Baking...and More Knitting

A friend gave me her Napa Style catalog a couple of weeks ago, and besides wanting almost everything in it, I found more evidence that knitting isn't diminishing in popularity. I love these little wine bottle toppers. 

I don't need to pay $20 apiece for my "winter apparel" for my wine bottles though.  I used a mini-mittens pattern from Ravelry, to make my own, and I'm pretty happy with the result. I may try to go a little smaller next time. My wine bottle definitely needs a hat, as well!

Besides knitting, I've been spending a lot of time baking. I have had the same sourdough starter since last spring, and I'm almost obsessed with it. I take it out of the fridge and sniff it, ask anyone who's around to sniff it, feed it on a regular basis, and am constantly experimenting with it. The bread above is just simple sourdough bread. I don't even use a recipe anymore for bread like it. It's just starter, flour, and salt, but it's still really good.

A lot of sourdough recipes take a long time to finish but you can ignore it most of the time, so it's not as bad as one might think. This bread was an olive/rosemary bread that was from Sourdough Home. It was so good. I used Santa Barbara Olive Co. calamata olives, which come in a delicious marinade, so I think my bread was probably better than the original recipe.

Hungry family members got to these rolls before I could take a picture. I made these rolls twice last week, by starting the "sponge" when I came home for lunch. I only have about twenty minute, so it didn't take much time to get it started. Sourdough takes longer to rise than regular yeast bread, of course, so it worked out perfectly for me to come home from school and shape my rolls, let them rise another couple of hours, and bake them.