Not just your mother's potato salad

Making certain old standard dishes at my mother's house is a risky business. You know the dishes in question -- comfort foods, the dishes that always remind you of home and family and good times (whether they were truly good or just in selective memory). These foods vary from culture to culture, from family to family. For me, it's turkey stuffing, mac and cheese, meatloaf, bow ties (a vaguely Italian dish named for the pasta that is used), potato salad. These are foods that never taste quite right at your best friend's house, or the way your mother-in-law or your neighbors make it. No restaurant makes those dishes properly.

These are the dishes that you want to make just like Mom made. These are the dishes that give meaning to the phrase "you can never go home again".

It is potato salad of which I write.

Let me start in the beginning, which is the logical place to start. Logic ends with that point.

It had been springtime here in New Mexico. I could tell because the calendar said it was late April. Not only that, but one of my apple trees had blossomed (unfortunately not the self-pollinating tree). It was a glorious display. My asparagus had sent up the first spears and I greedily ate the raw shoots moments after harvesting, because that's what you do with the first asparagus. Birdsong filled the air as they hunted for mates, flies buzzed around the horses, and the horses' tails were working as their winter coats flew off, hair by hair, into the warm breezes.

Definitely spring.

One afternoon when it was almost hot and felt kind of summerish, I got the notion that I had to have potato salad. Just like Mom used to make -- the only way it can be made, after all. The next time I went into town I bought a bag of organic Yukon golds. I couldn't make the dish right away, as I had to be out and about too much over the next few days, so I stored the potatoes in a cool, dark place till I needed them.

For three days I thought about potato salad, because it was spring.

Then it wasn't. New Mexico changed its mind. The thermometer dropped to 10° overnight. A frigid wind blew through my valley straight from the North Pole, not even pausing at the spaces in the wall of my cabin. I had to build a fire in the wood stove, the first time in weeks. Fortunately I hadn't gotten around to moving the logs outside yet. Procrastination does have value.

By morning there was a few inches of snow, and though the sky was blue at that point it clouded over shortly and snowed again. Several times.

Somehow the notion of making a batch of potato salad wasn't as attractive as, say, a hot pot of thick potato soup. Not that I made the soup. I made cornbread instead, but that's another story.

Springtime again... maybe

And thoughts returned to potato salad. I decided to go for it.

Mom's recipe is pretty simple, but it must be exactingly followed. That's the risky part about making one of these family recipes if you're at Mom's house. She wants it to be made just like she has always made it. And so does the rest of the family. No fooling around. No experimentation. Just tried and true.

Well. 

If you've read other stories of my cooking here, you no doubt are aware that following directions is not exactly my thing. I wasn't at Mom's and what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her. Plus I didn't have all the ingredients.

I'm sure you're wondering how that could be, since I had been wanting the potato salad for a week and I had been to the grocery store in that time. I can only say that I didn't feel like buying mayonnaise. I rarely use the stuff and so any leftovers after making this recipe would just go to waste. I figured I could fake it. That's pretty much my approach to life anyway, so why not with potato salad?

Why go by the rules when you can invent something new? Choosing a route off the beaten path is always entertaining. Yes, there's the risk of getting lost, of attacks by dragons or saber-toothed tigers, of death rays and carnivorous plants, quicksand and... you get the picture. But adventure! Excitement! And the possibility of treasure.

No different with cooking, though that's just my opinion. I've had my failures (I just threw out a batch of sourdough that refused to rise and was sad that even after a second chance it chose to remain a lump of flour and water). I've had some dubious results that probably no one but me would like. But sometimes... treasure!

Okay, today's potato salad isn't everybody's treasure. For one thing, I don't put sugar in it, for another -- faked ingredients. But I did have potatoes. And celery. That was a good start, right?  The rest of the ingredients were what I had in my fridge and in my garden that survived the snow.

Ingredients (all organic)

• 3 lbs gold potatoes
• salt
• celery
• garlic tops
• green onions
• white vinegar (a couple tablespoons at most)
• Icelandic yogurt (or other plain yogurt)
• dill pickle juice (a couple tablespoons at most)
• sour cream
• black pepper, ground
• olive oil (a couple tablespoons at most)

[EDIT: 05/01:  Last night I decided the recipe would benefit from some olive oil, since oil is one of the ingredients in mayo.  So I did add a splash or two and that gave a richer taste.]

Directions

1. Boil potatoes till cooked but still firm - if you're going to want salt in your recipe, add some to the water. 
2. Cut potatoes into little chunks when cool enough to handle. 
3. Sprinkle a small amount of white vinegar over potato pieces and mix. Cover and cool, mixing occasionally so the vinegar will be absorbed uniformly.
4. Chop celery into thin slices.
5. Chop garlic tops into small pieces.
6. Chop green onions into small pieces.
7. Add the chopped ingredients and the rest to the potatoes when cool.  You'll have to experiment with quantities so add the yogurt, pickle juice, and sour cream in small amounts, tasting as you go.
8. Chill before serving.

Note about Icelandic yogurt: It was in the grocery store and I hadn't seen it before. It had interesting stuff on the container including a list of all the nasty stuff that wasn't in it. It's thick, like Greek yogurt. I liked it and will get more.

My mother would not approve of my potato salad. She would taste it and be polite, but I know she'd be comparing to her own. Mine would come up a faint second best. But you know, I haven't lived at home for a long, long time. I've been making potato salad for decades and each time I make it I follow my own taste buds. At first my potato salads and all the other comfort food dishes did taste like Mom's. Over time they evolved. Sometimes the changes came about because I didn't have the exact ingredients, sometimes because I had no reference to compare to. Mom lives far away and I don't get to enjoy her cooking much anymore.

And you know, when I do go home and eat a meal there, I compare her dishes to mine. And I wonder why what she makes doesn't taste like it used to.

[EDIT 05/01/17:  Google for some reason won't let me comment or reply to comments on my own blog!  So don't assume because I don't reply that I haven't read your comments!]

The thrivalist life - progress report

When Anaheim peppers go red

Somewhat over four years ago I self-published a short (56 page) eBook entitled The Thrivalist: Beyond Survival in 2012. It's not a hot seller, but it got nice reviews from my friends. As one person put it, "This is not a survivalist handbook, with instructions on how to survive the next tsunami, two-day power outage, or bank failure. The author makes a distinction between survivalism -- gritting your teeth to endure an emergency til things are all well again -- and thrivalism -- living the good life every day in as self-reliant a way as possible for your situation."  (Thank you Laura!)

I don't just write it, I live that lifestyle.  I do it not because I think there's going to be an apocalypse or any particular Bad Thing beyond the tough things that have always happened (flood, drought, blizzard) where I live, but because I actually prefer the lifestyle.

 I always have.

I'm one of those people who, as a kid, was thrilled with stories of explorers and pioneers, of disaster victims who made it through. I didn't care if it was fact or fiction, or whether it was the past (the farther back the better) or the future. I was fascinated by those who would boldly go where no one had gone before and who planned on staying there and living the good life.

I yearned to live that way. I experimented here and there, trying out various ways of doing things. It took me a surprisingly long time to realize that I was building up to the kind of lifestyle I thought I could only dream about. It was even later when I decided that there was nothing stopping me from going whole hog with it if I really wanted to. I wouldn't be the first, after all.  But you know...

It would be a lot of work to just jump in.

Hence the gradual introduction of the various self-reliance practices over time at a pace that suited me. A very gradual pace. So gradual, in fact, that I didn't realize how far I had come until I took stock today.

For instance:

Off the grid and on solar for electricity. No utility bill – yay!

Solar hot water heating in the summer and even sometimes in the winter.

Composting toilet (home-made, not store-bought). I never have liked the idea of a big tank for holding sewage.

Gray water & rain catchment for irrigation .

Wood heat for the house in the winter and for water heating in the winter.

Propane: as little as possible.  I use it now only for cooking in the summer (not needed often, see below) because I cook on the wood stove in the winter. I've learned how to bake loaves of sourdough bread on top of a wood stove!

Mostly raw food diet. Much healthier way to eat, energy saving, too. Plus if I really want cooked food I can enjoy someone else's cooking in a restaurant in town (and someone else's dish washing!)

Garden… well. Maybe I shouldn't go there. This year I planted too much of the wrong stuff – why did I plant anything that requires processing to eat? And zucchini? What was I thinking? There's a glut of zucchini in the world. Fortunately my horses like zucchini. Anaheim chili peppers? Why? I probably will let them all go to red and then dry them. But my tomatoes are doing well, as are the potatoes, which I can store till winter when I want to cook since there's a heat source happening anyway. If I can figure out how to properly store potatoes for that long. The asparagus, which is now quite a few years old, gives me more than I want in the spring. The ants enjoyed the strawberries more than I did. Apples: Finally I got some on the trees this year! Four trees and a big total of three apples that I can see. Garlic: I failed to get it out of the ground in time, so the cloves will grow another year. Ditto for horseradish. My citrus tree (maybe a lemon, maybe a grapefruit) is growing like gangbusters. I started it from a seed. Who knows if/when I'll see fruit.

Plastering my straw bale house. Ummm. You'd be amazed how many people nag me to finish plastering.  Well. I did move the cement mixer closer to the house. That counts for something, doesn't it?

No refrigeration. Yes, it's true, and this is a biggie. For nearly three years I have not powered up my refrigerator, yet I've been able to keep foods cool that need keeping cool. And that's big because for over three years I have not had to have propane delivered. My huge, ancient (1940s model) propane fridge just isn't efficient enough for me to want to burn that much fuel to keep food cold. I'm getting a new (to me) smaller, more air-tight fridge delivered tomorrow. I'll hook it up to the gas line but I don't know if I'll ever turn it on.  It'll still work better to keep my food cool than the leaky old one will.

I could do more. I'm far from self-sufficient. But the end of the world as we know it hasn't arrived yet. I have the leisure to do whatever I want – or not do it. I have time to mess around with possibilities, and to learn as I go, and to enjoy the process because I don't have to do any of it! 

Sure, many of my experiments have failed, but I keep at it – not because I have to but because it's fun. And while it's more labor intensive to live this way,  the trade-off is it costs less to provide myself with what I need to live comfortably. It means a lot to me that I can work less to earn a buck and have the time to work on my own stuff.

Accidentally vegan

If you aren't going to use a fridge to keep foods cold, you have to be careful about your food choices. Cooked/processed foods, dairy and meats don't keep unless they're down below 40°, a temperature I can maintain in the winter but not in the summer. Fresh foods (fruits and veggies) can do fine with that if they're chilled overnight (are you wondering yet how I do that?)

Not keeping prepared foods, dairy, or meat at hand, I wind up eating vegan a lot. Since a vegan diet is not mandatory for my purposes, I don't mind it at all, especially since there are so many great vegan recipes out there these days.

Last week I cooked potatoes. Sometimes I go on a potato-only diet, but that's another story. Today I realized I had 4 leftover whole ones that I wasn't really that enthusiastic about eating plain., so I whipped up a tasty potato salad. It's accidentally vegan. Here's what I put in the dressing. Note: I like things tangy.

Vegan potato salad

• Salt
• Ground pepper
• Olive oil
• Parsley
• Green onions (chopped)
• Dijon mustard
• Apple cider vinegar
• Land of Enchantment spice mix (yummy - but chopped garlic or garlic powder will do if you don't have any LOE)
• A few pounds of cooked potatoes (I leave peels on but you do what you want)

Dice the potatoes and cover with the dressing, mixing lightly to get all surfaces coated. Let it sit half an hour for the dressing to sink in.  Eat.

Swamp cooler: chilling foods without a fridge

Warning:  This is something that works best in lower humidity

Evaporative coolers (swamp coolers) are a real thing. While I've never actually bothered with a thermometer, I can tell you that my swamp cooler system can cool objects lower than the lowest air temperature overnight if the air is dry enough to evaporate liquid from the surface.

Why pay money for propane or use electricity if you can use air to do the work?

Here in the arid southwest swamp coolers work just great, whatever the scale. At its most basic, you put your beer bottles in a bucket of water and keep it out of the sun. The beer won't get cold but it will be cooler than the air, because the water surface evaporates  Any time liquid evaporates it removes latent heat from the surface of that liquid. It's what happens when you sweat.  Sweating works best when it's not humid and the same is true with swamp coolers.

Taken one step further, a metal bucket that is in a pan of an inch or two of water will keep the objects inside the bucket cooler than if the whole thing was sitting in a dry pan. And if you put a moist cloth over that bucket, making sure the edges are in the water so that the cloth stays moist, the contents of the bucket get even cooler because there will be more surface area for evaporation and the metal bucket will not insulate whatever's in it from the cooling effect.

Voila!

You do need to be disciplined about this, but then most of this thrivalist stuff calls for some discipline. You have to remember to set up your cooling system once the sun goes down and the air temperature starts dropping, and then you have to get up in the morning and get your food into the fridge before the sun rises and starts warming everything up.

I also cool jugs of water this way and put them into the fridge to create thermal mass. In the summer my system works even when nighttime temperatures don't drop as far as I want. In the winter, of course, it works really well.  

But remember, kids:  this kind of primitive swamp cooling is only cool enough for living foods (whole raw fruits and veggies). Don't be stupid about it. Food poisoning isn't fun, especially if you've got a composting toilet to deal with.

Adventures in Creative Cooking: Sesame chicken... or maybe peanut chicken

Tahini chicken, except it's not really...

I don't often cook, but when I do I want to brag about it.

[Disclaimer: follow my recipes at your own risk!]

My brother-in-law, Jeff, made a great chicken dish when he was out here visiting a few years back. It was so good that I've wanted to enjoy it again ever since. So he sent me the recipe because in a moment of madness I offered to make dinner for my friend Laura, who was letting me do laundry at her house.

Of course this is me cooking. As I recalled (and I should know better, my memory being what it is), what Jeff had made for me years ago used tahini (yum!) as a base. That's the first challenge. I live here, in the middle of nowhere, so that while my choices for ingredients are much, much better than they were in the past, there's still not as much choice as one might wish for. And because this is me, I also waited until the morning of the laundry/dinner making evening to shop for ingredients in town.

Tahini? Here? Hahahaha! No.

So the compromise for tahini (which I finally - and too late - remembered I had gotten online in the past) was sesame oil. But not all sesame oils are equal. Just like with olive oils, some are stronger tasting than others (or is that my imaginative memory talking?). The store frowns on your opening sealed bottles of oils to sniff them... so I chose more or less at random. It wasn't like I had a lot of choices, mind you.

Unfortunately the oil I got is very mild. It could be generic vegetable oil. Very healthy and all, but I wanted flavor. By the time I discovered the blah taste of the oil it was practically time to sit at the dinner table. Okay... now what?

Simple: chunky peanut butter, because hey - anything is better with peanut butter, isn't it? And when it comes to peanut butter only chunky will do, organic and no sugar added thank you very much.

To be fair, Jeff's evolved recipe (that is, the recipe he sent me the other day, compared to what I remembered from years ago) did call for peanut oil, but there was no such thing in town so I was planning on using peanut butter anyway. But now I had a reason to use lots and lots of it.

The result was awesome (and pretty to look at, too), though I still want the tahini chicken someday.


Tahini/Sesame/Peanut Chicken

2 pounds chicken breasts, cut up
3 bunches of scallions or green onions, chopped in half inch slices
1/2 cup of peanut oil
1/4 cup of sesame oil.

Pan fry everything together over hot flame till chicken is cooked through, 5-10 minutes. Turn off as soon as the chicken goes from pink inside to white. Don't over-cook as the chicken will become tough.

Serve over brown rice and season with soy sauce to taste


NOTES:

1. OK, I didn't cut up the chicken breasts because I didn't feel like it. You really should. Cooking big hunks of chicken like that for just 10 minutes means the insides won't be done. And no, I didn't check to see if the insides were pink before I served the meal.  Giving the chicken hunks a few minutes in the nuker fixed that.
2. My asparagus is coming up like crazy, so I harvested some and sliced that up to add with the green onions. It was a great idea!
3. My actual sesame oil was about 3/4 cup and my actual chunky peanut butter was about the same.  
4. Um... I didn't notice till just now that there was only supposed to be a quarter cup of sesame oil....

A dream of a recipe

I should start out by saying that I am not a Johnny Cash fan.  Partly it's because I can't stand most country

Young Johnny Cash in studio

music (there are a few exceptions - but I even avoid those) and partly because with his nasal voice and his dreary stereotypical subject matter, he epitomizes everything about country music that I can't stand.

So this morning I woke from a bad dream that had Johnny Cash as the focus.  

I dreamed that I was required to transcribe a Johnny Cash music video as it was being recorded in a studio by Mr. Cash.  Although there would be no audience, the recording would be a straight run-through with no interruptions and no retakes.  I talked with the man but briefly, and only in preparation for the work.  There was a lot of pressure on me to get it right.  

And then the very first song that he did was a recipe for Chinese chicken salad.

Needless to say, I woke up before getting into that nightmare of a dream. 

Maybe not so coincidentally I came across an interesting recipe for Asian chicken salad recently that I'm eager to try.  I'll share it here.  I may omit the habanero sauce.  The jury's out as to the hot pepper sesame oil.  Plain sesame would be just fine, seems to me.

Asian Chicken Salad

• 2 cups shredded carrots
• 1 head large cabbage, chopped into very thin strips
• 2 tbsp  cilantro
• 1 tbsp  sesame Seeds
• 4 cups cooked shredded chicken

• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 / 4 cup white wine Vinegar
• 2 tsp  ginger (ground)
• 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 2 tbsp hoisin sauce
• 1 tbsp  hot pepper sesame oil
• 1 tsp habanero pepper sauce
• 1 / 4 tsp salt blend
• 5 whole chopped green onions, green and white parts

In a small bowl or jar with a lid, add soy sauce, vinegar, ginger, olive oil, hoisin sauce, hot pepper sesame oil, pepper sauce, salt and chopped green onions. Secure the lid and shake vigorously.

In a large plastic bag or large bowl, combine chopped cabbage, shredded carrots, cilantro, sesame seeds and shredded chicken. 

Add enough prepared dressing to coat and toss until well incorporated. Adjust amount of dressing as needed.

 

Makes 9 servings @ 1.5 cup.

Cranberry Orange Jalapeno Sauce

Ingredients:

• 1 pkg fresh cranberries, rinsed & cleaned
• 1 medium orange, cleaned & cut into chunks
• 1-2 jalapeno peppers, cleaned, sliced & seeds removed
• Grand Marnier
• 1/2 - 1 cup sugar

Instructions:

• Put first 3 ingredients through a food grinder
• Add a couple splashes of Grand Marnier
• Add 1/2 cup sugar
• Mix well
• Adjust Grand Marnier & sugar to taste.  

Make this at least one day before.  You don't need a lot of Grand Marnier in the sauce - with even a small bottle there'll be enough left over for after dinner!

Recipe by Lif Strand.  Try at your own risk.

Sourdough cinnamon raisin bread - WARNING: non-dietetic!

I tried a new recipe for sourdough cinnamon raisin bread that I have been taste-testing all morning (in the interests of research only, to be sure).  I got it from http://vegannomnoms.blogspot.com/2009/03/sourdough-cinnamon-raisin-bread.html

As you might be aware, I’m not into cooking, but I have this thing about sourdough – I don’t know why but I feel compelled to succeed at making a great loaf of sourdough bread.  I have set my handicaps:  Little patience for kneading, no cheating with electrical appliances, and, oh yeah, no oven.

That’s another story, the oven thing.

Anyway, now that my stomach is full of mildly underbaked sourdough cinnamon raisin bread, I have a new challenge:  Getting the baked-on sugar cement off the pan.

See,  I didn't follow the recipe exactly – I always preach following exactly the first time I make something from someone else’s recipe but in fact I rarely do that myself.  In this case I didn't have brown sugar (well, I probably do have some but I didn't look very hard for it after a cursory glance at the front of the shelves).  I also added a little dried lemon zest I had - I like the citrus taste in cinnamon rolls I enjoy at one particular local restaurant and thought that citrus might be a nice addition to the bread.  The result is pretty good but I think orange would be better. 

As for the sugar cement - the recipe calls for sealing the edges of the dough when rolling it up after sprinkling the dough with the sugar/spice mix.  I didn’t do much of a job kneading and maybe the recipe doesn’t call for enough flour (or maybe I didn’t measure the liquid part accurately – it eyeballed about right, it seemed to me) but for whatever reason, there was a lot of sugar leakage.

That didn’t seem all that important at the time.  I got a hint when I went to pick up the loaf to put in a bowl to rise and it started falling apart.  And after being left to rise overnight, the dough was kind of sitting in some sweet liquid broth – from the raisins?  Don’t know, but I poured some out.  Guess whatever it was, it had a high sugar content so now I have baked sugar cement on the bottom of the pan.  Also, as I mentioned above, it's undercooked – the recipe called for preheating to 450 and baking at 400, I preheated to 400 and ended up baking at 375 more or less.  That’s because I’m using a stove-top camping oven that just doesn’t like getting much higher than 400.  Like I said, that’s another story.

Meanwhile, the bread still is yummy - with all that cinnamon, sugar and raisins, how could it not be?  

Lif's Supposedly San Francisco Style Sourdough Bread

Note that my starter is iffy and my techniques are non-traditional.  I get hockey pucks as often as I get good bread.  The recipe below, however, is what I followed and got a really nice sour loaf - the longer rising time is what lets that sour develop.

1 c starter that's been sitting out at room temperature for at least 12 hours

1 c whole wheat flour

2 1/2 cups water

2 tsp salt

Whisk together all the above ingredients.  If you whisk the starter before you measure it, you'll get a better measurement (you'll whisk the bubbles out of it).

 5 cups bread flour

Add flour a cup at a time, mixing with a spoon as long as you can.  When you can't mix with the spoon any longer, start kneading the dough, adding in the flour that way.  You might need more flour or less depending on factors I have no clue about.  I occasionally wet my  hands and that keeps the dough from sticking to my skin so much, but I'm told I'm a weenie for worrying about that.

Knead bread 10-15 minutes.  Let it rest half an hour or so, then divide it into loaves or shape it as you want and let it rise at room temperature, covered, till doubled.  The original recipe I used said this would take 12-15 hours but it took my dough 48 hours in the pilot-lit oven to double.  I use the oven because 1) my house gets cold in winter and 2) fewer cat & dog hairs get into the bread - they get on the dough somehow even if it's covered.  I don't cook much so tying up my oven for 2 days is no big deal.

Preheat the oven to 375° (take the dough out first if you used the oven to let it rise!).  Slash the top of the loaves with a razor before you bake it- I don't know what good that does but the instructions say to do that and it looks cool.  Bake about 45 minutes.  The original recipe said to bake till the inside temp gets to 190° but I've never put a thermometer in the bread - I might try that sometime, since I think that would mean fewer hockey pucks.  Also, I'm at high altitude - if you're a sea level baker, the internal temperature should be 205°.  

Note:  If you have stronger starter you will probably get a shorter rise time.  If the dough gets doubled at an inconvenient time for baking, you can punch it down, knead it for a few minutes and let it rise a second time - the second rise time will be shorter.  Or you can ignore the dough for a few hours till you're ready to bake, which is what I do.  

Stovetop Sourdough Bread

Stovetop Sourdough Bread
Copyright © 2010 Lif Strand

I love sourdough bread – what can I say? It’s bread – that’s a big plus right there, since I really love bread (especially fresh and warm with lots of butter on it). I was introduced to sourdough in San Francisco in 1968 and from that point on, San Francisco style sourdough bread was the non plus ultra of breads for me.

I’ve been trying to make my own sourdough for the last four decades with poor results. I’ve used all kinds of different types of starter and ended up with lots of hockey pucks and bread that was OK except for not being sour.

Now I’ve added another hurdle: I decided I wanted to make sourdough bread on top of the stove. I started this process this past winter when my wood stove was providing the heat in my house and it seemed natural to use that heat for something more, like bread making.

Did I mention I don’t like to cook very much, and I don’t like to knead bread? Never mind.

To cut to the chase, this is what I did to make the best sourdough bread I’ve ever produced:

1. Find some sourdough starter on the web. When it arrives, follow the directions for a few weeks till you have enough to split the starter I half. Give some to someone who actually knows how to make bread, so she will tell you if the starter’s any good. Meanwhile, keep using starter as directed (either the instructions that came with the starter, some recipe on the web or even cook book instructions) to make hockey pucks.

2. When the starter’s about half a year old, start abusing it. In the summer it’s too warm to cook anywhere much less on the wood stove, so that’s a good time to take this step. Don’t feed the starter any sooner than two weeks apart. Don’t remove some and replace with equal amounts of water and flour, just add about half a cup of water and half a cup of flour onto the old starter and mix well. Keep it in the fridge and forget it for as long as you can without it going bad. When you think you’re right on the edge, add some more flour and water to keep the starter alive.

3. When you’ve got starter that smells really, really sour and has about an inch of icky looking gray liquid on top, divide it in half and add one cup of water and one cup of flour to each batch. Mix well. Put the starter you intend to abuse forever back in the fridge, put the starter you’re going to use now on your kitchen counter with saran wrap over the top. Hopefully this starter will be in a mixing bowl (I don’t like to wash any extra dishes, myself). Let it sit there and bubble overnight and when it’s looking real nice, put it in the fridge and ignore it for a week.

4. Just when it looks like the bread starter is going to separate and make that icky water stuff, take it out of the fridge, mix it and let it warm up to room temperature. Then keep adding flour and mixing until you can’t mix without bending the spoon (or in my case, breaking a perfectly nice wooden spoon you’ve had for a long time). Oops, you should have added salt when it was still easy to mix. I don’t know how much, but the amount I added wasn’t enough.

5. Put some flour on a clean non-porous surface and scrape your dough out onto the pile and start kneading it. You don’t have to be vigorous and I do recommend having a book nearby that you can read while you’re kneading. It shouldn’t be a library book that the librarian will make you pay for when you return it with dried dough on the pages and cover. Knead till the dough is more or less not sticky or until you get tired of kneading. I don’t think you can knead too much but I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never lasted very long at the job.

6. When you’re done kneading, shape the dough into a loaf. I make a ball of it by turning under the edges so that the top looks like a loaf of bread and the seams are on the bottom. I don’t know why this is important but all the cookbooks say to do it.

7. Put the dough in the pan it will be cooked in that you’ve put cornmeal on the bottom of to prevent sticking. I was given a heavy enameled cast-iron round pan years ago that is supposed to be for bread making I think. It is now. Put the bread pan in a Dutch oven or heavy cast-iron equivalent. Put that on top of a piece of steel that itself goes on top of the gas burner. The steel could be from an old wood stove or anything that is heavy and will hold the heat. All of this goes on a medium-low flame, and the lid of the Dutch oven should be slightly ajar so the moisture from the dough can escape and you don’t end up basting the bread. Also, you can put your oven mitt or a folded dish towel on the top of the lid to hold the heat in. Just don’t let it slide over the edge and catch fire.

8. Go do something else because at that temperature and with that much iron between the dough and the flame, it takes a long time to bake. My bread took almost two hours. Maybe I could have used a slightly higher flame, but I’ve produced too many hockey pucks with scorched bottoms to try a bigger flame. When you can’t stand to wait any longer (smelling the baking bread for that long is torture) flip the bread over and tap the bottom – if it sounds hollow, turn off the heat and let the bread sit upside down for a while – it gives just a little brownness to the top that looks nice.

That’s all there is to it. If you try this recipe, let me know if it works for you.