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…on the way home from Tacos Gringos (which were fantastic).

A junky grey pickup accelerated backwards into our front end while we were all stuck in traffic behind the 2am rush outside Jack In The Box.

And does it apply to bathtime?

Thanks to souvenir Japanese bath salts from Vaughn, bathtime felt a little like the time in high school when I dyed my hair Manic Panic chartreuse in the white plastic work sink.

Yesterday was beautiful, clear, and sunny, so I finally had the chance to take a photo of the Spudnut sign. This building on Pike, a few doors up from the market, has a development sign in the window, so it’s looking pretty shabby right now. Whatever sign was there most recently has been peeled away so Chuck and Peg can see the light of day again.

Spudnuts are basically doughnuts made with potato flour — and Chuck and Peg’s progeny are still at it. Unfortunately, they’re in Oklahoma.

This list, however, can help you find spudnuts near you.

Saturday we finally made it to downtown White Center (a bit unexcusable, since I’m working on a project just a few blocks away) for other food novelties. BS took us to the Salvadorean bakery for pupusas con frijoles and tasty sweets. Then we wandered down the main street and into the amazing New Angkor Market, where we admired these beautiful pickles.

After picking up some Asian goodies we made our way to South Park and into an anonymous industrial park to track down the Baron Brewing tap room. In a space not much bigger than our bedroom we chatted with friendly strangers who worked in the nearby marble warehouse and drank locally-made German style brews. Beer nerds take note: this place was great.

New Year’s Day we skied at Stevens Pass Nordic Center with Sherry and John. It was a super way to start the New Year.

This weekend John once again chauffered us in the Tacoma and we tried skiing at Cabin Creek (a state park) but the parking lot was full, as passive-aggressive middle aged people told us repeatedly once we were stuck at the far end in a long lone of cars. So we went to Lake Easton, skied the whole thing in under two hours (it’s really short), ate lunch, and then drove back to Cabin Creek and did a quick loop there. It was gorgeous out, sunny and warm, so we didn’t even need all of our layers. Yay for Sno-Park passes.

… reasons I’m not driving to Portland anytime soon.

#2: The Volvo thought it would be an extra funny joke for the windshield wipers to stop working five miles away from the house in the middle of the rainstorm of the century.

#1: The 180 mile trip is 580 now… From three hours to nine and a half. Ten little feet of water on I5 in middle of The Slog makes 400 extra miles through Eastern Washington. Super.

(Photo from “theritters” on Flickr.)

Right now it’s snowing.

I know I’ve sorely the blog neglected of late — but I’m on my way to figuring out how to make blogging work with my life again. I’ve said it before — but we’re just busier in Seattle. We have more friends, we like to do stuff here, we like just being in the house — all vast improvements over LA. But that just leaves little time for blogging.

Two possible improvements on the life documentation front are my new software purchases: OS X Leopard and Aperture 1.5. Leopard has widgets and I just found one that will let me blog in my Wordpress blog without even going through the webpage. Amazing. Aperture is fantastic photo management software for photo organization nerds — a step up from iPhoto (which I never used because I didn’t like it taking over my organization structure for my photos). So, updates to come. More photos, more words.

Stay posted.

This is my dad’s biggest woodworking project to date - a mortice and tenon woodshed. We get to see it in person this weekend, when we go to Portland to attend the fundraising gala my mom’s been organizing for the past many months. Click on the photo for more - and his narrative.

We’re back. After four days of perfect weather, one day of rain, and four nights in a building without plumbing, we are back in Seattle slogging through the work days once again.

Last Wednesday, we headed to Orcas Island for a lengthened stay (including my birthday) and Mary and Will’s wedding at Doe Bay Resort. In addition to a wonderful, beautiful, and moving ceremony, tasty food, and delightful company for the wedding, we went biking, hiking, and kayaking. Orcas is amazing and I hope we return. I will finish my synopsis with a list of the wild things we saw:

• Black-tailed deer (many, jumping in front of cars… eating outside our cabin at 5 am)
• Bald eagle
• Flicker
• Stellar’s Sea Lion (while kayaking; the thing was 2000 pounds and kept sticking his head up and opening his mouth at us… maybe to say he was gonna take a chunk out of anything we left for him? Our guide said he was “2000 pounds of sea mammal with the brain the size of a walnut” and it was best to steer clear and “treat him like a big drunk guy”)
• harbor seals (one in the water and many on the Peapod rocks while we were kayaking — but we couldn’t get close because it was a wildlife refuge and they’d freak out)
• harbor porpoises (in the distance while kayaking)
• tiny black squirrels with red bellies
• banana slugs

We’ve been keeping a sourdough culture for a few months now and mostly enjoying amazing pancake and occasional waffle breakfasts from it. My dad always had a start when I was growing up and, after he had neglected it for a while, ended up throwing it out a couple years ago. He recently renewed his sourdough passion with a fervor and now has multiple cultures, including a descendant of the San Francisco Gold Rush culture. Our yeast-friends came from a hunk of the Gold Rush culture he gave us when we moved back. Yeast cultures, like worm colonies, are easy pets to keep that pay off handsomely. I encourage everyone to give it a try. Here’s what you need to do:

Get a friend to give you a hunk of their start or create your own. You can do it with regular baking yeast you get at the store or with special yeasts you buy so you know your sourdough has a fancy pedigree (my dad has one that supposedly came from a centuries-old European bakery). My dad’s original start (the one he threw out when he thought it went bad - he later found out they don’t really ever go bad, they just need some rejuvenation) involved grape skins in upstate New York. You can make your start with your locale’s special wild yeasts too. The guy on this website suggests using equal parts stone ground flour and water and letting it sit on your counter till it bubbles. Alton Brown, in his baking book, uses a little commercial yeast, organic flour, and water, and then lets it sit out till it smells sour. Of course, the people on this website think beginners should just get one from someone else because too many people fail. But don’t be discouraged by them. It’s really easy once it’s going properly, I swear.

Once you’ve got your starter going one way or another, you just get a clean wide mouth quart canning jar, put in your bubbling starter, and stick in the fridge. To maintain it I just make sure to either use it every week or two (but it’ll be fine for a month or more) and then replace whatever I use. Most recipes call for about a cup of starter, so I take out the starter I’m using and then just replace it with the same volume of equal parts water and flour. If I am not cooking with it (rare, cuz we want those pancakes pretty frequently), after a few weeks I’ll throw out a cup or so and then add the same volume water and flour. The important thing is to stir it thoroughly so that the yeast can come into contact with as much of the new flour as possible. I then let it sit out for a while (a few hours to a day, I don’t pay close attention — this is not a precise science) with the lid loosely sitting on it till it’s bubbly before I seal the lid and stick the jar back in the fridge. (Bakers who use their starter frequently can keep it out at room temperature.)

Every so often the jar gets to be a big mess (gummy flour and the like) so I just pour the whole thing out into a bowl, wash out the jar, and then pour the start back in. We always use a wooden spoon to stir it in non-metal bowls because my dad warned us against using any metal implements for fear of weird metallic flavors from reactions with acid in the culture.

So there you go. Yeast pets are way better than hamsters and cleaning the jar is far more pleasant than any litter box experience.

This week, presented with a hiatus from work, I decided to make my first batch of bread. While not very labor intensive, it did take two days to complete, which is way more forethought that I am usually willing to give to anything in the kitchen. Keeping the sourdough has taught me that the small amount of effort to make the pancake start the night before definitely pays off in the morning, so it wasn’t terribly difficult to commit to the bread. And it paid off — it was chewy and sour and nicely crusty on the outside. There’s definitely some room for improvement, as I think it could have risen a bit more, but with a little practice I’m hoping to make it a regular thing and start incorporating whole grains for a good country loaf.

The recipe was pretty simple — I Googled for it and found the one for San Francisco sourdough off the Exploratorium website (SF’s science museum). The only thing we did differently was with the instruction to mist the bread before and during baking. I drizzled water with my fingers beforehand (we had no mister bottle) and then threw in ice cubes into the oven to make it steam while it was baking. The step we might modify in the future was letting it “rise in a well-oiled bowl, covered, in the refrigerator for 12–15 hours”. After that you take it out and let it rise at room temperature for another eight hours — it just seems excessive. What if it had risen at room temperature that whole time? That’s for next time.

My dad’s tried-and-true sourdough pancake recipe, however, is perfect. Once you have a starter and have experienced the exquisite fluffiness of sourdough pancakes, regular pancakes will always disappoint you.

Ken Hall’s Sourdough Pancakes
serves two or three

The night before (or, if you get up with a craving, a few hours before, but they won’t be as fluffly):

1/2 cup sourdough start
1 cup skim milk
1 cup flour

Mix start, lukewarm milk, and flour in a large enough bowl to allow the mixture to bubble. Put bowl in a draft free spot for the mixture to ferment overnight (the microwave is an ideal spot).

In the morning:

2 eggs
2 tablespoons cooking oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoons baking soda
2 tablespoons sugar

The next morning add all the above ingredients and mix well. Heat your griddle with a little butter, ladle out the batter in pancake-size dollops, and start cooking your cakes.

M & N’s recommended accompaniment: veggie bacon (Morningstar Farms is tragically corporate and very tasty) cooked in butter on the griddle until crispy.

(For waffles, the La Brea Bakery crispy waffle recipe is tasty. And this weekend we tried crumpets — you just replace a few ingredients in the pancakes: use 1/2 cup of milk instead of one cup, change the oil to melted butter, and eliminate the eggs. They were super tasty, if misshapen — we need to perfect our griddle technique for crumpets.)