Meet Matilda….

Seven geese pierce straight line over frigid bay,
Intervals between them constantly equal,:
Today is the ideal moment between yesterday and tomorrow.
Deng Ming~Dao
(I love this quote about staying in today…in the moment)

Like many of you out there, I decided to give making a sourdough starter from scratch a try.
When my oldest 3 children were small, a friend gave me some of her starter that I kept up with for a while, but life with 3 young children was busy and I just forgot about it and ended up making frozen bread dough a lot.

I had a couple of failures over the last 2 weeks, until I watched this video, which makes laugh..ha!
Joshua's measurements and methods however gave me this lovely sweet smelling starter in 7 days.
Meet Matilda!
Now, you don't have to name your starter, but I decided to give her a strong name, given that she is a Rye/wheat girl and how can you forget to feed something that you gave a name to, right?

I love to watch her grow after I feed her.
It starts off small with just a few bubbles…

…and she's on the rise!  
Nice big bubbles and a sweet smell.
The first picture is fully risen, before she deflates.
My first batch that was a failure had the most god awful smell and was trashed.

Ken and I are not huge bread eaters, or let me rephrase this.
 We choose not to be big bread eaters because at least for me, those carbs like to hang out in my middle, but after seeing all of the scrumptious loaves out there I've made one or two fast no knead breads right along with you.

I am fortunate that I have a big canister filled with sugar, flour and a few bags of rye and wheat flours along with some yeast that I have had from Thanksgiving.
Knowing how hard it is to get certain things right now, I have been trying to be very judicious in how I am using it.

See that bread mix…well, in theory it sounded like it was going to be really good with Rosemary, Lemon and Honey, but truth be told, I didn't like it at all.  The Rosemary was just too overwhelming, so I won't waste flour making this one again.  Ken on the other hand loved it BUT he doesn't need to be eating a whole loaf of bread himself either..ha!

Lessons learned, but watching that starter come to life has been a fun diversion from the stress that so many of us are feeling right now, so if you have the time and the flour, give Joshua's method a try.

Now I have to wade into the world of making the sourdough bread.  It sounds so complicated!