Hurrah! A loaf of sourdough I'm happy with! I pretty much followed the no knead bread recipe featured in the
NY Times a few years ago, but added the starter (my new one) in the first step. It has a fantastic flavour, and the chewy crust we like. The only issue is that it was, I think, still a bit 'damp' so next time I'll reduce the water. It was a bit of a gamble as I didn't know how much water to remove to compensate for the water content of the starter.
In other good news, while we were away our new bidirectional meter was installed (only took a week - what's the story SPAusnet? :-) ), and on wednesday the electricity company confirmed they'd received our tariff acceptance, so our solar is installed, running and making us money. From signing the order and paying the deposit to now it's been less than 2 months. We'll be eligible for the 60c feed-in tariff until 2024. Gotta be happy with that! In the past week we've fed in around 58kWh. Stay tuned - I'm sure there will be a chart or 2 coming up once I have a few months of meter readings :-)
We also took delivery of an important part of our "let the grass win" veg garden and orchard strategy - a Fiskar's momentum reel mower. Funky looking eh? It's still a bit wet (we've had over 70mm rain in the past 3 days) to give it a really good test, but we had a play with it today and I think it will be great. I really like the fact that the wheels are behind so there's no missed bits of mowing under the wheels, and it gets really close to the edges of things, It's light to push, quiet, and - even better - it throws the clippings forward so it kinda mulches the clippings as it goes and doesn't give you grassy feet. Will certainly be quieter, more fun and more environmentally friendly to use than the strimmer / whipper snipper. But no, we're not planning to mow the "home farm" acre+ with it ... although we probably could, but the ride-on is more fun for Jerry.
Hope everyone is having a great weekend!
4 comments:
The bread looks very yummy!
Wow what an unusual looking mower. I shall have to do a bit of research on them.
Wow, interesting looking mower - I've been using a flymo which my sister grabbed for me off a council street collection day. Love it, I mow quietly in the cool of the evening and as long as I keep the grass fairly short, it works fine.
The bread looks yummy - and I can say that without jealously because I've just had a proper bagel and bacon for breakfast - mmmmmmmmmm. I've found with bread making that actually every bag of flour is different and the first loaf from one needs to be watched for texture and dampness. Have you tried a saltwater crust yet?
Viv
wow, love the bread AND the mower!
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