New subject.

Since the last several entries have been food-related, I wanted to mix it up a bit.  So this entry is about... 

COMPOSTING!!!

It's messy, and stinky at times, but it is nature's way of turning the dead, unused, or rotten plantforms back into beneficial components.  Here's what my year-round compost heap looks like:

The big trash bag next to it was one of six bags of leaves I'd gotten from neighbors.  I am actually in the process of making a second cage next to the first one to put all of those leaves in.  Often times, overly finicky gardeners will spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on composting equipment.

Unnecessary.

Mine's working fine (although it is a tiny bit more work than the bins with a handle that you just turn to aerate it all) and it was cheap to make ($4.00 per bin).  It will take a bit longer for the waste to transform into compost than some rigs, but again... $4.00 < $350.00.

Step 1: Buy, salvage, or borrow something to make the cage out of.  I bought bug screen that was designed to keep critters out of people's radiators on cars.  You can use hog panels, chicken wire, or any other wide range of materials.  The stouter, the better.  But it also helps that it is made of something that can breathe.  If you decide to use something like an old trash can or a 55 gallon drum, I highly recommend that you drill many holes in the sides of it so that the necessary air can circulate through your composting materials.

Step 2: Find a place for it.  You'll want it far away from your house and garage.  It has a tendency to attract bugs (there are natural remedies for that too), and can get smelly if you don't have a good ratio of green to brown, and the right amount of moisture.  

Step 3: Build it!  Simple enough, right?

Step 4: Load it up.  Fill it with table scraps (but keep anything fatty or sugary out of the bin - those things don't break down well, they'll make the heap even smellier, and it will attract more bugs and animals to your yard).  The stems from broccoli, moldy old bread, grass clippings, untreated wood (like twigs that fell off a tree into your yard), dead flowers, leaves, old newspaper (preferably those that have been printed with only black and white ink, and with ink that doesn't contain lead), coffee grounds....  there's TONS of stuff that can go out to the heap that would otherwise end up in a landfill.

Step 5 (this is the part where the work comes in): About once per week (or up to once per month if you're feeling lazy), go out, disassemble your rig, and use a hay fork to turn your pile up.  Just kinda stir it around.  Once it's all mixed up again, reassemble the ring and fill 'er back up again.

Step 6: If you live in an area that receives little moisture, you'll need to add some water to the heap every so often to keep it moist and working.  But don't overdo it.  If it gets too wet, the pile will get a really pungent strong odor to it.  If it gets too dry or if you don't turn it often enough, the insides of the pile will grow a white powdery mold.  If this happens, your pile won't decompose properly (or at all, for that matter).

By using this method, in 6 to 12 months, you'll have good, happy compost to work with.  There will be nutrient rich, dark colored matter in the middle of your pile (and throughout it) which you can then use to fertilize your plants and lawn.  And those three bananas that you forgot about on your counter for  two weeks didn't actually go to waste afterall!

Using Starter to Make Flatbreads

Needing a cheap meal? Great snack? Something that makes you feel like a hippy?  Look no further!

I had homemade hummus just a-lyin' around, and desired something amazing on which to devour it.  And there was that overabundance of sourdough starter lurking on my kitchen counter, so it just made sense...

So I took an estimated two cups of my starter, and mixed that with some flour and water.  How much flour and water?  I don't know! I don't have all of the answers!

But you basically follow the recipe in the previous post about making a loaf of bread from your starter.  You add approximately 2 to 4 cups of flour (wheat, white, whatever), some salt (1/2 to 3/4 tsp ish) and 1/2 to 1-1/2 cups of purified water to a bowl with your starter and hand mix (or if you're really special, you may opt to use the lil bread dough attachment on your fancy schmancy mixing machine, you lucky asshole).  So once it's all blended, check your consistency.  If the dough is still soggy acting (when you form a ball with it and place it in a bowl, does it immediately start to sag or "melt" down in the bowl?), add more flour to make it a bit more solid.  If the dough is too dry (is there still some dry flour in the bowl that you can't get to incorporate?  is the outside of the ball dry and floury looking?), add a bit more water and mix it some more.

Sit it in the bowl in a warmish place.  Cover it.  Let it sit for 12 hours.  Leave it alone.  Don't poke at it.  Don't cradle it in your arms while you dance to 80's music (tempting, I know).

When that is done, and you've had enough of Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot, and covers of "Footloose", grab your big ball -o- dough and divide it into 5 to 8 chunks (depending on how large or small you want your lil flat breads to be, and what the dough will allow you to do).  Get a rolling pin and a clean, flat surface, and roll it out until it's as thick as your Hooked on Phonics workbook.  Rude!  Okay, but it needs to be between 1/2" to 3/4" thick.  Too much thinner and it gets crispy and too chewy.  Too much thicker and you've lost that whole "flat bread" effect.

don't. do. this.

So, see that photo above?  It tasted great, but it was a failure.  Do what I say, not what I do.  See, my dough was too watery when I attempted this first round of bread.  So when I rolled it out and tried to put it on my preheated baking stone, it was sticky and stretchy, which made it a horrible mess.  I was in a hurry, so I just folded it over on itself, and over-floured the holy living shit out of my baking stone to keep the lil lump from sticking.  The outcome? It was too thick, so it is a bit dense, has an odd flavor in the middle, is over cooked at the edges, and has a powdery, unappealing dusting of raw flour on the outside.

But, you can kinda see what we're going for here.  I kept mine in a Ziploc bag with a paper towel (to absorb extra moisture), and I just nuked 'em in the microwave for 20 sec before consuming them (this made it warm and soft and oh so delicious).  I dipped mine in hummus, tried it with Kimchi, and melted butter over it.  There are many, many different ways to enjoy your flat bread.  Get creative.  Ooh, and they freeze well too, so you can stash some extras back for later.

"Recipe"

Homemade Sourdough Bread (made with no commercial yeast!)

Some of the basic structure of the making of this bread was derived from a recipe found in Nourishing Traditions, a wonderful book from the Weston A Price Foundation.  There's many reasons I adapted it -

• whole wheat, for some reason, doesn't tend to pull in the yeast cultures as well as white bread; 
• I didn't want to pay for and order in a sourdough culture; 
• the bread tended to be very dry even before baking, and when it was done, it was even more so; 
• the bread was also heavy, and the crust was so hard it was inedible.  

Then again, maybe I'm just bad at following directions.  ...  ...  ... I'm probably just bad at following directions.

So after browsing through many other sourdough recipes, this is what I've come up with:

To make a starter for your bread-
  Day 1: Mix 1/4 c. white bread flour with clean, filtered (chlorine-free) water.  If all you have is tap water, you can draw up a glass, and leave it sit on a countertop (covered with a cloth to keep wee flies out) for at least 24 hours to let the chlorine dissipate.  I can't tell you exactly how much water you will use (it ends up being somewhere around half of a cup).  Mix these two ingredients together in a glass container (I use a large Pyrex measuring bowl)  You want the mixture to be fairly soupy, but not a watered down mess.  It should stir up about like cooked oatmeal, I guess.
   Once you've got it thoroughly mixed (I use a fork to stir it and aerate it), cover your glass bowl/dish with a dishtowel or cheesecloth to keep out unwanted foreign objects.  Leave it sit in a safe place (a warm countertop in some sunshine is ideal).

  Day 1, part two: twelve hours after that first step, and once every twelve hours after that, you'll need to add another 1/2 c flour and some water (about 1/3-1/2 cup) to your starter.  Again, you'll want it to be damp and a bit soupy.  If you check on it and see a cloudy greasy liquid on the top (called "hooch"), then you added too much water last time.  That won't hurt your starter - just pour off that excess liquid and give the starter a good stirrin'.  If the outside crust of your dough starts to look crusty when you perform your routine 12-hour check, then you will need to add a smidge more water next time.  Always give the starter a good stir with a fork or bread whisk at these 12 hour intervals to get it some air!

  By Day 5-8 (depending on how warm your kitchen has been and how much air circulation you've had), the dough will start to smell yeasty.  You should notice bubbles forming in it, and it should be trying to rise up out of your glass container in between times.  This means it is almost a teenager, and it's time for it to move on to the next step in its breadly life!

If you notice that your bowl/container is getting crusty, just transfer the dough to a different container.  I switch my dough from one bowl to the next about every other day.

Also, once the starter dough is beginning to "yeastify," I begin adding whole wheat flour, rye flour, or spelt (or any combination of the three) to the dough instead of the white flour.


Got starter? Make bread!

Remove 1 to 2 cups of starter from your bowl.  Mix it in another container with 3-1/2 c. flour (white or whole wheat, or a mix of the two), 1/2 cup of pure water, and 2 tsp sea salt (I prefer celtic!).   Depending on how much wheat you've used in this whole process, you may need to use more water to get the consistency you want.  The dough won't rise much if it is too dry.

Mix well, and cover with a dishtowel.  Leave in a warm-ish place to rise for 12 hours.

MORE WAITING?!! Yes.  This part requires quite a bit of patience.  If you want fast bread, then get you some quick-acting commercial yeast packets and a recipe from Food Network.  This is traditional shit, yo.  Gotta nurture it a little bit.

After that period of 12 hours is up, you'll take the dough and fold it over on itself... do that TWO times.  Then leave it alone again.  In the bowl. Covered.  For ANOTHER 2 to 4 hours until it doubles up in size.  If you're not getting a good rise by this stage, then you either didn't let the starter yeastify long enough before attempting some dough, or you may have too dry of a mixture.  There's various reasons that it may not rise.  Not all hope is lost, but beware that a dough that doesn't rise much will lead to a dense, heavy bread.

After that 2-4 hour wait, it's time to get to work.  Get the dough out of your bowl and onto a clean countertop.  Be careful with it.  The more you bend or shape or kneed or tear your dough, the more the proteins in it break down and change the bread.  This isn't a Stretch Armstrong, kid.  Shape your dough on the counter.  Wanting a round loaf of bread?  Make it round.  Wanting to put it in a bread pan for a more traditional loaf?  Go ahead and do that.  Once it's the way you want it (sort of), leave it alone to rise one more time.

In the meantime, though, turn your oven on to 450° F, and get an old aluminum pie pan (one that doesn't have holes in it).  Fill pie pan with as much water as it can safely hold, and put this on the bottom rack of your oven while the oven is still warming up.

Get your baking stone, if that is what you're baking the bread on.  Dust it with cornstarch so the bread doesn't stick.  Put it in the oven too, so it can be warming up.  Get some welding gloves handy.  Really.  That baking stone will be SOOOO much hotter than a pan, so if this is your first time using a baking stone, use extra caution.  I honestly handle mine with high heat welding gloves, and even that isn't enough sometimes.

After the two hours is up, and you've gotten everything preheated, carefully slide your bread stone out and transfer your bread dough to that (trying to disturb it as little as possible).  Put 'er in the oven for about 45 min.  When it's thoroughly cooked, it'll make a hollow thud when you thump the bottom of it (unless your bread is mostly wheat/rye, or unless it didn't rise much in the earlier stages).

When it's done, let it cool on your bread rack.  Easy-peasy.  Now admire what you've created!  Assuming you already had running water in your house, some pan/stone to cook the bread on, and some table salt lying around, then all you've purchased for this project was some corn starch and some flour (and it was probably fairly inexpensive).

Now, what about the rest of that starter?  You can leave it out and continue making bread with it (remember to feed it once per day by adding 1/2 to 1 cup flour and more water), or you can put it in a container and put it in the fridge.  If you put it in the fridge, remember not to seal it TOO tightly in your container, because it will still build up some pressure from the yeasting process, and it could make a big mess in your fridge if it explodes.  You won't have to feed it every day when it is in the fridge, but you'll have to feed it about once a week to keep it "alive."  I forgot about one mason jar of starter for almost a month in the back of the fridge and it was black and oily and disgusting when I found it.

Makin' Cop-peehhhs!

Okay. No. I'm not making copies.  But I am making bread.  Homemade, lovingly nurtured sourdough.  It's a wheat/rye/white mix.  My first batch from months ago was all rye and came out all dry.  So I'm altering things a bit (which will be less healthful, since I'm trading some of the whole-grain goodness for the empty carbs and processing of white flour).  Hopefully this loaf of bread won't be heavier and harder than a cinderblock!  Photos and recipe to come!

Giving my Best Friend a makeover

Ah, mon cher ami.  Mi bicicleta.  When I was a wee tyke, my parents bought me a small banana seat Huffy.  It suited me until junior high school, when that ol' pink thing was just not cool.  So I purchased my first "big kid bike" with my very own hard-earned cash.  It was a 30 speed Huffy mountain bike.  Not top of the line.  Not intended to actually bike on a mountain.  But it got me around town during my pubescent pre-driver's license era.  And that's what mattered.

And then I became certified to operate an automobile, and the bike was parked in a dusty corner of the garage for many, many years.  It wasn't forgotten; there was still a level of maintenance handled (pun intended), but it was not ridden.  I had forgotten what an amazing instrument it was.

So after all that time, more than 15 years since its purchase, the bike was resurrected.  Cleaned up.  Pampered.  Adored.  My need for gasoline and car maintenance has dropped.  I have a deeper appreciation for still, calm, moderately warm mornings (because riding a bike to work in 35 mph straight line winds with a wind chill of 18 Fahrenheit isn't an experience to be ignored). 

This brings me to my newest project.  My cushioned seat cover fell apart from sunrot and age.  I've got tons of yarn, and moderate hook skillz, so rather than purchase a replacement, I set out to make my own.  

I perused the internets.  I found a very limited number of patterns and even fewer were free.  Not too many pictures of seat covers either.  Time to get creative.  

So I came up with this:

Nothing complicated.  Just a series of single crochets.  Chain 15 to 20 to start (hold it up to the back end of your seat and stretch the chain to find the right number for your size of seat).  Then go back and forth with a couple rows of sc.  Then do an increase row (I added an extra sc on each end of the row to give it a bit of bow).  Do another one or two rows of regular sc across.  Then begin to decrease stitches to the tip of the seat.  I had to keep holding up the work to my seat and comparing it.   As a rule of thumb, though, make your cover a bit smaller than the actual seat so that there isn't too much slack in it once you put it on.  

After the top was complete, I went around the outside edge of that piece with more rows of single crochets and threw in a few decreases here and there for good measure. This made the sides.  I used another piece of yarn and threaded it back and forth under the seat to attach the cover securely (it's not pretty, but no one will see it anyway... except you!)

I realize that there were better ways to accomplish this last step.  But this was pretty quick and required very little forethought.

Other notes: I used a rough, stiffer yarn (not stretchy or incredibly pliable).  It's that cheap Peaches n Creme cotton yarn you can find all over the place.  It took only half of a skein or so, so this was a very inexpensive project.  I also used a smaller hook (I chose an H since my yarn was nearly a sport weight, and because I wanted the stability of having more stitches per sq inch).

And TA-DA!