I can’t look after more than four starters. My ginger bug Mary Ann, my kombucha SCOBY Etheldreda, my sourdough starter Eleanor and my buttermilk Betty all need regular feedings or they’ll die. I take care of this little family in addition to fermenting all sorts of other foods that don’t require starters—kimchi, dill pickles, chutney, […]
sourdough
How Do I Juggle All of This?
Sometimes this lifestyle makes me crazy. I will admit it. When I try to rush out the door in the morning and notice my sourdough starter sitting on the counter, yearning for the feeding I have neglected to give it, I get why people don’t want to look after one. Although feeding my starter takes […]
Zero-Waste Menu No 7
I’ve come up with the seventh and last menu in my zero-waste menu series. When we first went plastic-free, menus would have helped us a lot. Figuring out what to eat presented the biggest challenge of our new lifestyle. I’ll write a roundup of all the menus soon. Until then, if you’d like to peek […]
Someone Tell Me How I’m Missing Out
If you read environmental news, you may have stumbled across articles within the last week or so on a new type of edible straw. This article from Fast Company contains some unfortunate wording about these alternatives to wasteful, single-use, ocean-polluting plastic straws: It’s not about the consumer sacrificing anymore, it’s about the consumer having fun and […]
How to Prevent Your Sourdough Starter from Taking over Your Life
I’ll teach a sourdough starter webinar on Wednesday May 3rd from 4 pm to 4:30 pm Pacific time. You can watch it directly from my webinar page. Open the webinar up in YouTube and ask me questions in real time through a chat window you’ll see to the right of the video. If you can’t watch […]
Soft Sourdough Pretzels
My daughter Charlotte makes soft pretzels often. After I posted her recipe here, I decided I had to come up with a sourdough version to use up some of my extra starter. Sourdough deliciousness and food waste aversion all wrapped in one! Win-win! To feed my sourdough starter, I remove most of it from its jar and stir […]
Zero-Waste Menu No 3
If you have access to decent bulk bins and a good farmer’s market, with a little preparation and perhaps a substitution here and there, you can prepare almost any recipe without producing waste. Just follow the rules below. When we first went plastic free in 2011, it took at least a couple of months to […]
Sourdough Starter Webinar
If you missed my sourdough webinar tonight streaming on YouTube, you can watch it below. I have to warn you that this no-budget video, unlike the information contained within, is not of the highest quality. Below the video, I’ve added my class notes if you were either in the class and want to refer to them […]
Sourdough Measurements by the Cup (or Why I Use a Kitchen Scale…)
WARNING: Use these measurements at your own risk! When I feed my sourdough starter or bake sourdough bread, I measure out the ingredients on my kitchen scale. I set my bowl or measuring cup on the scale, zero it out and then simply dump out the flour until I hit x grams. And so in […]
Sourdough Pancakes
Click here to jump to the recipe Ever since Michael Pollan’s four-part series Cooked debuted on Netflix in February, my sourdough bread post gets more traffic than anything else on here, followed closely by this post on Eleanor, my sourdough starter. If you too have caught the sourdough bug, you have probably become familiar with The Sourdough […]
7 Foods to Make Not Buy
Updated 07/12/17 I follow three simple rules in my kitchen: no packaging; nothing processed; no waste. I should add a fourth rule: no effort. I do like to cook but I also love easy. Big Food has convinced us that cooking is very difficult, best left up to professionals, time-consuming, beneath us…and on and on. […]