Life in General

Sourdough Pricing

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I saw a YouTube video about “Sourdough – Starting the Starter” in the Home section. Thought I’d check it out. And wow. I’m disappointed. The guy uses and recommends starter from King Arthur Flour and Sourdoughs International.

Wow! $8.95 and $15.00 for starter. This is flour and water, mixed, left to do its thing. And you need to feed the starter with what you’d mix up to do a starter. What is the point of paying for something that occurs naturally?

King Arther has instructions for doing your own. In fact, they have a variety of starters. Rye, Gluten Free, Small Batch, and more. This is a great, honest company.

Perhaps I’m missing something. But the time to process an order and ship it to you takes about the same amount of time it would take to do it from scratch. After a starter is fed in your environment it’s going to get the unique balances of flora that exists in your area. It’s all yours – the joy of sourdough.

Books vs eBooks

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They claim the content is

This is intended as satire. The author is not yet ancient, cynical, technophobic, or curmudgeonly. He’s actually a pretty pleasant guy who enjoys many modern conveniences. 

David Ferrer

but don’t believe it. There are lots of reasons why books are better than ebooks. Read about it in 50 Reasons Real Books are Vastly Superior to Ebooks.

My favorites include Marginalia, Decoration, Used Books, and well, you get the idea. There are lots more favorites to have.

It’s Called Lobectomy

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That’s what I had this fall. And it seems to fit today. A day of fixing things that shouldn’t be broken, but they are. A website that wasn’t updating. Another one that hasn’t migrated. Then there was the car not locking the car up. It’s one of those things where you close and lock and unlock with a thing that you press the button on. Not today. Or the rebuilding of a laptop since the old one was stolen. And there was the lookup of jamhome.us, saunter.us/wanderings, and all the rest. Name resolution broke. And that lead to people’s email to me failing, and that lead me to needing to figure out why it broke. Which I did. But I should have a while ago. Before it was totally broken.

So with all the stuff broken, I may as well tell you I had a lobectomy. Upper node on my left side was removed. No, I don’t smoke. No, I’ve never smoked. I did have radiation treatment way back when, when the blasted you with as much as you could tolerate. Arteries would suddenly pop and I’d cough up blood.

Two good things come out of this. 1) I should remember what it’s called, lobectomy. 2) Now, maybe, I can scuba dive since I don’t need to worry about the lung spontaneously bursting.

Nourishing Things

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Things that have nourished people include these three. Sourdough, Polenta, and Commonplace Books. Two are simple foodstuffs, one is a keeper of the knowledge. All of them sustain people.

Sourdough is, or so it seems, simple. You mix flour and water. You wait. You add more flour and water. Then, eventually, it is filled with bubbles. There you have it. The thing that will raise your bread is ready to use.

Polenta, today, is coarsely ground yellow maize, coarse cornmeal. It is sustaining because you can eat it hot, like oatmeal. Or allow it to cool and become a loaf that can be grilled, fried, or roasted with topping to suit. Prior to corn being imported from the new world other grains had the same uses. Chestnuts, millet, chickpeas, and others were used. It is a flexible grain. You can include olive oil or butter, chopped jalapenos, a cheese of choice, these are the simplest of ways to modify polenta.

Commonplace Books is the way of keeping knowledge. Particularly, it was used by women before they were allowed to attend universities. There are notes in the margins of cookbooks. There are scrapbooks. There are books not know by this name. Do you have one? More? It sustains your personal knowledge base.

What sustains your life? These are three that sustain my life.