大象传媒

Well its finally turned to that time of year when the kitchen gets enough direct sun to maintain a nice steady temp required for natural yeast bread starters, so today we got quite a few of the basic ones going.










They vari from a really mooshy Ponge starter to a very firm mild starter & Italian Bigga starters, so from next week, no more plane white bread, instead we'll have traditonal french breads, italian breads, real tortellia's amongst other staple kitchen treats.

And to get us going back along the good bread road, one of our fav's. Jewish Challa Bread



Its going to be verging on chaos next week once these starters have been fed & refreshed over a few days & have outgrown their starter bowls & require buckets, good job we have a very very large fridge.

They didnt last long at all ! The french batons were amazing !




I've got a rye starter & a spelt wheat starter going to play with tomorrow, should be fun.

Oh has just returned from Unst, where he spent a weekend with, among others, Ruthodanort, doing a training weekend for cliff rescue coastguard work, pleased to say that everyone passed & it sounds like much fun was had by all. (I heard from OH that Ruth is going to post a picture of them all).

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, me & the kids did a lot of baking to amuse ourselves, the biscuit tins are now full of cookies & shortcakes, we watched some DVD's which I had stashed by for a rainy day, ate popcorn & got really bored of how quiet the house is over the weekends.


I have to take the fiddle up to a neighbour this week & she's going to show me how to tune, hold fiddle & bow & get me going on it. I have a starter book which, it states, is for ages 4 and upwards.... If a 4yr old can begin to master the fiddle, then surely an almost 40yr old can ! I refuse to let the 4yr olds of this world beat me in this !

Blimey, bit of a busy week here !


We've had a 6th Birthday (ill post the standard cakey pic in the morning), the pig house is now at the stage where its wanting its floor layed & a roof (hurrah !), spring seems to be springing (albeit a 2 day relapse into baltic cold & snow over the weekend).

I've settled into a routine of spending 1hr every morning attempting to become one with my violin & its paying off, the old brain is fast remember how to read music & is catching up with the fingers what have been racing on picking up notes faster than the brain could store the info.. We have now mastered all notes on all strings & stored to memory, one now needs to work on playing the faster notes & working up to speeds changes of finger postitions. Working on learning the back oh bennachie, meeri lads oh greenland this week & then I need to attempt something a peerie bit faster to get the fingers really limbered up and working on auto pilot, but im having fun, its fantastically de-stressing & god does it ever feel really grand to be finally doing something Ive always wanted to do !