Well, things are slowly getting back to the 21st century here at Kilmurry House. First, we experienced the arrival of our wonderful, new, German Dishwasher mid-week. This miracle of engineering let me collapse three hours work into about 15 minutes. Which, since my foot still hates me, is a very good thing. Of course, most folks wouldn’t need three hours to do the dishes, but I had to include the hour of stove feeding it would take to heat enough water to wash them. Even with a dishwasher, we were still stuck in the 19th century when it came to household heating supplies.
Well, as of today, we supposedly now have a fixed, working, “central” heating again. For all you North American’s out there, Central Heating here means that you have a furnace that heats up your wall radiators. Not that you have winds of warm air blowing delicately from hidden places inside your walls. This sort of heat (which I’ve seen in the US in older parts of the country) does a great job of heating the parts of a room, just in front of a radiator. But it doesn’t do nearly as well for the far side of the room. But its still a lot better than a small electric heater trying to fight an Irish Winter all by itself.
Our turf stove is supposed to heat some of the radiators on its own, but really doesn’t manage to do this very well. But as of today, we are a lot poorer, but our oil fired furnace is supposed to be in tip-top shape. After months of the typical local experience of “waiting for a part” we gave up on the local plumber and house-mate called the manufacture to see if they could recommend a technician to fix the thing (or tell us if it needed replacing). To the guy’s credit, he said the machine itself was in great shape, but the warn-out parts had not been replaced since 1993. And it hadn’t been cleaned in years….I wondered at this point, just what our local plumber had done with all the money we gave him for “parts” over the last few years, but never mind…even the new guy said that he could just keep putting in little patches, but it would cost more in the long run. I suspect that’s what our village plumber had been doing.
Many euro’s later (or it will be many euro when we pay the bill next week), we now have working house-heat. Which means we also have hot water most of the time. We have a separate electric hot-water unit that needs instillation too. But we use it more in Summer than in the Winter time. Meanwhile, the turf stove keeps going in the background, now helping to keep things warm, rather than being our sole hot water supply. The first thing I did was take my first really hot bath in days…
The second thing I did was go to bake bread, and discover that we are nearly out of yeast. Since the local shops are out (I checked yesterday) I decided to do what the ancestors did. Start a “Starter.” A bread starter, for the curious, is a bit of yeast, water, flour and sugar (or honey) that combines together to make a sort of wild yeast. You let it sit out for a couple of days and catch yeast that is floating around the air. The more yeasty stuff you do in your home, the more little yeast spores there are for your starter to catch. My husband does brewing as well as my daily bread baking in the kitchen, so it seems to have a lot of natural yeast. If you let your yeast starter sit out for a few days without adding extra sweetener, it will get “sour” and that is how you make “sour-dough” bread. I’m planning on trying to keep my sweet for awhile, since house-mate does not like sour bread. And, it’s a new thing, I’ve never tried keeping it sweet before.
Anyway, I dutifully mixed everything up, and put it on top of the fridge in a jar. At the last minute, I remembered to open the jar and put cling film on it and a plate below it. It’s a good thing I did. About two hours later my husband came in, pointed at the top of the fridge and said,
“I think your yeast is ALIVE!”
I looked up and what did I see? Not a nice, calm, jar; a jar filled with tiny bubbles of happy gases, no what I saw looked more like something out of a 1950’s horror film, instead of The Blob, I had THE GLOB!…
And, it was crawling out of the jar, onto the plate and marching down toward the door of the refrigerator itself! I just stared at it for a moment, it was so weird; I’d used one of those rubber ring jars, the sort with a wire clip on it. The Glob had succeeded in oozing itself over wire clip making it appear to have a white, bulbous mouth. A mouth open and ready to catch any unsuspecting flies that might dare to land upon it. Uh Oh, FLIES! Just thinking the word brought me back to reality. You see, someone forgot to tell our local fly population that its winter now and they should all be dead. I realize that THE GLOB, having eaten its way passed the wire jar catch has also spilled its way over and through the plastic wrap, which is quickly becoming a many faceted tail, rather than a jar covering. I jumped up as fast as I could; avoided the now very interested large dog at my feet, and managed to move plate, jar and wrap to the table. Which created only slightly more mess than there already was.
By careful application of kitchen towels and other cleaning devices, I was able to contain Mr. Glob into a large, Pyrex bowl. Where he sank down and became plain old Mr. Bread Starter again. I think if I keep this Starter going very long, I may have to name it Dr. Jekyll or something….anyway, I carefully placed another piece of cling film over the bowl and the bowl lid on top of that. If I closed it all the way, no new yeast could get it. But if I left it open to the air (the way the books tell you to) I will have created a white Forrest Lawn cemetery for kitchen flies. And I’d much rather have them commit suicide on the new fly paper strips on bought, than on my future bread loaves.
I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see if my new starter works. If it does, you can keep a starter alive for a very long time if you feed it and take care of it properly. I gave a sour-dough one to a friend a few years ago and she asked me:
“how long will it last, if I take good care of it?”
I said, with a straight face, “Oh about two, maybe three hundred years…”she thought I was joking….
Most of mine don’t last that long, or if they have, I guess I won’t know about it. I tend to forget them after a few months or they get contaminated with something in the kitchen. But I think this one is a mean one, a real go-getter that would like to stay around for awhile. After all, who knows what it could have done to the kitchen if my husband hadn’t noticed it? Not that I ever want to find out….
I’ll let you know how GLOB BREAD tastes in a day or two…
Disaster Cat…writing this off-line because Joe User is down and my computer insists the site does not exist. Perhaps The Glob got out after all?…..