Sourdough

Folks, I ought to write about sourdough.  I need to write about sourdough. I have had a very small jar of sourdough starter bubbling away in my fridge for weeks, and it survived me going off to Alaska for Christmas, and nearly my first act on arriving home was to start a batch of pancake batter so as to have a sybaritic breakfast on my first day of class.  Right now I have a loaf of whole wheat sourdough bread rising in the kitchen because I decided I would rather bake bread than buy bread this week.

My sourdough starter happened by accident, when a friend mixed up the necessary dry ingredients for naan and mailed them to me.  My naan did not work out quite right (suspect that the problem was the lack of a pizza stone), and I only made half the batch.  I stuck the rest of the dough in the fridge, vaguely promising to figure out what to do with it later. A couple of weeks later, I remembered it and pulled it out.  I smelled it.  It had the smell, the sour fermented smell that promises bread, fluffy pancakes,  and the best cinnamon rolls on the planet (you have not lived until you've had sourdough cinnamon rolls).  So I made pancakes.  Today is actually the first time I've made a loaf of sourdough, because pancakes are so simple and delicious. I'll let you know what happens.

Edit to add:
At one point Bird and I speculated about what hymns would be like if dogs wrote them.  I'm afraid that we thought they would mostly go: "I smell God! I smell God! I smell God! I smell Jesus! I smell God!"

The bread is in the oven, and I feel more or less or exactly that way.