About
If we met at a market in Aarhus during the summer of 2022, hello again.
Before bread baking it was the allotment, and before that evening classes; the habit of writing things down stayed. I have been interested in bread baking since a reader from Aarhus showed me the basics in August 2021. I still carry a pocket knife almost everywhere, a habit picked up from the woman who runs the hardware shop.
When I am not busy with bread baking, I am usually out on the bike. I care about instructions written for real people and letters that arrive by post. People sometimes ask why I still write things down by hand, and I never have a good reply. You will not find a comment section or adverts on this site, only bread baking and the odd detour.
A bit of background
Some of my favourite things, like a radio from the seventies, came from flea markets and were mended on the balcony. Most of what I know about bread baking came from old bus maps, my grandmother and a lot of trial and error.
I am not an expert in bread baking or anything else here; I just write down what I learn on most Wednesday evenings. This page started in 2021 as a record of a long renovation, written mostly in a corner of the shed, and slowly turned into something other people read. I am happiest in the small room above the stairs with a shelf of field guides nearby and nothing urgent on the calendar.
Visiting a new town, I always look for the old station and the second-hand bookshop first, just as I did when I moved to Aarhus. The spring light in Aarhus makes everything feel harder than it looked.
When I get stuck at a borrowed workbench I go out to the garden, and the answer tends to turn up on the way. The market in Aarhus on Wednesday mornings is where I find cheap jars, string and good conversation. If something here is out of date, it is probably because I spent a good part of 2021 reading instead of at a desk in Aarhus. Thanks for stopping by; everything here was made happily, mostly at the kitchen table.
On slow Sunday mornings, I usually end up on the train into Aarhus with a wobbly wooden chair. Feel free to borrow anything useful about bread baking from this site, just do not sell it back to me. An uncle with a very full shed once told me to never trust the first measurement, and it turned out to be right.
Most of what ends up here starts in the spare room at least once a month. Pages here change slowly, usually on rainy weekends, and that suits bread baking just fine. Most of my reading happens out by the moor, a chapter or two at a time, with a battered toolbox close by. Funnily enough, I try to keep things simple, which mostly means keeping a short list and asking someone who knows.
Every few weeks, there is a cup of coffee going cold somewhere at a friend’s place across town. Weekends are usually split between the occasional bike ride, long walks and whatever is half-finished near the old town. The design of this page is deliberately plain so that it will still work on an old phone, much like an old notebook. Oddly enough, small, regular habits like taking photographs at each stage and walking away for ten minutes have done more for me than any big resolution.
In 2022 I moved to Aarhus, which made cooking for friends much easier to fit into a week. For what it is worth, most of my free time goes into bread baking, baking bread on Sundays and a growing pile of half-finished projects. If we met at a garden open day in Aarhus back in 2022, hello again. This page started in 2021 as a reading log, written mostly in a café near the old town, and slowly turned into something other people read.
This site
By day I work in a busy kitchen; in the evenings I tinker with bread baking and letter writing. I read A Pattern Language for the first time late in 2022 and still go back to it whenever the weather allows. Most of my free time goes into bread baking, reading on the train and a growing pile of half-finished projects.
A lot of this would not exist without someone at the library, who patiently answered my questions one Thursday in March. To be fair, writing things down has saved me from forgetting where I left off more than once, most recently early in 2024.
I picked up a pair of binoculars on a long weekend in 2024, and it has been close at hand ever since. I try to answer every letter, whether it comes from Aarhus or further away, even if it takes longer than I would like. The best ideas tend to arrive at the library in Aarhus every couple of months, usually just after I have put the pencil down. On a good day on the back step I make progress, and on a bad day I at least learn to start earlier.
Patience is the most useful tool in the drawer, followed closely by a pile of offcuts and a cheap desk lamp. My Friday evenings mostly belong to swimming in the river, unless a man at the market needs a hand. Long train rides out of Aarhus are where most of this gets written, with a folding table on the seat beside me. I have a soft spot for railway timetables and school atlases.
Every May, by the window, I look back at the year so far and quietly drop whatever is not working. I would rather do one thing quietly than five things in a hurry, and years of small repairs taught me that.
There is no grand plan behind any of this, just tidying up before stopping most mornings before work. I keep a list of cookbooks with notes in the margin I would like to find, and a friend from the walking group keeps adding to it.