The Monkeys were out in the back yard this morning looking for sticks to craft into wands. They seemed to have the idea that they would whittle the sticks into shape, which isn't so scary when an 11 year old says he will wield a knife, but since an impulsive 6 year old was planning on joining in, parental spidey senses were screaming. So The Love Of My Life located his Dremel, and set to shaping wands. The kids were thrilled. As for me, I have always been very pleased with his wandwork.

I am still very enthusiastic about bread, and I thought I would give Tessa Kiros' recipe for white bread from "Apples for Jam" a go.  It used a bit less (450g) flour than my usual (500-600g), and used a fair whack of butter and an egg and milk, and no water, so the bread turned out more cakey and dense than the loaves I have been making lately.  It could also be that our nights are getting warmer, and by warmer I mean that we don't need the heaters on overnight, so the loaves probably didn't have the advantage of rising all night in a heated bedroom. 

I bought a whole heap of strawberries yesterday, so after baking the bread, I sliced the berries and put them in a bowl with some sugar, and put them in the warm oven for a while to moosh up a bit.  When they were warm, I sliced the loaves thickly, spooned some warm strawberries and a bit of the strawberry syrup from the bottom of the bowl over each slice, and they were all eaten by my family in record time.  We will do this one again!

 

I think that the bread would be better for something like grilled cheese with mustard pickle, because it tastes really yeasty and doughy.  There is a bit left, I might have to experiment at lunch time.  For science, you understand.

I have just finished my very first skein of spindle spun yarn and I am so proud I might burst.  Unfortunately I am having trouble getting photos of the yarn properly formatted on Blogger (boo hiss), since I took photos with my spanky awesome digital SLR.  Had I taken photos with my crappy iPhone camera, it would have been fine.  Sigh.

To keep you going until I can get the photos up, I present to you the movie I made of the Spindle House - a lazy kate made out of Duplo.  I am almost as proud of this invention as I am of the yarn.  Behold!  And do not fail to notice the Patented Chicken Tensioning Device.

Lately, since I have been getting a mite more sleep and haven't been completely full time responsible for the whole everything, I've had a bit of time to cook nice things.

Roast beetroot and garlic dip, with crackers. Poking these roasted beetroots to see if they were cooked was like stabbing Tom Riddle's diary with a basilisk fang, the bright red ooze was amazing.

The dip was delicious, but two bunches of beetroot makes a very very lot of dip and I had to share it with friends.

I made some crackers while I was feeling all domestic and bakerish, and they were a very simple recipe but a bit of a pain in the bum to roll out properly. I need a bigger and better rolling pin.

I went to the markets the other day and instead of buying a bag of bread mix like I had intended, I bought a 10kg bag of bakers flour and have been baking bread nearly every day. The pic below is of some pumpkin bread, the recipe I used as a guide was American and wanted me to add cloves and cinnamon and brown sugar - BARF. What is wrong with treating pumpkin as a savoury vegetable? The recipe insisted that I use proper strained pure pumpkin instead of mixture canned pie filling. EEEEEWWWWWW. I used left over roasted pumpkin from the roast dinner a few days before, for I am Australian.

My kids wanted to know why the mixer bowl contents looked like play dough but smelled like bread.  It turned out delicious.