Timing Sourdough Feeding

...or is important if you want to get a decent sourdough bread: the amount of time between feeding your starter and making your dough. I keep a small amount of starter on hand since I bake, at most, twice a week under normal circumstances (Under quarantine I’m baking a lot more but the reasons for that would be the subject of another blog post). Just before I go to bed, the night before I’m going to make bread, I take a tablespoon of starer and add i...

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Saturday Linkages: Gaslighting the Quarantine Cats

...nitize their food and kitchens 3 Reasons Your Chicken May Display Red Legs Time to Get Blueberries in Your Freezer? Strawberry Feijoa Jam Your wedding’s been cancelled by the coronavirus lockdown? Good Inside NextDoor’s Karen problem What It’s Like to Get Doxed for Taking a Bike Ride Writer Lane Moore condensed my mood in a Tweet, is anyone else feeling gaslit all the time lately? I’m wearing my mask everywhere I go, I don’t touch it, I don’t pull...

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The New Homemade Kitchen

...scales and bomb proofs your pantry. Green coffee can sit around for a long time and knowing how to roast it is a useful skill in our current crappening. In short, this book is very quarantine friendly both in the sense of having skills handy when supply chains are broken and having something more productive to do than binging Netflix. In addition to coffee you’ll find chapters on pickles and preserves, baking, dairy, meat and fish, cocktails, ferm...

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Leisure The Basis of Culture

...and rediscovered in hard work. Fr. Mark Kowalewski, who tipped me off to Pieper’s book, describes this state of leisure as “profoundly counter-cultural.” And yet I hear Gmail calling me. Time to update my Facebook profile and get out some tweets. How do you deal with life’s distractions? How do you carve out some time for true leisure?...

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Shoemaking Advice?

...The subject matter was usually a mushroom, or a cluster of mushrooms. Sometimes an owl. More rarely a Holly Hobby-type figure. Here endeth the lesson.) Free People actually seems like a fine book. It basically steps you through making one basic type of shoe that you can modify in different ways. Erik wailed about the horrible hippie-ness of it all when I showed him the illustrations of what I might make, but he wears cheap Chinese martial art sho...

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