Woe

My camera is dead... Ok not dead. Just... in a drug induced coma? Suffering amnesia? Short term memory loss? I'm not sure the exact medical diagnosis best fit to describe it, but from a technical standpoint, it has no memory left on its card.

Now, you may be assuming thats an easy fix. Just delete some! But you see... even in this age of data storage enlightenment, I don't have any sort of back up in place. So for the reeaaaallly important pictures. Family, friends, and favorites... Memories in JPEG(raw was a victim of memory shortages a long time ago). They stay on my card, you know, in case my computer crashes. And funny story, my computer crashed! After almost 7 years of faithful service, my laptop deserved a final rest. They do think they can get the data off, but I don't regret my Compact Flash safety net.

So to sum up my explanation with an explanation, any pictures I post in the next while are from my phone. My phone which happens to be by anyone reckoning, equally ancient as my deceased PC. Grainy, small, and blurry close up... Back in my day, food bloggers didn't all have lightroom and photoshop and 600$ macro lenses! And if they did I avoided their pages in abject and bitter envy. Anyway, these cant hold a candle to that, but they are photographic evidence, albeit inadmissible.

Braided chocolate loaf ready for the oven! Look at the beautiful stretch marks!! (who wore them better? The bread.)

The Challah recipe from Smitten Kitchen.

Some sort of sideways batch sourdough ciabatta stuff I made spiked with commercial
yeast out of desperation to start actually using starter!

I've been using the 'basic sourdough' formula from Peter Reinhart's  The Bread Bakers Apprentice as guidelines, but I can't say I'm been a faithful formula follower. At all. But it does help to have a starting point instead of reinventing the wheel. But I like the freedom of just... baking on whim. Taking the generalized understanding of flour, yeast, time, heat, acids... and seeing how far I can stretch it. I made blackberry walnut bread today... which I'm sadly too full of bread rosemary garlic sweet potato bread to have given a decent try. My Wheat Berry bread hasn't even been opened.

It seems, that the solution to eliminating waste in sourdough upkeep is NOT baking 2 loaves at every feeding (ie twice a day). There's only so many loaves a 4 people can eat in a day! Every day! For two weeks straight, and counting!