Mash the Bag

My friend Heidi gave me a "start" for Amish bread last week. The bread turns out to be of the same sort as banana bread, a sweet bread I guess you could call it. The "start" is contained in a gallon zip-lock bag, it looks like sticky pancake batter. There is a paper that tells you what to do each day, and the majority of the days tell you to simply "Mash the bag". So you mash this sticky batter-in-a-bag each day as it bubbles and ferments and looks positively disgusting sitting on your kitchen counter. Today was the day to add a couple of ingredients, I hoped rather than believed that it would make the blob look any better. My hopes were dashed. Much like the blob in the classic Steve McQueen movie, my blob merely grew in size and stickiness. How did the Amish think up this bread anyway? I can imagine that some deeply procrastinatory (yes, that is what I said, procrastinatory) Amish girl was making bread one day, got halfway through making it and decided to stop. She put the nasty mass of batter in a bag and left it on her counter. Her mother found it and told her to take care of it, to cover her tracks of laziness she came up with this crazy story about how it's a special bread where you only have to "mash the bag" a couple times a day and 10 days later you add stuff and make the bread. Gross. I think it's weird. Then again, I'm the one following through on it, so what does that say about me?