Faithful readers will no doubt recall that back during lockdown – four years ago! how? – people were doing a lot of baking things like banana bread and buying all the flour and yeast and stuff. Some people even nurtured their own sourdough starters, including London sister who called hers George and kindly shared one of George’s offspring with me. It feels wrong to call these offspring discards, as it might hurt their feelings. I called my new arrival Kevin, after Harry Enfield’s teenager, and kept him alive for….oooh, months. And then he grew mould and died a sad and gloopy death.
Luckily London sister is tolerant of my lack of culinary achievements (viz -TANITH! THERE ARE FLAMES! HELP!) and posted me another baby George which probably contravened some law or other about sending live things through the post but whatever. Kevin II spends a lot of time in hibernation or cryogenic suspension (OK, he lives in the fridge) but he hasn’t gone mouldy this time.
Every so often my family will request/demand sourdough pizza so I am forced to bring poor Kevin out of his slumber and coax him back to bubbly life. It’s not that I don’t love sourdough pizza (and cinnamon buns and bread and doughnuts) but I always worry that I’m going to spend several days adding flour and water to the jar while nothing happens, other than creating enough papier-mache glue to service an entire nursery craft activity.
Kevin, however, is from hardy stock and just two feedings later he was glooping away merrily, so much so that he and his discard (sssh!) made spirited attempts to escape from their containers shortly afterwards. This is despite the discard being in a container in the fridge….. “mummmmm, your sourdough has exploded…”
Today I made a loaf and tomorrow there will be pizza, and a baby Kevin will go out into the world this week to live with one of my colleagues (what will she name him, I wonder?) and then I’ll make a few more loaves and swear that I’ll make them regularly….and in a few months time when my family demand pizza we’ll do it all again.
Other things making me happy this week
- 5k in the sunshine on Saturday morning – though off-road is still a little swampy
- Popping down to The Bomb Factory in Holborn to see the work one of our community illlustrators did with the children at Holborn Community Association
- Reaching series 23 of Silent Witness – only 45 more episodes to go!
- Not being March anymore so my annual crisis is over for another year
- Using my Christmas fabric to make a beautiful coat – the proper version of the bucket coat I tested a few weeks ago
- Cutting things out for sewing bags
- Lovely evening celebrating a friend’s 50th birthday
Now I am off to start the lengthy, lengthy process of making pizza….honestly, making pizza for six is a day-long commitment.
See you next week!
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
The Easy Life in Kamusari/Kamusari Tales Told at NightThe Great Passage – Shion Miura
She and Her Cat – Makoto Shinkai and Naruki Nagakawa
Sweets – Tim Richardson (possibly one of the most interesting books I’ve read in years. Try it.)
Notes from a Big Country/Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson (Audible)
The Door to Door Bookstore – Carston Henn
What Kirsty did next 