bread, baby food and lessons learned

first, an update on the bread baking adventure. two beautiful (and tall, the book wasn't fibbing!), tasty loaves emerged from my oven after 30 minutes of baking at 425 degrees. i think i may have had my oven rack too high because the tops got a little brown. no fear though, they tasted delicious. as expected, dear husband raved about each piece he ate. and his tuna salad sandwich that i made him for lunch today actually kept him full until well after he came home from work. that's an amazing first! we are rationing ourselves, though, as this bread thing isn't coming easily to me. yes, there were a few black fuzzies from my sweater, but i'm not telling anyone!
now, for the domestic mishap from yesterday. let me preface this by saying i was doing three things at once, one of which was posting yesterday's blog. that said...i was fixing the little cherub's lunch while trying to post this blog and fix dear husband's lunch (all the while conscious of the rising dough). cherub was not happy because he was hungry (and sleepy, but that's another story for another time). so, i pulled out a cube of sweet potatoes from the freezer and stuck them in a plastic bowl (a microwave safe plastic bowl). hit auto defrost intending to leave the potatoes in only for 10 seconds. well, like i said, i was posting this blog, fixing dear husband's lunch and trying to soothe the little cherub. i started to smell something burning. i looked around and there was smoke pouring out of the kitchen! my first thought was that there was something in the burner where the tea kettle was heating. i rushed in and quickly turned the burner off and moved the kettle. but that wasn't it. remember the sweet potatoes in the microwave? yep, they were black as coal and the microwave safe bowl is no more. now i know why they calling it "nuking." so, i have to laugh about it. at least it wasn't those really expensive jarred sweet potatoes that the baby food companies sell. i only paid $.89 per pound for the potatoes. so i suppose the lesson here is (strangely the same as it was with the "softening" lesson) when you intend to nuke something for a few seconds, don't go off and do something else, because, again, you will forget about it. at least i do.