House guest

 I’ve never seen so much winter fog in all my life. For five days, we were socked in. Every day the hoar frost got heavier. Terry fretted. “The trees can take two days of hoar frost. They can’t take five!”

Frost on the river birch

Indeed, we lost a limb of the oak that was struck by lightning a few years back. The birch trees began to sag. Still, it was pretty.

The birch on the left is really starting to sag

Soon after the fog lifted, the wind blew the frost off the trees. It looked like maybe the sun was going to break through for a few minutes Saturday, but then the gray returned. If Jane weren’t in Florida to confirm the sun’s existence, it would be easy enough for me to believe that we were never going to see it again.

Speaking of Jane in Florida, we have our time-share cat back with us. Skippy and his Red Blanket are keeping my lap warm on these cold winter nights.

Skippy, our winter cat-guest

I’ve been sucked into sourdough again. My brother sent me a link to a sourdough bread recipe from King Arthur’s website. The last time I got burned out feeding sourdough every week, I froze some of the started. I would have said it was last year, but it was clearly labeled 2018. It was freezer burned in the extreme. I didn’t bother to thaw it to see if anything was still alive in there.

My next step was to look up King Arthur’s directions for making a starter. As in my last experiment, the starter required wild yeast. Unlike last time (when the yeast was harvested from the air), the instructions said that the yeast would be in the whole wheat or whole rye flour. I had just a smidgeon of rye flour left, and this seemed like the perfect occasion to use it. It wasn’t a whole cup, however, so I threw caution to the wind and topped it off with whole wheat. The development of the starter relies on the “good” yeast and bacteria outcompeting the “bad” microorganisms. I figured the wheat yeast would be interchangeable with the rye yeast. Yeast is yeast, right?

Whole grain sourdough starter, Day 1

Which reminds me of a joke. A farmer was having no end of woe with birds building nests in the mane of his favorite horse. He asked the vet to come out a couple of times, but nothing the vet tried worked, and it got expensive. The farmer remembered that when he was a young boy, there was an old man who knew all sorts of home remedies for man and beast. The now very old man was still living in his cottage at the edge of town. The farmer sought his advice.

“Feed the horse two cakes of yeast every day for one week,” the old man said.

The farmer was skeptical, but desperate. He dutifully fed his horse two cakes of yeast every day for seven days. Lo and behold, the birds left the poor horse alone!

The farmer went back to the old man. “Hey, that yeast thing got rid of the nests! How does it work?”

And the old man said, “Yeast is yeast, and nest is nest, and never the mane shall tweet.”

HA HA HA HA HA!

[Don’t get it? There used to be (perhaps during British Empire building) a common expression summarizing difficulties in European/Asian relations: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Don’t hear it much anymore. We are more enlightened. Too bad, in a way. It’s such a good joke!]