Making it Wild: Bread and Terrain

Some of you may know of my early forays into baking sourdough bread back in Melbourne. The results were delicious but I gave it a rest when we started packing up the house and The Big Move was well and truly underway. Now that we're here I've started up again but with a difference - this time, I'm making the starter from scratch also. I'm following a recipe which uses grated raw potato for the culture but a friend makes hers with pineapple juice. Apparently this helps control the pH with greater stability. I'm super keen to try that too but really want to see how this one turns out first. Currently, it's resting and hopefully sucking in plenty of wild yeasts from the air which will make it come to life. Oooh, it's like discovering ancient secrets of alchemy! I do realise that my excitement is inversely proportional to the boredom of those who don't share my passion for good bread. So... moving on then.

We had snow fall on our mountain this week! Have I mentioned we live on a mountain? Well, we do. It's one thousand, one hundred and fifty something metres high. I'm not the numbers person, that's Danny. Lorenzo however was very excited to see snow so close and couldn't stop talking about climbing up to play with it. I lost count of explaining to him that it's a long climb up. I'm beginning to think that 3 year olds have less short term memory than goldfish. I also told him how Andras, Dan and I walked the track once in summer a few years ago. I'm pretty sure it took us 2 hours to get to the top. At some points we were scaling boulders and solidly rock climbing so it's a fair hike but still worth it. You can even see the ocean which is 50 km away from up there. How incredible is that?

I don't have snow pictures though. We really didn't get close enough. When it's not snow-cold it's incessantly raining ergo a picture of the kids in their wet weather gear.

p.s. Eszter's birthday post will be next week when photos get developed.

Settling in

It's now been 2 months since the big move to Tasmania. We're in dairy country here, most of our neighbours have a herd of cows happily grazing in the fields. Sometimes we go for a walk down the big hill, which we don't always do because we then have to walk up the big hill, but it's amusing to see the cows watching us intently as we pass by. The kids love to count all the horses and ponies too. Maybe one day they can go on a ride!

The first month we were house sitting for friends on the other side of the Tamar River but now we're settling in at my parents' house. As we're still finishing the extension, Dan, the kids and I stay in the loft room up in the garage. Each afternoon we make a fire downstairs which warms up the central heating unit in the loft. So far, it's been toasty warm but this week there's been snow over half of Tassie. We're hoping there'll be some here too but so far only hard frost. It was beautiful to see everything covered in ice and I took Lorenzo out early- before breakfast even! - bundled up warm for his first outing in the 'snow'. Of course, he wanted to eat some so we found some icy ferns to taste. The verdict? Watery!