Little notes from Heather and Martin

A while back a kind friend gave me some sourdough starter, along with twolots of instructions to make no-knead bread with it.  I love sourdough, plus it's good for me as it's low GI, so no-knead sourdough sounded like a winner!

Unfortunately, the instructions involved making bread frequently in order to keep the starter alive.  I don't eat much bread, so that wasn't going to work for me.  I was sure that the culture would survive freezing, but I couldn't find any information on how to go about freezing and reviving it.

After some experimentation, I seem to have come up with a method that works reliably:
Freeze your sourdough starter in 1/4 cup lots (I put 4 or 5 'blobs' of it on a silicone tray in the freezer, spaced well apart as my starter is quite runny).  When they're frozen, store in a ziplock bag in the freezer.  I don't know how long they keep like this, but definitely at least 6 months.A few days before you want to bake your bread, take one p…

Martin and I are excited about a new project that the Baptist Union of churches in New Zealand is involved in.  In partnership with the Baptist Union of Papua New Guinea, they are starting up a fair trade coffee growing and processing business.  It will be established in the Baiyer Valley in the Highlands region of PNG and be called 'BU Kofi'.

You can read more about the project here*, but the things that appealed to us are:
the project has been initiated by people from Papua New Guinea (rather than foreigners);they see this project as being important in peace-building in an area that has seen a lot of conflict in recent times;their process has been guided by a World Bank report into the coffee industry in PNG, so they won't be making the same mistakes as have been made by others in the past (although of course they can make new mistakes and they still see this as a high risk endeavour). The Baptist Union of PNG is asking the Baptist Union of New Zealand to help them financ…