Floydm's blog

This is my last post about my trip before returning to posts about managing the site and baking, I promise! -Floyd

As far as I can recall, we ate Polish food exclusive on this trip.  Not out of necessity, mind you: at least in cities like Warszawa and Kraków you can dine on sushi, burgers, Italian food, phó, pretty much anything you like now. Chains like Starbucks, McDonalds, Hard Rock Cafe, and KFC are about as common as in the rest of Europe.  We didn’t take this trip to eat American or Italian or Japanese though, we went to eat Polish.

This is off topic, I recognize, but this was only the second time in eight years I stepped away from TFL for more than a day or two, so I hope you'll allow me to indulge in a couple of off topic posts!  Hopefully they'll be a of interest to some of you.  -Floyd

It wasn’t until we arrived that I realized how long it had been since we last visited Poland.  Seventeen years.  

Hey TFLers!  

I'm still getting over the jet lag, but I'm back from Poland.  As all of you in the UK know, March was unusually cold over there this year, so we saw a lot more snow and a lot fewer flowers than we expected. Still, we had a great trip.  

I hope you'll forgive me for making an off topic post, but my last post didn't do justice to how pretty it is Poland right now.  I wanted to do a quick post to share pictures of a few of the sites here.  

Warszawa:

We've been in Warszawa since Thursday.

It has been cold, but it is actually quite beautiful right now.

I've just updated the sandbox (development) version of this site.  If you are so inclined, take a peek!  Username crust, password crumb to get to the site.

As I mentioned three weeks ago, I've been working on upgrading this site to a newer version of the software it runs on. While I am doing that, I'm refreshing the user interface, trying to make the site cleaner and easier to use, and well adapted to mobile phones and tablets.

As I've mentioned previously, as time permits I've been chipping away at an upgrade to TFL.  Progress was slow through the holidays what with the kids home and so many things going on, but recently I've cleared my plate so I can get serious about it.   

There are lots of things I'm trying to accomplish with the upgrade:

Fed the starter dark rye flour Sunday evening.  Monday morning combined:

1000g bread flour

680g warm water

Left that as an autolyse for half an hour, then added:

20g salt

180g ripe starter

Mixed it briefly.  Stretched and folded every hour over the next three hours, then put it in the fridge.

My fight against scurvy (not really) and the wintertime blues (really) by baking fruity things continued today.  This time I went for raspberries and made a Raspberry Cream Cheese Braid using the Blueberry Cream Cheese Braid formula on the site.