15-03-25

Morning, everyone.  Welcome to the weekend!

After Veronica's encouraging  comment yesterday, I went into the kitchen and made some sourdough pasta - basically normal pasta with some sourdough discard added for extra flavour, I assume.  I've made pasta before so no problem but I left this in the fridge overnight to give the fermentation time and will dry half of what it finally comes out for another time.

I'll let you know.

And a shout out to Veronica's site, which is really good if you like reading about recipes and ideas.  She's just started posting again after a quiet time.    

https://www.larecettedujour.org/

Bubbles is still very, very slow and I am definitely learning patience with her.  It is so very tempting to feed more/less/more often/less often - all a bit confusing but the advice out there seems to be all about patience.  Having said that, this morning she had almost a 1cm rise.  Not amazing but better than nothing!

Squeak is fine - slow but pretty much doubling. 
I won't be baking a 'proper' loaf yet but  I am wondering about trying my usual loaf, half amounts (don't want to waste more than I need to)  but use some activated Squeak instead of the usual dried yeast - just to see how it behaves.  I might do that.  After all, I have all weekend!
And I have the pasta to finish and some pancakes to make.

But enough of this waffle.

As expected, I had gained one and a half lbs at SW yesterday.  That's fine - I had a great weekend, made my choices and accept the consequences.  Now I'm moving on!  I must finish planning my meals for the coming week, based on what I have got in.

I did my shop after SW - it wasn't a big shop but no shop nowadays is a cheap one, is it?  Every week things are going up and up and goodness knows where it will end.  However, I am pretty sure I have enough for the rest of the month now apart from things like milk, salad veg, other veg and, perhaps, some fruit.  So next week I will focus on my food bank donation for the month and use the list that I printed out to get a mix of food and non-food necessities.

Today, as mentioned above, is another gentle day.  There's nothing in the diary but there's various bits and bobs to be getting on with and I notice that Hobbycraft has the Aran yarn I want to get back online so I might pop over there to see if it's back in the shop too.  That's not an absolute 'need' but I really do need things to keep my hands busy and I do know what I want to make with it.  At the moment I am knitting sets of fingerless gloves either for the Sally Army drop off or for the Food Bank to donate in the later autumn, when the weather gets colder (and it's using up my stash).

I also have to get some stuff to carry on with my furniture renovations.  Two of my three coffee tables (they're a set) now have a back-to-the-wood clean and smooth top ready for varnishing.  They actually look really nice as they are with a lighter top and the mahogany trim and base and the wood grain is lovely but, if I kept the tops that colour, they wouldn't go with everything else.  I'll see if I can take a photo - hang on!

Yes - here you are - just as it looks right now, allowing for not very good light.

for this one, I ran a damp cloth over it because it shows the wood better but it does absorb the water quickly and dry out so I didn't want to get it too wet - hence the patches.

However, I think I will wait until April to buy anything - I will need varnish and a good brush.  In the meanwhile, I am waiting on one of those scratch removal pen thingies and when that arrives I can deal with the scratches and marks on the trim and the base.

There's more to this than I first thought there would be but it's rewarding. 

I've just drawn the curtains back and, yes, there's a fair old frost again.  It's supposed to stay chilly all day but should ne nice and sunny so that will keep inside nice and warm.
Well, I had better go and start my day with a session in the kitchen feeding the babies, activating some of Squeak for this bread I want to try, emptying the dishwasher and all that stuff.

Have a lovely day/weekend, everyone.  xx