7 YEARS LATER

 I guess this should be Nikki's New Life Part 2, something I never thought I'd write.

 

On 28 June, 2017, my best friend and TG supporter, Barbara, died. On 29 May, this year, my life-long love, Pauline, who married me last year and grew to understand and support TG people passed away through cancer.

I want to write, to celebrate Pauline's life. That will come in its own time.

24/06 - Feeling raw emotions as I collected Pauline's ashes today. Very strange, in the bright sunshine of the hottest day of the year, walking with a carrier bag containing 73 years of someone's life across the road amidst the everyday traffic and over to Sainsbury's where the car was parked. Then home and so, where do I put those memories? Nothing fits, nothing's right ... this shouldn't be, but that's what life is, an interruption in nothingness.

Curiously, at the end of an evening laced with brandy, I find some solace in playing Bruce Springsteen on youtube. He sings with such vibrancy about life and I remember when we saw him in Frankfurt all those years ago, back in '81. I finally have to turn off youtube when, however good he is, he isn't playing with the E Street Band and switch to BBC Radio 3, a channel P and I adopted in the last year. That brings me to Mahler, but he must wait as it's late now.

 

 

 

SOURDOUGH AND AIRFRIERS

 It's been a long while since I posted anything here. There are reasons for this, some of which I can mention here. I did write a couple of drafts on things I have since almost forgotten about, but I want to get to point of this  ... sourdough.

I enjoy cooking and baking and have devised a very successful (IM not so HO!!!), if long-drawn-out version of ciabatta, which I covered in an earlier post January 2022. I have given up the egg wash as it seemed a waste of an egg! The main thing is getting the oven hot enough, which with current energy prices can seem wasteful, but I try and time baking with other oven uses ... usually moussaka. More of this later.

My partner has Parkinson's and has also developed a malignant cancer which has occupied a lot of time - surgery, chemotherapy, hormone therapy and now immunotherapy), but eating is something she enjoys, so I keep fiddling about to provide tasty things. A while ago I became interested in sourdough, to the extent of buying a couple of books which should have led me to Nirvana. All they did was warn of failure ... everything was so complicated - temperatures, feeding, flours ... blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I did make some ferment (this is flour+water which has become bubbly) and found I had some 3 year-old rye flour, so I tried out some rye sourdough. It worked - the bakes looked good and the one I didn't try to knead came out nice and holey (LHS in pic).

The downside is that rye flour is incredibly gooey and cleaning up is very difficult. But, what kept coming back to me was that the ferment looked rather like the results of the first stage of the ciabatta making. Mulling it over at 5am (my usual time for mulling). I decided to treat the ferment just as that first stage. So one morning I took 375gm of ferment and put it in the breadmaker pan and added the contents of stage two: 1/4 tsp of fast-acting yeast + 325 gms strong white bread flour + 1/2 tsp of sugar + 4tbsp of olive oil + 1 1/2 tsp  salt + 90 ml water. This is then put on a dough programme for 2 hrs 20min. I then made up some small and medium rolls (no pix!) and cooked them in a max. heat oven for 12 minutes. If I didn't know, they could have been the old-style ciabatta. Tasting a roll, the slight sourness of sourdough came through!

What this post is really about, 'though, is how simple it is to have the ferment ever ready for baking. 

I never got round to finishing this piece. The last date associated with it is October 2023. Now, in June 2024, I am reflecting on how the title of this blog has run its course. In the first piece on this blog I describe my relationships a little. Now, change is here again as cancer has taken Pauline. 

A fuller update to this blog will follow.