Blahs and Strawberries

[hrj]

 I think I have a case of the quaranblahs this week. Just not feeling like much of anything. But there are a few bright spots. I picked the first ripe strawberries of the year from my garden this morning and savored a couple at random intervals during the day, saving half for tomorrow. On my lunch bike ride I played marmalade fairy and dropped off a jar of orange marmalade, one of apple chutney, and a baggie of candied orange peel at the home of an online-friend-who-happens-to-live-in-my-town. Doing the Produce of My Estates thing is so much more fun when I can share it.

Speaking of which, I'm pondering an online version of my planned "share the estates" party for my birthday next week. Still refining the idea but the basic plan is to do something communal and creative with variants for participation by people of all abilities and on various platforms. Stay tuned for details.

The Tuesday evening movie night with the mostly-NY-area-crowd is getting ever more technologically convoluted in trying to find ways to share movies in various online meeting rooms while dodging around DRM issues. Tonight's experience ran through three different venues with shifting combinations of connectivity problems for different people. I ended up having to phone in to the meeting in order to get any sound, since I was only getting (jerky) video on the laptop. The communal aspect of it is fun, but the movie-watching aspect isn't very satisfying. But tonight we finally managed to watch "Bride and Prejudice." (Bollywood-style interpretation of Jane Austen, which works extremely well for the cultural parallels.) My delivery dinner was curry and naan to match the mood, and I have enough leftovers for one or two more dinners.

I made my first actual loaf of sourdough bread with my pet culture! And it tastes just like sourdough should taste! The culture is currently having a time-out in the fridge and my next task is to determine a regular schedule for growth, use, and hibernation to keep it healthy without burying me in more bread than I can eat. My dad put in a bid for some home-baked sourdough on my next grocery delivery, which means I need to figure out the timing of when I need to start the production cycle for a specific delivery date.

Comments

[hrj]

5/4 - temperature 97.2; lunchtime bike ride with mask, no contact, no close proximity.
5/5 - temperature 97.7; different route for my lunchtime bike ride with mask. Dropped a bag with Produce of My Estates at Margrethe M's house but maintained distance (except for sequential touching of the package).

[kareina]

Oh, I like the idea of being able to attend your modified produce of your estates gathering! Quarantine does have one minor advantage in making more possibilities to see friends on different continents.

[hrj]

Yeah, not being able to do an in-person party does open up the options.

[hudebnik]

Re sourdough: with two (2) adult humans in the house, I started baking a loaf every 10 days or so last fall, and it's doubled to every 5 days or so since we've both been staying home. I also often throw some starter into a batch of pancakes or the like in between batches of bread. The starter is definitely happier being used more frequently: at 10 days it was spending the majority of its time in the fridge, while now I leave it out on the counter most of the time. I find it takes about 36 hours from initial mixing to having a complete, baked loaf, and that suits the current pace of my life.

Of course, that's a mostly-liquid-style starter, fed with equal parts (by mass) of flour and water. I gather San Francisco style is more typically a hard ball that one breaks open to extract the soft, active core and discard the rind; I tried that approach years ago and was never terribly successful at it.

BTW, have you read the novel Sourdough, by Robin Sloan? The two protagonists are a software engineer at a Silicon Valley robotics start-up and her semi-sentient sourdough culture. The plot gets amusingly surreal, with hints of "Little Shop of Horrors" and excursions to comment on other aspects of Bay Area [human] culture.

[hrj]

I"ve been doing a fairly liquid starter. I'm picking up traditions by word of mouth and King Arthur Flour. I need to run the numbers and schedules to figure out what my ideal rhythm is. Probably a loaf every other week at most (unless I'm baking for paternal delivery) but I can use discard every couple of days. I think what I'll aim for is keeping a fairly small volume of starter, save up discard to use every few days, and try not to have to refrigerate the main culture. But I also suspect that when the quarantine is over, I'll find it too much to keep up with. We'll see.