Sour Cream Bread.

It's been a while since I chronicled a bread baking adventure. I have been stuck in a bread rut. When I do get around to making a loaf I usually stick with my easy whole wheat. It's fast and it's reliable. I found myself marginally bored today so decided to try a new recipe. It's a sour cream bread. Back when I first started baking my own bread over five years ago I made a loaf that used sour cream. I remember I liked it and made it a couple times, but this is a new one to me. I generally don't want to write up a big to do about a recipe I haven't proofed a few times, but what the hell.

It starts with a sour cream base and uses that for the bulk of the moisture. When you mix in the proofed yeast/water/sugar mixture and start adding flour it resembles more of a frosting than anything.

After another cup or so of flour it turned into something that resembled cookie dough.

A good long knead got it all together.

Out of the oven and looking fine!

Verdict: Sour Cream Bread is like eating a cloud. It's AMAZING. I will definitely make this again. I can't ever use a whole carton of sour cream and it gets moldy. This bread is a great way to use it up and feel like you are literally eating a corner of heaven.

A look back at 2010...

January: I spent a lot of time on the couch with my arm elevated, watching movies and taking pain medication. We talked a lot about putting in a garden and toyed with the ideas of making a garden on the side, in the front, building retaining walls and other fantastical notions. I found out I was losing my job.

February: I got laid off. I started this blog. We built three raised beds in the front yard and started seeds. By the end of the month we had radish sprouts. Our worm compost bin started to take off with the second generation of worms showing their face.

March: I had my second surgery. I started to really enjoy having days of time and used a lot of it baking bread. We got our first vegetable - radishes! I sold my car and became a full-time pedestrian.

April: I learned to knit! It's become a habit since then and I haven't been without a project for more than a couple days. We started to get some more variety from the garden, namely kale. I continued on with excessive bread baking.

May: It was my birthday! The spring garden was bursting with lettuces, spinach, peas and kale. The summer garden was budding with roses, bean sprouts and tomatoes. I began contemplating what I really want out of life and quickly realized I like actually doing things (ie, growing my own food, knitting my own clothes, cooking from scratch) rather than working to pay for them (ie, buying produce at the store, buying sweaters and scarves and hats and gloves, buying pre-made or boxed food).

June: The fruit trees began to bear. The house was flooded with cherries and as necessity is the mother of invention I learned to can. I made my first jam and jelly. I finished my first knitting projects. The garden was producing like mad filling our freezer with spinach and kale (I'm actually using some of the frozen spring spinach tonight-it's still going!) and giving us daily broccoli and salad greens.

July: I kept baking like mad and made my first sourdough to a resounding success (I have another batch going right now. Two days in, four to go.). I continued canning as the plum tree ripened. I started planning for right now. I had my winter garden plans all mapped out by mid-July.

August: I learned to make my own yogurt! Hopefully the first in my dairy related adventures to come. Next year prepare yourself for cheese making. I also made my first pickle. Believe it or not I still haven't dug into the pantry stash of pickles. I made so many small batches of refrigerator pickles over the summer that we haven't had to go into reserves. Right now we still have two jars of green tomato pickles in the fridge. I finally learned to make a good pie dough and I stopped buying tortillas and started making them myself.

September: We expanded our storage capacity for canned goods as they were taking over the kitchen. We built a patio in the backyard. I started back to work and started having more time to knit. Go figure. The onions were harvested and cured (and now almost gone. There are a couple tiny ones left in storage, but I bought onions for the first time in three months yesterday. It was a sad day.).

October: The month of tomatoes. Winter seeds were all in the ground. Mike found a functioning sewing machine, which I still have yet to learn to use. We painted and updated the bathroom, which we still have yet to finish completely. The job thing is clearly starting to get in the way. I start to realize that I can't do the corporate thing and will likely never make a lot of money and realized I'm OK with that. I just need to require less. Serious thinking and plans begin about my future.

November: We built the cover for our patio. Everything in the garden died aside from kale and arugula.

December: Lots of rain and lots of work results in lots of knitting. Also a massive amount of holiday cookies.

It's great to look back on everything I have done this year. Sitting here now I snack on pickles and put preserved plums in my yogurt. When I peek in the storage pantry there are still jars lined up of fruit and pickles waiting to be eaten. It's rewarding to see that work I put in back in the beginning of summer is still paying off now in the dead of winter. I am concerned about next year. I won't have as much time to devote to any of this and I want to expand our garden space at the same time. Anyhow, here are my goals for the coming year:

• Learn to sew
• Begin organic pest control
• Better fall/winter garden prep
• Have cold frame
• Increase pickling repertoire
• Dry something
• Grow own herbs, preserve
• Get in summer canning routine
• 70% vegetable growth - through winter
• Set up grow lights for Spring? - at least Fall.
• Make one personal bread recipe
• Put in fence
• Begin testing soil, amending
• Start regular fertilization
• Better tree pruning
• Make a soft cheese

Final harvest.

Even now, in the final days of the year, we still have fresh produce coming from the front yard. Harvested today:

1 bunch kale

6 carrots

1 bunch arugula

'Twas the day after Christmas.

The day after Christmas we took to the forest. Well, Forest Park anyway. It was a little chilly, a little drizzly and a little cloudy. We actually hiked through the clouds. We got a nice look at this one from within and above it.

Mike wore his secretly-knitted-Christmas-hat to keep warm. I managed to finish it in a week only knitting while I wasn't at home. Success!

We made it to the top at the Pittock Mansion and took in the view. On a clear day you can see all five mountains. That day we could see my old apartment, the Columbia River and across town to Mt. Scott (really more of a hill).

*For those of you I worked with in the spherical realm, check that out above. iPhone, stand in one spot and spin while your phone takes multiple photos and stitches them together, and does a decent job at it for what it is. Now just think about all those hours and days you spent tweaking stitching scripts. Makes you a little mad, doesn't it?

'Twas the day before Christmas...

Merry Christmas Eve!

I've been so busy the last few weeks with work and preparation for the holidays and other various projects that I haven't had time to sit down and write about any of the things I've been doing! First off I finally finished the arm warmers I started back in September. They are riddled with mistakes, but I told myself I didn't care and that they were practice, so I just kept knitting. And, now when you put them on and look at them from across the room, you can't even tell.

I had a busy weekend last weekend with holiday cookie baking. I made German Honey Cookies, Whipped Shortbread and Peppermint Fudge.

I made some yogurt too, which I have fallen out of the habit of doing. Of course, as soon as I told myself we didn't eat enough yogurt for me to keep making giant batches there was a bout of gastrointestinal distress in our house and we had to go out and actually buy a big carton of yogurt. I had failed. But I found myself last weekend with half a carton of milk on the verge of expiring, so it got me back in the yogurt-making swing of things.

We are going to do the family Christmas celebration tonight and the kitchen has started working! I made my little timeline of oven temps, cook times and prep times to make sure everything is ready to go by 6pm. So far we are on schedule! Bread is rising, beans are simmering...

And in between things I've started my next knitting project. It's going to be a cowl with a big wooden button. I'm knitting on size 19 needles, which, frankly, makes me feel like an elf. They are gigantic! On the plus side it makes knitting go super fast, which is in need after the last 3-month project. Some instant gratification is needed around here.

And, lastly, here's a cat. Merry Christmas!

Tannenbaum.

We got our Christmas tree last weekend. We decorated it with ribbon and candy canes.

We left Lemon at home all day on Thursday and came home to find the bottom half of the tree stripped of candy canes. The only evidence was some plastic wrapping by her crate and the fact that she kept sniffing the tree to find more. It didn't seem to affect her any aside from now begging when we eat candy canes. Oh, Lemon.

The cats are enjoying sleeping under the tree too. It makes a good cat cave.

From the Flood.

Greetings from the depths of Oregon winter. They have been saying this is supposed to be an unusually wet and unusually cold winter here this year. I think they are right, just not necessarily at the same time. It's the beginning of December and we already had a light snow and almost a week entirely below freezing (pretty rare here) and now we are in the midst of a week long biblical level rainstorm, but it's pretty warm getting into the 50's. It's been coming down hard for a couple days already and here's our outlook for the coming week:

To be fair, it's not unusual for the 5-day to be all clouds and showers, but "heavy rain" and "rain" are serious business. I'm already looking forward to the break on Tuesday for just "showers". Storm drains are clogging and flooding the streets in places and our backyard is a giant mud pit. Consequently we have muddy dog prints on our carpet.

I went into the garden yesterday morning to grab some carrots for dinner and it was like pulling the carrots out of water. There was no resistance whatsoever. I also noticed that we are almost out of carrots! There's only about a half dozen left out there and they are pretty tiny. Well, that just means I need to plant more carrots next year.

The Aftermath.

I took a peek at the garden on my way out the door in the morning to see how the plants fared over the freezing patch we had last week. Well....the kale bounced back like a champ, arugula is holding on and there are still carrots in the ground but that's about it. Chard is dead, lettuce is close to it, cabbage is wilted, broccoli and cauliflower were eaten down to the nub again...it's a sad little winter garden.