Sourdough Sunday

 It's Superbowl Sunday for some but it was Sourdough Sunday here. Maybe every Sunday will be Sourdough Sunday! Anyone want to do that with me? We could try a new recipe on Sunday or Saturday or whatever day you want.

I have a friend who is just getting into sourdough and she was having some issues with her starter and wondered if her kitchen was too cool. Maybe . . I think my starter must have acclimated itself to our freezing cold house in the winter. Having an electric heat pump in an area that gets as cold as it gets here and having one unit for a house with a basement . . not good!

About 1 a.m. this morning I went upstairs and fed the starter. It was in a quart jar and with the feeding, it was almost to the halfway point in the jars. I thought about putting it in a half gallon jar and figured that was overkill so I didn't do it. Almost always I put the jar in a bowl with a bit of water in it so if it overflows, it won't be such a mess to clean up but I didn't do that either.

While I was upstairs, I fed a second jar of sourdough and got another jar of buttermilk started and just forgot to put on the bowl under the quart jar.

You can see that it didn't seem bothered by the cold. The starter on the right, in the 1-1/2 pint jar, is for the Same-Day Sourdough Wonder Bread Copycat Recipe that has been my favorite sourdough sandwich bread for quite a while. I do substitute fresh milled flour (hard white) and add a bit more water but otherwise, it's the same exact recipe.

Even with the overflow, I had enough starter in the quart jar to make two batches of crackers.

There's the sandwich dough rising. In the two pint jars are crackers that have lemon balm added. The 1-1/2 pint jar on the right has rosemary added. I'm working on using up the herbs I dried last year since it won't be long til I'll have more herbs to save.

In the background, the jar on the left is the starter that was left after the two batches of crackers. It's fed and I'll have to feed it again tomorrow to get enough to make English muffins Tuesday.  The glass container in the middle was about 3/4 full of discard so I put most of it in the blue canister and left just a bit in the glass container. That starter has been in the fridge without having been fed for probably 6 months so I'm going to feed it and get it happy and active again and start using it for the crackers, which we're eating instead of chips and store bought crackers so we use a lot of them. I'll probably transfer the starter from the blue canister to a half gallon glass jar - just because of how I feel about plastic.

The pint jar is sitting there to show how much the bread rose. You may can see a couple of green specks on the bread. Just as I was shaping it into a loaf, Vince asked if I could add rosemary to that so I did but I mostly just patted the dough out, sprinkled rosemary on top, then rolled it and shaped it so it probably isn't going to be real pretty inside . . we'll see when I slice it tomorrow.

I did make cookies yesterday. These were the ones that were supposed to be tea cakes but tasted more like store bought slice and bake cookies. Definitely not my idea of tea cakes but I suppose I could have screwed up the recipe.

I had seen these bottles of finishing sugar and thought they might be fun and different. I have used lavender before and Vince never liked it so I put strawberry on most of them. Vince tried the lavender and loved it. Men!  :) I'll try another tea cake recipe soon and use the sugar on them too.

I don't remember if I mentioned on here that I made marshmallows last week.

They were fun to make and they were very good but . . who sits and eats marshmallows? We did but that's not something we normally do. This is the recipe I used and they are made by soaking dried marshmallow root, then straining the liquid and using that. They were sweetened with honey and the color came from butterfly pea flowers so, as far as junk food goes, they were halfway healthy.

Yes, I've been stitching too. And, at some point this week I'm going to plant broccoli seeds and get some artichoke, pepper and tomato seeds started in cups that I can keep indoors til time to set them outside. Gardening season will be here before I know it.