Terra Sig and test tiles

Heavy duty studio morning yesterday making two different batches of OM#4 terra sig. Four gallons on the left are done traditionally with the old Calgon and one on right it supposed to be a 3 hr version done with Darvan 7. After 4 hrs I didn't notice any difference, and haven't checked it yet this morning.

My back went into spasm after days of straining it with all those tests and then making and cleaning up after the terra sig, so I didn't get to make the other batches of tests on my list. After a short rest to let my back quiet down, I opted to pick all the ripe cherry tomatoes and make a pasta puttenesca sauce for dinner. Puttanesca was named after the ladies of the evening in Italy, who made this quick, tasty, easy sauce between clients. While sauce was cooking I mixed up a batch of no knead sourdough which I'll be baking  once it's finished rising in the next 1/2 - 1hr.

With an osteo treatment this afternoon I may not get any studio time today unless I can squeeze in an hour after the bread is done. There's always so much to I'd like to do and not enough time and limited energy to do it all!

Good thing I didn't fire the kiln yesterday. It poured last night and into the early morning hours, which would have been a disaster with a non covered, cooling kiln in the driveway. Next week the forecast is sunny most of the week, so I have plenty of time to finish batching those tests this weekend and may even manage to get in two firings - one with just test tiles and the other with re-fires from the pallet kiln that didn't get enough soda.

No knead sour dough

Here's the no knead sourdough I made the other day. I need to tweak the recipe a bit because, initially the dough was way too wet, probably because my starter is wetter than that of the person who posted the recipe. Fortunately, it tasted great, even though I had to add extra flour later in the process.

Enjoying a totally lazy Sunday, so far. We had bagels with cream cheese and smoked salmon for breakfast which should fortify us for another hour or so of garden clean up this afternoon.

I'm making a roast chicken, mashed potato and fresh garden beans (the last of the season thanks to the Remay covering the plants) dinner tonight. Before we head for the garden I think I'll have Jim take down some of those pots in my studio so I can photograph them for the blog when I can find the time.

Time to put kitty Bonnie Lass out for a few hours. She loves her outside adventures and so far, we haven't had too much trouble getting her back in around dinner time.

My photo setup

Well, here it is - finally - my new photo setup! I took Joy Tanner's wonderful photo class and learned how to make my own light box and other accessories, as well as how to take better photos, use a gray board and reflectors and diffusers. Next I have to take some test photos; but probably not for another day. The garden calls today. 

It's going to be around 70 degrees this afternoon and I need to plant some late parsley and continue general garden clean up and harvest what I can.  I'll probably be too tired after that to do anything more than make dinner and vegg out over a Netflix movie tonight.

This morning I baked the sourdough version of the "no knead" bread. The dough, from an on line recipe, was way too wet, so I kept folding more flour in without kneading, until it would hold it's shape a bit. Obviously, the poster has a much firmer starter than the one I use. The loaf looks good; but I don't know what it will look like when I cut into it. Even if the texture isn't right, I'll get an idea of the flavor and just adjust the amount of water next time.

We had another lovely dinner at the Knife and Fork in Spruce Pine. I had their stack cake - my first time eating this local cake. The history of stack cake goes back to early weddings in these mountain, where many of the woman brought one cake and then all of the cakes were stacked with applesauce in between. It was delicious, as was the rest of the meal.






 

No knead sourdough this morning

Here's the no knead sourdough dough that I baked this morning. My friend John Britt told me about this method and referred me to you tube where there's a video of the recipe and technique. So after watching the video, I went out to Walmart and bought a round, iron, lidded pot to bake the bread. The woman on the video took the no knead method and adapted it to using sour dough starter. The bread, when baked in the closed environment of the pot, comes out super crunchy. I had a problem with it though, and it didn't rise and I think I've baked a door stop!

The bread batch was more like batter this morning, so I kept folding in more flour till I could get it to at least hold it's shape a bit. I followed the directions and amounts exactly, so I'm going to have to watch that video a couple more times and triple check my ingredient list. If it's still too wet the night before, I'll add more flour then. The good news for me was that I was able to bring back life to my neglected sour dough starter. I hadn't fed it in about a month, since my accident, but after about 3 feedings yesterday, it came back to life.

This won't be a garden or studio day. We got a bunch of chores to do this morning, then on to Johnson City for lunch at a new (for us) Indian Buffet, then more food shopping at Sam's Club, and a few other stops.