Weekend update, 7-8 April

It's been 5 weeks since my last post and I confess I feel a little bit guilty. I've jotted down notes for at least six different topics, but I never seem to make the time to sit down and turn them into cohesive paragraphs. At the very least, I have been hard at work during those 5 weeks, developing a new gluten-free bread recipe, mending a bunch of old clothes, spending a week volunteering at Coed Talylan near Llangadog, and most recently, getting the vegetable patch up and running.

This time last year, our conservatory was full of seedlings ready to plant out, but with the possibility of snow as late as two weeks ago, everything is a bit behind schedule. Looking around this week though, Spring is most definitely here, and so this weekend was all about the garden.

Milk Kefir Sourdough Starter

In my Universal Pancake Recipe, I mentioned that a little milk kefir mixed with flour makes a good, low-commitment sourdough starter. Today, I'm going to go into a little bit more detail about how that works, and how to make and maintain your starter.

Let's start with the basics: What is sourdough?

For the purposes of this blog, sourdough is any dough which uses a starter culture containing a diverse mixture of wild yeasts and bacteria. Store-bought yeasts consist of a near-monoculture of the yeast species Saccharomyces cerevisiae (the same species as the yeast used for brewing beer, but a different strain). A sourdough starter contains both Saccharomyces cerevisiae and lactobacillus bacteria (the same stuff that makes lacto-fermented pickles and turns milk into yogurt). Unless you are growing your culture in a tightly controlled laboratory environment, it will also become home to lots of other types of wild yeast and bacteria, creating its own little ecosystem.

Weekend update, 1-4 March (Storm Emma!)

Well, we survived the "Beast from the East" and my first-ever snow day more or less without incident. On the first day of the storm, I arranged to work from home, but by around 9:30 the university decided to close up shop, so I got an unexpected 4-day weekend!

The view out our back window on day 2 of Storm Emma.

As someone who grew up in Los Angeles, I still get a little giddy whenever it snows even a little bit, and we had much more than a little snow this weekend. The cold weather didn't stick around in South Wales nearly as long as it did in other parts of the country, but my area did get just under two feet of snow over the course of two days, accompanied by 45mph winds. In spite of the giddiness, I confess I did worry a bit about our garden as the snow drifts rose over the tops of our raised beds and completely buried a large portion of our herb garden. I was very glad that that we'd finished the raised beds and put new cloche hoops and fleece over them.

By Sunday morning, the snow was beginning to thaw and I peeked outside to inspect the damage to our herbs, which weathered the storm without protection. Much to my amazement, the only casualties appeared to be a recently-transplanted garlic mustard and a couple of broad beans whose cover blew off during the worst part of the storm. Plants are amazing.

Compost Update

February is winding to a close, which means that we've been following our new composting regimen for nearly two months now, and I figured it's time for an update.

Between the two of us, Steve and I have done a pretty good job of turning/rolling the bin at least three times a week. Unfortunately, our £7.50 RollMix Composter doesn't seem to be able to withstand even two months of that kind of use. There's a springy wire that wraps around the outside of the cylinder to help hold its shape, and the end of that wire popped out within about two weeks of use. After three or four weeks, the casing for that wire started to rip around the middle. At this point, I just hope that the bag itself lasts long enough for us to decide whether or not a big, rigid compost tumbler on a frame is worth the investment.

The wire on our RollMix Composter started poking out of its casing
after just a few weeks of use.

At this point, it's still difficult to say whether the frequent turning has had any significant effect on the rate of composting. The stuff in the compost tumbler does seem to be breaking down a little bit, but I don't know whether that's actually the case, or if the new additions just look brown because they have a coating of dirt on them from being mixed with the rest of the compost.

Frequent turning of the pile is supposed to help create a better oxygenated environment for the aerobic bacteria that do the heavy lifting in the initial stage of composting, but those bacteria also need heat, which is in short supply this time of year. As I'm typing this, the weather guy on the radio is going on at some length about the "Beast from the East" bringing icy weather from Russia and making this the coldest February in some large number of years, so our local population of decomposers is working at a serious disadvantage.

Whether or not the tumbling action has made a significant difference, there can be no doubt that the composition of the pile has a huge effect on the behavior of the compost.

Universal Pancake Recipe

A few weeks ago, I promised that I would post my Universal Pancake Recipe.

The first few years I went gluten-free, I hated it. Okay, I still hate it, but I've also learned to appreciate the staggering variety of flavors and textures that are available beyond the basic three grains.

As I was re-learning how to cook without wheat, barley, and rye, pancakes were one of the first things that really *worked* for me. I'm terrible about following recipes, preferring to eyeball rather than measure, and substitute whatever happens to be at hand. Pancakes were the first thing that I felt comfortable eyeballing, and having at least one dish that I understood well enough to improvise gave me back a lot of my confidence as a cook. They're a great, low-commitment way to try out a new flour or flour blend.

Hopefully, if anybody else out there is struggling with re-learning how to cook gluten-free, this will help give you the confidence to experiment, and the knowledge to rescue something that doesn't seem to be working at first.

Weekend update, 17-18 February

Saturday was spent in the garden. The weather was finally clear enough for Steve to put the second raised bed into place. Our cloche hoops finally arrived, so I bent those into shape, and covered them with new, not-ripped fleece. Doesn't it look much nicer now?

As long as I was out in the garden, I picked a few radishes, transplanted a few that were overcrowded, and moved a few shovelfuls of dirt back into the raised beds. (We needed to clear a bunch of dirt in order to set the beds into place.) Our soil is still very, very heavy clay, but it was heartening to see SO MANY WORMS in every shovelful.

On Sunday, I intended to make pancakes, feed the worms, do some sewing, write a blog post, etc. but I only got as far as making pancakes before my brain chemistry turned against me and I became non-functional for the rest of the day. Will try again next weekend.

First Foray into Naalbinding

I need a new craft hobby like I need another hole in my head.

That said, speaking as someone with five piercings in each ear and one in my nose, that clearly hasn't stopped me before.

Last September, I found myself looking ahead at a 3-day conference bookended by a train journey of roughly six hours involving multiple commuter trains (noteworthy for their complete lack of luggage space) at either end. I had just finished my last big commuting project, and all of my other unfinished projects were not terribly portable. I needed to find something compact and brainless but time-consuming, and I didn't have time to shop around for new tools or supplies. (Besides, the fabric/yarn embargo still stands.)

So it was that I picked up a bone needle and a ball of homespun wool, and took up yet another craft.

January carrots, or, The trouble with seasons

Needless to say, there's a bit of a learning curve to growing your own food. Particularly if you grew up in a place like Southern California where seasons are something that happens to other people, and then move somewhere like, say, Scotland or Wales where seasons make the difference between lounging outside with a picnic of fresh strawberries, green salad, and roasted summer squash, versus sitting in your house shivering and hoping you never see another rutabaga as long as you live.


This year, we did a lot of things really well. One of the things we didn't do so well was carrots.

Weekend update, 27-28 January

As I sat down to write up my weekly update this morning, I found myself rambling on to the point where I think I maybe some of the tangents might be better broken out into separate posts. While I work on that, here's the bullet points version:

Sourdough:

• To use up excess sourdough starter during the week, I made some simple injera/dosa-type flatbreads using millet flour.
• Over the weekend, I made a batch of Sourdough Oat Biscuits for breakfast, and some Millet-Corn Muffins to go with a black bean, corn, and chicken chili that Steve made. Both of these came out... interesting. 

Garden: 

• There was only one reasonably clear and sunny day during the week, so Steve did a bit more work levelling the dirt under the pavers in the back garden.
• The compost tumbler is still rather smelly, so the hunt for more "browns" continues. On which note...
• Every weekday, I walk past a couple of small parks on my way to and from the train station. We've had a few stormy days recently so I've been picking up a handful of fallen sticks and small branches each day to add to our compost. 
• During a brief spell of clear weather, I planted out a bunch of carrot seedlings from our conservatory. Yes, January is a fantastically stupid time to be transplanting anything outdoors. Yes, carrots tend to dislike being transplanted at the best of times. This is one of those things that will take some explaining.
• Over the Christmas break, I ended up chopping a bunch of woody, dead bramble stems that were growing near the gate to our back garden. I finally got around to scattering them around the front garden as mulch, in place of wood chips. (Use what you've got, right?)

Crafts: 

• On Tuesday, I managed to pick up another skein of matching embroidery floss, so over the weekend I was able to finish the embroidery/seam treatments on my Viking smokkr! Next step: shoulder straps.
• I finished the cuffs of my nalebound mitts! I still need to make the thumbs and the flap that goes over the fingers, but they should be wearable within the next week.

Weekend update, 20-21 January

Food:
I was so pleased with the success of last weekend's sourdough loaf that I decided to try again. Twice. Once midweek, and once on the weekend, with different flour substitutions each time.

The first batch had 1 cup sorghum flour, 1 cup cassava flour, 3/4 cup arrowroot starch, and a bit of millet flour left over from another recipe. The second batch used sugar in place of honey, and about 1/2 cup each of millet, sorghum, cassava, and brown rice flour, with 3/4 cup of arrowroot starch again.

Arrowroot starch is supposed to behave similarly to tapioca, but less gummy/binding and more crunchy. The original recipe was, if anything, a little bit too stiff, which is why I swapped in arrowroot for tapioca starch. And because I'd never used it before, and wanted to see how it turned out. Millet flour also bakes up quite crunchy, and the loaf does indeed have a very crunchy crust, with a soft, very moist interior. I swapped in the cassava flour (made from the same stuff as tapioca starch) because it's tasty, and to make up for the loss of the sticky tapioca starch.

Gluten free waffles!

Both batches came out much closer in flavor to an ordinary sourdough white bread, although the first batch had a little more sweetness than I would have liked, hence the substitution of sugar for honey and reducing the quantity of sorghum flour in the second batch.

Also, I made waffles. Just because I could. At some point, I will write up my universal pancake/waffle recipe.

Garden:
It was raining most of the weekend, so not much happened. Steve planted a bunch of garlic during a brief dry spell. We rolled the compost a bit, but it's a bit smelly so something clearly isn't right. I tore up some more paper and cardboard and added it to the roller. I also started updating our seed inventory for the current year.

Decorative seam treatment on smokkr.

Crafts:
I stitched a few more rounds on my naalbinding mitts, and a few inches of decorative seam treatments on my Viking smokkr. I've run out of dark blue embroidery floss though, so I'll need to stop by a craft shop this week.

House:
During the heaviest rains this weekend, I noticed that we had water dripping from our conservatory ceiling. Luckily, we basically just use our conservatory as a greenhouse, so there are very few things in it that could be damaged by a bit of water. But it does mean that we need to find somebody to come and do some repairs. Bleh.

Compost for the Suburban Hippy

As I mentioned in my first post of the new year, one of my goals for 2018 is to wrap my head around composting. In our vegetable garden, we're following a mixture of square foot and no-dig gardening, both of which call for large quantities of compost on a regular basis. Last year, we rented a car and picked up loads of free compost from our local council. Not only does the need to rent a car negate the benefits of "free" compost, it wasn't particularly good compost. It was full of large chunks of wood and little bits of plastic. A year later, I'm still pulling brightly-colored bits out of the vegetable bed every time I go out to harvest or weed. So, to take matters into my own hands, I bought myself a copy of How to Make and Use Compost by Nicky Scott and started looking for ways to make more compost, and faster.

Weekend update, 13-14 January 2018

In the interest of actually generating some content for this blog, and as a way to boost my self-esteem (I hope), I'm thinking of changing the format slightly. Instead of only doing big, illustrated write-ups when I finish a project (which isn't very often), I'm going to try to at least jot down a quick note of what I accomplished every weekend. I'll still do big project write-ups from time to time, but my primary goal is to be able to look back on the year and see that I have actually accomplished *something* with my time. Sometimes I'll probably ramble on at length. Other times, it may just be a few bullet points.

So, here's what happened this past weekend:

2017 Gardening Recap

Oh dear. Is it really 2018 already?

The past few months are a bit of a blur, honestly. Sometime in October, my brain chemistry decided that it hates me, so it has taken all of my energy just to keep myself more or less presentable for work and try not to let the house devolve into a squalid mess. Every once in a while, I'll summon the will to do some work in the garden or chip away at one of my crafty projects, but it tends to be a few stitches of embroidery here, a bit of weeding there--nothing that seems to be worth publicizing to the world. That said, this blog *is* called Things Made Slowly, so I suppose I'm living up to the name.

Three months after the initial assault, my brain still hasn't quite let go of its enmity toward me, but with 10 whole days at home with absolutely no commitments over the holidays I began to feel like I might just function long enough to do some work in the garden. While standing outside on New Year's Eve, shoveling dirt in a drizzly 3 degrees Celsius (festive, no?), I couldn't help but be a little impressed by all we've accomplished in the past year.