All you knead is loaf

Today's blip is by my wonderful husband!

Do; dhow; door; doff; duff... in English the 'ough' stands for a range of phonemes, as in through; bough; thought; cough; rough... Until today, as far as bread-making was concerned, it was hardly coincidence that 'dough' was virtually with 'Doh!'.
I like pottering about in the kitchen, assembling meals. I'm actually not bad at biscuits and I can throw a cake together at a push, but bread... very chancy. That universal staple in its infinite variety has always tended in my hands to become a sullen block of irreproachable but heavy-going wholesomeness.
Jo bought me a day's bread-baking course at Loaf, an artisan bakery on Pershore Rd., up near the Northfield end if you're interested. Tutor, enthusiast and founder of this little enterprise is, no kidding, Tom Baker. No point in trying to précis a day's stream of information here, but suffice to say I brought home pretty passable examples of seeded wholemeal rolls, ciabatta, sourdough loaf, and a piece of nifty boulangerie called a 'fougasse'. Until today, Fougasse was for me the pen-name of Kenneth Bird, the Punch cartoonist who drew the 'Careless Talk Costs Lives' propaganda posters in WW2, who took the alias from a WW1 personnel-mine. Today I added to my pub-quiz fact scrap-book this deceptively simple but natty-looking bread variety.
This evening's meal: breads and cheeses.
Kneading the dough as demonstrated: slap... fold, slap...fold is so satisfyingly therapeutic that I may make time to make dough at the end of some days just for that cathartic pummelling. For that and much else, thanx, Tom