M.J. Scott's Blog, page 39

Gotta be starting something

For a while now I've wanted to try making sourdough bread. As I've said before, I love to bake and I do make bread from time to time but given my lack of time it's usually fairly quick yeast based stuff. Which is perfectly yummy, don't get me wrong, but for the denser, chewier, tangy really satisfying sorts of bread, you need a longer process (sourdough being one of the options).

Last December I read Barbara O'Neal's wonderful How To Bake A Perfect Life, which features a baker heroine and many divine sounding recipes (as her books always do). I wanted to try sourdough then but promptly got sick with a horrible stomach bug that wiped out much of my January and after that the year sort of accelerated and I didn't come back to it. But the last few days I've been having one of those serendipitous things where sourdough starts popping up everywhere and I had the urge to read How To Bake again (which I did in one long luxurious reading last night…happy sigh…though warning, you need snacks on hand to read Barbara's books as they make you very, very hungry!. So I woke up this morning determined to actually try it for myself and hied off to the shops to buy some bread flour and a few bits and pieces.

A sourdough starter is the essentially a mix of flour and water (with other ingredients) which is left to develop over a week or so and it (in the purest form) gets its yeast from the naturally occurring wild yeasts that surround us (hey, you didn't know you were surrounded by teeny tiny yeast monsters, did you?). It starts to ferment and bubble away and from the point at which it's ready, it can then be used to make sourdough without needed commercial yeast. This is how bread was made before commercial yeast existed. Plus you just keep it in the fridge and keep feeding it flour and water (perhaps I shall name mine Seymour) and it will just go on and on and on.

The recipe I'm trying is the Easy Sourdough Starter featured in the book…(go buy it!) which isn't a pure sourdough as it includes commercial yeast to give the process a bit of a kickstart, but as Ramona (the heroine) says, start with something reliable while you're figuring how to work with the stuff. It also uses potato water (ie water that potatoes have been cooked in…so bonus potato salad for dinner for me) to give the little yeasties some extra starch to munch on to help them along. It takes anywhere from 4-10 days to get to the "ready to use" stage, so I shall report back. It's meant to be warming up here in Melbourne this week, so I'm hoping it will be on the shorter end of the scale (if it doesn't get too hot for the yeast!) and I might be able to try making some bread next weekend!

Here are some pics of what it looks like today…

Starter...day 1

This is kind of like dough soup…flour and potato water and the yeast. It's meant to be a mix of rye, wholemeal and white but my health food store was out of rye, so mine's just wholemeal and white.

Pretty much straight after stirring.  You can see it's already got some teeny tiny bubbles. That's from the added yeast. To do it the other way, you start with smaller amounts of flour and liquid and the wild yeast gradually colonises the mix over days (it's like the world's tastiest science experiment!).

And here it is about two and a half hours later.  As you can see it's foamed up and thickened a lot already (it's a lovely warm but not hot day today, so perfect for bread). I'm glad I chose to put it in a big bowl. It's doubled in depth, as the next pic will show! Now I just leave it to sit (covered!) and stir it and taste every day until it's ready (and consult wiser baking heads than mine if it all goes pear shaped) : ). In the meantime I can read up on what to do with it once it is ready!

Blood Kin cover

And yay, Blood Kin has a cover…

The awesome art department at Roc have done it again!

Freedom

Aka Pic of the week #2

Not sure it's brilliant photography but it is my poor right ankle free of the dreaded walking boot and venturing outside in thongs! Freedom after three long months.

Now starts the fun job of physio to make the darn foot and leg work as they should and the ankle is still not 100% healed so I have to be careful with it but the first big hurdle is passed.

If anyone is curious the pic was edited a bit in both Snapseed (which is a very cool little iPhone/iPad photo editor) and Photoshop Elements (another of my goals this year…figure out how to use Elements better!).

And the winner is…

Okay, okay, so it's a little after New Year's Day but I had to make sure that it was New Year's everywhere plus everyone had has a change to recover from the celebrations (that's my story and I'm sticking to it).

But I have drawn the winners in the end of year contest and they are Jet and Mary Preston.  So if you two can contact me (use the form here) with details, I'll send you a copy of Shadow Kin post haste.

And now it's back to writing book three for me!

Beginning

Happy New Year!  Given it's Sunday and therefore both the start of the year and the end of a week, I thought we'd begin with a photo.

So have a gorgeous clear blue sunny sky and I hope it stays that way for all of us this year!

A year in books #6

It doesn't quite seem possible that I've been blogging for six years but apparently I have! So it's time to wrap up the year with my now traditional post about my favourite books of the year and my reading in general.  Looking at my Goodreads shelves, I think I've just about cracked 150 books this year (about 110 new & 40 re-reads/or re-listens), which is up a bit on the last couple of years. This can probably be attributed to the busted ankle factor, which has meant more time on the couch lounging about plus the fact I now have a kindle and can indulge in instant book gratification more often. Good for the reading numbers, bad for the credit card.

And now, in no particular order, here are some of my favourites amongst the new books I read this year:

The Black Hawk – Joanna Bourne I have enjoyed all of Joanna's books and this latest installment was great.

Girl of Fire and Thorns – Rae Carson  Lovely YA fantasy.

Feed and Deadline – Mira Grant   I bought Feed back in September but didn't get to it until just this month. Promptly devoured it and the sequel, Deadline and now can't wait for June when Book 3 will be released

Real Men Will – Victoria Dahl  I enjoyed all three books in the Donovan Brothers Trilogy but my fave was Real Men Will. Hot bad boy in kilt. 'Nuff said.

Until There Was You – Kristan Higgins  I read a bunch of Higgins books this year and this was my fave, mainly because she switched to third person and we got some hero POV!

Snuff – Terry Pratchett – Pratchett is one of my auto-buy (and generally auto-love) authors.

Ghost Ship – Sharon Lee and Steve Miller I love the Liaden world and the Theo books have been lots of fun.

The Man She Loves to Hate – Kelly Hunter  Kelly continues to deliver lovely sexy witty romances. More please.

All They Need – Sarah Mayberry   Sarah is another category author whose books I love.  The characters in All I Need were very real and I gobbled this book up (even though it's always weird to read a heroine who shares your name!)

Magic Slays – Ilona Andrews  The Kate Daniels books continue to be my favourite UF series

Angel Town, Taken and The Hedgewitch Queen – Lilith Saintcrow Another of my fave UF writers. Angel Town wrapped up her Jill Kismet series perfectly, Taken was a great Nocturne and The Hedgewitch Queen was intriguing (I want the next book). Very much looking forward to her new Bannon and Clare series!

The Corinna Chapman series by Kerry Greenwood  I read the first of these quite a few years ago but for some reason hadn't gotten onto the others. So when they popped up on Kindle at bargain prices, I had a big glom.  Set in Melbourne and featuring a baker heroine, these books are great fun and will make you hungry! Kerry also writes the Phryne Fisher books which are set in Melbourne around the 1930′s and are lots of fun…looking forward to the TV series of those in 2012.

Looking over my lists, the two authors I read most this year were Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb (due to a Eve re-read) and Terry Pratchett (due to my slight obsession with Pratchett audiobooks). I also re-read all my Megan Whalen Turners. Sigh. So many books, not enough time. I would say write faster, please fave authors but those in glass houses etc etc…

So that was 2011…looking forward to many more wonderful stories in 2012!

 

 

 

Onwards…

It's hard to believe that it's almost the end of the year! I kind of feel like I blinked and missed it, even if a heck of a lot happened this year.

So, as usual, this is the time of year when lots of us sit back and think about what we want to achieve next year. Call them goals or resolutions or whatever you like, but here's the list of stuff I want to do next week.

1. Get my foot working again and get an exercise routine happening. The exact timing of this, and how it will work is somewhat dependent on what happens at my appointment next week (i.e. has my ankle done the right thing and healed or does it require some sort of intervention aka surgery…everyone cross fingers for the former please) but as soon as I can there will be physio and whatever exercise I'm able to do.  Three months of limited mobility is enough! (And yes, I know I'm lucky it's only been three months and I have great sympathy for anyone who has an ongoing issue!)

2. Get the writing routine nailed down more firmly.  2011 was always going to be a learning curve year as I went through the process of everything that goes along with getting a book publication-ready and doing promo for the very first time.  Throw in two overseas trips, one new cat, one old cat dying (and another late last year) and then to top it all off, busting my ankle and my writing routine has been all over the shop.  So I need to get the balance back (killing book three will help given it's being all sorts of difficult) and make the new words thing tick along nicely around everything else.

3. Take more photos! I finally have the DSLR I've wanted for ages and I have, I think, five other cameras (though two are film) and another two on top of that if you count the iThings. So more making pictures.  To which end, I think I'm going to implement a pic of the week feature on the blog.  Just one shot I like each week taken with whichever camera it happens to be.  I promise there won't be 52 pictures of the cat (or cats if a new number two feline is acquired). Just 52 little pics of the life of Mel.

4. Keep doing the craft (longing to spin when my foot is back in order…sadly my spinning wheel is double treadle so can't use it left footed). There is much yarn in the house to be turned into things.

5. Do whatever else the writer brain seizes upon as interesting and/or muse-sustaining.  Right now, that seems to be getting back into music in a teeny tiny way.  I played oboe in high school and did a lot of dance and I love love love listening to music and I need it to write (and exercise usually).  For a while now, I've had a vague inkling in the back of my mind that I'd like to play something again. I didn't know exactly what and knew I didn't exactly have oodles of spare time in the schedule to take up something like cello (which I've always loved) or piano (don't have the space for one either). But my inner musician has been obviously waiting for an opportune moment to pounce. And pounce she did the other night at the Neil Gaiman gig at the Athenaeum when Amanda Palmer jumped up on the bar at interval and did a ninja performance of her "ukulele anthem" on a teeny tiny red ukulele.  Hey, said inner musician, that looks like fun. At which point I shushed her.

But apparently she would not be shushed as I found myself humming the song a lot and thinking "can't be that hard, surely" and surfing the net looking at ukuleles. Now, don't get my wrong, my talent for music is largely in the appreciation arena.  I was an okay player of the oboe and did a little guitar when younger and I can sing a bit but I have played with and been around enough people with real musical talent to know the difference between me and them (which is fine as I do the making up stories thing instead). But music does make me happy. So now I own a very very cheap blue (naturally) ukulele (though I did spring for some good strings) and a tuner (cheap ukuleles with new strings go out of tune A LOTTY LOT LOT) and am slowly futzing around learning some chords. So far, the chords are easier than strumming but I'll figure it out eventually. And tonight I have been making myself giggle playing a very slow and terrible verison of Ukulele Anthem which is kind of the whole point. For me to have fun. If I stick to it I may buy a better uke  that doesn't require quite as much tuning every 30 seconds but don't expect me to pop up on YouTube any time soon!

We'll see what other weird things the brain latches onto during the year.

So there you go, the plan for 2012. Hopefully it will be a little more even-keeled than this year! So what's everyone else got planned? Anything exciting?

While you're thinking about it, here's Amanda singing her song. Maybe it will make you giggle (plus it has bonus Neil)!

The year that was…

To see out 2011, I figure it's time for a contest.

2011 has been a rollercoaster ride for me. Full of great things and a few less than great things.

One of my all time favourite things was, of course, seeing Shadow Kin finally in print.

 

So to celebrate this year, and win a copy of Shadow Kin, just leave a comment on this blog to tell me your favourite thing that happened this year!

I'll pick two winners on New Year's Day here in Oz.

Stormy weather

Hope everyone had a lovely christmas/hannukah/solstice/whatever holiday you choose to celebrate!

Melbourne got hit by some wild and woolly weather Christmas day. Rain, thunder and ginormous hailstones (seriously, some places they were tennis ball sized).  I wasn't in the city (and my house was fine as the worst of the storms bypassed my suburb — which I think is fair as I got flooded pre-christmas a few years back and also got nearly flooded in the post Yasi rain last year), as I was down at my parents place which is further south.  We didn't get the one massive storm that Melbourne got but there was rolling thunderstorms and rain from about 11pm on Christmas Eve right until late Christmas night.  About 8.30pm, there was some seriously spooky yellow gold stormy sunset light going on, so I grabbed the trusty camera and took some pics. Have to say, my Canon does an awesome job at sunset type shots!

 

Love finally having a camera that takes good shots in all sorts of light!

 

 

 

Happy Holidays!

It's officially Christmas Day here in Oz! A wet and thundery day so far!

I hope wherever you are, you have a great day and may 2012 be full of happiness, the company of those you love and plenty of time for losing yourself in great stories!