Sanibel Journal

The summer of splendid isolation is what I call this time, in a deliberate effort to keep my spirits up.  In this year of horrors, my husband Tom and I are doing our part by staying home, not allowing the virus to find us.  The previous 22 summers of our lives we took ourselves and our computers to Paris, where we summered in the city. Even if we never return to Paris, that city has changed us in what seems like a thousand little ways.   We didn’t drive for those months in Paris, so not driving anywhere much now isn’t so strange for us.   In Paris, we learned how to live comfortably enough without air conditioning even when summer turns wickedly hot.   Tom loves the French bakery breads so much that I’ve now learned how to make a boule [1] that we’d be pleased to find in a Parisian bakery.   We experienced the full range of French cuisine, as well as so many other ethnic cuisines that can be found in the big city. In Paris, we came to love certain aspe...

In the summer, I am accustomed to having really good, simple bread from the bakery around the corner.  We’ve spent summer in Paris since 1998, but my husband Tom and I will not be going to Paris this year because of the pandemic.  We are self-isolating at home due to his underlying medical condition. So now I bake bread – a fresh loaf every other day.   I use Jim Lahey’s No Knead Bread recipe , which gives us a simple bread with a taste, a crunchy crust, and a chew like the breads made in the best bakeries in Paris.   Even though the very first loaf I made weeks ago was really fine, I experiment with different flours in different proportions, trying to achieve even more bread perfection.    Try 2 cups of bread flour and one cup of spelt flour if you like a light, country-style bread. To make a loaf of Lahey’s No Knead bread, you need approximately 3 cups, 385 grams, or almost 1 pound of flour.  I say “approximately” because, as I have l...

A week or so before The Isolation, I was thinking about a month of March with warm, sunny Sunday afternoons, when we would give Island Jazz concerts on the patio in front of BIG ARTS.   I needed a sun umbrella that I could clip onto my beach chair, so that I wouldn’t fry to a crisp during those concerts, I thought.   So I ordered one from Amazon. I haven’t used it because of The Isolation.   Within a couple days after the March 8 concert, my husband Tom and I knew enough about the corona virus that we decided to cancel all seven of the remaining concerts for the season. This No-Knead Bread tastes like something we would buy in a bakery in Paris. Then came a stream of orders from Amazon.com that tell one aspect of the story of our isolation.    Each week of The Isolation, we have ordered everything from the local Bailey’s General Store that we can – but there are perturbations in the supply chains, and sometimes Bailey’s cannot deliver certai...