Chop Chop Charlotte: Growth spurt

Our house has been a hotbed of fermentation this week. Everywhere you look there are plastic tubs of beige ooze. They don’t look like much, but they contain MAGIC – the magical beginnings of sourdough bread. How exciting is it that you can mix together a bit of flour and water, keep adding little bits of flour and water each day, and then after a few days add a bigger bit of flour and water and some salt and make a beautiful, crusty, chewy loaf of bread? Very, that’s how.

Sometimes the starters get a bit over-excited – never keep one in a glass jar, apparently they can explode with such force that they shatter the glass.

My starter (Bob – apparently you’re supposed to name them - the leaky one pictured above is my housemate Conor's offspring, Bernie) is 8 days old, and tomorrow, if all goes according to plan, I’ll be baking my first two naturally leavened loaves. Earlier today it looked like this – I think at this stage it's called a sponge (Sponge Bob - ha ha). Or perhaps it's still a starter – need to read some more Andrew Whitley.

I kept some back as a starter (sponge?) for next time I want to make bread, added more flour and salt, and mixed a craggy looking dough.

After 15 minutes of good hard kneading, it was starting to look lovely and smooth and round, like an ostrich egg, or a big pregnant belly.

It’s been growing all evening, and before I go to bed I’m going to knock it back, shape it, and put it into baskets for its final proving, ready to be baked tomorrow morning.

Other things have been growing too. Spuds, for example. This is Darina's husband Tim Allen, our gardening teacher (and bread-baking guru), lifting the very first new potatoes of the season.

(As they’re grown in the glasshouse, these potatoes are so early that when I worked on the Ballymaloe stall at the farmers’ market on Saturday, we were selling them at €8 a kilo. One woman brought a bag over to the scales and I had to tell her that that would be €28 please. It was quite a big bag, admittedly, but still. She politely declined.)

The broad beans are ready for picking too, and the courgettes are in full swing, and my little spring onions are coming along nicely.

Our windowsill salad garden has contributed towards several dinners...

...and the seeds I planted in gardening class a couple of weeks ago have come up lovely and are ready to be snipped into salads.

A first chick has hatched in the incubator in the office (you might just be able to make him out)…

…and the adopted duckling is now almost as big as his surrogate mum.

What else has happened? I’ve learned to cook some proper hearty Irish fare, including a full Irish breakfast, complete with fadge (stop sniggering at the back – it’s potato cake) and black and white pudding (but omitting the optional kidneys, because as everyone knows they smell of wee). I overcooked my egg a bit, but other than that it was a very tasty plateful, eaten for lunch yesterday, washed down with a glass of Bucks Fizz. Beats a sandwich sitting at your desk, I think you will agree. (Apologies if you're reading this while sprinkling your keyboard with Pret crumbs.)

(Hmm - not sure why this photo is sideways.)