It's a few days into March already and spring seems like it's just around the corner.  I'm sure though we'll be getting another snowstorm at some point before winter decides to make it's departure here in Southwest Wisconsin.

Are you a tea drinker? I only started drinking coffee about 15+ years ago and did not drink tea, that is until I had a cup over at a friends cabin in upper Wisconsin, and I have been hooked. I'm not a fan of just straight black tea or green tea.  I love the one that we've been drinking in the evening. It is a bit more spendy but seeing that we only drink one cup in the evening I figure I deserve that pleasure.

Oh my goodness, I am totally in love with the whole sourdough baking process.  I have finally started to master sourdough baking.  I don't use any commercial flour in my bread recipe, we grind our own flour, which has actually taken me a while to figure out.  The bread I made the other day I used half fresh ground rye and half fresh ground wheat, with the sourdough starter.  Both breads turned out absolutely beautiful and delicious.

Sugaring season is upon us and it's going to be the first time without our Sadie running around the sugar bush, or trying to drink up the sap that is running over the side before it hits the ground as Jim is pouring it into the tank we use to gather the sap.  Sadie loved this time of year as well as the snow, she was a good companion out in the bush.  Especially like tonight when the sun is going down, and darkness has crept up on us, and hearing the coyotes in the distance, I definitely feel the void with her gone.  We sure do miss our Sadie girl.  Despite missing Sadie it feels really good to be sugaring again.  It feels so good to smell the air after being cooped up in the house during the cold winter days that sometimes prevented us from venturing outdoors, at least preventing me from getting outside as much as I'd have liked to.

Here's an update on my sourdough starter that I had started.  As things were progressing along or not progressing I made a few adjustments.  My starter on the right is a totally new starter and it's made with Wheat Montana unbleached all purpose flour. The one on the left is one of the original starters that I started with, the flour was 1/4 cup Wheat Montana unbleached ap flour and 1/4 cup of our Wheat Montana berries that I freshly ground each time I fed the starter.  But, it wasn't moving a whole lot, it was starting very slowly.  I figured it out though.  Many people said that they would weigh the flour and water and many people said that there was no need to do that.  I did a bit of checking on the amount of flour I was putting into the starter and was adding a lot less flour to my starter.  I'm guessing I wasn't adding enough flour for the wild yeast in the flour to start moving.  When I started to weigh my flour and adding only my fresh ground wheat and no all purpose flour my starter really took off.  Last night it had risen so high I put it into a bowl incase it overflowed, it didn't but I will be putting it into a larger container from now on.

Last night I started an easy overnight bread dough which is much like the crusty bread I had made a few years ago. 

I love the bowl that used to be my grandma's bowl that she used to make bread in.  I think of her every time I use it for bread.

Yummy bread, I can't wait to try it.

So this is my results of making sourdough starter and the results are wonderful.

It's been really busy here around the homestead.  Jim's been working outside doing odds and ends, getting rid of the burn pile that has grown over the year.  It's always good to burn it before it gets too big and the fire ends up being too huge.  Stacking wood by the sugaring area for when it's sugaring time, we definitely don't want to be low on wood when we're boiling sap.

I stayed in and did some prep work for a recipe I wanted to make this week.  I had to go to town to get a couple of the ingredients that I didn't have on hand, one being chili sauce.  Now, I'm a label reader and if it has high fructose corn syrup in it I won't buy it.  Well the two chili sauces that they carried both had it in them...ugh!  I just couldn't pull the trigger to buy either of them.  So, I pulled out my phone and looked up homemade chili sauce and I found a recipe for a maple chili BBQ sauce, okay I could work with that.  When I got home I made the sauce and made another one that is actually chili sauce, and they both are delicious.  Instead of vinegar I used apple cider vinegar.  I just may end up using them both in the recipe I'm making.

A few days ago I started 3 sourdough starts.  I'm actually experimenting with starting them with different flours, all purpose flour, our fresh ground flour and I did two yogurt and buttermilk starts with all purpose and fresh ground, just to see how each of them do.  It looks like a science lab in my kitchen right now :)

Here I am ready to do the first feeding on one of them.  I mixed 1/4 cup all purpose flour and 1/4 cup fresh ground whole wheat flour together and added that with 1/2 cup room temperature water to my sourdough starter, covered it up and put it back to do it's work for another 12 hours, which then I will feed it again.

See the beautiful action that is going on here?  You can also see where the starter had risen at one point then fell back down.

Here are my two yogurt/buttermilk starters, not much action going on with them, they take a bit longer to get going I'm told.

We woke up to 0° here in Southwest Wisconsin this morning, hubby says it's cold out but no breeze of any kind so he says it's quite beautiful out.  I'll just believe him and stay in my nice cozy log home with the fire burning in the wood stove :)