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Nüwa the Mother Sponge has is on her fourth day now. Each day I feed her sugar water and rye, and within minutes she starts furiously bubbling and boiling. Nüwa is a sourdough starter, created from rye flour mixed with live kefir, live vinegar and live yeast. Tomorrow she will be ready to be made into a sourdough rye bread.

Today, I made both a brioche and a batch of Mexican chocolate cookies. The brioche disappeared in an instant. Fortunately, I can only bake six cookies at a time or they would all be long gone as well. I found two recipes for inspiration: Mexican Chocolate Icebox Cookies and Ibarra Mexican Chocolate Chip Cookies. Here’s my final recipe: Mix 1 cup butter and ¾ cup mixed brown and raw sugar until smooth. Beat in two eggs. (I still don’t have any vanilla. If I did, I would have added about 1 tablespoon.) Mix in 4 discs Ibarra chocolate, chopped into little pieces. Then 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon cinnamon, ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper, ¼ teaspoon allspice, ¼ teaspoon salt, and a pinch of white pepper. Refrigerate a day. Bake 10-12 minutes at 350º F.

Today’s baked item is muesli cookies. I more-or-less followed my favorite oatmeal cookie recipe, substituting unsweetened muesli for the oatmeal and raisins. I skipped the vanilla (only because we ran out), added a pinch of allspice and used a mixture of brown sugar and demerara sugar (a bit less than specified in the recipe). The coarse sugar crystals give the cookies an extra crunchiness, balancing the chewiness of the oat and barley flakes.

Lunch was bacon lettuce & tomato sandwiches. Home baked wholemeal bread, lettuce and tomatoes from the garden, applewood-smoked bacon and Japanese mayonnaise. I could easily make my own mayonnaise, but I have become a hopeless Kewpie-addict. The next logical step would be to make my own bacon. There are no shortage of pork-bellies in Hong Kong, but the process could be problematic since Eric, our landlord, is vegetarian and may not appreciate barrels of pig slurry in the yard nor the wafting aroma of animal-flesh smoke through his flat. Mmmm, bacon!

Granddoctor Alpo also brought us an expired Limburger cheese from Wisconsin. I had never actually eaten Limburger before and found the aroma exactly as expected. The reason the smell is so offensive is that it is fermented with Brevibacterium linens, the same bacterium responsible for body odor. (In fact, studies have shown that mosquitos are unable to differentiate between Limburger cheese and human feet.) Our breakfast was traditional sandwiches of Limburger, sliced onions and spicy mustard on fresh homemade brown bread. Like a durian, the taste was so much better than the smell, and the sandwiches were strangely addictive.