Notes from the week of May 20, 2024
This week I’m thinking about: passive cooling, hurricane season readiness, bread, watermelons, and off-grid refrigeration…
The temperatures kicked up to around 80F for this week, up from the mid-70s. And I don’t know if I just wasn’t ready for that jump, but it has been uncomfortably warm in my apartment. I absolutely do not want any cooking happening in my house.
Apparently, this is a sentiment also shared by my sourdough starter, which took a turn for the worse just as the high temperatures climbed to 80+. I was all excited, as the smell was just starting to take on that nice yeasty, bready tang… But then it stopped growing, the texture got weird, and the tang got… tangier, and not in a good way.
I don’t know if it was indeed the temperature, or just some “contamination”— the troubleshooting tips I saw don’t describe anything that I was observing… A valiant effort by the microbes, but we just weren’t on the same page. Try, try again.
"You know, we call ourselves bakers, but the truth is we're fermentologists. It's really about guiding fermentation. Think about the bread-making process: The bread you’re making takes, what, 24 hours? But the bake just takes 50 minutes. So the biggest part of this process is really guiding fermentation." Seeking guidance from the King Arthur fermentologists, here.
I just think we need to bring back the summer kitchen. Or barring that, a basement kitchen.
There’s no HVAC system on earth powerful enough to keep my plaster-walled, uninsulated, pr*-w*r apartment cool in the summer. I might be able to hack some baking capacity outdoors, with a dutch oven on the charcoal grill? I would love to do some canning and preserves, but if it requires heat, it’s not happening. (Or is it? If you’re “urban-homesteading” in a similar old East Coast multifamily, share your set up in the comments please!)
Even better, NOAA is predicting the worst Atlantic hurricane season, and I quote, “ever.”
Which has me worried about power outages and food storage (again). I’m thinking about using our washing machine as a mini fridge - it’s in the basement, which stays mostly cool, and we could fill the top-load drum with ice. We’re in a two-family, and each unit has their own washer-dryer - this would be trickier in a larger building where the washer-to-household ratio is not 1:1…
I was remembering a very aesthetic video (not this one, but similar) I saw a while ago about traditional Persian food, and how the courtyard pool/fountain is used to temporarily cool certain produce. That’s what led me to the washer idea… again, borrowing low-tech, vernacular solutions from hot climates. Although I think I remember both the Boxcar Children and Anne Shirley storing their milk and cheese in a stream…
I connect these random dots to make the point that, sometimes looking to a really different geography can offer us solutions for the intense changes we’re living through. And sometimes we only have to look back 3 generations.
To assuage my feverish climate-problem-solving, I went for a long walk at an Audubon-managed property in eastern CT with a friend. (Yes, I’m gatekeeping the specifics because too many people think they’re exempt from visitor guidelines. Not sorry, not gonna be a hike-influencer.)
I was honestly shocked I didn’t see *any* of the typical invasive understory species that are pretty much rampant throughout Connecticut - bittersweet, mile-a-minute, garlic mustard, mugwort, et al.
We did see lady slipper, trillium, may apple, native rhododendron, swamp dewberry…
Not everything is terrible.