Lunch, May 16; Dinner, May 16
Maui onion potato chips and a pear and camembert sandwich on walnut bread from Bay Bread. Leftover tomato sauce spaghetti. Black beans.

I started making a loaf of whole-wheat sourdough bread with my Full Belly Farms whole-wheat flour and the sourdough starter I've been cultivating on top of the oven. I dissolved 3/4 cup of starter in 1 1/4 cups warm water with 1 Tbsp honey and 1 Tbsp olive oil, then poured it into a well of 2 cups flour and slowly added about a cup more flour as I stirred the dough together.

The results so far seem rather lacking. I think the dough was too wet, and the starter is not strong enough yet--the dough, while fairly smooth once I had kneaded it for about 800 strokes, was still a sort of soft saggy mass rather than a smooth, firm ball. I left it in the slightly warm oven (the beans had been baking in the other half of the oven, so some of the heat came through the oven wall) to rise. After two hours, it looked pretty much the same. The next morning, it was slightly bigger, but passed the poke test specified in Laurel's Whole Wheat Bread Book: moisten your finger with water, poke it into the dough 1/2 an inch, and see if the dough springs back or sags inwards. Since it did neither, I decided the bread was ready to be deflated. I pressed it down gently and put it back into the slightly warm oven to rise all day. Hopefully, when I get home today, it 1) will have risen nicely, and 2) will not have overflowed all over the oven floor.

Breakfast, May 17
Yogurt with honey and almonds.

Lunch, May 17
Roasted sweet potato (roasted in the toaster oven) with black beans and yogurt.