A Plea for Sourdough Sanity

When the MiL was here last month, she watched me make sourdough bread and remarked, "It's amazing how you don't take any particular care shaping your bread, and yet it's so good."

The story of my life. I don't take particular care, and yet it turns out pretty good.

As everyone has no doubt seen, this current situation in which yeast is apparently as rare and valuable as caviar has resulted in an incredible number of people trying sourdough for the first time. Or trying it again. And what I keep seeing over and over are frustrated comments about how to do this.

When do I feed it? How much? How often?

What do I do with the discard?

How do I shape it? What do I bake it on?

There are sourdough hydration calculators online! I am not kidding!

This is insanity. I wish people would calm down and not make it so complicated.

When I was having trouble getting my starter, uh, started again after our trip to New York, I tried troubleshooting with sites dedicated to sourdough and I quickly lost patience. If I were trying to start baking with sourdough using those sites, I would give up immediately.

I want to tell you all a secret: I don't do any of that stuff. I don't even know how.

I don't feed my starter. I keep it in the refrigerator, scrape it all out to start a new batch of bread every ten days or so, and then, before the third addition of flour, add some dough back to the jar in the refrigerator to serve as starter for the next time.

I don't worry about baking with discards. Because I don't feed my starter.

I bake it in regular bread loaf pans greased with butter.

And what this produces is four loaves of sandwich bread a week for my family. Which is all anyone wants, really, at this time.

You do not need artisanal sourdough loaves if you are trying to make PB&J for four kids. You just need bread. And not bread with an almost-black crust that resists a bread knife, or all those big holes that sourdough people get all excited about. That looks pretty, but doesn't make a good sandwich for kids.

Maybe all those tips and tricks (and calculators, good Lord) result in slightly higher rise or airiness or whatever, but do you need that? I don't.

Sourdough will give you very good bread, with very little effort. I'm not a natural baker. I don't even LIKE baking much. But even I can bake with sourdough.

And I don't use a hydration calculator.

The Seeds of Revolution

Cubby has created a country within our household. Sort of like Vatican City in Rome. This country is called Goth, and it has four residents. I bet you can guess who they are.

Poppy is the Queen of Goth. Cubby is the commander general and de facto ruler, despite Poppy's honorary title.

Their currency consists of "smacks" and "half-smacks," (despite the name, actually pieces of paper, not physical blows) which can be used to buy such necessary items as a tube of lip balm without its cap and pencils. Cubby is also the Secretary of the Treasury.

The country's borders are the driveway, barn, and fence on the south side of their enemy country of Mom's Dictatorship (I made that name up myself).

Their aim? To go to war with Mom and Dad and win greater independence.

This is their military command unit, set up in the heart of enemy territory.

The sign says, "Hello. We don't want you here. Go away."

Inside, Goth's military strategist is hard at work.

They thought I was just taking a picture to show Nana and Baca. Little did they know it was a not-so-covert spy mission.

Shortly after that picture was taken, Cubby came into the kitchen requesting "provisions" for the beleaguered troops. So I guess they need to work on their supply trains.

Will the plucky but ill-equipped rebels succeed? Or will they be ruthlessly quashed by the might of the Mom Dictatorship?

What do you think?

Friday Food: Now with Thrilling Photos of Fractions

Friday

Short version: Tuna patties, mashed potatoes, green salad with leftover ranch dressing

Long version: I now use three 12-ounce cans of tuna to make tuna patties. That is a LOT of tuna. And it all gets eaten. Yikes.

Good thing I buy it by the case. And good thing I bought a case just about two months ago, because it is apparently not in stock online for another month. Sigh.

Saturday

Short version: Tacos with leftover pork and homemade corn tortillas

Long version: Know what else is hard to find online now? Masa. I guess because it's a kind of flour? I dunno. I do not have a case of that, but the five pounds I do have should last me a little while anyway.

Sunday

Short version: Barbecue mutton, sourdough biscuits, coleslaw

Long version: I bought 100 pounds of flour from King Arthur early in March, right before the great flour shortage of 2020 began. I wasn't intending to hoard flour; I just use a LOT of flour to bake all our bread and was tired of almost running out and didn't want to pay shipping more than once. And now King Arthur is apparently out of every kind flour.

This is fun, isn't it?

The mutton was the meat that came off the bones we boiled to make stock from the wether. It's not great meat after it's boiled for six hours, but good enough to mix with barbecue sauce and eat with coleslaw.

Monday

Short version: Grilled cheese sandwiches, vegetable soup, yogurt with maple syrup

Long version: There was more of the boiled mutton (yum) left, but when 3:45 p.m. rolled around, I couldn't make myself cook it. Because I didn't really want to eat it.

We had all had eggs for breakfast, so I made grilled cheese.

I still had a big bowl of sheep stock in the refrigerator, even after freezing several gallons of it, so I used some of it to make the soup. Onion, garlic, half a can of whole tomatoes that had been hanging out in the refrigerator, leftover mashed potatoes, and some frozen stir-fry vegetables. It needed more flavor, so I threw in a cube of pesto from the three left from last summer.

The soup turned out pretty well. But everyone still wanted to round the meal out with another course. Thus, yogurt with maple syrup.

Tuesday

Short version: Bunless hamburgers, boiled potato chunks, green salad

Long version: Yeah, "boiled potato chunks" means I was going to make mashed potatoes, but somehow ran out of motivation before getting to the actual mashing part. Luckily, boiled potatoes with plenty of butter, salt, and pepper are also good.

The salad was actually the last of the lettuce from the store mixed with the last bit of coleslaw. The coleslaw was pretty liquid-y, so it made a surprisingly good salad dressing.

Wednesday

Short version: Roasted Italian sausage and potatoes, frozen green beans

Long version: Funny how even though I'm home on Mondays and Wednesday, which are my work days at the school, I now have no more time to cook than I did when I was at the school all day. That's because my house is now the school, which means helping Cubby and Charlie with their schoolwork as well as completing my own work tasks, as I'm still getting paid to work from home.

It's surprisingly hectic. Or maybe not so surprising.

Anyway. On such days, sausage to the rescue!

Thanks, MiL! Again.

On a related topic, since I have to turn in all of Cubby and Charlie's work via photo attachments in e-mails to their teachers, my phone has almost zero photos of the actual children, but dozens of these:

Behold, how The New Math teaches fractions. 

So this was April Fool's Day, and I was very relieved that my children forgot about it. This, despite Cubby actually writing on the calendar the week before, "Plan April Fool jokes."

I hate April Fool's jokes. I am Not A Fun Mom, I don't enjoy shoveling Legos out of my bed before I can go to sleep (last year's brilliant joke), and I'm not sorry, either.

Thursday

Short version: Mutton tacos with homemade tortillas, frozen green peas

Long version: I used the last of the mutton that came off the bones during stock-making to make the taco meat. It wasn't great, but it was okay.

I used some of A.'s green garlic as a topping on the tacos, which was very good. I must specify that this was green garlic that he had provided to me, because I'm too afraid to dig up any of his hundreds of garlic plants. He's very protective of his baby garlic.

Speaking of A. and gardening, he helped me plant the asparagus crowns that I ordered two months ago and that finally arrived this day. I was very excited.

We can't actually EAT any of the asparagus until next year, but it's anticipatory excitement.

Incidentally, A. is an excellent person to have on hand when it's time to put in a garden. The man is a digging machine. This is convenient, because I am . . . not.

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

Life As We Know It

It has not escaped anyone's notice that life as we know it has changed.

For instance, this is now our classroom:

All the comforts of home. Because you ARE home.

The boys now meet with their teachers and classes in that spot right next to my bed, for the sole reason that this room has a lock inside the door and thus can exclude any unwanted siblings. Which is all of them.

They use A.'s work laptop to do this, because we discovered that of the two laptops and one desktop computer in our house, A.'s is the only one with both a functioning microphone and webcam for video conferencing.

So for the moment, the three boys are using that laptop for their school meetings, I'm using it for my online teaching, and A. is using it for his law practice.

Convenient.

On the plus side, our food supply situation has actually somewhat improved. The school decided to temporarily allow community members to place orders for limited items through the school's Sysco delivery. This means that every Wednesday, a truck arrives ten minutes from my house with gallons of milk and pounds of ground beef, potatoes, rice, flour, sugar, butter, and all kinds of other things.

Unfortunately, that list of limited items doesn't include fresh vegetables, but I can get four gallons of milk and 36 pounds of butter, so that's fun.

Also, Rafael stopped by yesterday with a box of food for us that he couldn't use:

Cubby helpfully sorted it for me.

It was mostly a lot of dried beans, brown rice, and Cream of Wheat, although there are two bags of  instant dry milk, which is a pretty hot item these days I understand.

We have watermelon seeds sprouting, as well as some pepper seeds (FINALLY). The small tomato seedlings are growing rapidly, as are the basil plants. We expect beet seeds and carrot seeds outside to start sprouting any day, and the lettuce, radishes, and arugula are growing apace.

So that's how it is for us. How's your life these days?

A Two-Year-Old Life Coach

Poppy has composed an original song that she will sing--well, more like chant--spontaneously and frequently. The lyrics are:

Don't be afraid
Don't be afraid
Don't be afraid
The sun will come up in the morning.

Or, if I were to transcribe it the way she actually says it, it would be:

Don' be 'fwaid
Don' be 'fwaid
Don' be 'fwaid
Sun'll come up in the monin'.

An excellent mantra for all of us these days.

Poppy also advocates flinging yourself down and screaming and crying when it all gets to be too much and you need to rage against the injustice of life.

In between those episodes of emotional venting, everything should be as normal as possible. Play. Talk. Laugh. Eat. Read books. Make silly faces.

Like so.

And don't be afraid. The sun will come up in the morning.

Friday Food: And Then There Was Mutton

Friday

Short version: Scrambled eggs, roasted potatoes, refried beans, carrot sticks with curry dip, cookies

Long version: I thought I was conquering the excess egg situation in my refrigerator when I was down to only five dozen eggs. Then our neighbor brought us three dozen more, and here I am, with ridiculous quantities of eggs in my refrigerator.

Not that I am complaining, given the difficulty some people seem to be having getting eggs at all and here they are just appearing at my door. Luck of the Irish, I guess.

It's been awhile since I've made the curry dip, which is simply mayonnaise and sweet curry powder, and it really is very good. Good with the carrot sticks, of course, but particularly good with the roasted potatoes.

I made chocolate chip cookies as a reward for the children. They really did remarkably well during their first week of Mom School. I know, you're not supposed to use food as a reward. I did anyway. So there.

Saturday

Short version: Elk, mutton, cornbread with or without cracklins, frozen green peas

Long version: This was the day A. slaughtered the wether. He always removes the tenderloin while he's skinning the carcasses, because those are the pieces of meat that run on the outside of the animal, on either side of the backbone. They're easy to take off without cutting the whole animal up, so we almost always eat those first.

The tenderloins were pretty small on this sheep, so I added some elk to the marinade too and cooked them both together, just pan-frying them. I set up a taste-test with some elk and some mutton on everyone's plate and had them all guess which was which. They all guessed right. That wether made some good meat.

Cracklins are the bits left from rendering fat. They're traditionally used to flavor cornbread. I didn't have any stone ground cornmeal left, so I made these muffins instead, but in pans because I loathe cleaning muffin tins. I made one pan plain and one pan with finely diced cracklins. A. loved the cracklin cornbread, though it wasn't so popular with the children.

Sunday

Short version: Elk stir-fry, rice

Long version: Nothing to see here. Just the last of the bag of elk marinated and put into stir-fry. Jack was very happy.

The two older boys have been spending a lot of time riding Samson around our ghost village and letting him graze, so we don't have to feed him so much hay.

Good for the horse, good for the boys. And good for Mom to have two of the four children out of the house for awhile.

Monday

Short version: Creamy green chili chicken stew, cheese, root beer float popsicles

Long version: One package of chicken drumsticks simmered until the meat could be stripped, and there was good stock. Then onion, garlic, green chili, juice from a can of tomatoes, diced carrots and potatoes, and a can of corn Miss Amelia gave us added to the stock and chicken. Sour cream at the end to make it creamy and tame the green chili a bit.

This was one of those stews where I just kept adding things until I somehow ended up with a totally full pot. That's cool, though, because I purposely made a lot so I could bring some to Rafael and his wife. I would've brought some to Miss Amelia, but I think she's staying with her daughter in Santa Fe right now.

When the MiL came to visit, she brought the ancestral popsicle molds. These were the popsicle molds she used when A. was a boy. She has no further use for them, and I certainly do, so she passed them on to the next generation. I still have that flat root beer in the refrigerator, so we made the same popsicles as before, with the root beer, cream, and vanilla.

Popsicles and goons.

Tuesday

Short version: Barbecue pork, sourdough biscuits, baked beans, frozen green beans

Long version: The pork was simply one of A.'s chunks o' butt (heh) cooked slowly in the oven, then shredded and mixed with barbecue sauce.

While that was in the oven, I also put in the beans. That was just some already-cooked pinto beans that I had frozen, which I put in a casserole dish with diced onion, ketchup, mustard, barbecue sauce, vinegar, and maple syrup. I don't have a real baked bean pot, but then, these aren't real baked beans. So I can bake them in this cool Art Deco casserole dish the MiL got me from our very elderly neighbors' estate sale when they moved.

Much prettier than a bean pot.

The biscuits peeking coyly into that photo are these biscuits. I made them because I was already in the process of making bread, so I just took some of the dough out in the morning to serve as the starter for the biscuits. Hard to beat hot biscuits.

Wednesday

Short version: Jack's special mutton bits, leftover pork, roasted potatoes, carrot sticks with ranch dressing

Long version: This was the day we butchered the wether (it hangs a few days to tenderize and improve the flavor), which is why I had planned on leftover meat. The last thing I want to do after handling raw meat all day is cook any.

However.

While A. was doing the initial cutting, he set Jack up with his own cutting board and a paring knife to work on a small piece of meat. What Jack did was cut that one piece into many very small pieces. So I cooked those for him, because he was very proud of his end product. I just fried the pieces with paprika, garlic powder, and salt, and he ate them with ketchup. He was very happy with this.

I was very happy with the ranch dressing and roasted potatoes. Just as good as curry dip and roasted potatoes.

Thursday

Short version: Italian sausage, pasta, green salad

Long version: This time I roasted the Italian sausage, which is a much better way to cook it than spattering grease all over my stove top.

For the pasta, I just mixed in butter, cream cheese, garlic powder, and pepper. So good.

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week? And a bonus Bizarro World question: If you've been to a store lately, what's the situation there? I haven't been in about four weeks, but I've heard from others that our regular stores are pretty depleted.

Springing

The peas are planted! A single Very Fancy Tulip survived the voracious gophers last year and is coming up near the driveway! I'm eating (a small amount of) arugula!

And the apricot tree by the door is in full and very impressive bloom.

Hello, Spring. We're so happy to see you again.