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.

When I checked my mail this morning, I had two alarming messages from TurboTax telling me that our tax return submissions had been rejected by the IRS and the FTB. The message about the Federal return said that it had been rejected for having a duplicate Form 1099-R; the State message said they’d rejected the return because the Feds had done so. Both messages told me to start up TurboTax for more details, so I did.

TurboTax told me to check and make sure I hadn’t accidentally duplicated a Form 1099-R – I hadn’t, but we did have two forms from the same payer with the exact same amount. I checked their “help” site and discovered a lot of discussion of this issue – it appears to be new this year. The message claims that the IRS rejected the submission, but the discussion seems to indicate that the problem is with TurboTax; people have been getting around the problem by adding one cent to the amount on one form (since the IRS rounds to the nearest dollar, this shouldn’t be an issue, but it makes everyone nervous). There was also a pointer to a page on the TurboTax site where you could add yourself to a notification of any updates to the problem – but that page claimed that the problem had been solved today. So I submitted the return again with no changes and will see what happens overnight.

On a more cheerful note, we booked our flights to Iceland and Boston for our summer trip. The travel agent is only booking fully-refundable tickets for clients this year. I was surprised to see that the difference in price between refundable and non-refundable fares was less than 10% instead of the doubled or tripled fare that was typical in the Before Times – of course we bought the refundable tickets!

It was the hottest day of the year, so we didn’t go out walking until after dinner. Diane takes a lot of the flower photos she posts to Facebook on our neighborhood walks – sometimes I take flowers, too, but tonight, my eye was caught by something rather different.