Soupcakes, Kefir, and Sourdough updates

What do you do with a painfully bland and watery soup? Make pancakes, of course! I must toot my own horn a little and say that this is one of my favorite recipe innovations to date. It was blissfully easy and gratifying.

I took two cups of leftover Dark Days Potato-Leek-Carrot Soup and whisked it together with one cup buckwheat flour and two local eggs. Then I poured it by the quarter-cup into a piping hot cast iron pan full of olive oil and quickly had about three meals' worth of lightly latke-flavored pancakes.

This afternoon I sat down to enjoy them with a heap of apple kimchi on top (in lieu of the traditional applesauce with latkes) and it was delicious.

Another quick update: Kefir.

My kefir has been in the refrigerator for a couple of days now and it is continually changing. I have all sorts of theories as to why this is.

My first theory is that I didn't follow the package directions and now I'm paying for it. But that theory is boring.

My second theory is that, in Wild Fermentation Sandor Katz states the importance of straining out the kefir grains before refrigerating your kefir to stop the fermentation process. In my kefir, I didn't see anything that seemed to identify itself as a "grain", and the storebought package of culture omits this direction anyway. Do they want to keep me from saving the grains, thus keeping me dependent on buying their cultures? Do their cultures not work the same way? I don't know. But I skipped this step and the kefir has been continuing to grow more lumpy, fizzy, and sour by the hour. I'll keep you posted...it may end up as sour cream.

A third update: Sourdough starter

This is my first attempt at sourdough starter. However, I started it with buckwheat flour and then became concerned. Another blogger, Engineer Baker (see comment in previous post), has assured me that all is well, so I'll tell you what I did; I followed directions a-la-Katz insomuch as I mixed two cups of (buckwheat) flour with two cups of water. I usually make oatmeal in the morning with raisins and pumpkin seeds, so I added extra water to my oats and used that cookwater as a warm, starchy starter. Then covered it with cheesecloth and stashed it in behind some root vegetables. So far, it has been stirred once, and it smells like....flour.