The holidays are over. Time to do the little things I didn’t get around to while the girls were home. Little things like attending to my car. I made a few long driving trips recently to Maine to visit my nephew, to Vermont to stay with my parents and the car needed a bit of a tune up. I don’t mind doing this because I usually wait and force myself to disregard the distractions of my phone. Time to turn my brain off, bring out my book and read.
A visit to the garage
The chairs are very comfy and I settle in. At some point I realize I’m listening to the oddest conversation among men. The only people I notice in the service reception area are men. There is someone in an office behind a wall with an open door, also a man. Hearing the word “sourdough” pushes me out of my book fog. Am I seriously listening to a conversation about sourdough? I am not implying men don’t have the capacity to talk about cooking or bread. But this just seemed out of character for the garage. This is a smallish town. I’m in a garage not a bakery or restaurant and not in the culinary epicenter of the universe. However, here where I live, men are having an intentional conversation about sourdough.
I sat up and listened in at this point:
“How’s your sourdough starter doing?”
“It’s doing great.”
“How often do you feed it”
“Well, I feed it every day.”
“Do you need to feed it every day and what’s your recipe?”
“I probably don’t but I do, it’s just my routine.I use equal flour to water - about 50 g each and mix it in”
“What do you do with the discard?”
“I throw it out”
“Couldn’t you make bread with it”
The person inside the office pipes up
“Why not use it?”
“I make bread on the weekends. I guess I could use it to make bread during the week.”
“How long have you had your starter?”
I am captivated. I was interrupted by the fact that my car was ready. Too bad. I got up to settle the bill and mentioned that I couldn’t help overhearing their conversation. I told them I loved the fact that a group of men were talking about and even had knowledge to talk about sourdough starter and were baking bread regularly. How great. It turned out one of the men had been to a bread baking workshop at the farm……Amazing. I love it.
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