Sunday is already my favorite day in our experiments, because our week starts over on Sunday, and I have two "cheats" ahead of me. What will it be? Diet soda? White chocolate martini? Pretzels? The possibilities make me positively giddy!
Thursday night I dug out my sourdough starter from the fridge and set two "sponges" out to ferment overnight. Sourdough is a very interesting cooking experiment. It's thought to have developed in Egypt purely by accident--some airborne yeast settling into some flour--and is assumed to be the first leavened bread. It was quite popular among prospectors during the Alaskan gold rush--prospectors were often referred to as "sourdoughs." It lives in the fridge and I feed it regularly. It does not require walks, but it has to be somewhere warm to become active.
Friday morning I returned a cup of starter from each "sponge" back to the "mother sponge," and we enjoyed sourdough pancakes for breakfast (with REAL maple syrup and REAL butter for Andy--I eat mine plain), then I made sourdough honey oatmeal bread--a recipe I've been perfecting and tweaking for about 8 years now. It's such good bread that Friday night I just had two pieces of plain bread for dinner. Store-bought bread has preservatives added, so unless we make bread, we don't get bread, so fresh homemade bread is a great treat.
I've started keeping a spreadsheet of what I'm buying from the stores, and I'm keeping a list of meals (of course, I didn't think of these ideas on January 1). Since we're having to cook more, keeping track of things I've bought will help for menu planning--as well as keeping the grocery bill in check. It would be really, really easy to start fixing chicken, potatoes, and a steamed vegetable at every meal, so I'm trying to keep branching out--though maybe not as far as last week's toxic soup.
On the menu today: We'll be trying out the pasta maker Andy bought me for Christmas!
One thing we definitely need: soup stock. I bought a pressure canner, but while Theo needs supervision I don't want to try canning anything, so I think I'll just make a double batch of vegetable stock this week and freeze it in small containers. Soup made from water just isn't the same, and the "allowable" organic stocks are really expensive, so We'll be resorting to homemade. That might be Tuesday's project.
1 comment:
Ah, I love homemade stock... guess what happened to the turkey from Christmas... it came home with us from my mothers. I made stock. I should do Chicken and Veg again soon.
Do you have a breadmaker?
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