Bread from Sourdoughish starter

I had two bakes this weekend neither complicated but both successful, so I'm happy.

I had a piece of dough saved from my boomerang bread debacle, even though the bread turned out terrible the dough was not at fault so after reading this great Sourdough Bread baking article http://www.io.com/~sjohn/sour.htm I had begun a bit of a sourdough starter. I never do anything by the book which is one of the reasons some of my breads don't turn out so well. Again I strayed from the 'baking rules'. First of all when you make sourdough you don't start with a piece of old dough. You just start with flour and water. But I'm used to the poolish method so I thought I'd combine the two methods and make a sourdough poolish? Also when you feed a sourdough you're supposed to take half of the starter out and throw it away. I don't like throwing stuff away so I just added to it leaving everything in there. I did this for 3 days figuring I would just keep building it up and use it when I needed it. So Friday evening with not much going on in the house I decided to start up a batch of bread dough. I based the dough on the recipe from the sourdough website that I linked above. It calls for 2 cups starter, 3 cups flour, 2 tbsp olive oil, 4 tsp sugar, 2 tsp of salt. When I measured out my starter I only had 1 1/2 cups so I reduced all the other ingredients accordinglyish, you know, because I never do anything by the book. I ended up using

1 1/2 cups starter

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1/2 tbsp sugar

1/2 tbsp kosher salt

1 tbsp x virgin olive oil

and then because the dough was just too dry to come together as it bounced around in the bowl of my Kitchen Aid I added 3 tbsp of water (1 at a time until the dough came together). If you read that sourdough baking link you will see that the author mentions that flour varies in absorbency and starters vary in wetness so I found it isn't against the rules to add more water or more or less flour depending on the look and feel of your dough. It actually means you're an experienced baker, so go me! Pleased with my dough I plopped it into a large plastic Tupperware bowl, covered it and left it on the kitchen table for an hour. I was ready for bed (it was 11pm) so I decided to give the bread another ride in the KA, back in it went and it spent 3 minutes rolling around on the dough hook and trying to escape out of the top of the bowl. I put it back in the Tupperware, covered it and let it rise overnight on the kitchen table. At 8am the next morning I had my hands back in the dough. The dough had more than doubled. I punched it down to let out the air and folded it over itself 3 or 4 times. I then cut it in thirds shaped it into small baguettes, laid it out on a flour cutting board, covered it with a flour dusted towel and let it rise while I took the kiddos to Dunkin Donuts and then 9 am soccer practice (ugh)

Back from soccer at 11 I preheated the oven, scored my loafs and slid them into the oven. They came out great, although very small, they look like little hoggie rolls J That's probably what I should have used them for! We ate one for lunch, it was yum! My brother-in-law even stopped by and got to sample it fresh out of the oven; I wrapped another one up to give my friend Michele.