Far be it from me to complain about having a job in this economy, but there are certain inconveniences for the food blogger engaged by day in the 9 to 5 grind. Like bread-baking: for me, it has to be a weekend activity, since even if you take the delayed-fermentation route – doing most of the work the day before – dough needs to be taken out of the refrigerator two hours before baking. Try that on a weeknight after work and you won’t be eating delicious bread until well after nine.

It’s a shame, too, because what  better time for the comforts and reassurances of a fresh-baked loaf of bread than after a day of the humiliations of office labor? No better time, that’s what. So today I decided to stop whining about my problems and  actually do something about them: I took a friend with me to work.

We had a nice bike ride through the snow, my bread dough and I, enjoying the subtly rutted and newly slushy streets and trails of Minneapolis. One nice thing is that I did not have to worry about my dough fermenting prematurely during my ride, since the ambient temperature in Minnesota right now is far colder than a refrigerator.

When I arrived at work, the dough went straight to the fridge and I was off to a dedicated and productive day. I only allowed my focus to break away from my labors at the stroke of three, when it was time to take the dough out to warm up. I set it by the water cooler, where I am sure it had many conversations with my coworkers about the latest happenings in sports and popular culture.

Soon enough five o’clock rolled around, and it was time for my dough and I to end our day on the job. Just a short bike ride home separated me from baking and weekday-bread-induced bliss.

Since I knew I wouldn’t have much time to shape and proof the dough once I got home, I had planned on making a simple bread, and it doesn’t get much simpler in terms of shaping than focaccia: just take the wet mass of dough, plop it down in a sheet pan coated with olive oil, pour on some more olive oil, rest a half hour, and then bake at 425ºF for about 20 minutes, until the bread looks brown and crispy. If you’re wondering about my dough recipe, it was:

• 12 oz AP flour
• 12 oz whole wheat flour
• ½ tsp yeast
• 1 Tbsp salt
• 18 oz water

With the overnight fermentation, it’s not that important to knead this dough – a good thing, too, because at 75% hydration kneading would be a challenge.

Proofing and baking the dough gave me the perfect amount of time to put together the rest of dinner. The bread came out very well, and much sooner than would have been possible without bringing it to the office. I think I’ve found my new commute partner.

Cookbooks have a life cycle: when a book is new, it’s exciting, it might get cover to cover, torn bits of paper sprouting up like so many shoots in the spring marking promising recipes. Then comes experimentation: making each of those recipes, seeing which work and which don’t. And finally – tragically – the third age of cookbookdom; sad years spent languishing on the shelf, ignored but for the one or two recipes that keep the book from being sent off to the big cookbook library in the sky.

Some cookbooks can avoid this fate – maybe a copy of the Joy of Cooking that gets referenced for everything (I prefer Cook’s Illustrated’s New Best Recipe) – but most are destined to become so much shelf decoration.

Take Curried Favors: Family Recipes from South India by Maya Kaimal MacMillan. When I received this book as a gift, I was into Indian food in a big way. The book was a perfect gateway into the cuisine: easy, apparently authentic recipes that produced great food. In the first months I had this book I cooked widely from it, even preparing the multi-course dinner menus suggested in the back. We had such good times, Curried Favors and I. But, eventually, my enthusiasm for Indian food was crowded out by other cuisines and Curried Favors joined the other disgraced books of yesteryear on the shelf, pulled down only when I had a craving for that one recipe; in this case cholé – a curry of chickpeas and tomatoes.

Cholé is a household favorite for Martha and me, made so many times we don’t really need to look at the recipe anymore. But for whatever reason last week I got the urge to double check the recipe – maybe just to be sure I had the spice mixture right. What page was cholé on? The paper scrap bookmark had long since fallen out. To the index! C… ch.. hey, cabbage! In all my excitement for the familiar flavors of cholé I hadn’t forgotten that we had half a cabbage sitting in the crisper drawer, on its way to being thrown out, rotten in two weeks unless fate intervened.

And as fate would have it I found myself turning not to Cholé on page 93 but to Cabbage Thoren on page 73. Scanning the list of ingredients – coconut, a green chile, garlic, cumin, coriander, cayenne, turmeric, salt, mustard seeds, dried red peppers, bay leaves, rice, the aforementioned cabbage – we had everything on hand: it was meant to be.

I had never made Cabbage Thoren before that night – in spite of having the recipe in my possession more than eight years – and it’s a shame, because it was very good. And it got me thinking, maybe it’s time to start exploring Curried Favors again. Paging through to the elaborate suggested menus at the back, I started to plan another Indian feast.

This month is replete with bloggers’ suggestions for food resolutions. Here’s mine: find a cookbook you own that you have more or less forgotten, dust it off, and see what new things it has in store.

I put away our Christmas ornaments today and disassembled the tree; I packed up the lights around the window, the “candles” in the dining room, and the gingerbread tea light holders. Because we’re not quite finished burning through this year’s Frasier Fir candles, I’ll keep our new Sagaform votive holders out a little longer. The spot where the tree was looks awfully bare now, but it’s nice to get things put away and to look forward to next year.

I pack all of our mostly-flat ornaments in an old chocolate box in layers of tissue; the more dimensional ones are stowed in a larger box cushioned with crinkle-cut paper. For added protection, any ceramic or glass pieces are clad in bubble wrap. As if that wasn’t enough, a very few of the ornaments (not pictured) spend the better part of the year obsessive-compulsively stored in their original boxes for maximum security.

All these smaller boxes fit into two plastic totes with locking lids to protect against the periodic flooding our storage space is prone to–the cause of which has thus far not been discovered.

And so, comfortably enough past Epiphany, we close up the boxes of Christmas until next year.

Around 10 boxes formerly part-filled with tea are now flattened and in the recycling thanks to this handy yellow file drawer. Originally purchased for our wedding in September, this box from Hindsvik‘s shop has been sitting around my office with nothing in it ever since it arrived as a part of a package from Michigan back in October. Not sure what I would do with it in the apartment, I brought it home on Friday to see if it might be of some use. Less than 24-hours later, this old file box has a new calling.

Tom and I have been dreaming of a tea box for a while now, since it always seems like we have at least one million boxes of tea each with 2 tea bags inside, all of which tend to topple to the floor every time we open the tea cupboard’s door.

Online searches for a tea box turned up a few, but most of them (according to reviews) don’t actually fit the average teabag inside. After coming up dry on the web, I considered making a teabox myself from wood. That thought didn’t last long due to my wood working experience and lack of equipment.

Zero effort required, not only does this box fit perfectly in our tea cupboard, it is also–unlike the aforementioned actual tea storage boxes–the exact right height for tea bags:

If you’re interested in a box of your own, Hindsvik still has a few metal numbered drawers available.