Our trip obviously won’t be happening as planned. When things first started to go south, I remade the itinerary avoiding cities and only doing national parks. Then only a day or two later it became apparent that traveling at all would be not only difficult but selfish. We decided to delay our trip, most likely to fall and possibly spring 2020. I had a day of feeling sorry for myself but talking to my mom made me feel better as it always does. I also went to work that day and remembered why we are making all of these sacrifices. Minor sacrifices in the grand scheme.

So that day, I started baking bread. The first day I used a recipe from a friend in France called Magic Bread . The recipe is on that link but it is in French (some browsers automatically translate!) and you need a kitchen scale to make it. It’s super easy though. You basically make a wet dough and “pour” it into loaves and it somehow turns out amazing (hence the “magic” in the title). It is not a very flavorful bread though since that can only come with time.

I also seeded a sour dough starter that day. I put some unwashed grapes in a flour and water mixture and fed it regularly over the next few days. I read several recipes explaining how to do this and they are all pretty much the same. Some use grapes or other fruit to seed the starter and some wait for wild yeast to land in the starter on it’s own.

Friday Nova and I made pretzels. When I don’t already have a favorite recipe for a bread, I usually go to King Arthur Flour for the recipe and that’s what I did this time. I added some of my sour dough starter rather than throw it out. I liked these “Auntie Annie” style pretzels from their website but I prefer the German style more and will probably look for a better recipe next time (and food grade lye??). Anyway, the same day, Nole and I ate 3 and 4 pretzels respectively so obviously there was nothing wrong with these! I mm

I have this problem where I don’t plan well when making a recipe (or read ahead). It keeps things interesting… But I didn’t have baking soda for the pretzel bath and had to run next door to beg some off of my neighbor Mary. Luckily she puts up with me and also had some baking soda to spare. Thanks again Mary!

Yesterday, my starter seemed to be “mature” so I decided to make a sour dough loaf. So again I went to KAF and picked one. I only read one direction at a time and the first one required a 4 hour rest and then 12 hours in the fridge. Luckily it was afternoon so this worked out. I decided I would make the bread in the morning when I woke up. So when I got up I added more flour per the recipe and then noticed another 5 hour rest. It also says it might take longer than 5 hours. Well, I have to work this afternoon so hopefully 5 hours just right. Hopefully all this time means a flavorful bread.

Update: Two hours in and no rise yet… something tells me this will take more than 5 hours.