We are here on another gorgeous Saturday and I have a few updates from the projects I started last week. The sun is especially bright today making the 19 degrees (65 F) seem a little bit warmer. Kids are playing football on the street below and I can hardly blame them for all of the ruckus. The weather is too lovely not to be outside.
Lately, I've really taken joy in slow living. I started this morning with my usual journal routine, accompanied by coffee and those buttermilk rusks I made last week. (I’ll definitely be making a bigger batch next time.) Except, this morning I sat down and asked myself how I would like to make my day beautiful. What was I feeling? Was I craving quiet or movement? Did I want rest or productivity?
I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted my day to go. All I knew was I wanted to make a beautiful Spring dinner with sourdough and seasonal vegetables like turnips, which I had never made before. That led to the idea of baking sourdough this morning and serving it up with fresh strawberry jam made from the strawberries I bought yesterday. Now that sounds like a delight.
Before bread baking, I checked on the mint I had propagated the week before and I was surprised at the amount of roots it had grown. It even started sprouting new mint leaves so I figured it was ready to plant. Unfortunately, it has acquired a few little brown spots on the leaves. What that means, I have no clue. Gardening is something I know next to nothing about, as you can probably tell. Worry not, it’s on my list. I found an old flower pot and got to work filling in the soil. Big bursts of mint filled the air with every ruffle of the leaves; naturally I gave it an extra few shakes. I felt like a princess from a Disney movie sprinkling fairy dust into the sunlight. Now that my mint is planted and watered, it’s time to get to the star of the show: the sourdough.
If you read my article last week, you know that I naively began making a sourdough starter. Let’s just say that I’ve never had a project quite so project-y and, if you know anything about sourdough, feel free to laugh at me. When I started it, I had no idea what sourdough really meant and I think I may have gotten myself into an amount of work I had not been prepared for. If you don’t know, sourdough is how they used to make bread and it requires a sourdough starter instead of yeast. The sourdough starter is what I made last week and it is a living thing that you have to “feed” daily until the end of time lest it die. Essentially, it’s flour and water that ferments and creates the power needed to give bread its rise as well as gives it its sour taste.
I would like to emphasize that I hadn’t the faintest clue what I was getting myself into or what I was doing. All I did was follow instructions and reasoned that time would tell me what was going on. A few days of feeding my jar of goop and I thought to myself, “Okay, now what?”. Two days ago Youtube saw my interest in sourdough and recommended a few videos about the common mistakes beginners make. White wine in hand, I started watching them and it dawned on me that this sourdough thing is a PROCESS if I have ever seen one. At this point, I was surprised that people even try to make this at all. Had I watched this first, I probably wouldn’t have attempted this. Yet, I was already in it. I might as well give it a shot.
I started out by opening up my sourdough starter jar and a sharp whiff of tang went right up my nose. Whether or not it smells good depends on the person, but I think the simplicity of it all gives the smell a wholesomeness you can’t help but enjoy. Kneading the dough was an unpleasantly sticky situation and half of it stayed behind on my hands. Sourdough is infamous for being difficult to work with, which I also didn’t know until later on. When I was done, it looked like a sad, heavily saturated, glumpy mud pie sitting in a messy bowl and the self-doubt was beginning to set in. I had already gone through sticky dough hands and 5 days of feeding a jar of fermenting goop, so I had to trust the process. Persevering was my only choice since I had already told my husband I was making bread, so if it was a flop I couldn’t pretend like it never happened. My home was a little chilly this morning so I picked a little spot of sunlight to set my dough in.
While my dough was proofing, I decided to roll out my yoga mat and do some morning pilates. Stretching and working my body in such a relaxing type of exercise always makes me feel like the epitome of health. Combine that with baking from scratch and you feel like the epitome of the epitome of health. Proofing takes a couple of hours, so after my pilates I started on the laundry and hung out our freshly washed bed sheets to dry in the sunlight. I don’t have a laundry day, but it seems that my laundry has chosen Saturdays. Nevertheless, getting some movement in and being productive makes fueling your body with delicious food all the more satisfying.
As I hung out my laundry, the daily milkman came. This is no ordinary milkman. It's three guys on a flatbed truck that jump off and yell “Milk came! Milk came! Milk came! Yes, sister, the milkman came! Fresh milk!” The funniest thing to me is to think how strange this would be in America. When you buy milk from them, you order it by the kilo and they give it to you in a plastic bag from who knows where. You lower your basket with the money and they send the bag up. I’m pretty sure it is milk from a goat somewhere. I usually buy it for cooking because I cannot drink it. There is something extremely odd about the smell and taste that I cannot describe. Is it the smell and taste of unpasteurized milk? It could be, but I have no clue.
By the time my laundry was hung out, my bread was proofed and ready to be shaped. I dusted flour on the countertop for the second time and rolled the dough in sesame seeds. I highly recommend the sesame seeds because it gives it amazing flavor. Just to clarify, this was my first attempt at baking sourdough, thus it did not exactly look like what you see on Pinterest. I also didn’t have a fancy scorer, so I couldn’t make a cute design on the top. But, what it lacked in aesthetics, it made up for in texture and I wish you could hear the crunch on this bread. I used a method I have used before which is to put a tray of water in the oven with the dough. Then, when the loaf is finished, you leave it in the oven while the oven cools down. The result is artisan level crunchy, chewy crust that is worth every ounce of effort you put into baking the bread yourself.
There are few things that make me happier than enjoying delicious food I made with my husband. Last week I mentioned how I wanted to eat hot, fresh bread with homemade jam until we were rolling all over the floor. Well, that happened today. These moments of such joy from something as simple as this are so special to me and what I love most is that I was able to share it with my husband. The longer the loaf baked, the more the smell of freshly baked bread was pouring out of our apartment windows and the faster we were scrambling to get everything ready. We tore into the loaf and burned our hands on the steam pouring out of it, but we were so excited we didn’t mind. We were passing the bread from one hand to the other to save our fingertips, plopping butter right in the center. It’s so hot the butter melts on impact. We topped it with strawberry jam still warm from the stove and everything was alright in the world. Every bite had us almost falling over in pure delight. Despite having a main dish, we filled ourselves to the brim on jam, bread, and butter alone. I have no regrets.
All of the excitement with the sourdough took me out. I have to say that I am not the type of person to take naps. I normally wake up anxious because the passing of time always makes me nervous. However, after that bread, I could sleep peacefully with a content heart. This, I think, is the power of food and fellowship. Many of the happiest cultures in the world are centered around this idea and I fully believe that taking the time to make food from scratch is one of the simple joys of life. There are few things better than watching your loved ones enjoy food that you prepared and enjoying it with them. Not everything you make has to be from scratch. It can be as simple as making a side dish or a dessert. No matter how small, it changes everything.
Now that I’ve woken up from my nap, I’m having a coffee at a dangerously late hour but I am too content to care. I would love to go for a walk but the crowded Istanbul streets are everything but serene at this hour. Usually, going for walks here causes me stress rather than relieving it. The sidewalks are narrow so you walk on the narrow streets. Cars don’t slow down for anyone, not even for children. You have to watch every step you take and be acutely aware of vehicles around you. I yearn for the day when I can walk in nature just outside my home.
Instead of putting myself into ensuing chaos, I’m going to spend the late afternoon reading. I find that reading before the sun goes down gives me a strong sense of calm. Perhaps it's because the day feels like it's coming to a standstill as you transport to another world. It’s not like videos though. Books are slow paced making everything else slow down with them. When I’m done reading, the afternoon is still there. When I’m done watching a video, the day is gone. So, I'm going to get comfy and dive back into the world of Turkish Harry Potter.
After some time reading, I find myself with my hands back in the flour jar once again. You might notice a theme of baking on Saturdays, but this wasn’t planned and I only recently started baking routinely. After that strawberry lemon loaf, I decided to always have something baked in my house. So, when one is gone, I make another. Just like the laundry, baking chose Saturdays. Nevertheless, I have decided to follow a pinterest recipe for dark chocolate, pistachio, tahini cookies. To me, it's the perfect combination of Mediterranean cuisine and western desserts, so let’s hope it tastes as good as it sounds. The dough is ready, it’s time to pop it in the fridge to chill.
In the meantime, I’m in the mood for a very light dinner so I have my turnips, carrots, mushrooms, and brussel sprouts lined up to be chopped. I love when veggies look like you just dug them up from the garden and splashed some water on them. It gives them such a fresh and earthy look that makes me want to paint a picture of them. Instead, I’ll chop them up, drizzle olive oil, salt, and a bit of honey on top and bake them for a good 30 minutes. (You would be surprised how good this was. Simplicity at its finest.)
Update: The cookies were very yummy, but I couldn’t taste as much of the pistachio or tahini as I thought I would. The recipe calls for browning the butter and that may have overpowered the other flavors, but I could be wrong. Mustafa really liked them and he’s usually not a fan of American style cookies, so that says something.
If you guessed that my night ended just like the last time, you’d be right. Except, it wasn’t as picture perfect because I thought I would finish this gorgeous project tonight, but as fate would have it, I’ve run out of yarn and only have 3 rows left. What a pity. Regardless, I’m really happy with how my day went and I can go to sleep with a heart that is full to the brim with the sweet, simple parts of life.
See you next week & thank you for reading the blog. XXX
Beautifully wrote :)