the heart as it is | courage • grief • beauty

These are the days of…

…Starting a mostly (90% ish) anti-inflammatory diet for the duration of Lent. This was one of my first breakfasts which included homemade sourdough with peanut butter (just peanuts, water, and salt), along with plain, hard-boiled eggs, and mandarins (which I found out I actually can’t eat for the time being due to a temporary gut issue):

…baking sourdough discard muffins but with italian-imported flour (the one one the left is semi-sweet chocolate muffins and the one on the right is blueberry muffins):

…hanging out with the floofball. This was actually a video but Jacob said that JJ standing in front of the Christmas tree decoration looked like he was wearing it as a hat, so I took a screenshot of it:

…finding out that my gut also has a hard time digesting apples right now, and thus discovered that the only way my stomach could process apple was to boil it, so I made like a sweet Chinese herbal drink with other herbs and cut up and skinned apples to finish off as much apples as I could:

…originally wanting to take JJ with me to Shoreline Park but finding out that it does not accept dogs, so walking around the Google campus with him instead:

…JJ being pooped after the long Google campus walk (ft. me also):

…running into one of the Deer Hollow Farm cats ! I don’t think I have ever run into them before:

…also making yummy sourdough discard scallion pancakes. So easy to make, you just mix the sourdough discard with green onion and sesame oil, and then you fry it like a pancake on a skillet. The taste is actually quite strong for me so I like to pair it with kimchi:

…getting sorbet during a hot heat wave day at my internship (I would not have gotten it otherwise because of my diet right now but my supervisor was covering so I had to get some):

…attending a baby shower with lots of big dishes at an Italian restaurant:

…seeing this cute tote bag outside of a book store:

…finally making my most successful sourdough loaf thus far ! It still was not 100% perfect, but this is the closest I have gotten to a desirable loaf. I use a scale for the flour, sourdough starter, and salt, but then kind of feel my way to how much water I need since the Italian Caputo flour feels trickier to work with. And the initial folding and kneading every 30 minutes for the first two hours is actually really helpful so I need to be setting aside time for that:

And that’s pretty much it for the month of March ! Thank you for reading !