I’ve lived in the Bay Area my whole life but I’ve never actually lived in San Francisco.  I grew up in the suburbs, in the small town of Orinda just 15 miles east of the city skyline and have lived in various parts of the East Bay for much of the past 10 years.  I’ve always spent a lot of time in the city for dinners and parties and girls’ nights out, but I just never felt the urge to live there.  What can I say?  I’m sort of a suburban girl.  I’ve always liked coming home to my little neighborhood, where I could tend to my garden and watch my neighbors’ kids play in their front yards.

But earlier this year I met someone special.  I started tweeting things like “we” are doing this, and “we” are doing that.  And “we” are cooking dinner.  Or, even better, “he” is cooking dinner.  Which he does!  He roasts the tenderest matzoh-stuffed chicken, makes the most beautiful salads and sets a lovely table.  Oh – and did I mention the wine collection?  He has racks and racks of fabulous wine… it’s his passion.  If ever a girl were wined and dined, it was I.

So things have been going well, as you can imagine, and effective exactly this week… we’re living together.  And for the first time in her life, this Bay Area native is a resident of the city of San Francisco.

We’re living in a 1930’s building in the Marina (that’s our neighborhood, pictured above), which has lovely wood floors and big windows and arched doorways.  There’s no garden, but we do have a large deck and since I’d been doing a lot of container gardening anyway (since my previous landlord had filled in my old garden patch), I’m quite content.  We have herbs in pots and a couple of tomatoes that, we’re told, are cultivated specifically to withstand the city’s cool, damp climate.

It will be a few months before we have our first tomato, I’m sure.  San Francisco doesn’t get warm until the fall, so I’ll be lucky to harvest anything before August or September if the fog doesn’t get to the plants first.  So in honor of my move to San Francisco, I’m doing something with a slightly more immediate gratification value: I’m making sourdough.  I’m making the starter, to be exact, which entails making a wet, yeasty dough and leaving it on the kitchen counter to bubble and ferment for a couple of weeks.

My guy crinkled up his nose a little bit last night when I showed him what I had done.  But I told him that if making sourdough starter isn’t  an effective way to put your scent on a new place, I don’t know what is.

Sourdough Starter

1 1/4 cup all purpose flour
3/4 cup rye flour
2 cups potato water (water that potatoes have been boiled in until soft.)
2 teaspoons active dry yeast

Mix all ingredients in a bowl until thoroughly combined.  Pour into a 2 quart mason jar and cover the jar with cheesecloth and place in a warm spot.  Every couple of days, stir the separated liquid back into the starter gently with a wooden spoon and allow to ferment until the desired sourness is achieved, about 4-10 days.  Store loosely covered in the refrigerator and use as called for in sourdough recipes.  Replace what you take with the equivalent 1 part water to 1 part flour.