Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

1 pound bread flour, plus extra for shaping
1 teaspoon instant rapid rise yeast
2 teaspoons honey
10 ounces bottled or filtered water
2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 quarts hot water
Vegetable oil, for greasing the rising container
2 tablespoons cornmeal
1/3 cup water
1 tablespoon cornstarch

Combine 5 ounces of the flour, 1/4 teaspoon of the yeast, all of the honey, and all of the bottled water in a straight-sided container; cover loosely and refrigerate for 8 to 12 hours.

Place the remaining 11 ounces of flour, remaining yeast, and all the salt into the bowl of a stand mixer, and add the pre-ferment from the refrigerator. Using the dough hook attachment, knead the mixture on low for 2 to 3 minutes just until it comes together. Cover the dough in the bowl with a kitchen towel and allow to rest for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, knead the dough on medium speed for 5 to 10 minutes or until you are able to gently pull the dough into a thin sheet that light will pass through. The dough will be sticky, but not so sticky that you can't handle it.

While the dough is kneading, pour half of the hot water into a shallow pan and place on the bottom rack of your oven.

Grease the inside of a large straight-sided container with the vegetable oil. Place the dough ball into the container and set on the rack above the pan of water. Allow to rise until doubled in size, approximately 1 to 2 hours.

Once the dough has doubled in size, turn it onto a counter top, lightly dust your hands with flour, and press the dough out with your knuckles; then fold 1 side in towards the middle of the mass and then the other, as if you were making a tri-fold wallet. Repeat the folding a second time. Cover the dough with a kitchen towel and allow to rest for another 10 minutes.

Flatten dough again with your knuckles and then fold the dough in onto itself, like you are shaping something that looks like a jellyfish. Turn the dough over and squeeze the bottom together so that the top surface of the dough is smooth. Place the dough back onto the counter and begin to roll gently between your hands. Do not grab the dough but allow it to move gently back and forth between your hands, moving in a circular motion. Move the dough ball to a pizza peel or the bottom of a sheet pan that has been sprinkled with the cornmeal. Cover with the kitchen towel and allow to bench proof for 1 hour, or until you poke the dough and it quickly fills back in where you poked it.

Place an unglazed terra cotta dish upside down into the oven and heat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Combine the 1/3 cup of water and the cornstarch in a small bowl. Uncover the dough and brush the surface with this mixture. Gently slash the top surface of the dough ball in several places, approximately 1/3 to 1/2-inch deep. Add more of the hot water to the shallow pan if it has evaporated. Slide the bread onto the terra cotta dish in the oven and bake for 50 to 60 minutes. Once the bread has reached an internal temperature of 205 to 210 degrees F, remove to a cooling rack and allow to sit for 30 minutes before slicing. It is essential to wait for 30 minutes in order to allow the gluten to continue to make the important bonds being created inside the loaf.

Birthdays are great as a kid because presents seem to be given to you for free, without any strings attached. As you grow older and have a family, you realize that Birthday presents are being purchased out of your communal funds and, indirectly, you are buying your own gifts. This conundrum has drained some of the magic from birthdays for me. I'm not sure how to clearly explain it, but gifts received for free always seem a bit different than a gift which costs our family. This makes the gift seem less like a gift, more like a present to yourself.

This week, we celebrated our Unbirthdays. Rebecca has been trying for the past year to get anything of interest from Craigslist or freecycle. We haven't been able to get anything for free because of the overuse of these sites in the Bay Area. It almost makes winning the lottery seem more likely. But for our unbirthday week, (which we hadn't even planned) we won two free bookcases. Our books had been overflowing on our shelves (worse than we thought to fill up two complete bookshelves!) and we were glad to get the free bookcases even if they were a bit ratty. That is how our unbirthday started on Tuesday. A friend from church took me in his truck to pick up the bookcases while Rebecca found some more luck and was able to go pick up a free jogging stroller (which we won't be able to use for another year, which is okay because some repairs need to happen to it first). After heavily dusting the bookshelves, we stayed up until well past midnight setting up our shelves and organizing the books into a sensible spacial distribution. Three gifts for free! Call that an unbirthday? Well, it goes on.

I was accepted for residency tuition. This saves us approximately four to five thousand dollars a semester. If that isn't a great free gift, then I don't know what is. And during the next 24 hours we managed to trade company stocks which doubled our investment (another free gift) and our anniversary present arrived in the mail several weeks early and surprised us. Well, things for our unbirthdays were going great. So we topped it off by going to a free movie and watching the Simpsons, courtesy of Discovercard bonus award. Which, by the way, exceeded my very low expectations.

With unbirthdays out of the way, we could focus more on birthdays coming up, including the smallest birthdays. Thursday evening we spent 3 hours in a birthing class, not for free. I tried to come up with as many questions as I could, since there are averages which books don't tell you and expectancies that, although there isn't any normal birth, give us a better idea of what we should be expecting with labor. I would say it was a productive evening. I wasn't expecting much.

Friday night we swam in the pool, after a long hot day. Saturday we went to a free performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Cupertino. The San Francisco Shakespeare company puts on free Shakespeare in the park every year and they tour the performances around the Bay Area. We got there about an hour early and the amphitheater was already packed with people and their picnics. For future notice, get to the park by 6pm (the show started at 7:30pm). Our friends brought some bread, crackers, salami, fancy cheeses; this was really the best way to have an outdoor dinner before a fancy show [we brought a salad -- finger foods were a bit easier to deal with]. The performance was so well done, I felt bad leaving without paying -- we dished up whatever cash we had to their donations box after the performance [we never carry much cash on us, so it wasn't much...]. Although Midsummer Night's Dream is one of the more difficult works to follow, this company did a wonderful job of presenting the show. We intend on making this a staple of our summers in the Bay Area; we're excited to see which Shakespeare play they put on next year.

"But he's holding it!"

-a little girl in the audience continuously yelled this when the performer, for obvious comedic reasons, was holding tight to his sword preventing the other performer from drawing it.