Dead Zombie Goo

 Day 5 Take 2 

September 18, 2022 

I decided to try and make some high protein bread. Not having any of the necessary ingredients I decided to use what I had. 

Having made beautiful things out of quinoa in my past I figured I had this and would use flax and chia seeds to sub the eggs and psyllium husks to bind it all together and fall apart when you’re eating it. 

I cooked up the quiona and put everything into a blender. Then added some water, and more water and more water. 

The thick warm paste of mushed quinoa and seeds filled the blender and still wouldn’t fully mix. So I did what any mad scientist would do in her ktiechen and I threw some yeast into it and mixed it by hand. 

Taking the blob of yeasty quinoa goop out of the blender with the spatula I stirred it with I moved it into the parchment lined loafs pan. I had a good feeling about this bread. After all, my other quinoa breads were quite tasty. I let it sit on the counter for about 45 minutes hoping it would rise. It didn’t. 

So I popped it into the oven and let it bake for over an hour, quinoa tends to be a little on the moist side so I left it in a little longer than I should.The toothpick came out clear so I removed the loaf from the over and plopped it on a cooling rack. 

It spread. Like hot thick goo overflowing the boundaries or a crusty shell it spread right before my eyes. Slowly it started to sink through the rack. Crap I thought, what now? 

I put the crusted gooey blob onto a cookie sheet and popped it back into the oven. Maybe that will dry it out enough to eat. 

HARD NOPE. Maybe I could save it. 

I scooped the contents out of the hardish shell into a bowl and added more water in hopes that I might be able to balance the batter with something that creates horribly dry baking. This would normally be a job for coconut flour but I couldn't find mine. The last time I saw it I think I cursed it and sent it to the basement with the quail food making ingredients. Having deemed it unfit for human consumption because it was far too dry would have made it the perfect candidate. Instead I used dehydrated black bean powder, which can end up dry or moist depending on the recipe. 

The black bean powder had turned the goo a dead gray. The dead gray color you would expect to see of a decomposing zombie. Dead zombie goo I now called it. 

Having properly bloomed the yeast this time I had faith that it would work. 

My faith was once again misplaced but that didn’t mean that it wasn't going to rise in the oven. So I put it back into the oven and left for well over an hour. Nothing could still be goo in an oven for that long? Right? 

Wrong! I pulled the dead zombie goo out of the oven and just like before it was still a hot mess of mush, only this time it was well mixed and looked like death. 

Now these ingredients are expensive and sometimes difficult to get where I live. Wasting them was not an option. I pulled out the dehydrator and spread the dead zombie goo ever so thinly over parchment paper on the racks. 

My dehydrator has been making me crackers from this sort of concoction for years. It was my last hope. I sprinkled each rack with light dusting of sea salt and whispered to my dehydrator “Don’t fail me now” as I plugged it in and left it to run in the sunroom overnight. 

Horse O’clock which had started as a minimum of 1km has now evolved into “lets see what we can do in an hour”. Setting time boundaries with myself is a big part of my balance experiment for this cycle and so far I think they’re working really well. I let go of my tension and then like I had hit a secret button Punkin let go of hers too! There we walked, long and relaxed in an effortless fast gait. 

4.12 kilometers we walked tonight working on releasing tension while moving. Which puts us at 34.6% of the way through our Valkyrie Challenge and only 63.6 more miles of ground work left until our nightly walks will transition into nightly rides. And to think I almost didn’t go because of today’s earlier failure. 

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