North Fork Bed and Breakfast Sourdough Bread

Well, I’m back and as promised, I have some photos from this morning when I prepared the sourdough loaves to rise. With my bread, you have to feed the base. The base is a potato base sourdough. After 12 hours, you make the dough. The dough rises for 12 hours and then you punch it down and make it into loaves. I took some photos so that I could show the process. It is a sweet tasting bread, contrary to it’s name. I make white and cinnamon swirl. I’ve been making this bread for 30 years now. It’s very popular at the farmer’s market. I will be going this Saturday to the Green Market in Ogdensburg. My husband Tim, will be going to the farmer’s market in Canton Friday to sell coffee. St. Lawrence Valley Roasters roasts the best coffee. You can go to his website and purchase or email him, calls are fine too.



North Fork Bed and Breakfast Sourdough bread after being punched down

This is being prepared as a loaf of cinnamon swirl bread.

This is what the bread dough looks like when it's being rolled out to make it into a loaf. After it's completely rolled out, starting at one end, you roll it up into a log.

This is what the dough looks like after it's rolled

Preparing the bread loaf



After crimping the ends you place it in the loaf pan to rise. In the warm summer months sometimes you can make an entire batch in a day as long as the base has been fed ahead of time. Otherwise, it takes about 36 hours to make the bread. As I’m writing right now, I have the first 3 loaves of white bread baking in the oven. I’m not sure I will be able to stay awake long enough to bake all of them but I’m going to try. I will take some shots of the finished bread as well to share. It certainly is tasty!! There’s nothing like it. After a while one becomes very spoiled by this bread. Guests at the B&B love it as toast and they love the french toast I make as well.

Pressing Flowers Today

Today my plan has been to press flowers. Also, I am going to be blogging in both places. So, if you look for me here, you'll still find me but you'll also find me at the new address. I'm too attached to this blog to leave it. Some of my blogs are on the other site too. So, you get to pick and choose I guess. At any rate, I'm off to the shop and the front porch to finish putting the shop back together after a long stretch of having everything that could freeze in the house. The front porch still has my wreath making things on it and I really need to get all of those put away as well. As soon as I have the batteries, I'll be posting the pictures from the day and the bread making that has been taking place. I hope everyone is having a very enjoyable Memorial Day weekend.

My blog address has changed....please follow me.....

Hi, after much work, my blog address is changed. You can find me at http://www.northforkbandb.wordpress.com/  Please save this address and come and sign up to follow me there. You can also see the latest blog postings as well as lots of new and exciting links. I will keep this up until I see all of you there as followers. I look forward to seeing you there!

Today I planted the window boxes and a couple of the planters. The yard is shaping up nicely. I was excited to find that a wren has moved into my new bird house which is located in the memory garden. Come and see me at the new address and let me know what you think!!

We've had a very busy weekend here at North Fork B&B

This past weekend was incredibly busy here at North Fork B&B getting ready for SLU graduation. Congratulations to all the graduates. We had wonderful guests and they loved their breakfasts! Tonight we'll be doing the spotlight on the business for the Chamber of Commerce and going to Kyle's place to see his stuff. It should be both fun and interesting. Right now it's a bit overwhelming. Too many things and not enough time as we head toward the end of the school year and the start of summer.

I'm pretty sure that I've lost everything on my computer. I'm working really hard to get the laptop up and working so that I can continue with my blog and get some pictures going. It has been very frustrating and very time consuming. Hopefully, somehow they can retreive the data from my computer. If not, eventhough I have a lot of it backed up, I'm still going to have lost a lot.

I hope everyone is enjoying the beautiful weather. Wish me luck as I work to replace the lost information and search for someone to repair my computer, if that's even possible.

Snow and Lilacs?!? on Mother's Day!!

Yup, that's correct. It's been snowing most of the day here and this morning when I got up there was some snow on the ground! Very weird weather indeed. Had to wear a hat and mittens to walk today. We've been very busy here at the B&B. This weekend we had the pleasure of having guests for the Clarkson Graduation. They are from Clevland, Ohio. Always fun to meet new people.

Congratulations to my nephew for graduating from Clarkson yesterday!! We had a wonderful time celebrating this accomplishment last night.

Lots going on just now. It makes it tough to keep up here. Our Spring Concert is Wednesday with a dress rehearsal Monday, another Tuesday and then, finally the concert. I'm sure it will be wonderful. This time of the year is bitter sweet as I'll miss the students that are graduating. I've had them since kindergarten. Wonderful people. I'm very lucky to be their teacher.

I haven't had a chance to do much in the way of creating lately. Hopefully, I'll have more time soon.

The Antique and Artisan Show

It's hard to believe that it's been a week since the show. It was a wonderful show and it was even better because my cousin came up from CT and we were able to go to the show together. It was great! The lunch was fabulous and dessert was to die for. I was able to get a new hand crafted mirror for the Adirondack room and I'm very excited about it! It's done in birch bark with twigs around the sides. Just perfect for that room.

Getting ready for the show was both work and fun. I created some new soaps and made some lotions which sold well.

This is Patchouli made from goat's milk soap. It was a popular purchase at the show as was the lotion.

This is actually lavender vanilla but I'm going to make some the same color in chocolate.

These are some brand new pressed flower soaps with baby powder fragrance. My cousin says if blue had a smell this would be it. These were also a hit at the show.

A new soap that can be used to clean your hands after gardening or for your feet. It's an exfoliating soap made from shea butter with pumice for that extra scrubbing. The shea butter makes your skin soft.

This soap has a wonderful smell. Goat's milk with a lemongrass essential oil fragrance. Wonderful!

All in all, the show was a great experience. Making all of these new soaps was a lot of fun. There are more to come. For those of you that check the website, please be patient with me. School is extremely busy at this time and my time to upload things to the website is limited. You can always shoot me an email if there's something you'd like that you see here. northforkbandb@hughes.net  I'm working on the spa bags and gardening gift baskets for mother's day gift giving as well. Hopefully, I'll get these onto the site very soon.