Spring Sourdough

Oh my goodness, Thank  you.  Thank you thank you to whomever is ultimately responsible for the color returning to my city.  We had little intimations that it was coming, slowly ambling on it's way, and now I do believe it has finally stopped knocking, walked in the door, set down its traveling bags full of worms and bugs, flowers, tank tops and sandals.  Spring, you're welcome to stay for as long as you wish.   

On my Sunday morning run through the little back streets of West Seattle, my face smiled at the sunshine.  The lawnmowers were buzzing in yards filled with tulips the color of cheap drugstore lipsticks.  The apple and cherry trees lining the sidewalks are now filled with fluffy pink and white flowers making each branch look like sticks of cotton candy.  The air now actually smells like spring too.  There is so much opening up right before me.  The green buds on trees, the tiny purple flowers that open and spread thick like carpets across flower beds. Everything is opening up and stretching toward the sunshine, and I think I'm opening up too.  That same excitement and energy that I felt weeks ago in San Francisco is sneaking back in.  A feeling of freedom spring gives you, so that all the things you left behind amidst the gloom and cold rain may slowly creep back in.  

Everything's sprouting around here - even things on countertops.  My alfalfa sprouts have made their warm weather comeback, sprouting green tops out of little brown seeds in glass jars.  I'm now looking longingly out at our new yard, edged with areas that could hold tomatoes or kale.  My energy is increasing with the daylight hours, and things which seemed a bit cumbersome before now look fresh and compelling.  With all of this growing going on, why don't I grow myself some sourdough bread starter?  This was something I hadn't done since moving to 35th Ave.  At the bamboo hut, the molds in the air there made it impossible to produce a nice yeasty starter (which I found out quickly after a couple of strange-smelling flatbread experiments).  What?  You don't know what a sourdough starter is?  Well, that doesn't surprise me.  Not many people do this sort of thing anymore.

You see, a long time ago (don't click away, I promise this will be interesting - albeit - food-geeky)  when you wanted to make bread, you didn't buy those little packets of yeast from the store.  No, a long time ago nothing came in little packages.  Your bread coming out tall and light and well-textured relied on your cultivating the yeast yourself.  Where does the yeast come from?  The air.  Bacteria and yeasts are floating through the air in your home, outside, in your car, in your bathroom (especially there), everywhere.  You just have to capture them somehow and use them for your own delicious ends.  To capture them you have to give them a place they want to go to eat and multiply.  You must make the perfect yeast trap.  Some flour and water will do the trick, along with open air and 60 seconds of your attention every day (yeasts eat a lot and must be fed regularly).  At the end of one week you will have a jar full of yeasty, bubbly flour bacteria soup.  Yum!  The starter you make will be unique to your location.  Different types of yeasts inhabit different cities, neighborhoods, houses... that's why San Francisco got so famous for it's sourdough bread.  Their yeast strains make a wonderfully sour and desirable loaf.  

As the sun came up this morning, over the mountaintops and streaming into our front room, I had my routine cup of strong black tea with soy milk.  Right beside, on a glass plate sat sourdough toast with butter and sea salt. Spring mornings are now bright at 6am, pushing me out the door and onto my bicycle to begin my day.  It's a bit easier now to peddle fast uphill and look forward to walks outside at lunchtime.  Maybe next week I'll try making my own yogurt, or go foraging for wild nettles!  

Anything's possible. 

Sourdough Starter

Ladies and gents, this is local food at it's finest.  The yeasts that come from your kitchen?  You can't get any closer to home.  When you get behind in your breadmaking, take a cup of your starter and give it to a friend - spread your bacteria all over the place!

1 cup white, wheat or rye flour

enough water to make it fairly soupy

leftover cooked grain (optional)

To make your starter, start with a large wide mouth jar or a medium glass bowl that you can cover easily with a cloth.  Add the flour and enough water to make it fairly soupy - the consistency of heavy cream.  If you have some leftover cooked grain, feel free to add a bit as well, just keep the starter soupy.  Cover the dish with a cloth and place in your kitchen out of the way.  Each day for about 7 days, add about a 1/4 cup of flour and enough water to maintain consistency.  You can add cooked grain each day too.  The liquid may also be water from cooked plain pasta or potatoes as this will have lots of good starch for the bacteria to feed on.  When the mixture finally turns bubbly and begins to rise out of the container, you're done!  Now before using it all in your loaf, reserve 1/4 cup of the starter and add some flour and water to begin the starter all over again.  If you take care of it and speak kind words, your starter will last you forever.  It's alive.  Kind of creepy, huh?    

There are many recipes out there for sourdough bread - but I just wing it and throw all kinds of unmeasured things together.  I would recommend doing some research yourself, or check out www.thefreshloaf.com for some nice recipes.  

Out of Place

Local. Organic. Seasonal.

These are the father, son and holy ghost of the 'save the world through food' movement, now omnipresent, in the Pacific Northwest.  We get a little haughty about it, a little holier-than-thou at times, in the midst of our trying to do good for our bodies and the planet.  Gasp!  Are those mass-market organic canned tomatoes in your pantry?  Those blueberries are little blue chemical bombs!  Ack!  Were you planning on making me a pesticide smoothie with those??   

I've been following these principles for a few years now, trying like mad to keep my dollars at the farmer's markets and out of Safeway, eating out at restaurants that label every carrot and bean sprout with the local farm that sowed them with care, loving words, soft music, and loads of flowery-smelling manure.  I even, at times, knew the name of the cow from whence my stinky cheese came (Red Darla exhibits some real sophistication for a cow.  Moo.) 

I've been trying to keep the unavoidable melodrama and panic to a minimum (although Mark would probably disagree, as I've been known to hurl slices of major-brand supermarket wheat bread across the kitchen at his HFCS-loving head).  

Alas, I try.  I try to do good while eating well, enjoying food, and keeping my perspective.  It doesn't help that my dining room table is strewn with conscious-eating magazines, organic market fliers, and recipes torn from every local, organic and seasonable publication you can imagine.  It's an occupational hazard, the obsession to vote well with every dollar I spend on food.  Us nutritionists, neurotic as we are, don't always sleep so well some nights.  

But I have learned, after years of extremist experimentation, that raw foods/vegetarian-only/vegan-without-grains/macrobiotic/pesca-ovo-vega-mega-tarianism (all local, organic, and sustainable of course) is not the only answer.  As the buddha says (or as I paraphrase from reading Siddhartha so many years ago) the middle path is the way to go.  The key is finding what your own middle path is, as each person's extremes may be entirely different.  

I'm getting into my own groove these days, finding comfort in my middle path.  It's March here in Seattle, and we're at the point where the new sprouts and buds are crying out from underneath the transient morning snow. The winter vegetables are just about depleted, with no Spring ones yet to take their place.  My fridge has been dutifully filled with carrots and parsnips and big bunches of kale.  The fruit basket is always filled with apples, pears and bananas since they're organic and fair-trade.  The lettuces I cheat on, as my salads hail from down south on the coast, but organic, are all but comfort food to me now.  If I buy meats, I buy them organic and even from the farmers who think organic is just ridiculous - why would anyone do anything but?  A long time ago, farming organic was the only way to do it.

I love my local food, and what abundance we have here in the midst of our rainy, mild Winter.  The clouds have made for grey skies most days.  The sun peeks out, then turns shy and hides behind those clouds once again. We'll have hail, rain, snow and then sunshine all in a single day.  My dinners have turned to brown or pink beans, stewed with vegetables and grains, sometimes squash.  Deep earthy colors, dark tones that fit in with the darkened sky.

But at the market, on a quick trip to our favorite market that always seems to be bursting with color, fruits and flowers - I had to have this.

On a cold rainy day, my body yearned for sunshine, for sweetness, for the memory of sitting outside, breakfasting in Cabo San Lucas and taking a bite of this all covered in lime and sea salt.  The beach breeze blowing through my hair -  the cafe con leche, sipped overlooking the sandy beach.  Spring was getting me all rowdy.  Delicious, sweet, juicy papaya... probably full of toxins and imported from Mexico.  But hey!  This is my middle path... and it's covered in little black seeds and spent wedges of lime.

I sliced this big green papaya right down the middle, spooned out the caviar-like black seeds, and chunked the buttery-melt-in-your-mouth flesh into a mound in my big white china bowl.  Respite from the chill, a bit of color to remind me it still exists in nature among the earthen greens and browns of Winter.