I’ve been pretty lucky in the kitchen over the years. I have won a box full of ribbons for my pies and cakes and for canned and baked goods in various fairs and contests over the years. I’ve been featured in a couple of local papers when I lived in Glenwood Springs and was known as “The Pie Queen”. I taught baking classes and baked for a couple of the restaurants in town. I can remember two major mishaps in the Colorado kitchen. 

I was in a hurry to get my cakes to the judging table at the Colorado Mountain Fair one summer. I had to park quite a distance and Daughter #1 helped me carry the cakes. Unfortunately, she tripped and the cake flew into the air, did a flip, and landed on it’s top on the ground. She was devastated and I felt so bad for her. I couldn’t have cared less about the cake itself. Another time, the face didn’t turn out the way I wanted, and at the last minute, I tried to turn it into a kind of trifle thing and it was a disaster. 

When you win a lot of ribbons, expectations begin to be placed on you to continue with bigger and better desserts. It really was a lot of fun, but it was an incredible amount of work. The refrigerator was off limits to my family and heaven forbid they eat something I’d been working on as a main ingredient for a complex presentation. Presentation is as important as the flavor and texture of anything you enter in competition.

I haven’t baked like that in years. I finally quit competing when I overheard someone say the contests were getting less entries because my two friends and I took almost all the ribbons…year after year. My last year competing, I won four blue ribbons and one second place. I didn’t figure I could do much better than that. I decided if I quit before being perfect, it would help me stay humble. 

During the lockdown, I…like so many in this country…began baking. I taught myself how to bake sourdough bread which was quite an undertaking. One of my friends is Kate Dunbar…the Campground Gourmet and currently BBQ Pit Boss on the production of the prequel for Yellowstone, 1883. Kate lost her precious husband a little over a year ago. Just before he died, she sent me some of her dehydrated sourdough starter. 

I’d been wanting to bake sourdough for years, but it was never the right time for me. Being home a lot presented that opportunity I’d been waiting for and I threw myself into it with great fervor. There are several pounds of sourdough on my backside as a result, but man…was it ever good. I kind of got a little burned out on it after a year. I did continue to feed the starter about twice a month to keep it going. Little and I baked sourdough this summer, and now that the weather is getting colder, I got the starter out to feed it and get it growing.

I fed the starter last week and it grew like crazy. I decided to feed it one more time before I baked my first loaves of the season. When I looked at my starter the next day, there were grey streaks running through it and I knew something was terribly wrong. I took the link off and it had an off odor and I realized I’d picked up some bad bacteria. Unfortunately, that was my only working starter and I knew I had to throw the whole thing away and sterilize anything I’d been working with…jars, spatulas, measuring cups. 

I keep the bottle of filtered water and a jelly jar by the stove. I use the jelly jar for the water and warm it up slightly in the microwave before adding it during the feeding. And I use a small coffee measuring cup for the flour. I got into the habit of setting the measuring cup in the top of the jelly jar as it just fit. When I picked everything up to clean it, there was mold on the bottom of the measuring cup. I had inadvertently contaminated my sourdough starter.

Fortunately, I dehydrated a batch of starter last spring so I’d have some to fall back on should something like this happen, but I was really sad I’d killed my starter because it was really ripening well and had picked up some nice wild yeasts along the way. It was starting to develop a really good flavor. I have started feeding a new starter so we’ll see how that goes. Hopefully I didn’t kill the yeasties with too high heat in the dehydrator. I won’t know for a while.

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“But he answered, “It is written, “‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’””

Matthew 4:4 ESV