My house smells better than your house

I am finally moving through some of the stress and have started to get to the excitement part of this adventure. At least, mentally, I am moving to excitement. The signs of stress are still clearly present in my body: my jaw is sore from clenching and I've developed a weird muscle fasciculation in my leg (wish I was kidding about that). But there were moments this week where my excitement about a PhD and new country have outshone my anxieties about my growing to do list, so that feels like a win!

We are starting to see some of the results of our actions. My luggage arrived this week. The suitcase seems really big, but I suspect it will fill up very fast. When I saw it, my first impulse was to see if I could fit into it. Justin talked me out of this, but I'm confident I could if I tried. We also got a bunch of boxes this week, and got our silica packs**. That means the actual packing (rather than just cleaning, de-cluttering & donating) is about to begin.

If I'm being honest, I feel like my quest to use up all the flour in the house has helped me move through some of my anxieties. Most of the stuff we have to do right now is home-based anyways (packing & cleaning). This way, I have a non-leaving activity to intersperse with packing. And I get fresh bread. So far I have tried a cinnamon raisin bread (also helped use up some of our raisins) and a basic white bread (aka homemade wonderbread). Both winners. There are no losers in the flour challenge.

When I was going through the kitchen (to find un-opened food to donate), I found a bag each of bread flour and cake flour. I'm pretty confident I can get through the bread flour, but the only way I'm getting through the cake flour is if I convince Justin that poundcake sandwiches are an acceptable lunch food. The cake flour also introduces an ingredient conundrum: Do I buy more butter/sugar/oil just to use up the cake flour? I found smaller bulk bags of even stranger flours: dark rye flour and chickpea flour. No idea what I ever used those for, so I'm not including them in my flour challenge.

Here is where I stand:

AP flour:

Starting weight (SW): 4.272 kgs

Current weight (CW): 3.189 kgs (-25%)

Bread flour:

SW: 1.245 kgs

CW: 0.931 kgs (-25%)

Cake flour:

SW: 1.951 kgs

CW: 1.951 kgs

If anyone has any cake flour recipes, now would be the time to send them my way!

**For those of you who are curious, silica is a desiccant. It absorbs moisture. You know those little white packets in shoeboxes that say 'do not eat' on them? That's silica. To preserve our stuff & save space, we are going to pack a lot of things in Justin's lunch boxes. Because everything is going to be boxed up for 3+ years, we are being extra careful with our packing. Any lunch boxes with paper products in it (eg. paper cranes, boxes, etc) is getting packed with a bounce sheet & a silica pack.