Mending, sourdough, books, and board games
All things that I am doing and think you might like
Hello Friend!
Good morning! It is such a soggy and gray day here. My parents have a day off due to the bad weather. My partner is working from home. And I am writing to you, hoping that you can do something cozy and nice for yourself today. It’s on days like this that I feel we most deserve to indulge.
This week I am sharing with you a list of things that I am doing and liking this week. The first couple are for everyone and the last bunch are for paid subscribers only.
I am making a new sourdough starter. My partner, Kody, asked me to start making sourdough again and that was all I needed to get very excited about it again. My starter is around five days old. I started it with whole wheat flour which is going very well, but it doesn’t like all-purpose flour now. I just started feeding it a half-and-half mixture and that’s going the best. The fun part about sourdough is experimenting, observing reactions, and adjusting. I will admit that I got very nervous when I saw a one-day spell of inactivity after feeding it only all-purpose flour. I had to make a Decision. I am not the best at making decisions. I think too long and too hard and get nervous about doing the Wrong Thing. But it’s just sourdough and it’s getting very bubbly and sour smelling now.
Excess and the sourdough process. I hate waste. Food waste was pretty much the ultimate sin in my family. You had to clean your plate at the end of each meal and if you couldn’t, that was tomorrow’s meal. We have composted our food scraps for as long as I can remember and now we have chickens who eat the majority of our food scraps anyway. I love this about my family. I would hate to have been raised any other way. As anyone who has made sourdough can tell you, there is a lot of flour waste. Because you have to feed the starter regularly, you take out some of the starter and then put new flour and water in. The stuff you take out is called discard and is still good for baking with. But if you feed your starter regularly, you suddenly have a ton of discard to use. I have a quart jar of it in my fridge right now. So today I will be making biscuits. I learned that you can also compost discard, which makes sense, but I don’t have a composter of my own yet. That’s a goal for this year. My family lives out in the country so instead of having a compost container they just have a huge heap. They don’t have to worry about rats eating their scraps like I do in the city. So I will have to buy something. Anyway, this is another fermentation project for this year. Check.
If anyone wants some sourdough starter, let me know. I have an abundance.
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