Jorpblog

Going through old photos, I found this one recently. I think it pretty much speaks for itself.

Well, my sourdough starter died while I was in Morocco. To be more accurate, it was still alive but covered in something else that was alive, making it even more disgusting looking than usual. So I threw it out. It served me well–I think I got at least 20 loaves of bread and maybe 100 english muffins out of it. It lasted about 6 months, but I guess I should have doubled it right before I left and stored it a little better.

But it’s liberating in a way to not have that sourdough clock ticking all the time, telling me every weekend that it’s time to make one of the 6 sourdough recipes I know.

So today, using regular old yeast, I made bagels. It’s pretty amazing to me–they look and taste like real bagels. Until a few months ago, when I heard of someone else doing it, I never would have thought of bagels as something you could do in your own home (I suppose I should ask myself what else is in that category). Turns out they’re pretty easy to make, though only about 3/4 turned out right. The others had this uncooked doughiness that I need to figure out how to avoid.

But anyway, now that my sourdough starter is gone, I can work on my New Year’s Baking Resolutions, which include mastering the following: BAGELS, challah, brownies and lasagna. There are some non-food resolutions too, but I can leave that for another day. Today, I’m going to kick back and enjoy having made a good start towards a resolution only 3 weeks into the year.

“Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.” - Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive at the Kaplan Thaler Group, quoted in the New York Times.

Right, and 1,000,039 is the new 1,000,038…this turn of phrase is not clever anymore. Please stop now before it gets really ugly.

I’m still sorting through a few hundred photos and some short movies from the trip to Morocco. But in the meantime, here’s a short movie from a band we saw on New Year’s eve. It was quite a spectacular night. Our group of 23 took up a whole Riad in N’Kob, a small village in the high atlas mountains. After a typical meal of bread and olives, harira soup, tagine, couscous, oranges and tea, we had a couple of bands play just for us.

Hopefully someone else in our group got a full recording, but I got this one minute sample (it’s actually from the 2nd time we saw them 2 nights later). Note how they stay elbow to elbow as they move in those super-tiny steps.

New Year’s Eve Bendir Band(5.3MB)

(Updated since I figured out how to make smaller movie files)