Failure doesn't photograph well

Of course, just when I could really use the food, the dumpsters have either been empty or unusable, because of people being around it. (Did they really need to have a cop car parked near the dumpsters? Cops really have nothing better to do than that?) I'm going to go again tonight and probably every night until I get something substantial. I did find some sushi yesterday, but it was only the kind with eel in it, and that does not fly with me. The bread dumpsters never fail, though, so at least I have that. Although, some vegetables in my diet would be nice.

Sourdough bread of partial failure

Two major things went wrong with this loaf of bread:

1) I didn't knead it enough before the initial rise
2) I left it in the oven so it would be warm for the second rise. I left the house. Someone turned the oven on without realizing the bread was in the oven.

That second reason is probably the most significant in why I came out with a flat loaf that did not rise at all during baking. I also forgot to slash the top of the loaf before putting it in to bake, but it didn't really matter, as there was no expansion of the dough during baking, anyway.

Its started out well, though.

My starter seems to have recovered from its week without refrigeration without any harm.

It's not a super-dense loaf, so at least it's edible and tasty, but hopefully future attempts will prove to be more successful.

Sunday dive and more roasted vegetables

I got a fairly good haul last Sunday: corn, asparagus, squash, lots of apples, a few papayas and most excitingly, a watermelon. Watermelon! The apples aren't nearly as bruised as they look in the photo.

I still had vegetables left over from last week's dive so I decided to do some more roasted vegetables. There's asparagus, peppers, potatoes and cauliflower.

The finished product didn't turn out looking nearly as undesirable as my last roasted vegetables did.

In fact, the cauliflower ended up actually looking appetizing.

mmm...macro

Nothing too exciting

I made a stir fry, but it looked kind of blah and I never actually got around to eating it, but the broccoli tasted and looked good. boring though.

Living off the air

No, I'm not a breatharian, but that sure would be awesome, though. No, I'm talking about sourdough! (I realize that most if not all of the yeast in sourdough starters come from the flour, not from the air, but isn't it neat to think that in the air everywhere there is yeast floating around that needs only to be caught and domesticated in order to yield delicious bread and other baked goods? It may not be entirely true, but it's an entertaining thought, at least.)

Anyway, this is my sourdough starter. I cultivated it back during the first week of February, which makes it only 3 months old. I used this method for beginning the starter. This was my second attempt at a starter, with the other one resulting in a huge amount of gross flour sludge.

This starter, which I've named "Fluffy" is pretty hardy. It survived living in room temperature with not quite daily feedings for a week, although I haven't baked with it since then, so I can't say
how the flavor was effected.

Apart from the pizzas I made last week, I haven't really made anything sourdough lately. This is one of the first loaves of bread that I made with it. It's about half whole wheat, and the dough was a bit wet so the loaf didn't really hold its shape, but it had a great crumb and nice sour flavor. I've since learned how to make a more crispy crust and shapely loaf, but I've never been able to replicate the crumb of this loaf.

What's the Difference?

Which onion was from the trash and which was bought at the store?

(The one on the right is the onion that I bought at the store.)

I Still Have Four Packs of Lettuce Left

Even though I've been eating salads with almost every meal for the past week. Maybe it's time to be a little more creative (and less lazy).

Using Vegetables That Are Past Their Prime (part 2): Pizza

OK, this is kind of like roasting, but quicker, fancier and with bread. For the crust I use a mostly whole wheat sourdough, but I guess if you don't have a sourdough starter lying around you could use whatever you want. (I use this recipe for the crust)

I usually don't bother with any replacement for cheese, and I usually don't even do tomato sauce. My pizzas generally come out less pizza-like and more along the lines of vegetables-on-round-flat-bread-like. I had a lot of tomatoes, so I figured a tomato sauce was in order. I was hoping that putting some tomatoes and seasonings in a pan and simmering it for a while was how to make tomato sauce, because that's what I did. Apparently it really is that easy, because it worked out pretty well, and I had just enough sauce for the two pizzas.

The peppers, onions, tomatoes and tomatoes in the sauce on this pizza were all dived. There's also some baked seitan on there as well. I put the oven only on 450 degrees instead of my usual 500 or as hot as possible, because I didn't really feel like dealing with the smoke detector that is guaranteed to go off whenever make something awesome in the oven. But maybe it's not a smoke detector at all, but an awesome detector, and it's trying to tell me that what I have in the oven is even more awesome than normal, and I should prepare myself accordingly. It didn't go off this time, so I guess that says something. I was also impatient and left the pizza in the oven for as minimal time as possible, so nothing really got even remotely browned except for the peppers, which are lightweights, anyway.

Using Vegetables That Are Past Their Prime (part 1): Roasting

Roasting has many benefits for cooking vegetables, namely that you can put everything on a pan, put it in the oven and then do nothing, and somehow end up with tasty food. I'm pretty lazy, so I just cut everything into smallish chunks and call it good, but I guess if you wanted to be all fancy you could do smaller pieces of things that take a while to cook, or not put everything in at once so that some things don't end up over cooked and some things end up under cooked. When I'm cooking for just myself, though, I'm way too lazy to do anything like that. Those white chunks are the daikon radish that has yet to grow on me. I'm assuming everything else on there is pretty obvious.

For these I just put some foil on a cookie sheet, arranged the vegetables on top and put it in the oven at somewhere around 350 degrees. Normally I would put some oil on there, too, but that didn't happen in this case. Also, salt is good, too.

The vegetables post-roasting were not nearly as photogenic as pre-roasting. Or maybe I was so lazy that I didn't even cook them, I just ate everything raw, using the cookie sheet as a big plate. You'll never know.