Next to it on the countertop, I have teff and water soaking. I've been making a lot of African recipes lately and those require culturally similar bread to eat the dishes with or on. My bread of choice is injera, a sourdough flat bread made from teff flour. I've been wanting to try this recipe since Passover. The plan is to get this dough all bubbly over the next couple days and to make our favorite meat and onion stew on Sunday afternoon. I'm already looking forward to it.
Then there's the bread bowl. I've got challah rising overnight. It's the strangest bread dough I've ever worked and I'm a little scared of it right now. The creator of this particular recipe wanted a stiff dough (stiff dough braids easier) and eliminated nearly all of the liquid from the recipe. When I started to knead it, the dough was crumbled, like a cobbler topping. Very odd. But it did become more elastic with kneading so fingers crossed that this will work.
In addition to the stuff on the counter, there are two bowls in the oven. One is dry chickpeas. I want to make hummus. The dry peas have to soak at least 12 hours, than need to be boiled until they are tender. It would be easier to use canned peas but this is so much more fun. Plus, I can control the salt content more easily. The reason for making hummus is that I have a sourdough pita bread recipe. Pita and hummus sounds most excellent right now.
Finally, a bowl of dry navy beans. Ba'al mentioned the other day that he wanted a white soup. Well, I've got chicken sausage in the fridge and the beans soaking. Tomorrow, I'll make a bean and veggie soup with bits of sausage in it. Hopefully, there will be challah to go along with it!
I've added new links in the What We're Looking At list. We have decided that a green house without green energy is rather pointless. Ba'al also discovered tonight that Colorado has incentives and rebates for people using green energy so the equipment shouldn't be as cost prohibitive as it otherwise would be. We've been looking at several companies tonight that make very quiet vertical (don't have to be oriented towards the prevailing winds) wind turbines. They're very expensive but the state will probably help us with the cost and the local power plants will buy any excess energy we generate. We also want to put up a couple of solar arrays.
Last, a radio program we listened to while running errands included a statement about our dependance on oil going so far as the clothes we wear. I'd completely tuned out the fact that manmade fibers are mostly made from a petroleum base. So we decided that we're going to make more of a point of buying clothes made from natural fibers. I'm not prepared to stomach the cost of organic cotton but we will buy regular cotton, along with wool and linen. The only exceptions to our new natural fiber rule are A) thrift store finds and B) the manmade fiber is less than half the total content of the garment.
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