Sourdough

So my husband recently became interested in making sourdough so we started a sourdough 'starter'.

Basically Eric, as it's been named, is one tablespoon of plain flour and one tablespoon of water left out in the room temperature air (with his lid on but not screwed on). We feed it once every 8 hours-ish (another tablespoon of flour and water and mix) for the first week.

We've had Eric for almost a week now and so we went to make our first loaf.

So we tipped him in and added another cup of water and a cup of flour, then we mixed him up and left him to sit in a slightly warm environment for a good few hours so that the live cultures of the yeast and the lactobacillus (the bacteria that gives the sour taste) can proliferate.

After that you put a decent chunk back into the jar to live for another loaf and add more flour tot he rest to turn it into a bread dough. At this point i guess you could add flavours and special ingredients but since this one was just a practice run for us we left it completely plain.

Again you leave the dough ball to double in size in a warm environment before shaping it into a loaf and baking it.

Now, our Eric-loaf didn't exactly grow in size during the dough stage. I reckon this is because we didn't wait the full week and the two cultures are still young and learning to live together. However the loaf had a good flavour even though it was rather dense and heavey. Also we made some in a silicone loaf mould to try that out and it didn't quite cook through properly however the one we made on the normal baking tray came out perfectly cooked through.

so Eric's back in his jamjar bubbling away until the next loaf. After a week old we only need to feed him once a week i believe but as the husband did all the research and knows the details (and is the one feeding it) i couldn't say for sure.

So anyways!

Apart from that getting on with completing some flowerpot amigurumi for myself. I tell ya, it's rather tough to crochet 7st circles with a tiny gauge, I feel like I should have a magnifying glass or a pointier headed hook to get right in there. Despite that it's going decently quick.

One flower down and 2 to go.

A long Hiatus

So it's been a while since an update. Not entirely wasted time either, I got a part time job in the past month cleaning at a local school, it's been my little boy's 1 year old birthday and, worst of all, we unpacked our XBox 360 from our shipment from Aussie.

So there you go, I have been away chasing around my little boy and playing xbox.. but most importantly I've been working on the spiral baby blanket too.

My first one failed, it was a wonderful mossy green colour but I had forgotten that the US and the UK had different stitches under the same name. So I was using a UK stitch pattern with the US| stitches. It came out oddly dome shaped however it's now a little shopping bag for messages that sits at the door :)

So attempt number two, I used a lovely cream aran wool i had laying around from my mum's jumper knitting. I frogged out the little granny square my mum showed me how to start and started the spiral again.. with the correct stitch this time.

After a while I admit i was getting a bit impatient for the spiral to be big enough. probably after all that time on the first spiral didn't help. So I made it a good size and then switched to a baby blue colour to try to make it into a rectangle. It turned out really well considering I'd never done anything like it. sure one end is thinner than the other and there's a couple mistakes and it's certainly not got any proper counting in it once I went to blue. However! It's home made, hand made and I'm rather proud of the blanket. Hopefully my sister-in-law will like it and it'll get loved.

Will post a picture shortly. Just need to write some washing instructions for it :)