Diving into sourdough

Due to my wife now being a prediabetic her doctor has told her that she has to cut down on her bread (as well as pasta, rice, potatoes) etc. I loved baking bread and have a bread machine. Now she is limited to 2 slices of bread a day, and they should be preferably whole grain and sourdough.

We try to keep a sense of humor with my wife having edema, needing to loose weight, having two artificial hips, and needing to avoid diabetes mellitus. We joke that the doctor reduced her diet to bread and water, and now he took that away from her.

I have been investigating sourdough for about a month, and tonight I will be baking sourdough with my newly activated Russian starter from Sourdough International. Look here in my blog for how things go, including recipes I try, new sourdough recipes I create, and old recipes I convert to sourdough.

The 9th of January was my birthday, and I asked if I could get a few bread books. I stopped at three. The books I got were Ed Wood's "Classic Sourdoughs", which is very interesting, Dan Lepard's The Handmade Loaf, which has wonderful pictures and recipes I am very interested in trying out, and The Laurel's Kitchen Bread book, which I have just glanced at. (Dan Lepard used to be a photographer before he became a baker as well, so there are some wonderful bread pictures in his book.)

A new year can begin with a new day

Happy new year to everyone. May it be a year in which your dreams are fulfilled and you see the greatness of God in your life.

Many people start the new year with New Years resolutions. The reasons range from past disappointments to people wanting to improve themselves.

I run across plenty of negative people that are very vocal in how bad life is, how bad the day is, who are unforgiving as to what others have done to them. It is hard for them to see a way out when their minds are full of these things.

I find that for myself, as hard as it is in the middle of crisis or major disappointment, it is much better to look forward to upcoming good things. When others try to infect you with "things won't get any better" fill your mind with how you would like things to be better or how things might become better. Fill it with prayer, and with praises to God for the good things that have happened in your life. If you let your mind get polluted with others' negatives you only have a more miserable day.

For the sake of argument, let's say that things don't get better in the upcoming day, week, or month. Let's say you were right in your negative thoughts. That does not change the fact that having filled your mind with the positive possibilities and the goodness of God has still made your day, week, or month less miserable than it would have been otherwise. It may also have changed some of your circumstances.