Cooked..................

Backyard gardening.....(not mine though)

Even though most kids went back to school today here in Albuquerque, it's still summer.  The temp's this week are in the low 90s, and this evening is the first where we didn't get any rain in about a week ~ which is really unusual here, which I mentioned in my last post.  Even though summer gardens are starting to wrap up, its just now that tomatoes are really producing.  There's tons of green ones on the vine, and that urban gardener is looking at those plants and calculating that very soon there will be way more than they can eat.  Even if tomatoes are your "nectar of the Gods", and really there is nothing like a homegrown one, there is a limit to how many your family will eat in one day.  That's when neighbors, co-workers, family and friends get to share in the bounty.  When our OM brings in her excess, everyone in the office comes up and snags a bit to take home.  

I don't know about your friends, family and co-workers, but almost every one I know has a garden, or at least a few potted tomatoes.  Well, except me.  I didn't quite finish up with college soon enough to prepare my little plot of open space for a garden this year.  I can't put potted plants on my back patio because the sun is so intense that it literally cooks anything that isn't in the ground.  Believe me, I tried every type of pot available ~ clay, glazed clay, plastic....nothing can hold back the power of the sun to suck every bit of moisture out of it.  By the time I get home from work I can see the severe wilting.  After a week of that, it simply gives up.  I discovered that although I can't container garden, my small garden area can produce quite a bit.  In years past I had tomatoes, tomatillos, herbs, etc.  Once I tried cantaloupe and discovered that I didn't plant it soon enough.  It was not much bigger than a softball, and never ripened.  I didn't try those again, haha.  

The prompt to this post is the Netflix show Cooked.  Michael Pollan is the host (& apparently a cook book writer) who explores cooking through the inspiration of the four basic elements ~ fire, earth, air and water.  It's really quite a good series.  Of course I watched the one on bread first, and I learned something quite new about sourdough.  Fermentation apparently increases the nutritional value.  So, although you can't live on simply flour and water alone, you could ~ although it wouldn't be too much fun ~ live quite awhile on certain kinds of bread, and sourdough in particular.  Fermentation also increases the digestibility ~ and therefore the nutritional value ~ of foods that we routinely ferment.  After watching it, I realized that I will never look at a store bought loaf of bread in quite the same way.  

By the way, my sourdough did revive, and quite nicely.  I apparently wasn't paying attention to what I was doing when refreshing it (which needs to be done once a week ~ bakers never refrigerate their sourdough, because they use it every day) and I apparently added twice the water I was supposed to.  I was just relieved that it came back so strongly.  It even leaked a little out of the crock I keep it in.

And you guessed it, I made two loaves of bread today.  Romeo has already had 3 pieces.  We'll see if there's any left by the end of the day tomorrow.  :-)

Love, 365