Back from almost 6 weeks away (and no inclination to write here) my first order of business was to coax my sourdough leaven back to life. In 36 hours I managed to go from the somewhat smelly jar above to the rather delicious bread below. And I wrote about it over on Fornacalia, which, like the leaven, has been a little bit neglected of late.
Really excellent guide to changes in cuisine through history, and the forces that drove them. A useful antidote to the rose-tinted myth that the cooking of times gone by was so much better than the food we have now. Some people have described the book as too dry; I disagree. It is scholarly and informative, rather than the once-over-lightly so common in so many "factual" works.
Getting ready for a trip, and enjoying the luxury of making sure some things, at least, work.
Over the past few days I gave myself the luxury of a few unbroken half days to try and get to grips with the machinery underneath this website and to try and revive the Vaviblog. In the process, I've learned a bit about Grav and a lot about me and how I tackle this sort of thing.
The biggest single problem is how easy it is to simply suck it and see. Try something; save it; refresh the browser. Rinse and repeat. I've made a lot of progress that way, but I wouldn't say I have really deepened my understanding too much. I get some of the principles of programming; after all, I started been doing it around 45 years ago, with FORTRAN on an IBM370. The rot set in with my first personal computer, an Apple ][e, a dozen or so years later. Working in BASIC, it just became easier to try things rather than go through all the stages.
Yesterday I was walking down the street and I almost swooned under the influence of a tree full of orange blossoms. Today, I continue repopulating this website and discover that at around this time of the year, 14 years ago, I almost swooned for the very same reason. In fact, that day was very muc...
