56 Black Bass Fillets

We ended up with 56 black bass fillets (I wonder how many everyone else had!?).



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My "sponge"

Apparently they call this phase of the sourdough the "sponge". Although it's totally weird, what part of this process hasn't been? So now I'm taking my sour-smelling mixture and adding one cup of flour and one cup of water, with high hopes that tomorrow will yield a "sponge" worthy of baking ( or even that I might know what that means). We'll see! Here's what I have now:



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Sourdough, Day 3

Yesterday yielded no interesting announcements in my yeast factory/bacterial culture, so I made no updates.

However, I came home tonight to a very pleasant surprise - my sourdough starter had risen so much that it almost overflowed! Check it out:




You can kind of see the bubbles in that photo, but here is the view from the top:



It's alive! Definitely alive! I fed it again tonight...so we'll see tomorrow!

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Sourdough Experiment

In my quest to bake more bread this year I have been reviewing tons of bread recipes from every cookbook I own, in addition to every blog I come across, and of course, my favorite foodie websites (foodandwine.com, foodtv.com). All of these resources have me convinced that I'm missing out big time if I don't attempt the sourdough. So, here is my attempt to start a sourdough - day 1!

The first day is pretty easy! I mixed one cup of flour with one cup of warm water and put it in a jar (I actually mixed it in the jar with a wooden spoon, apparently metal is an enemy to sourdough bacterial cultures). This is what it looks like:



It smells like flour (which should only be the case today). We'll see what happens!

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Ina's Lemon Pasta with Shrimp

Tonight Rachelle and I made Ina Garten's lemon pasta with shrimp recipe. It was delicious! We used shrimp from Rosa's Farms (we made our last Mecca there a couple of weeks ago), and lemons from our tree! Delish!




And of course, we topped it with freshly grated Romano!



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Homegrown Citrus Salad & Italian Panini

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