kaberett | Entries tagged with lares & penates

Date and walnut sourdough frozen in its basket at the start of final shaping/proofing (see previous), then got out of the freezer when we got home on Monday afternoon and moved back into the fridge overnight, turned into Wholly Adequate Bread. I'm not sure I want to move to keeping a loaf permanently in the freezer, but I'm definitely going to start making an extra right before we go on holiday so we have the option of fresh bread the morning after we get back...

It was only a couple of months ago that it occurred to me that I could feed flour leftover from rolling out pastry/biscuits/etc to the breadpet, instead of just sadly flapping at it, having a massive executive dysfunction over clean-up, and eventually guiltily putting it in the compost. I am still fondly-amused-at-self that this just... did not occur to me, for so long.

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Watch on Vimeo

[a bat swoops back and forth against the trees silhouetted against the sunset; the audio track features the output of a bat detector, held by My Glamorous Assistant just to the right of the shot. video taken 2021-04-19; first sighting of bats this year 2021-04-18]

Below the cut: THE SNAIL.

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Getting start(er)ed: I used instructions from Shipton Mill, lo these many years ago, but you can equally well refer to Leiths or Doves Farm or wheresoever you prefer. Shipton Mill are particularly good to my mind in that they're clear about how adjustable proportions are and explain what you're aiming for; they don't explain in quite so many words why they recommend wholemeal stoneground organic flour, but the idea there is that it's likely to come pre-inoculated with at least some of the kinds of wild yeast you're trying to catch, in a way that more processed flours (with less of their remaining exteriors) won't.

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For bonus motivation, you can catch yourself a starter for science!

Maintenance: most places will tell you to throw away half your starter, then feed it; there's an enormous range of recipes for using up "discard" rather than just binning it.

I don't bother with either of those -- the discarding, or the frantic Using It Up baking. (Mostly. Blini are a good time if I'm feeling enthusiastic.) The key principles are:

you need to at least double the mass of your starter when you feed it (to give it enough to eat, keep its environment comfortable for it, etc);
you want to feed it a very roughly 50:50 mix of flour and water each feed;
you want to aim to have a minimum of ~2tbsp left over once you've extracted a portion for baking, to keep it going.

I use 100g of starter for each loaf I make. After I've removed the required quantity, the pot it lives in goes into the fridge and lives there until the night before I next want to make a loaf. The morning of, I give the breadpet roughly 50g of flour and 50g of water at about the same time I have my breakfast. Come lunchtime it's bubbled up, increased in volume, and ready to start using -- so I'm removing pretty much exactly the 100g I fed it for breakfast, which gets me back down to a stable baseline quantity rather than, you know, exponential growth.

How long your starter takes to be ready to bake with after feeding is down to the specific culture you end up making. Mine's usually good to go (from a room-temperature start) after about four hours; from fridge temperature it needs a bit longer; but 12-18 hours is often quoted, and it will probably take some experimentation.

... bread? I swear by the Leiths recipe, somewhat modified for laziness. To whit: ( Read more... )

Baking: pre-heat your oven to ~220°C, optionally with a heavy-duty baking sheet or griddle in it. Once it's up to temperature, turn the dough out onto your baking substrate (this is the point at which you find out whether you developed the gluten and floured your proving vessel adequately, but never fear, if you have to peel the dough off tentacle-by-tentacle it'll still be perfectly well food), deeply score the top with a sharp knife (so that the poor thing can actually expand in the oven), and fling it in for 30 minutes. Turn out to cool; consume.

I engage in the superstition of dumping a mug of boiling water in a roasting tray in the bottom of the oven right before I put the bread in, but I'm honestly not sure how much of a difference it makes to the crust.

There are variants involving baking in a lidded casserole or Dutch oven, on a similar keep-the-steam-in basis, but this isn't something I've particularly experimented with.

And finally...

Ornamentation! you have so many options, my goodness. Link is to a YouTube video of exciting scoring options (with timelapse photography!), including 100% of the motivation for the title of this post.

Prompted by conversation elsewhere, I just want to note that I am still Very Happy with my Hotbin. My current Delight is that it will fairly happily digest polylactic acid, a bioplastic used as filament in many 3D printers: Adam's workplace has one such printer for general use, and these days there's a scrap bin kept next to it for misprints and odds & ends, which he then lovingly carries home to me, for me to take to the allotment as Bin Tribute. Really dense prints tend to need to go through twice, but they go from "impossible for me to crush" on the first pass to "trivial to fragment" for the second, so that's nice. Among other things, it's reducing my other plastic consumption in one significant way: I parcel my meds out into dosette boxes, and the thing I always break first is the lids, but! I no longer have to buy An Entire New Set when attempts to glue them back together fail, because Adam will now print them for me.

... which is a massive digression from the thing I actually intended to talk about, which is How I Keep My Bin Happy. So. Having enthusiastically vacuumed up pretty much all the info on their website, most-but-not-all of what I actually need to do to keep the bin happy is in there.

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... that is all the infodump I have in me right now, but I am very happy to be given further prompts? The executive summary is "pretty much always more shredded paper", though.

Using the Instant Pot, with Collective Dairy yoghurt as an initial starter. I'm not quite getting the results I want, so here's some in-progress notes, with input v welcome.

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For Reasons I have been having Difficulty with food, generally, for the past couple of weeks. Today I am At Home, with - due to some scheduling mishaps that have worked out in my favour - an A also At Home.

I have made soda bread, with rosemary and raisins. I have topped up the buttermilk and it's resting. The yoghurt has come out of the Instant Pot and gone into the fridge. I have prepared the base mix for vanilla ice cream, at Adam's request, to rest overnight and be churned tomorrow. I have eaten soda bread and pickled onions and cheeses and a perfect pear, all of which I actively wanted to eat. I have ingredients for tagine and am working slowly up to maybe making it. I will shortly feed the sourdough.

I wanted to go to the central London protest this evening and had every intention of doing so. And then I had to go out for eggs for the ice cream and I got more and more panicked as I got closer and closer to home, and have decided, to my very great frustration, that trying to get out this evening is really not a good idea.

I can keep myself alive, though, and coax myself back toward health, and keep feeding people, and I have signed the (38deg) petitions (No10); as my next step I will get in touch with my MP.

Keep living seems a small thing, a sad thing to offer (not quite what you deserve me to be), but it's what I've got tonight.

Because now I have a culture, and that means I do actually gotta refresh it periodically, and that means I gotta use it.

I've been making a lot of scones. I've got a small mountain of celeriac in the fridge, so celeriac mash is on the to-eat-at-some-point-soon list. I'm aware of the various pancake options.

I've gone back through the smitten kitchen archives; I'd forgotten the existence of the raspberry buttermilk cake but I love it so I'm definitely going to be making variants on that... in the near-ish future... possibly actually using soft fruit from the allotment...? ... and had not previously tried the lemon cake, the pear and hazelnut muffins (even though they're obviously my kind of thing), the blue sky bran muffins (though I've been intending to ever since Deb first posted them, which is apparently five years at this point, good grief), and, of course, variants on cobbler (the freezer currently contains a non-trivial amount of rhubarb/apple/pear compote that I should probably bake up).

A would, of course, be delighted by the appearance of soda bread, and I may yet give that a go (I've opened up the baking book to the relevant recipe & everything). Corn bread is also an option, though I'm not currently in a particularly chilli-ish mood. (Though I suppose we do have a portion of it in the freezer that could stand to be used.)

Any other suggestions?

I am home. In my house. With my plants. (To my mild astonishment I actually Managed the public transport All The Way Back with only intermittent panic, and I only dropped things about twice, and only once in a way that was actually a problem.)
For bonus points, having dragged myself out of bed and through packing to get the 9.07 bus... and having then been expecting to hang around Redruth interminably until the 12.28 train... I actually arrived in time to get the 10.27! Which was beyond my wildest dreams in terms of getting home at a reasonable hour!
... it was a ten-car train, not a twelve-car. Which meant there were no standard-class wheelchair spaces. Which meant I was in first class. Which meant I got plied with free orange juice and sandwiches and cake, and felt mildly guilty, but only mildly.
NEW ROLLING STOCK I'd not been on the long-distance new(ish) GWR trains before, and they have a fascinating two-stage ramp system. And, much as I might grumble about it in practice, when we got to Plymouth I was moved to the rear set of first class carriages because the accessible loo in the front pair wasn't working -- and this is institutionally A Good to have happened unprompted and unrequested even though I did not, in fact, want to use the loo on the train.
A valiantly fed the breadpet while I was away. It became happy! It... became Very Happy. It... escaped its container by quite some way. (It is now being turned into two loaves, one of which I will be palming off on the allotment seed swap social tomorrow afternoon if I can bring myself to leave the house again.)
Having got some bread started upon my return home (lares & penates, honouring thereof, etc) I Left the House again and poked around supermarkets various, where I acquired the ingredients for burritos (having decided I wanted to Make Some and that The Instant Pot Makes Refried Beans Meaningfully Possible) along with Several Small Treats, and only got rained on a little (which is good for my plants so I'm not even complaining that much).
And then there was a the-new-regional-legendary raid on, so I did my first one... ... and it's 100% of all possible stats and I caught it on my second ball (of twelve) so it... wasn't even hugely stressful??? And that's... This Month's Legendary... Done...?! Hurrah.
Curled up on sofa with A finished Leverage ate some misery pizza (beans will take tiiiiiiiiiiime) did some talkings.
Items brought back from the mouldering ancestral pile this trip (for me): a pair of Felco Model 7s (in need of some tuning up); a bonus pair of ratchet anvil secateurs; my favourite of the walking sticks Papa owned, that I'd been keeping down there (he mostly used crook-handled sticks, which don't work well for me); a proper workbench clamp; my grandmother's collection of seeds, including the Ancestral Lovage (which turns out to be from Suttons but I'm not actually complaining); and a venerable train timetable for a friend.
I have discovered that it is in fact currently possible to buy my preferred form-factor of wok... provided I don't mind getting it shipped from Germany. Which is still better than "none of the shops I have looked in at any point over the past decade have in any sense contained the thing I want", so: tiny celebration, and at some stage I will work out if I actually want to buy one.

Movement. ( Read more... )
I got a phone call from a Dublin number while I was at the gym. ???, I thought. And lo, it was the passport office, wanting to confirm my card details so they could take a payment. (This does not mean I'm getting the passport any time soon; it just means they're processing it, which means that in the next phone call we'll get to discuss a. my name and b. my godmother's phone number, I expect.)
A's lavender -- that we got for 50p from a stall by the side of the road on our trip to the south coast to pick up chiasmata's wheelchair, and which has spent the winter resolutely grey and miserable and dormant -- is sprouting with enthusiasm from its base, and getting visibly larger day by day. (This is going to be one of the plants that lives on the back porch at home, at least until it gets big enough to layer, at which point I might move a baby plant over to the allotment for the sake of pollinators.)
w8rose had more reduced thyme! so I have another bucket of thyme that I HOPEFULLY won't kill off instantly, which gets to go live... on the porch. (Also there were reduced tiny carrots and cavolo nero, so dinner tonight was sausage + mash + veg, and reduced yarg, so belated lunch was cheese + ajvar + Ryvita + cucumber.)
I have allllllmost finished moving the furniture around. (It's not perfect but then it wouldn't be with the constraints we're working with; it is nonetheless an improvement, I think, and I'm appreciating having A Book Corner.)
On Monday I collected some rhubarb from the allotment; we have spent the week consuming pear-and-apple-and-rhubarb crumble.
Bread bread bread. A continues to set the oven to be hot when we actually wake up, which is making fresh sourdough for breakfast a much less time-consuming and sleep-disrupting process, hurrah. (Still working on the timings of feeding the tiny god for optimum rise. Unfortunately, this means lots of experimental bread. It Is A Trial, etc.)
I have more-or-less decided where I want to stick the comfrey on the plot. At least one of them can go under the cherry tree, and I will probably attempt to distribute the other two in the Awkward Corner.
rydra_wong has pointed me at some footage of Beth Rodden being amazing, and I have the firm intention of curling up with it tomorrow afternoon in the post-meeting adrenaline crash (if I don't just disappear off to roll around in the mud, which is also a possibility).
A is great and has spent the evening wrangling soldering irons and heatshrink in service of streamlining my life; we have sorted a batch of towels for disposal; more bits have been put on freecycle/freegle; I have Progressed Some Of The Mending (by which I mean "I have taken the memory-foam travel pillow out of its wrapper in order to facilitate sewing repairs to the disintegrating wrapper, also lol whoops the pillow... has a massive tear? never mind", but this is a significant executive function step); make house a home, etc etc etc.

1. I waited in all day, slightly fretfully, but shortly before 6pm UPS actually arrived with... ten... large... cardboard... boxes... of Stuff... for A. (Specifically, garage storage; two sets of three-by-seven Really Useful Boxes, in rainbow colours.)

2. In turn this means that (i) I am about to have WARDROBE SPACE (at least assuming A is as excited about filling the boxes up with stuff as he was about constructing them -- we spent a significant chunk of the evening in the garage...) and (ii) conveniently we turn out to have a bunch of Very Large cardboard boxes and an enormous volume of bubble wrap... just in time for them to be incredibly useful transporting a greenhouse across London. (Whereupon they will GO ON FREECYCLE and vanish fairly rapidly and be No Longer Our Problem, also hurrah.)

3. I finally remembered to actually cut a tag out of a shirt (by dint of hanging it up to dry inside out so that I'd have a shouty visual prompt when it came to putting it away) & suddenly I have an actually comfortable black button-up, instead of one that seems like a good idea until I've been wearing it for longer than about five seconds at which point it becomes Unutterably Wretched.

4. I am almost done wrangling an Enormous Spreadsheet. It is Large, and also Big, and if there is a way to usefully tell Calc "I want everything in this row to three significant figures" I haven't found it yet, but -- one of the big tedious data-wrangle jobs I've been stalling on for the current paper is NEARLY THERE.

5. Bodge-repaired oven meant we got sourdough breakfast bread, hurrah, and maybe I'll manage to deplete stocks enough that I can actually start feeding it again. (I took a small aliquot to Belfast, and ended up bringing back... a significant quantity, so I now have two healthily-sized household gods and it's A Problem and I might actually have a go at pizza dough.) (There was OVEN PHYSICS and it made us both laugh.)

6. TOMORROW I will LEAVE THE HOUSE and GO TO THE ALLOTMENT and SOW SOME NIGELLA SATIVA because having got The Wretched Spreadsheet mostly wrangled I will gleefully and with relief Take A Morning Off. I am really looking forward to this.

spot the difference!

preferment: the selection of clergy to hold positions of senior office in the Church (of England) (largely obsolete)
preferment: a preparation of a portion of a bread dough that is made several hours or more in advance of mixing the final dough

my recreational reading, you see, currently includes a nontrivial amount of Austen and a nontrivial amount of The Theory Of Sourdough. APPARENTLY in this modern day and age we don't believe in clarifying punctuation. as a result I am spending a lot of time being very confused about theology.

Reading. Mostly Predator's Gold, the sequel to Mortal Engines, because I found it for two quid in a charity shop and I wanted to know what happened next. Spoilers beneath the cut. ( Read more... )

TV. Slow progress with Leverage S4, encouraged by a visitcousin who's very into the show. Still pausing several times an episode to go YOU WHAT. THAT ISN'T HOW ANYTHING EVEN. (It's possible I've been spoiled by Matt Damon's Important Space Potatoes, but like, show. SHOW. That is NOT HOW POTATOES.)

Food. I had... two surprisingly faily attempts at sourdough, after a long run of Good Bread. One was in no small part because I started cooking it using the grill rather than the oven because I was Not Terribly With It (...), but both were more of a bread-puddle than they ought to have been. I eventually worked out that I'd made the starter slightly wetter than it had been previously, which meant I needed to decrease the liquid some. Nevertheless our guests this weekend (my parents; a cousin) have consumed three loaves in their entirety, and cousin will make further inroads into the fourth once I've baked it tomorrow morning, so that's all gratifying. For bonus points the cousin is in the process of setting up her own starter so I am getting to do lots of Sourdough Nerdery with her.

Tiny adventures. Yesterday we took a trip to the Giant's Causeway, because it's right there and it would have been silly not to (and also I only waited this long because my mother had put in a special request that we delay it until she could join in). It turns out that despite perfectly well knowing the relevant physics for columnar jointing and therefore what the scales involved are, I'd somehow interpreted "Giant's Causeway" to mean that the jointing itself was on a giant scale i.e. I was expecting diameters of, oooh, at least 75cm or so? Rather than... the thirty-odd we were actually getting. Which, to be fair, is still a good deal larger than my previous in-the-wild encounter: we'd plonked ourselves down in a pile of bracken in a streambed to have lunch, one day during my mapping project, and went "oooh, that's a funny-looking rock..." It turned out, on slightly closer inspection, to be a very small exposure of some really small columns (diameter ~5cm), and I was charmed and delighted. (They were SMOL.) So, yes, this was much more impressive than that, in both scale and definition, and I'm very glad to have seen it, even as I wist after being able to do the proper hike. I hadn't realised about the concave-and-convex ball-joint horizontal fractures as a result of vertical contraction because they're less spectacular so my lecturers just... didn't bother mentioning them? But they were charming, I was charmed, hurrah.

Today we visited HMS Caroline, because my mother is interested in naval history (and my father can be persuaded to be) and it spent nontrivial amounts of time stationed near HMS Essex, which my great-grandfather served on; in the most recent trip to the mouldering ancestral pile some of the things we dug out were A Lot of records pertaining to his time aboard both the Essex and, before that, on the cable-laying ships working the Atlantic. The Caroline is remarkably accessible -- they've installed three lifts, and the ramp to get on board is only unnavigably steep at high tide. I... had a bunch of feelings.

me_and's favourite fact was probably that regarding the ships mascots during WWI: two cats and... a rabbit. (I'm not sure I can generate one, because feelings.)

This week coming. Hopefully actually managing to send off a draft of my paper; hopefully actually getting the final data for the final segment of it; hopefully getting to spend a good deal of time at the allotment.

Good things: this afternoon the fracture clinic cheerfully told me to piss off; my cousin managed to arrive just as I was leaving for said fracture clinic and therefore get a key off me (and my parents didn't arrive til after I'd returned); and for bonus points there was a rainbow.

And over the course of the afternoon and evening I have prepared a second loaf of bread, to prove overnight and to eat for breakfast, hopefully after just baking it rather than grilling it.

Food: gosh but the sourdough was Excitable about having milk sugars to eat. Very tall, very soft, very close crumb, much less chewy than the water-based ones I've been making; also rather sweeter and rather less tangy. Definitely an interesting variation and I'm definitely going to use up the rest of the flagon of milk tomorrow to make another loaf.

Politics: I keep thinking to myself with grim hilarity that, hey, if this is actually about parliamentary sovereignty, well, the EU has never been found to be in contempt of Parliament, which means it's doing rather better than other party in these negotiations.

Item the first: I am absolutely become, apparently, the kind of person who gets Mildly Cross about not taking cheesecloth with them when they travel for more than about a week. (I'm still not buying the 10m roll.)

Item the second: this means I'm using up some of the milk-as-needs-used in a slightly experimental loaf of sourdough, instead of just turning it into paneer for dinner. (This has the bonus that I don't need to get my act together when A is actually in the house; the sourdough's generally happy with filtered water than with mains water, as recently mentioned, and while we have a filter jug at home out here we've only got A's filter-as-it-goes-along water bottle.)

Item the third: I was most of the way through mixing this up before I remembered I'm not supposed to eat calcium at breakfast.

OH WELL.

Waking up to (mostly) clear streets, against a backdrop of snow on the hills.
I have in the fridge my first ever tub of The Collective Dairy's passionfruit yoghurt. It... is my new favourite? It is very much my new favourite. (I was forever into the limited-edition raspberry trifle which is, alas, no more; the plum and honey is also Good; but I think passionfruit is My New Fave.)
The ritual of sourdough continues soothing.
Today I finally had a proper poke around the Professional Caterers' Shop in the centre of Belfast and successfully didn't buy anything, though honestly this was mostly because they only sell cheesecloth in 10m rolls and I thought A would be... Unimpressed... if he came home to find one.
To my minor astonishment, I have actually managed to string words together today in the context of the PhD! More words than I have managed for the past week! It is a relief, and also things continue slotting into place.
A & I have been having a bunch of Conversations that on the one hand have been hard work, in terms of leaky feelings and vulnerability, and on the other feel immensely productive and positive and affirming.
Nice clothes today: the mostly-cotton definitely-peacock-blue V-neck sweater and the black-blue-purple-white striped herringbone shirt, both from a charity shop (and specifically the BHF). They're both new-to-me enough that I'm Wearing Them A Lot and being delighted.
I have been playing... a lot... of Dominion Online, mostly against the bot but sometimes against friends, and (1) enjoying it (!) and (2) getting to try out a bunch of ridiculous okay-but-what-if-I-don't-buy-any-money decks (to go with the okay-but-what-if-I-do-endless-gardening ones).
Problematic Aunt got me cheese for the new year, from the Snowdonia Cheese Company; the Little Black Bomber is always a win, but I hadn't had their vintage Red Leicester before and it is good.
I am struggling somewhat with uncertainty around illness, but: I'm being kind to myself, and letting myself rest, and doing a bunch of self-soothing and self-care around No, Really, Love, You're Ill. I've got so much better at this specific skillset, and it's such a relief.

My starter is much happier when I feed it filtered water than when I feed it mains water; this is presumably because it is, fundamentally, A Culture, and mains water is deliberately treated to discourage that.

So: currently, after I've removed 100g of starter to make bread with, I'm feeding it equal masses of spelt flour and filtered water (in theory to approximately double the volume; in practice, I'm often doing ~50g of each), giving it a good stir, and popping it back in the fridge. (I did have it in a Kilner jar, with the seal ring removed; currently it's living in a Sistema soup mug, which most importantly means that if I drop it it won't shatter everywhere, but has the added bonuses that it's fairly light and that the lid clips on firmly and it can still be exposed to the outside environment and air and local cultures by dint of having the steam vent opened. In addition to which the pot is freezer-safe so I can Just Transfer It To The Freezer if I'm going to be neglecting it for longer than a week.)

The day before I want to make bread I'm removing the starter from the fridge and sitting it on the side to warm up overnight.

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Reading. ( Read more... )

Film. ( Read more... )

TV. ( Read more... )

Music. ( Read more... )

Food. ( Read more... )

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who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

well that worked!

[food] further recent realisations

snupdate

great & small

[food] bread (& roses): some notes on sourdough

adventures in composting

[food] notes on yoghurt-making

quotidian resistance

[food] making good use of buttermilk

ten good things {thought I'd something more to say}

there are a lot of reasons to be very tired so let's have some good things

some good things make a post

apparently february is for shitposting

Consumption

this morning I attempted to bake bread using the grill

food & politics

misc.

ten good things

[food] how I'm currently making sourdough

Consumption

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