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Ben is pushing me pretty fast on a merry-go-round and then JUMPED ON by himself! Wow!

I was so excited to make a soup today using leeks (have never cooked with them before, honestly didn’t even really know what they looked like) so it seemed a perfect time to do Safeway home delivery. You can search for the ingredients using a search bar (no wandering the aisles) and just plunk it right into the virtual cart. Sam was under the weather yesterday anyway and didn’t want to go to the market. So I did my order online and scheduled delivery, so psyched to have dinner in the bag, so to speak. Well, the order came but a couple ingredients did not. So…I had my gorgeous leeks but no cannellini beans. The leeks were too cool to let just sit idly, so I improvised. Sometimes I improvise fabulously, other times it just goes horrendously bad. Seems I don’t improvise well here in WA. In 8 weeks I have had 2 complete misfires with the crock pot. Both involved putting pasta in. I have done well timing rice so that it turns out well with beef, but not pasta. I don’t seem to do well with that. And I am not sure leeks EVER want to be eaten in a pasta. Oh well. The dinner was so bad I walked it out to the trash at the road, ready for pickup tomorrow. It is not welcome on my property. However, I was tempted to see if my farm friend’s hogs would eat it. Probably not. They would know better about leeks and pasta. While the crock pot was going I had chicken in the oven, so thankfully the family did have some edible food.

While all that cooking was going on, Sam and I were working hard on a special project for the harvest fair – creating bread dough to form a decorative sheaf of wheat. The bread dough was made from wild yeast I’ve been nurturing for the past couple weeks. Very very slow to grow here in the cool kitchen. I have tried baby-ing them, distilling my water, feeding regularly, changing the hydration, sitting the container in a warm bath… I really wanted to cultivate the wild yeast from my kitchen but decided, finally, to give them a little boost. I put a few blueberries from the farm nearby in there and got fresh flour (vs the Hawaii flour). Boom…it started to get more active. I am excited! So one small victory in the kitchen today, but it is not for eating 🙂

The harvest bread! Sam helped create 115 ears of wheat for the top!

For more uplifting news, please click on the picture of Big Ben above to see what we’ve been up to. I loaded more photos a day or two ago. Aloha!