Rising to the Occasion

Seeking solace in sourdough + my Weekly What

I have been successfully baking sourdough since 2016. I specify successfully as pre-2016 I had a big fail involving an attempt at homemade sourdough starter that really went sideways. My husband carries emotional scars to this day. More than a decade and many delicious sourdough treats later he still talks about the smell ::shudders::

But anyway, my successful sourdoughing began in November 2016. I know this because I searched my email for the starter I purchased from Cultures for Health (here’s my testimonial: it worked!) It wasn’t until I did this that I realized I started baking sourdough just after the 2016 election, that tracks.

Sourdough trended during the early days of the pandemic; I’ve noted a resurgence lately in the wake of the 2024 election. I think sourdough is both a fun little hobby and a hint at something larger. From wanting to read less books, buy fewer things, spend less time on screens, it seems many of us are seeking ways to slow down, create, not consume, and get back to basics (or even discover what this means.) And sourdough fits that bill - for the most part. You will want to consume this after you create it, because: tasty! Delicious home baked goods are not the type of consumption we seek to avoid.

Early this week I found myself doomspiraling, which, hey, I made it an entire two weeks into this administration before I totally lost it. Not entirely ridiculous considering the relentless shitstorm of crises to which we have been subjected. I’ll spare you the details, I’m sure you can relate.

I needed a distraction. I had the brilliant idea to try a new sourdough recipe. So I made English muffins.

Recipe from Amy Bakes Bread

For two days, part of my mental space was forced to orient around the slow process of baking with sourdough. Unfortunately, this practice didn’t drown out the doom entirely - that would be a lot to expect from microorganisms, even impressive ones like those in sourdough - but it did help me refocus, interrupted my doomscroll, and helped me reset a bit, and really that’s what I was looking for. And now I’m enjoying some delicious and nutritious English muffins as a reward. Not too shabby.

In conclusion, I recommend spending less time despairing and more time doing things you enjoy, especially when said activities yield delicious baked goods.

Tangentially related backlist book recommendation: Sourdough by Robin Sloan.

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Tell me:

• Do you have any relaxing hobbies that help you reset? In addition to baking I also like to puzzle, read (obviously), walk with my dog, and tend my plants (and/or dream of summer gardening, which I’m currently doing.

• Do you have any strategies for interrupting the doomspiral?

• Anything, let’s chat!

What I’m…

Reading

• Penitence by Kristin M.E. Koval. Complimentary copy provided by publisher. A wintery literary suspense debut set primarily in rural Colorado about a family in crisis who turn to the mother’s first love for help when their daughter is accused of murder. This book is being marketed for readers of Ann Patchett and Celeste Ng and I can see it for substance, but not necessarily style. Setting my expectations so high probably didn’t serve this book well, but I did enjoy it enough and it held my attention.

• Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman. I saw this book marketed as “a relentless social horror novel about a family on the run from a demonic possession epidemic that spreads through media.” Say less. I then saw it was blurbed by Jordan Peele, Josh Malerman, Stephen Graham Jones, Chuck Wendig, and Nat Cassidy, among others and was like: gimme! Y’all this book is BLEAK. Some people are taking that as a selling point. I get this; I am that reader. I don’t typically have trouble steeping in ruin and despair, but this may be too close to current reality for fictional comfort. Proceed with caution is all I’m saying. In addition to dragging me to even further depths, the premise of this book is actually very smart, there is some truly gnarly body horror happening (take that as a warning or endorsement depending on your tastes), and Anderson Cooper shows up to MC for a bit. This one is a ride. After finishing I recommended it for fans of Evil Dead who want to wallow in despair. I stand by this.

• The is a Love Story by Jessica Soffer. Complimentary copy provided by publisher. The story of a 50 year marriage as recounted through memories as one half of the couple is dying. The publisher calls it intimate and lyrical and I think that’s a perfect distillation. Deeply literary and told in a very fragmentary style that took me a good bit of the book to settle into, this won’t be for every reader. I was hooked about halfway through and it led to a strong finish. Going in I was expecting something more like The Heart of Winter, this is quite different. It’s also very much a story of New York City, parts are narrated by Central Park, which is interesting and not unwelcome.

• Big Fan by Alexandra Romanoff. This is the first book published by 831 Stories. I can’t remember exactly how this book hit my radar, but I know it did in conjunction with 831 Stories, which piqued my interest for their desire to be a “hip, horny Hallmark”. A startup entertainment company with “books at the foundation” and a multimedia romance focus is intriguing. Big Fan is a novella about a mid-30s politico who starts up a professional turned private relationship with her teen boy band crush. I saw a reviewer saying they’ve never read a romance with more discussion about universal basic income, and it was with a negative tone?! Sign me up! I’m not usually big on the normie/celeb romance trope, but this read like mature fan fiction in a fun way.

Listening

• The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes. A timely account of the commodification of our attention. Highly recommend.

• Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point by Steven Livitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Back in November I read their previous book How Democracies Die, which was written in the wake of the 2016 election. In November 2024 it felt woefully outdated in many ways, though it still contained plenty of relevant info, the death of democracy is an evergreen topic, unfortunately. I decided to go ahead and read this newer book, which published in September. It is also outdated in a lot of very depressing ways. This takes an account of all the ways our current systems empower the minority (still very relevant.) The depressing thing about this book and others like it is they never seem to account for what happens when we don’t heed the advice and just keep pushing past that brink. They always come from a perspective where we’re fighting off tyranny and fascism, never one where we just hand the country over to the fascists, yanno? It’s a deeply uncomfortable disparity for me. That aside, I did appreciate Tyranny of the Minority. The reason why so many of us feel frustrated by our current system and that it’s not working for us is because it’s not designed to work for us. It’s designed to give an edge to the people who don’t want the system to function for the majority of Americans. It hasn’t always been this way, though in some ways it has (see: we have a long history of excluding or disenfranchising voters) and it certainly need not continue in this fashion, in fact, I think it can’t if we want to preserve self-government. This book gets into the details and the history and the first step in fixing something is understanding the problem.

• The Ezra Klein Show: Don’t Believe Him. This is essentially a 15 minute audio essay the main theme of which is Trump is acting like a king because he’s too weak to govern like a president and we need not accept what he’s offering. It sort of reaches through the chaos to remind us of how precarious this administration actually is. I appreciated it and in my better moments completely agree. Regardless, we have a responsibility not to accept any of the shit the Trump administration lobs at us.

• Sydney Writers’ Festival: Ann Patchett on Ordinary Joys. A thoroughly delightful chat between Ann Patchett and her friend Meg Mason (author of Sorrow & Bliss).

Watching

• Only Murders in the Building, Season 2 (Hulu). Still going strong.

Eating & Drinking

• We have had so many leftovers accumulating lately. We usually do at least one leftover night in the interest of me taking a night off from cooking and not having food go to waste, but somehow this ended up more of a leftover week.

• I repurposed meat from those slowcooker French Dip Sandwiches with some egg noodles and peas

• We had some chicken quesadillas and enchiladas leftover from a family gathering. I also this Instant Pot Spanish rice, which turned out really well.

• Creamy Garlic Shrimp Pasta and our favorite One-Hour Breadsticks with some salad alongside.

Links + Loves

• Every year around the start of the year I strip my activewear using 1/4 c. Borax, 1/4 c. washing soda, and a scoop of Tide in an overnight soak. It works really well, but it’s annoying to dig all the ingredients out of my laundry cabinet and I should do it more often (the manufactured materials in activewear are prone to buildup.) This year, instead of my usual process, I decided to give Rockin’ Green activewear laundry detergent a try. This is a brand I’m familiar with from our cloth diapering days (the origin of my wealth of laundry knowledge.) I’m very pleased with how this detergent performed. Two scoops in my top loader, I let my laundry soak for about an hour then ran a short wash without anything added and it worked about as well as my old routine and it was much simpler. I’m thinking once a month or so I can probably send my activewear through a regular wash using this detergent and I likely won’t have to bother with the whole stripping process. Either way, it’s easier and quicker using this detergent so I’m happy thus far!

• I love puzzles of all kinds (I play Wordle, Connections, Strands, the NYT Mini, and Spelling Bee daily) but rarely are they as tailored to my personal interests as this literary crossword from Electric Lit - so fun!

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