Three weeks before shipping our baby off to college and becoming empty nesters, we bought a sourdough starter kit. I’m not sure what we were thinking. For those of you bakers out there, you know where I’m going with this. For the rest of you, here’s the story…

Among the slew of local, national and international organizations supported by our Jewish Federation is 70 Faces Media. From its website, “70 Faces Media is a not-for-profit digital media company that aspires to connect as many people as possible to all sides of the unfolding Jewish story.”

While the news service Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) is its best known brand, the organization also hosts Kveller—an online community for parenting Jewish children and My Jewish Learning—provider of education on all things Jewish, and several others. Each of the websites is very useful and easy to navigate and you can register for any of their several newsletters.

My favorite 70 Faces Media brand is The Nosher, which “offers a dazzling array of new and classic Jewish recipes and food news, from Europe to Yemen, from challah to shakshuka and beyond.” Several of the Nosher’s recipes have made their way into my Shabbat dinner repertoire, including Iraqi Apricot Meatballs and tonight’s Uzbekistani Plav.

A few weeks ago, the Nosher newsletter offered a recipe for sourdough challah. It sounded delicious, so I forwarded it to our daughter Bina, our challah baker. To keep this long story from getting any longer, I’ll end by saying that we’re now committed to feeding sourdough starter every eight hours indefinitely and all hopes of having an empty nest seem like a faded dream.