Far and away one of our most popular posts, we’ve gotten so many requests for this recipe that we thought we’d post it again. Happy Monday!

OK, I suck at baking, am cheap, lazy, dumb and live at an altitude that I’m sure would make it almost impossible to bake anything if I ever bothered to try. That said, even I am capable of making this perfect, beautiful, moist, delicious, yeasty bread (with apologies to the enemies of gluten). It’s so good that you would think that I have magical powers. It’s like a party trick. Yes you, too, can wow your friends with hot and delicious bread.

First off, I did not invent this bread. My wife and I found out about it from Ele Annand’s blog GoAwayWinter.com. She found out about it from the The New York Times, which adapted it from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking. Which is all to say that we didn’t invent it. That said, I’ve now shared this bread with enough people to realize that enough people don’t yet know about it. So we’re spreading the gospel. I can’t stop baking it.

Now, this recipe IS adapted to make ONE loaf of bread. You’re obviously more than welcome to follow the the recipe at The New York Times for more loaves and if you DON’T have a covered baking dish. However, we like the one loaf recipe and Ele’s suggestion of using a Dutch Oven (or any other covered baking dish or claypot, which work equally well because they all keep in the moisture).

So here it is:

3 cups of unbleached, organic flour + extra for dusting (approx .85 cents)
1 and 1/4 tsp salt (approx .02 cents)
1/4 tsp yeast (approx .02 cents)
1 and 5/8 cup of water (approx .01 cents).

Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl then add the water and stir it all together until it’s a lump that looks like this:

Then cover it up, preferably with a wet dish towel over the top. We like to wrap the towel around a plate so it stays fairly moist. Like this:

The reason you do this is to keep the bread from drying out because it’s going to sit for about 8 to 12 hours to rise. That’s right: NO KNEADING!

The second rise is shorter, but equally important. Once the bread has risen and doubled (approximately), dust the top with flour, scrape it from the sides of the bowl and flip it around a couple of times. Then cover it again (remoisten towel if necessary). It’ll look like this:

Then, in an hour or two (preferably two if you want it to be lighter and fluffier), preheat your over to 425 degrees with your well-greased (butter or oil both work) covered baking dish in the oven. Once it’s hot, take the baking dish out, dump the bread in and bake it for 30 minutes and it’ll be perfect. If you time it right and get up early to feed your dog or iguana, you can do the second rise at 6 a.m. and then bake it 8 a.m. for a breakfast treat. Or you can do the second rise when you get home from work and have it hot on the table by 7 p.m. When it’s done it’ll look like this (I swear on unleavened bread—it’s amazing!):

Enjoy! You’ll never buy a $5 loaf of bread again… probably.

For further reading in the kneadless bread genre, you might also check out this excellent book: Kneadlessly Simple: Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads by Nancy Bagget.

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You’ll have to forgive us all these mountain bike rides (all of which are also hikeable!), but it’s summer and after a year in New York it’s hard not to indulge in what makes the Pikes Peak Region so very not New York. Last week we rode the North Catamount Reservoir Loop Trail. It’s a 10-mile, intermediate ride with a fair amount of steep climbing and very little technical difficulty. Not a thrill ride by any means, but it’s a beautiful 2 hour-ish ride including a picnic. There are good directions and a good description of the trail HERE. Enjoy!

In the three years that she lived in Colorado Springs, printmaker Ele Annand didn’t show her work much, but always made an impression when she did. We’re sad, for us, that she’s leaving, but happy for her that she’ll be moving to North Carolina to study at the renowned Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. Of course, we couldn’t let her leave without asking her to share some of her seldom-seen work and her thoughts about the Colorado Springs arts community.

(Please leave us some feedback below in the comments or via email at thebigsomething@krcc.org. Thanks!)

There are any number of reasons to go see Blondie at the Pikes Peak Center tonight. She was rock, she was punk, she was rap, she was ska, she was new wave and she was… disco! This video of “Heart of Glass” (sorry, embedding wasn’t available on this one) pretty much says it all. Yeah, she’s no spring chicken now, but neither is Bob Dylan, and he never did disco like this, or at all for that matter. Whatever you’re doing tonight, we can almost guarantee that it won’t be your last opportunity to do it unless you’re going to see Blondie. She’ll never come here again. Seriously. Pay homage!

All the info you need to buy tickets and find your way there is right HERE.

And just in case you thought she was done with her genre safari, here’s an acoustastic country version of “Heart of Glass” for you:

This was another of the earliest Big Something posts and, because we fear you may have missed it, we want to present it you again as we implore: You should read this comic book by Colorado Springs native Kollin Strand!

Here’s the original post from this past May:

If you don’t mind us saying so, this complete comic book by native Colorado Spring artist Kollin Strand is pretty amazing! (To get the full effect, we recommend viewing it in “full-screen” mode by clicking on the arrows in the lower right hand corner). As Kollin rightly points out below, “COMICS ARE HARD WORK!” The fact that he managed to produce this by himself and to do so with such visual elegance is pretty remarkable. Kollin currently attends the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he produced the comic. Here’s what he has to say for himself:

I am 29 years old and live in Chicago. I attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for painting and drawing and work as a freelance illustrator for anyone that will have me. I spent 21 years in Colorado and was fortunate enough to study under some of the local greats. I think they’re great. Floyd Tunson while he was teaching at Palmer, my oldest brother Kel, and Rob Olson at PPCC were the most influential people in the development of my art practice and philosophy. Actually, I don’t have a specific philosophy regarding art as I am stll deciding what the function of art is. I illustrate, a function that is much easier to define. I am drawn to the grotesque and weird for subject matter, although the “Story of Fire” may not reveal that so much. This is the second full length comic I’ve drawn and consider it to be far more successful than my first attempt. My third comic will be a series of short stories that I am still in the process of fleshing out. I hadn’t realized previous to drawing comics how much work they are and how easy it is to have the crucial elements fail to gel. COMICS ARE HARD WORK. Recently I have attempted to expand beyond this style of drawing with experimentations in automatic drawing, light table collaging, and image manipulation that is for the moment completely non representational. I like to make lines, regardless of what the image ends up being.

You can check out more of Kollin Strand’s drawings at his Flickr page HERE.

OK, even if you don’t know who Don Draper is, you’ve surely heard of Mad Men, the AMC Drama about early 1960’s New York advertising culture that’s had critics slobbering over themselves since Season 1 two years ago. If you haven’t seen it, we strongly recommend that you do so (it’s on Netflix). Season 3 just began (it’s available on iTunes on Monday mornings) and looks to be as visually grand and socially caustic as the past two seasons. A word of advice: it takes a bit of getting into, so don’t give up before you’ve watched at least 6 episodes.

We doubt the main character, Don Draper (played handsomely by actor Jon Hamm), will have advertising business in Colorado Springs this season, but if he does, he’ll surely be impressed by this 1964 Alexander Film Company (more on that later) Promotional Film for Colorado Springs: TIME TO LIVE.

See the beautiful Antler’s Hotel (wait, the one they tore down?), skate at the amazing Broadmoor World Arena (didn’t they tear that down?), ski just up the hill at Ski Broadmoor (yep, definitely closed), play on the amazing surrealist playground concrete equipment (gone!), see JFK at the AFA (dead!). Yes, you can still visit this “happy, progressive community.” It’s so good, it’ll actually make you want to move here! Only Don Draper could’ve created such great propaganda for our city! (Thanks to the Pikes Peak Library District for posting this on YouTube).

(All photos in this slideshow by Adam Bauer)

Colorado Springs’ Memorial Park is now home to the largest skate park in the state of Colorado. Local skateboarders Dan McDonald and Adam Bauer have been documenting some of the young local talent at the new skatepark since its opening in January 2009. In this audio-slideshow, McDonald describes the features and tricks and skaters they’ve captured.

There are more images of the impressive architecture of the skatepark itself HERE.

If still images aren’t quite cutting it, here’s a couple of videos produced by Adam Bauer featuring some of the same skaters at a variety of skate spots around Colorado Springs:

If video’s not cutting it and you want to see it for yourself, there’s a contest this Saturday (sorry, we couldn’t find the times), August 22 and the park is located at the corner of Pikes Peak Avenue and Union Boulevard.

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