Our 17th century kitchen doesn’t have an open hearth with a spit for roasting venison, but still, it feels like it could have. There is a cubby hole in one wall that clearly used to be an oven with a fire underneath. Now, it hides recycling containers and a rubbish bin. Next to it is a black working stove with wood stored beside it, but when I’m working in the kitchen it is rarely necessary to light the fire; heat from cooking is enough. The floor is stone, and some of the walls. This kitchen is the reason I’ve taken up baking sourdough bread, pies, and cakes. 
My kitchen opens itself to me, invites me to fill it with the comforting aromas of baking . I’ve never liked baking before. It smacked of the victim/housewife I feared to be in the 70’s, the one I threw out of my active life, and the one I’ve longed to reunite with ever since. Not as a victim, of course. I don’t want her back. That’s what was confusing, back then. How to take charge of our lives, make choices for ourselves, stand up and be counted.
I didn’t know then how to separate the two, the traditional dependent housewife and the positive nurturing woman. So I threw them both out. I have been faltering without that nurturing self ever since. Slowly, piece by piece, I’ve been recovering her. Now, I allow my kitchen to envelop me in a circle of wholeness. 
I’m still experimenting, of course. Some of my bread is too hard, or too dense, or too brown. I write down what I have done and try to do better next time. That’s what I do in my life, too.
This one is the second most successful bread I’ve made. The crust is just thick enough and crunchy, the crumb tender, the loaf full of large holes. Delicious. I used some home-made leaven* and a little fresh yeast for an extra boost, because I’m afraid I added too much water to the starter which I began in November and slowed it down too much. Its aroma is still sour and yeasty, but the consistency is thin.
I then chopped pungent white onions into small dice, threw a handful into a pan of milk, heated it to boiling, then let it cool.
Meantime, I pitted (!) – yes, I couldn’t find pre-pitted olives that were tasty – and chopped some herbed black olives, mixed 3 flours – white bread, whole wheat, and spelt with some sea salt.
When the milk was cool, I added it to the yeast and leaven and poured it onto the flour, then added the drained onions and chopped olives. I’m experimenting with a kneading technique from a book called The Handmade Loaf by Dan Lepard which seems to produce a more rustic bread, but it is pretty sticky and messy. Anything goes in the pursuit of the perfect loaf, though, from a motley collection of starter containers in the frig to batter-laden fingers and hard-to-clean containers.
The result was a big crusty loaf bristling with chunks of olive. It was far more than we two could eat before it became stale, so I cut it in half and gave some to our next door neighbors, neighbors who brought us soup when we were both sick. 
*I made the starter with a recipe in The JOY OF COOKING. It worked perfectly. Just white flour and water and time.
