Thank you for reading my last note and for putting a smile on my face each time you shared a soup story with me.
Each one was a wonderful distraction that got me through even more waiting. (Because the waiting hasn’t stopped.) Thank you for keeping me company.
Not many soup recipes were shared, though.
But, two people actually offered me homemade soup!
And I took it!
First, I (porch) picked-upped a North African stew with chickpeas and beef from F that her partner, D, had made. Oh. My. Goodness. This. Stew. Was. Uh. May. Zing. I claimed it all for myself and wished my menfolk luck in finding something else to eat. I didn’t feel bad at all that I had a better lunch than they did for a few days.
Then, I collected a mason jar filled with Dill Harvest Soup from my friend’s front step. She also used to be my kiddo’s preschool teacher who would get the kids involved in making this soup. Each fall, the kids, teacher and assistants would pick the veggies and herbs they had been growing in their community garden. Then they’d chop everything up, cook it, and the kids brought some home to share with their families. I haven’t eaten this all-the-veggies-and-a-load-of-dill soup in over five years. But it only took one spoonful for all the memories tied to it to come back to me. So many sweet toddler memories.
Thank you, soup-angels for your generosity! I hope to one day repay your kindness with a homemade loaf of bread!
Because… I MAKE BREAD NOW!
Well, I’ve baked two loaves.
I used the same-ish recipe, but I ended up with very different bread each time.
Let me remind you I don’t follow recipes precisely. My curiosity and creativity conspire and succeed at changing something. It could be substituting an ingredient (or two, or three… even if I have all of the listed ingredients). And/ or increasing or decreasing a time. And/or changing a measurement… because two cloves of garlic is never enough.
So, I took a little from a recipe in the book Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson, and a little from The Sourdough Whisperer by Elaine Boddy. Then I added in some wisdom I remembered, rightly and wrongly, from studying these books, plus the ones I got from the library, and what I sourced from YouTube. And eventually I came up with a recipe and schedule I thought would work. For me. And for Florence. (Yes, I named my starter Florence. Florence makes delicious pancakes and enjoys a song sung in their honour.)
My first bread dough ended up being a gloopy mess. I tried to salvage it by pouring it into a loaf pan and baking it anyway. It turned into a super sour bready-brick with a pale crust. And it was absolutely delicious with butter and strawberry jam!
I tweaked my unsuccessful recipe and process and tried again.
This happened:
A much better result! And what a reward for waiting!
While this bread is also delicious (and still great with butter and strawberry jam), it’s not sour enough for my liking. Which means I’ll tweak my recipe and oven set up again before I make a third attempt.
This process will continue until I learn what I need to learn.
Or until I’m no longer enjoying the process and will eventually stop before I become (more) resentful of doing something that doesn’t bring me joy.
But until then, I’m willingly signing up to wrestle with more waiting.
Waiting for dough to rest, to proof/prove, to rise, to bake, to cool.
Waiting to try again.
And again.
Hold on to the hope that everything we’re waiting for ends with a savoury bonus of some kind.
Enjoy the rest of your day.
PS. There have been other perks to waiting. Like a last-minute day trip to fill a change in schedule. Or spending some time amongst trees.
PPS. My reading capacity seems to currently be set to bread making books only, even though I keep picking up so many other kinds of books from the library. The two books that I mentioned above, Tartine Bread (I didn’t want the Bread in Time section to end) and The Sourdough Whisperer (this one gave me the idea on how to not waste my first dough) are the ones that I’m reading the most.
Watching TV and movies continues to be a welcome distraction!
Three Thousand Years of Longing with Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba is great! These pretty people have tricked me into watching way too many crappy movies, so I expected to feel disappointed after watching this one. But that expectation vanished shortly after the movie started. I loved the way these characters talked about stories. It was a joy to watch.
Friends got me excited about RRR (Netflix) simply because of how highly they praised it and ranked it amongst the levels of Everything Everywhere All at Once. They weren’t wrong! The three hours and seven-minute run time of RRR made me hesitant to watch it. But by the end of the movie, I wanted another three hours!
The finale of Bad Sisters (Apple TV+) was satisfying. I’m not able to say that about many finales.