Jane Adams. Yeast, Lasers and too many Words


Yeast, Lasers and too many Words!

I’m trying to finish a book. It has to be delivered at the end of Nov and I realised about a week ago that it wasn’t about what I thought it was. Not good. Yes, my characters will be doing roughly all the things I first thought they would but the heart of the book, the real centre is something far less dramatic than the all guns blazing sort of tale I thought I was writing. What I really want the reader to focus on is a much quieter tale about one man’s now ancient mistake and the, I suppose you’d say professional coming of age of a very young police officer. Now I’ve finally spotted this, it all makes perfect sense! – just wish I’d noticed sooner; that would have saved a whole heap of rewriting.

Sometimes I get so sick of words, especially towards the end of writing a book. It feels like there’s a daily supply or a daily tolerance level over and above which I just don’t want to know. I don’t even want to read! So, displacement and replacement activities move in to fill the vacuum – apart from watching rubbish on the television; always an attractive option at the end of a long day of word wrangling. We’re all keen bread makers in our house. Well, my son and I are keen bread makers, my husband is a keen eater of said product. Last month we decided we’d have a go at making wild yeast bread.

First catch your yeast……

Our culture comes from our apples – Yeasts are everywhere. We’ve fed it and hugged it and called it Clive – no, really, we have. Clive is thriving and we’ve now got a reliable sour dough culture that takes about five hours to rise but makes great bread.

We’ve also been playing with lasers. Having read somewhere – wonderful thing, web browsing – that if you passed a laser beam through a drop of water and project said laser onto a screen you can see the little critters living there, we just had to try. The results and pretty amazing and one of our pictures is below – if I’ve uploaded it right. And yes, I know it would be easier using a microscope, but hey, this is much more fun.

Comments

Linda Gillard said…
I finished a draft of a novel yesterday, so I feel your pain.

When words have become too much and my brain projects the message THE DISK IS FULL, I watch ballet dvds. Bliss! Colour, movement, music, feelings, drama, comedy, but no words.
I feel your pain too! And why does it take so much messing before that simple solution pops into your head? Keep going, you got there in the nick of time.
madwippitt said…
You can get yeast from apples? Now I need to know more ... It makes me realise I have no idea where yeast comes from anyway. Apart from dried in the supermarket, or live from the local baker ...
Jane A Adams said…
That's exactly what we wondered, where does yeast come from? So we did a bit of research, dunked one of the apples and a small bunch of elderberries in water, let them sit for a few minutes and then added about an equal quantity of bread flour. You let it sit for a few days in a bowl, covered losely with a tea towel and keep checkin on it. After a while you get bubbles coming to the surface and you know your yeast is alive. Then feed everyday with equal quantities of flour and water. After a while you can move the culture to the fridge - which slows it down. When you want to use it you remove what you need, feed it to wake it up, make bread however you like but let it rise just once. Our bread takes about five hours but it took us a bit of experimenting to get it right. Wild yeast isn't as concentrated as the commercial stuff so you have to be patient. It cooks in about half an hour and is an open textured sort of bread.

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