Tag Archives: homemaking

What a girl wants

I only chose the title of this blog because I was watching a promo for the Rachael Ray show and the girl who plays Rachel Berry on Glee is going to be on tomorrow, and she was singing the Christina Aguilera hit…

Anyway.

What this girl wants is more of the same.  I feel like I’ve found myself again.  The old Faith is back.  Or is this a new Faith?  Either way, I like her.

She cooks dinner almost every night (from scratch!), and bakes sourdough bread and scones and gives them all away to anyone who happens to walk through the door.  She makes more jewelry and sews baby bibs for her pregnant friends.  She teaches four classes a week and laughs a lot, and watches the Rachael Ray show in the mornings.  She runs (2.5 miles now!) and goes for long bike rides, where she gets really sweaty but mostly likes the feeling of coasting down hills with the wind in her face.

I don’t think things will be just like they are right now for very much longer.  Life always goes like that, in seasons – in ebbs and flows.  But I’m just digging my toes into the sand while the tide’s out, and I’ll let it wash over me when it heads back this way.

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Filed under a change will do you good, cooking, home, seasons

Bake us, this day, our daily bread…

Want to know what I’m doing right now?

No?

Well, I’ll tell you anyway: I’m eating my breakfast, which consists of coffee and sourdough bread made by none other than…ME.

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Yesterday was my day off from teaching, and my friend Emily let me come over to her house and soak up her breadmaking knowledge – not to mention that she gave me a cup of the bread starter that’s been in her family for decades.

Really.  

Sourdough bread starter is just a mixture – a living mixture – of flour and water, and yeast and bacteria.  Yummy.  Once you get a good starter going, you can feed it every week or so, and keep it living for years.  Emily remembers her mom making sourdough bread when she was a child from the same batch of starter she uses now.  When Emily got married, her mom gave her some of her famous starter, and now Emily feeds her little starter pet and keeps it in her fridge.  A few years ago, Emily’s mom’s house burned down, and Emily was able to give her back some of her original starter.  And now, she has kindly shared it with me.  I feel honored to be a part of such a rich breadmaking heritage…lovely…

Anyway, in addition to being a great breadmaker, Emily is also a great mom to her three-month-old, Evan.  So, as you can imagine, I was in heaven yesterday: holding babies, talking books with Emily, who has an MA in Literature, and baking bread.  Oh – and did I mention the coffee drinking?  

My first bread loaves turned out tasting fabulous, but only looking semi-fabulous.  You see, bread dough usually takes hours – and hours – to rise before you bake it, and we were on a bit of a tight schedule, so…

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Next time, they’ll be a bit fatter.  And that’ll make two of us.

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Filed under being southern, cooking, home, learning