Bread Bowls, Soot, and Obligatory Knitting Content

For Christmas, I received a Bread Bowl.

To season it, I followed the directions which came with it. Coat thickly with olive oil or other food grade oil, let stand 3-4 hours, wash, dry, and enjoy your seasoned bowl. (That's a loose paraphrase, by the way.) Except the next day, the wood looked a bit dry. So I coated it again, and again, and again ... and two cups of olive oil later, it still looks a bit dry to me.

Then I had to figure out how to use it. I looked online, and saw that at least one person made her bread in it from start to almost-finish. She mixes up the dough for 3 loaves in there, kneads it, lets it rise ... and bakes it elsewhere. I gave it a shot, mixing up one loaf's worth of dough and making a mess all over the counter. The bowl isn't that deep. And kneading in it was tough - I banged my wrists on the narrow sides and got bruises on my legs from the bowl spinning on the table when I tried to rotate the dough. Hmmm. I must be missing something. It's a gorgeous bowl and I want to use it ... any ideas how one can safely use it? I've got the bit about putting the dough in, letting it rise, and then shaping it and doing a final rise elsewhere. I can't do a final rise in the bowl since the dough sticks (despite generous flouring of the bowl, or additional oiling of the bowl).

On another topic ... here are my gorgeous pink gloves AFTER being scrubbed with soap and water. Soot is a pernicious, dirty thing. My fingers are still soot-streaked, a day after cleaning our stove WITH the gloves on. This does not bode well for Queen Susan. I'll have to schedule my cleaning for days that I don't have much knitting time. (I did discover that a baking soda scrub, followed by dish soap, can work wonders for getting soot out/off of things. It's not perfect, but it's better than anything else I've tried)


Speaking of knitting time, I've been hard-pressed to come up with 'traveling knitting' projects to work on lately. I fell back on hats. Two watch caps, Jali, and now a Fish Hat, to be precise.


Today's a home day. I need to brave the elements and walk over to the post office to mail some packages, but apart from that - hot soup, a cuppa tea, and some sewing are on the agenda before I sit back to knit.