The birth of Börk, and a squash invasion

We've had an exciting week at Generous Servings!  First, we have welcomed a new life into our happy family: I am please to introduce you to Börk, who weighed 2 ounces on Monday and is growing rapidly:

I decided that it was time to start a sourdough culture.  It's a big decision, but after I taught a super-fun Breads class on Sunday, I knew it was the right time for me.  I've toyed with the idea of having a yeast starter for many years--it does, after all, combine my two greatest interests, microbiology and food--but whenever I would look up instructions for how to do it, I would always get annoyed at the imprecision and often completely ridiculous explanations of the "science" behind it.  I have found that most people's understanding of these old "homesteading" techniques is firmly stuck in the 1800s.  This was the case back when we were trying to optimize our butter-making procedure, and it's even worse for anything involving microbes.  If I still worked in my old lab at Stanford, it would take literally $50 and two easy days of work to figure out exactly what is in ten different sourdough cultures, but apparently no one has ever done this for a sourdough starter.  I realize that you probably can't get a grant for this, but you don't need a grant.  We wasted $50 on useless experiments about once an hour in my old lab, and having a good idea of what's going on in a starter wouldn't be useless at all.  There are a lot of people out there trying to figure out why their starter died, or didn't do what they wanted, and they have nothing to go on.  Alas, I didn't think of this idea when I had the chance.

Anyway, I did as much research on starters as I could, and then I decided it was time to wade in.  So I mixed up some whole wheat flour and orange juice (based on the best web info I could find, at this site), and we named our starter Börk, after the last three words in the Muppet Swedish Chef's classic song.

Now we wait and see what happens!  If all goes well, in a few weeks we can try making bread using Börk.  If she dies, or gets overcome by mold or foul-smelling bacteria, we'll try again.

Yesterday was Squash Day!  It turns out that if you ask people at the end of the summer to donate squash, this is what you get (Jill is in this picture for scale; also note the weird curved squash on the far left):

We forgot to weigh the squash before we got started, but I think it was about 200 pounds.  Four of us hacked away at it for several hours:

Until we reduced it to many, many pans of roasted squash:

This is the kind of job that makes you think you will never eat squash again.  But I'm sure by the time we thaw this out in January to use in our next Cook for a Cause, I'll be all excited about a great recipe we're going to make to use it all up.