Floydm's blog

I baked a couple of sourdoughs from Local Breads today. The first was a rustic French. Isn't that beautiful? Nice brown crust, good oven spring, great flavor. The bottom? Oh...

Man fends off a rabid fox with a loaf of sliced bread. Be sure not to miss the video.

Hey Facebook users... I added a page for TFL there too. Check it out: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=7599145950 I'm still working on tuning it. Ideally it'd be just as easy to stay in tune with what is happening on TFL there as it is in any other RSS reader. Personally, I watch TFL activity in a number of places: on My Yahoo page, on live journal, now on Food Buzz, and via email updates too.

My laptop has been in the shop, so for the past few days I've only been on the site long enough to check that there was no spam. That said, it looks like there have been some very good posts lately, like ehanner's garlic bread and bwraith's recent blog posts. I have some catching up to do. I did bake this weekend. I tried a sourdough with chocolate chips. I added milk and some sugar to the dough and bumped up the amount of starter to around 10%.

Yet another miche I baked last night... The sad thing is I'm just going to chop this up and let it dry out to make stuffing out of it. Yes, it is cheaper and easier for me to do this than go buy a bag of bread crumbs at the store. Besides, this will taste considerable better I am sure.

As you may have noticed, in the past couple of days I've replaced a few of the ads on this site with ads for Food Buzz. The folks at Food Buzz approached me a month or so ago to talk about sponsoring the site. After chatting with them I agreed because it seemed like a mutually beneficial relationship. Food Buzz will include The Fresh Loaf as one of their Featured Publishers, thus increasing the exposure of this site. Presumably that'll increase traffic here and expose more people to the great content we're creating here.

The Gingerbread I baked last night I did not bake long enough, so the ends were done (and quite tasty) but I threw away the majority of it. So sad. However, the miche I baked Monday night came out fantastic. Pretty, pretty loaf.

A right sidebar! We have a right sidebar! Whoo hoo! Ok, if you aren't a geek you probably don't care, but I think it is neat. If you are running at 1024x768 or less you won't see it, but that is ok because it isn't critical information. If you are running at a high resolution, it is an added bonus. Of course it looks perfect in Safari and Firefox but a bit funky in IE. If you are still browsing in IE, I beseech you to download Firefox.

I made a few changes to the layout over the weekend. The logo has changed and is now dynamic, I've reduced the padding between some of the elements, and, most significantly, I've fixed the width of the body. Non-nerds may not care about this, but whether web pages should have a fixed width so they look the same on all machines or a flexible width so that they can take full advantage of large monitors is one of these debates that web designers discuss endlessly. I've always been in the flexible width camp, but of late I've begun to move into the fixed width camp.