Lots of doctor visits today – Diane had her mammogram, and I visited the dentist and the ENT.

The trip to the dentist was to let them scan my mouth and order a crown, which will be installed in about three weeks – I don’t understand how the scanner, which is hand-held, is able to merge its images accurately, since the process takes several minutes, which means that the dentist is moving her hand and I’m moving my mouth. Clarke’s Third Law must be at work!

The ENT was a follow-up visit – the miraculous recovery of my sense of smell didn’t last very long. I saw the ENT for the first time last month and he confirmed that I had sinusitis (as well as a deviated septum) and put me on a short course of antibiotics, along with a new regimen of nasal irrigation, Flonase, Mucinex, and Sudafed. Since then, my sense of smell has come and gone randomly – that’s good news, in that it indicates the system is working, but it’s also bad news, because it’s not clear what will get it working all the time. He’s put me on a different antibiotic for the next 10 days to see if that can clear out the sinusitis.

But even without the new antibiotic, I was able to smell the star jasmine just outside our door today – and it looks pretty good, too!

My chiropractor surprised me this morning. Last week, we’d talked about barbecuing and baking, including the pretzels I’ve been making. He was interested, so I sent him the recipe and mentioned that I hadn’t tried making them with the diastatic malt powder that was listed as an optional ingredient.

We went there this morning, and he handed me a small bag of powder. It was diastatic malt – he’d ordered a jar the day we’d talked! He clearly takes his food preparation seriously.

Naturally, I wanted to make pretzels as soon as we got home to see if I could detect a difference with the malt powder. I did a few things differently this time (beyond using the malt powder). I leveled the flour in the bowl instead of letting it pile up; I added the other dry ingredients except the yeast before the water (instead of putting the water in right after the flour); I put the yeast in the water and added them together as the final step before mixing.

The dough seemed to form more quickly than usual, but, as usual, there was a lot of flour that didn’t get incorporated. I added some water – perhaps 3 or 4 ounces – and kept mixing; I wound up with a moist lump of dough that came off the dough hooks and the side of the bowl much more easily than usual.

The dough rose; when I went to fold it, it seemed stickier than normal, but not unreasonably so. But when I tried to shape it into logs, it was almost too sticky to deal with – I had to put a lot of flour on my hands and on the board to get it to work.

It rose a lot in the 20 minutes that I let it rest before making the pretzels – and it was still very very sticky. But I persevered.

When it came time to boil the pretzels, I had more problems – several of them fell apart in the water. And they were sticking to the parchment paper. And some of them seemed to retain liquid. But I got them done and put them on two sheet pans and into the oven.

The pretzels on the top sheet pan looked properly baked after 14 minutes so I took them out of the oven and moved the bottom pan to the top – usually, I have to bake the bottom pretzels for an extra two minutes. Today, though, they didn’t look brown even after three minutes – I finally took them out and let them all cool.

When I cut into one of the pretzels from the bottom batch, the inside looked weird and felt gooey. We didn’t eat it. Nor either of the next two I tested.

I don’t know what happened – my guess is that I added far too much water at the start of the process when I wanted to incorporate all of the flour. Maybe I should ignore the surplus flour next time? Advice welcome!

I’m not sure if I could tell the difference in flavor from the malt, but the pretzel we did eat was good. And we have half the batch left to try.