day 2: solving each problem as it arises
I was hoping to get some no-knead bread going tonight, but things aren’t going according to plan, just in general but especially now. I thought I had enough AP flour, but it turns out I don’t, and all the stores nearby are sold out.
There’s enough flour in my kitchen to keep my starters going, but I don’t have enough for much else. So for now, I’m not doing a lot of baking, but I encourage you to try out this recipe if you want in the meantime. I’ll make it as soon as I can. Last week, I bought a 50-pound bag of flour online, and the estimated delivery is Sunday, so hopefully it won’t hold me up for too much longer.
This afternoon, I checked on the new starter from yesterday. As expected, not a whole lot of action, but we have to be patient. Things might look different tomorrow.
For comparison, here’s Yeast Rock right before I fed her this afternoon (it’s important to give your sourdough starter a name). You can see a few things, here. There are a lot of bubbles, so you know things are working as they should. If you look at the sides, you can see that the starter rose and fell. That’s the natural cycle of these things—you feed them, they grow, they collapse, and it repeats.
Earlier today, I wanted to make a dish using some canned tomatoes. What usually happens when I go shopping is that I grab 2 or 3 cans of tomatoes because I always forget that I have some at home, and that’s why, most of the time, I have a stack of about 5 or 6 canned tomatoes sitting on my shelf. I try to go out of my way to use them when I can.
After chopping and sautéing the onions and peppers and garlic, I went to add the canned tomatoes but realized they weren’t there. I’d somehow used them all without noticing, or at least without remembering that I had noticed, so I didn’t think to grab any more cans of tomatoes when I picked up groceries last night.
I decided to go to the store down the street (they’re only letting 10 people in at a time), because at this point I felt pretty stupid and was committed to getting these tomatoes into the pot, but as I was grabbing my socks to head out the door I got an email from a student asking for a Zoom link to a meeting I had also forgotten about, which was supposed to start in two minutes. I dropped my socks and pulled out my laptop and made it just in time, but when I was finished I had to prep for another meeting, and then I had to grade, and then I got caught up watching YouTube videos so the next thing I knew the grocery store had closed, and as I write this there is a pot full of peppers and onions sitting on my stove. I’m not sure what to do with it, and I don’t know why it took me so long to figure out that I have ADHD.
At the Yale Art Gallery, there’s a painting by John Baldessari, a conceptual artist I really like. It’s called “solving each problem as it arises,” and they haven’t displayed it in a while. It’s just text on a canvas, and I know this isn’t exactly the point of the painting, but I spend a lot of time thinking about the title, just like how I spend a lot of time thinking about canned tomatoes. Sometimes all I can do is solve problems as they arise, and I worry that it’s all I’ll ever do.
On Instagram, an old friend tagged me in a photo of their sourdough starter, saying it helped mark the passage of time. The jar was dated, and I realized that this is something that had never even occurred to me before. I don’t know if I’ll ever be the kind of person who dates their jars, but maybe I should be. Maybe I should keep track of how much flour I have before I make plans to bake with it. Maybe I should know how many cans of tomatoes I have on my shelf.
John Baldessari died on January 2nd of this year, and I’ve been sadder about it than I should be.
I know this ran away from me, but I guess that’s the point of a newsletter. I wish I were baking tonight, and I wish things went according to plan more often. But it makes me happy to see your starters, and I’d love to see any photos of bread you eventually bake (@vladchituc for pretty much everything). I’m excited to bake again, soon.
Until then,
vlad