Our friends Jason Chandler & his sister Laura were intending to visit us overnight tonight, but the weather seemed to be unwilling to cooperate. We arose this morning to the same sight we saw our first morning on-island: rain and fog. In addition the wind was still blowing steadily at 20kts from the NE, and the seas were stacked up into the 5’-7’ range, particularly around the entrance to The Cove. However around 1030 the wind had completely died and the seas immediately began subsiding; I waited an hour to be sure it was not an aberration, and by noon we had a good 4’ swell running, but no seas to speak of, which are acceptable boating conditions. As it now appeared that we would have guests, I tackled my big project that has been three days in the making.
Last week, when Mother came to visit, in what the Joy of Cooking refers to as a “true act of friendship”, she left me with a jar of her sourdough starter. While I can produce a fairly consistent product with baker’s yeast, I have never once tried bread with a starter. I read all of the notes Mom gave me, then read what Joy of Cooking had to offer, learning that the sourdough actually traps natural yeast in the air, and as that ferments with the flour & water added to the mix, it causes the bread to rise. Keeping this in mind, I was particularly amused in Joy by the passage which read “In kitchens where yeast baking has been going on for centuries, these organisms are plentiful in the air, and success is assured”; I can only imagine what bugs are floating around in the Seguin air, just waiting to be trapped and incorporated into my bread.
As I said earlier, I started the process on Thursday, taking the starter out of the fridge and feeding it water and flour every day, sometimes twice a day, and leaving it next to the space heater, so it would be warm enough to ferment & grow. By this afternoon I had a healthy smelling batch and was ready to make the dough. Mother’s warning that the dough would be “wetter and stickier” than yeast dough did not do reality justice. As you can see in the picture above. It was so wet, in fact, I was unsure if I had measure the ingredients out correctly. The resultant loaves however, looked & smelled perfect.
Jason & Laura arrived around 1930 courtesy of Dad, bringing along the banjo, a bottle of Kraken rum, and Megan the intern, who works for their mother Nancy. We ate a loaf of the bread with dinner and found it tasted even better than it smelled. After dinner we went up in the tower to see the sights. The view was okay, with Cape Elizabeth and Monhegan visible, although it was still cold and threatening rain. We descended back down to the quarters and made up mugs of hot grog, and broke out the banjo & mandolin.
So we conclude our first month on the island in the company of friends, full of tasty food, the rum flowing, with homemade music backing up the conversation. We are all fully enjoying the scene, and it strikes me that if we didn’t have the myriad of challenges that Seguin posses, our appreciation for all of these things may not be so deep.
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