Paint Your Wagon

I am full of ideas lately, but sadly not too many useful house ideas. First it was castle dreams, now I can't stop thinking about getting a little travel trailer and fixing it up. I don't even really want it for travel, I just like the idea of using our RV parking pad to create a little getaway cozy nook. I remember when I was a kid I had a friend whose parents had a tent trailer that we could play in. It was always so fun to go out there and have this whole separate world. We spent hours in there despite it being so hot and musty inside. So I have been looking for old funky retro mini travel trailers for a while now. Airstream trailers are beautiful but surprisingly expensive! Then today I saw this while browsing for home design stuff:









If that is not the cutest most fun thing I have ever seen today then I don't know what is! You can find the rest of the pictures at desiretoinspire

I still think the travel trailer route would be better for me since it seems like these wagons need to be built from scratch and I think I am more of a re-haber than a builder.

Okay, okay so you may be thinking to yourself "What is your problem? You have this whole house to decorate and fix up and you want to start a whole NEW project??" But I think my problem is that I am still completely overwhelmed with this whole house project. There is just so so so much to do! But I will keep trying to stay focused on the task at hand and not be distracted by colorful and cute things. Maybe some day...

Castle dreams

Upon returning from our viewing of the new Harry Potter, we were reminded about how much we the contributors for this old blog would like to live in a castle. I don't know how you can watch those movies and NOT want to run away to England and sleep in a big canopy bed with a nice fire maybe a couple dogs laying at your feet keeping you warm. In any case, the Hogwarts castle is loosely based on Alnwick castle. Here is a picture - isn't it loverly?

It's not just the exterior that we like, but the interior. For me, I long to have a room much like Slughorn's office with two tufted sofas facing each other with a cozy rug and a roaring fire in between. I could only find one screen shot from the scene, its not the best.

There's Ron recovering from his near-death experience! Yikes!

In any case, this got me shopping for tufted leather sofas online, where I discovered Horchow, which has the most fabulously extravagant and beautiful things I have ever seen.

Not sure where this post was supposed to go . . . oh well. Until we move away to France or someplace similar to live in the castle of our dreams we will be here sleeping in good ole Rosemont. Well I will be sleeping, I am pretty sure Mr. House said he was going to stay up all night reading the book. . . Night!

Our first harvest!

Our garden has yeilded its first bit of bounty! This fig is our first harvest. It probably should have been picked sooner, as it was a bit wilted and overly ripe. We have three more growing on the tree, which may be the extent of what we get this year.

Also, an update on our garden. 90% of what we planted died the very next day. All the vines, peppers, fennel, and more, which we had grown from seed, died . Very sad.

Only the tomatoes, tomatillos, and basil survived. My dad brought over some spare tomatoes from his garden, and we added to what was left. Those plants are doing pretty well, and one of the tomatillos seems to be taking off, which is good. With 3-4 months left in the season, hopefully we will get something from this effort.

We have had very prolific growth of some sort of suculent weed in our garden. I weeded today, and got a full five gallon bucket of just this suculent weed. Not sure what it is, but I am fairly certain we can not eat it. Here is a blurry picture of a larger plant.
Any ideas what it is?

The Fundamentals

Here at This Old Blog we like to experiment in the kitchen. We also like to eat bread, specifically sourdough bread. We have been kicking around the idea of making sourdough bread for a while now and I think the time has come. I was searching around the internet for a recipe and I think I found a good one. Here are the directions on how to make the sourdough starter:

Creating Your Starter

The novel thing about sourdough baking is that it requires that you keep something alive in your fridge. I think of my starter as a pet, kept and fed so that Sandra and I will have all the bread we need. Sourdough "starter" is a batter of flour and water, filled with living yeast and bacteria. The yeast and bacteria form a stable symbiotic relationship, and (as long as you keep the starter fed) can live for centuries, a thriving colony of microorganisms. To make sourdough bread, you blend the starter with some flour and make dough. The yeast propogates, and leavens your bread. This is how you make your starter:

• Select a container that your "pet" will live in. A wide-mouthed glass jar is best. I use a glass jar with a rubber and wireframe seal; you can find these for $2-$4 in any antique or junk shop. A small crock with a loose lid is also great; these can be bought in cheap sets for serving soup. You can also use a rubbermaid or tupperware container. I've begun starters using the plastic containers that take-out Chinese soup comes in, and then transferred them to jars later! A wide-mouthed mayonnaise or pickle jar will also do just fine. Metallic containers are a bad idea; some of them are reactive and can ruin your starter (for the same reason, avoid using metal utensils to stir your starter).
• Blend a cup of warm water and a cup of flour, and pour it into the jar. That's the whole recipe! I use plain, unbleached bread flour most of the time, but I've had good results with all-purpose and whole-wheat flour, too. If you want, you can add a little commercial yeast to a starter to "boost" it. If you do this, sourdough snobs will look down their nose at you - but who cares about snobs? I personally find that (at least here where I live) no yeast "boost" is necessary, and I can make "real" sourdough with no trouble. But if you are having trouble, go ahead and cheat. I won't tell. Note that starter made with commercial yeast often produces a bread with less distinctive sour flavor than the real thing.
• Every 24 Hours, Feed the Starter. You should keep the starter in a warm place; 70-80 degrees Farenheit is perfect. This allows the yeast already present in the flour (and in the air) to grow rapidly. Temperatures hotter than 100 degrees or so will kill it. You can take comfort from the fact that almost nothing else will do so. The way you feed the starter is to(A) throw away half of it and then (B) add a half-cup of flour and a half-cup of water. Do this every 24 hours. Within three or four days (it can take longer, a week or more, and it can happen more quickly) you should start getting lots of bubbles throughought, and a pleasant sour or beery smell. The starter may start to puff up, too. This is good. Here's the gist: When your starter develops a bubbly froth, it is done. You have succeeded. If this sounds brain-dead simple, that's because it is. People who didn't believe the Earth was round did this for millenia.
• Refrigerate the Starter. Keep the starter in your fridge, with a lid on it. Allow a little breathing space in the lid. If you're using a mayo or pickle jar, punch a hole in the lid with a nail, that kind of thing. Once the starter is chilled, it needs to be fed only once a week. Realistically, you can get away with less; it's important to remember that your starter is a colony of life-forms that are almost impossible to kill (except with extreme heat). Even starving them is difficult.

The whole keeping this living organism alive in your fridge and then using it to make food is very strange. Bakeries such as Boudin claim that they have been using the same "mother" starter for a hundred years or more. I doubt I will be able to keep it alive for a week, but we will see. We will certainly update if we ever give it a go.

If you want to check out the rest of the recipe, head over to http://www.io.com/~sjohn/sour.htm 

Cost

One of the (many?) factors we did not anticipate when moving to a new home was the increased cost of shopping at the grocery store. Our new local store is Raley's, which, while locally owned, is more expensive than our usual Safeway when we lived in Midtown.  Example: Pasta Barilla is on sale for $1.40 at Raley's, and on sale for $0.89 at Safeway.  Pretty much everything we buy is more money at Raley's, and they have fewer, and less deep sales as well.  A pity.  Now we have to either drive back to our former Safeway, or pay the toll of convenience. 

In other news (really news this time), we are working on the fence.  Should be done in a week or so, which will be nice.  Working in the garden will be more enjoyable knowing that it is not on public display.