On my bench top is a bowl of flour and water mix, just beginning to bubble. The friendly wild yeasts that hang around my kitchen are moving in, ready for me to bake sourdough bread unlike anyone else's.
Not far away from it sits a bowl of cream inoculated with yoghurt. In a few hours I will beat it with a wooden spoon and bingo! It will turn into butter.
All this Earth Motherhood is because of my new favourite book: The Lost Art of Real Cooking (Perigee, hbk, $32). Its authors are Ken Albala, a culinary historian, and Rosanna Nafziger, a former farm girl who writes about old-fashioned cookery on her blog Paprikahead.com.
This small but fascinating book has no glossy pictures and no lists of ingredients, just plenty of practical can-do advice. Here is the opposite of convenience food: the authors describe it as "cookery made difficult and inconvenient". (This, of course, is only partly true. Once your sourdough starter has matured, it can even be used in a bread machine, though I wouldn't say so in front of the authors.)
Each recipe reads like a story and following them is like sharing the kitchen with your wise old nana.
You may have heard of slow food, but the pace of these dishes can be glacial. Some cheeses and pickles take days or weeks and there's not a microwave or a blender in sight.
I was inspired to head for the kitchen before I'd even started reading the second chapter.
And that's not the only exciting thing going on right now.
My two bee hives are ready to come home just as the manuka is flowering, and we have been levelling a sunny (ish) site for them down by the greenhouse.
Hopefully, it is far enough away from the path, the drive and the house so that the bees aren't annoyed when we go about our daily tasks.
Hopefully, the hens won't hang around the hive entrances pecking up bees as they come out.
And, hopefully, I can get the hives home without being stung or dropping anything important, such as a colony of bees.
So if you see a green Hilux being driven by somebody nervous-looking wearing white overalls (possibly also a veil), steer well clear. It could be me.