Mike Nolan
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Spinach and ricotta filling is easy to make in a blender or food processor, and I'd just spread it on like I would a compound butter for cinnamon rolls, but thicker.
I don't know the ratio of spinach to ricotta I use, but it comes out pretty solidly green.
Let's say you have 200 grams of starter.
If you follow the traditional home method for feeding it, you'd use or discard 100 grams of starter, then add 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water to the rest, getting it back to 200 grams. You then set it aside until next time. (Whether or not you refrigerate it is a separate issue.)
But consider a different scenario:
You have 200 grams of starter. You add 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of water, getting to 400 grams. 12 hours later you remove 200 grams of recently-fed and now quite active starter and use it to make bread.
You still have 200 grams of starter left, which was fed with a 1-1 ratio of water and flour. The difference is a matter of timing.
So figure out how much starter you need to make a batch of bread, and consider that your 'carryover' amount, each time you feed it you double that, then use half of it for making bread, getting back to the carryover amount.
I guarantee you that professional bakers are more likely to do it this way than to throw away half of their starter at each feeding.
We had mac and cheese
I sent a followup note to Unified Mills speculating what they were after when using yogurt in the preferment, I don't expect a response until next week at the earliest.
I think the buttermilk plant relies on there being an active culture in the buttermilk that is used to seed it, otherwise it wouldn't regenerate itself.
We had salads with tuna fish tonight.
Maybe that recipe was looking for 'active culture' yogurt, which I don't think most yogurts are, it didn't specify greek yogurt.
We haven't been eating much yogurt lately, I don't care for it at all, for several years that was my wife's breakfast but she's been on a cottage cheese and fruit kick lately.
I couldn't find a small container of plain yogurt, so I bought a small one of vanilla yogurt, that seemed like the least 'flavored' one in a small container. (A quart of plain yogurt would have been $3.00 or more, and 99% of it would have gone to waste.)
I actually thought about using kefir instead of yogurt for the einkorn test bread, because active culture kefir is getting easier to find, for some reason. Sour cream was another possibility I considered.
In any event, I didn't see any indication of any kind of fermentation activity in the preferment for that bread, but it seemed to come out OK.
BTW, that einkorn bread made pretty good fried cheese sandwiches last night. I paired it with some Cabot 'seriously sharp' cheddar cheese. Dipped in tomato soup, the cheese sandwiches on the einkorn bread were really good.
Self-rising flour isn't something I see on shelves here much, it's more of a Southern thing, although we saw more self-rising flour than AP flour when we were in England and Ireland 17 years ago. I'd consider it a single-ingredient item in the same way that I'd consider baking powder a single-ingredient item.
I'm planning to make peanut butter cookies on Saturday. After several days in the 80's, the projected high on Saturday is 47 with a low of 31 Sunday/Monday, with intermittent rain, so no steaks or pizza on the grill this weekend.
We had tomato soup and fried cheese sandwiches, using some of the einkorn bread, which goes well with a sharp cheddar cheese.
She did pick up take-out Chinese, since her PT's office is in the same shopping complex.
We see a lot of what our gardener calls 'solitary bees'. They look a lot like honey bees to me, I'm sure there differences but they're not obvious to the untrained.
In something like 6 of the last 8 years, we've had temperatures in the mid 30's with wind chills in the 20's after the 20th of May, so I will not be in a hurry to transplant anything outdoors. The plants generally benefit from a few days of hardening off, anyway.
Most of my seedlings are up, I'm going to wait until Monday and then replant the few tomatoes that haven't come up by then. My spaghetti squash and melons are just starting to come up.
We're participating in the Nebraska Urban Soil Health Initiative project with the University of Nebraska this year, I'll have a 100 square foot section of the vegetable garden that is part of the test protocol. I took soil samples over the weekend, will add in the compost they're supplying before I transplant anything, and will monitor it for 2 seasons, with 2 more soil samples. They had around 500 people volunteer to be part of the project, far exceeding their expectations and causing some budget revisions. Part of the project is to grow a specific variety of zucchini that they're supplying seeds for and measure yield, so everyone has one plant in common. I'm going to grow the zucchini in the aisle between two rows of tomatoes. It's supposed to be something of a 'bush' variety, as much as that's possible with squash.
And although it isn't strictly part of the garden, I got the gas grill ready for the season, removing the cover, cleaning all the removable parts, replacing the grease tray and cranking it up to full temp for 15 minutes. Now I'm ready to go buy some steaks!
I have a final small bag of snow peas from the Aerogarden (I'm in the process of shutting it down, taking it apart and resetting it for another set of gardens), but I don't think that'll be tonight's supper, maybe tomorrow? Not sure what we're doing tonight, my wife has PT (for her shoulder that she dislocated 18 months ago) until 6, and she's usually pretty wiped out after that. Maybe she'll have enough energy to pick something up on the way home, maybe not.
Aside from the height/width ratio, it is a good loaf. Good taste, good interior crumb. Just not a good shape for sandwiches.
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