Sourdough

Greeting fellow Earthlings.  How are you?  Hanging in there?  Learning new skills?  Keeping sane?  :-)  I've been feeding and caring for my sourdough starter "pet", Jane Dough, and we thought we'd try making artisan bread.  I have to admit, all the bread I made in the past, I added yeast in addition to the sourdough.  This time we were going au natural, just my own "culture".  Here is the result.  

But let's start at the "start".. see.. I made a funny.  This is what it looks like when it's happy, or fully active culture and ready to use.

I am the mother of the sourdough and the "encourager".. Dayle is the chef.. so he took on this experiment.  Here is the dough which he made up in the evening.  It sits on the counter overnight and is finished and baked the next morning.

This is it in the morning and was doubled in size.

Here she is, out of the oven.  I'm not going to share this recipe because it was in metric measures and drove us nuts trying to convert all the ingredients into cups.  We used our large Le Creuset French Oven to bake it, you start it covered and then finish it off with the lid off.

Here she is cooling on my antique bread board with my antique butter dish full of Irish butter.  :-)

I so love using vintage things in the kitchen.

Then the real test, how does it taste?  First to saw it into slices for our taste test, the crust was definitely CRUSTY and I had to work pretty hard to cut it.. lol.  

Ohh.. the texture is lovely.

Ta-Dah!  Bite.. chew chew.. ohhhh.. yessss.. YES!  The true real sourdough flavor was out of this world!  No fake sourdough "flavoring" for this baby.  And no "cheating" with added yeast.  Num num num.  Success!   It is delicious!  And Dayle just cut a slice and toasted it and it's even better as toast!  I sure can recommend experimenting with sourdough.

We had a bag of frozen shrimp so I thought we should try making Shrimp & Grits, we saw Cardea Brown make her Gullah style dish on her Food Network show recently and I was inspired.  So, I ordered a bag of old fashioned grits from.. wait for it.. Amazon.  It arrived yesterday.

And the recipe is right on the back of the neat muslin bag!  

And look at what Chef Dayle produced!  I offered to help by making the grits, but he preferred to have the kitchen to himself.  Okay, works for me.  This is an amazingly tasty meal.  I can happily recommend this recipe.

Wanna bite?

We don't remember where we got this!

The flavor of these was excellent.  So nice to have something in the freezer that you can make at home when you're in the mood for shrimp.

I had to show you how huge our Bonfire Begonia Boliviensis is getting.  We are quite literally amazed and it's only halfway through it's growing season.   

The little pink one is pretty but is dwarfed by its big sister.

I finished the flag embroidery but will show it to you on my next post.  Stay safe my friends.. news reports of the spread of this virus are appalling and frightening.  ((hugs)), Teresa