iN tHiS eCoNoMy

Today I'm cooking with sourdough.

Over the weekend E and I tried to use up our sourdough discard in a pizza crust. It’s not that we often “waste” discard— if it doesn’t end up in tortillas or crackers or pancakes, it goes to feed the compost. But we thought ~*in this economy*~ it would be really nice and extra efficient to dump the jar of discard haunting our fridge into pizza dough once every two weeks.

Efficient? Sure. But delicious? Absolutely not. The crust of our Sunday night pizza turned out tough and bland, bad to the point E immediately made another dough using his regular sourdough recipe. I poked the new batch with my finger this morning and can I just say, even the feel of it is better! Glossy and bouncy and elastic!

Tonight I’ll stretch it thin and top with jammy, lightly spiced red sauce. E will add a generous layer of mozarella, followed by some vegan pepperoni and a drizzle of the pretty good olive oil. While the pizza cooks on a hot stone, I’ll make a yardfood salad: blanched and iced snow peas, bright and crisp, tossed with the first buttercrunch lettuce of the season. Little snails are already eating it, but they’re so stinking cute I can’t bring myself to do anything about them. We’ll just have to share the crop I suppose. I’ll coat the lettuce and peas in honey balsamic vinaigrette and garnish with bar nuts I baked last week. On the side, a nojito Spindrift.

P.S. Do you follow me on the Substack app? I sometimes share photos of my garden and dinners like we’re on Instagram in 2014, it’s fun <3