Sourdough and Garden are Both Coming Along

 This has been a weird week. I won't go into details but there was some sadness at the first part of the week. It lasted for about 24 hours - then I shrugged and moved on. I'm getting good at that in my old age. It's been a difficult lesson but dang, the sailing is so much smoother once you realize what really IS important in life!

Since surviving cancer, I wake up every single morning with a prayer immense gratitude for one more day of life. 

I LOVE my life!  

One day last week I heard a noise outside. It had been snowing all night. I went to the front door and opened it and there were two smiling men from my church, busy shoveling the snow from my walkway! That really made my heart happy - to know people do care about me. It was such a good feeling!

I'm excited for Spring to come! I think Joe and I are going to put in a couple more garden boxes. 

I had big plans for winter and some of them manifested - but I decided it was more important to take my time each day and just enjoy whatever I was doing instead of rushing through, so some projects are still on the burner.  I have some writing I want to do but I've decided that is something I can do this summer on camping trips to the mountains and the coast. 

Yesterday I baked 2 beautiful loaves of sourdough! It's the only bread I can eat here in the USA, and it was so expensive to buy, I decided I'd make it myself. I tried for a while last year, but wasn't too successful.  This winter I'm trying two different methods for making the starter.

My loaves still aren't perfect but they're good enough for me and I'm pretty excited to watch as they get better each time.  I sliced the round loaf and put it in the freezer and forgot to take a photo, but here is the sandwich loaf. It is SOOOO good!

I bought this beeswax bag to keep it in. 
I really like it and it was SO big that I was able to cut it in half and make covers for small bowls with the leftover. 

I made one batch of bread and made a giant mistake.
I was reading a recipe where you could make either one loaf or two.

I put all the ingredients for TWO loaves into the bowl but only added the water for one loaf. So the dough was crazy thick and heavy.

I didn't want to toss it, so I worked a bit more water into it, then pinched it off into buns and froze them. I took one out of the freezer, thawed it, then flattened it and baked it in my Air Fryer oven.
It puffed up like a ball, but baked just fine and gosh it was good!

So now if I just want one or two small pieces of hot bread, I can just take these out of the freezer, let them thaw for an hour, and bake them. 

YUM!

I spent two days working on the Freeze Dryer.

It was not holding a vacuum. 
I called Harvest Right and they had me upload the info onto a flash drive and send it to them. Then they called me and told me I needed to update the programming, which was a pain in the kazoo.

After 6 failures, I realized it wasn't working because the flash drive I was using was too large. Weird, I know, but the smaller 8 G worked and FINALLY I got it updated. Then I ran a load of scrambled eggs I had been holding in the freezer since last week when it failed to dry and voila! Aren't they pretty?

My garden plants are growing taller by the day. 
The lettuce will be ready to transplant in about a week.
Here are two of the pots - probably about a dozen plants.

I have two more pots growing.

I moved my broccoli into individual pots yesterday also, and I ordered more pots. Tomorrow I'll move the tomatoes and peppers into separate pots - it's exciting!  I went out into the garden this morning to cut some kale and the crocus are blooming! Spring is on the way!

I made a pot of Portuguese Kale Soup for dinner.

Oh my gosh, it was good.

I'm so happy my kale grew right through the snowy winter!
It had fallen over and I thought it was a goner,

but it just kept on growing...

I'll be sure and plant one or two more of these this spring!

I still haven't finished the sculpture of Marley.

But it's getting close.

Maybe tomorrow... 

Well, I guess that's it.

Have a great week, everyone!

Love,

Annie