Music and food

   One of my guilty pleasures is doing my grocery shopping with my iPod. I'm a coupon clipper and list maker. So when I go grocery shopping, it takes me quite a while to go through the whole store and get everything I need and save the most money I can. Listening to music during this process helps me concentrate and stay sane. Many people don't appreciate it - I get a lot of menacing looks. But I don't care. I really enjoy it! I spent almost two hours in Wal-Mart getting groceries and toiletries. After check out, I had saved $30.50 in coupons alone, not counting all the savings from items on discount! Then I hit Sam's Club to buy meat and my bread ingredients in bulk. I was kind of disappointed because they only carry white bread flour, no wheat bread flour, oats, seeds, nothing else. I guess I'll have to find a whole food store for those items.
   At home, I took out my starter from the sourdough bread a few weeks ago when I made my first loaf. I prepared it to make wheat sourdough by substituting 2 cups of wheat flour for the white. While that was rising, I flipped through several cookbooks looking for tasty things to make for Sunday dinner. We settled on apricot glazed pork chops, sweet potatoes and grilled asparagus. Then I came across a recipe for cheesy spoon bread. I had never heard of it, but it only took an hour to make so I decided to add it to the menu.
   You need: yellow corn meal, milk, cheddar cheese, eggs, salt, baking powder and sugar. I thought it strange that the recipe didn't call for any flour. How can you make bread without flour? It also called to seperate the eggs and beat the egg whites until they peak. What an odd thing to do for a bread. Well, this was some trickery "bread". When it came out of the oven it looked perfect and plump, almost like cornbread. But the constistancy was kind of like cheese grits and it was really "airy" or fluffy like a sufle. It was very tasty! However, I would consider it an imposter bread. It seemed to me, more like a breakfast item. Note taken.
  Now, my wheat sourdough. It didn't rise as much as the first loaf I made with this starter, but by midnight I was ready for bed and divvied up the dough into three loaf pans to let it rise again overnight. I timed the rising process so I could bake it Monday morning and take it to work. After all, I don't need all this bread laying around the house. My coworkers are great for providing feedback and suggestions, albeit sometimes unsolicited and from people who know nothing about cooking, I do appreciate it while I'm learning. This loaf was a little sweeter than the original sourdough, so I'm going to assume that's because the yeast and sugar had longer to ferment? The wheat flavor was delicious. I actually liked the wheat sourdough, better than the original. Success!