500.  We are starting to meet more crews as we go to events, it will be great to arrive in the Caribbean already knowing lots of boats.

 

The sailboat show last weekend is followed by the power boat show on now.  The transformation as the docks are dismantled to let the sailboats leave and then reassembled around the power boats, all happening over less than 2 days is really impressive.  Lots of boat traffic and the sailboats gave us our own parade as they did a run down the harbour before leaving or anchoring in the bay.

 

We are off to Solomon’s Island next week for a haul and paint, but more on that later.

We are sitting on a mooring ball in Annapolis harbour, waiting for the official start of the Annapolis Boat Show on Thursday. But in the meantime, the activity in the harbour is a show all in itself. It is a beehive of activity as the tents go up, the extra docks are put into place,

and the fancy yachts arrive to fill them.

Enjoying the sunset aboard Kinship. You can see the tents off to the right. We are a short dinghy ride from the boat show. Going to be a fun weekend.