Children’s Farm and a Lentil

Today we went to the farmer’s market at the Collingwood Children’s Farm in Abbotsford. They had animals in enclosures(which i don’t like, but i like patting the animals), different plants growing everywhere, a cafe and music, all in a really pretty foresty setting. But why is the market only once a month???

Got some very nice produce and then we went to eat at Lentil As Anything, which is a not for profit community restaurant where you can ‘pay as you feel’ for a really nice vegetarian/vegan buffet. It was delicious! I’m thinking of volunteering there, but it’s a bit tricky at the moment with working full-time and at the weekends i just wanna make my own food and go for drives in the country..

After that we went to the wholefoods shop.

When we got back i made a roast with our finds from the market, so inspiring to cook with veggies in all these odd shapes and gorgeous colours.

The roast I made

And i made another bread, which turned out nicer and much less messy then the one from last week. I put heaps of spices in it, that’s why i call it the Pepper Bread..

The Pepper Bread

We also found heaps of rosemary growing in a library car park. Now how cool is that?! That went straight into the roast! It smells so nice! I wish i could eat like this every day.

So yeah, lots of food foraging and cooking today and hopefully some more eating and relaxing with some youtube clips coming up!

Ah yeah, and i watched this.

Watch it! It’s good. It’s about kids and how they get marketed to and turned into mini consumers so they can grow up to be big consumers. Nice, right?! I hate brands and marketing and consumer crap. That shit should be outlawed! Or better, people should stop being so stupid and buy all this shit trying to fill the voids in their lives.. and stop buying this crap for their kids too.

I wish you all a happy weekend!! What are your plans? I might go for a drive in the country tomorrow..

Baking bread and sweet potatoes

So i baked some bread today, i must have baked bread before, but i can’t quite remember it, other then making flat breads..

Anyways, it turned out quite nice i think, i used the videos in this post to guide me through, they were really quite helpful.

I put too much water in(my cups must be bigger then the ones in the recipe?) and then i had to compensate with quite a bit of flour, so the dough turned out massive and i made it into two breads!! Which is kind of handy, considering we went to the wholefoods shop today and they had run out of bread, so we should have enough maybe for a week.

I kind of feel like we should make our own bread most of the time from now on, we will see.. So yeah, i will try some variations soon with chia seeds and ..ah dammit, i just remembered i wanted to put rosemary in it. Ah well, next weekend..

So this is the bread

Pretty nice, right?!

We had it straight out of the oven with olive oil and salt and it was just delicious!

I was wondering how sweet potatoes are grown and looked it up for a friend. Apparently they like a warm, subtropical climate. So probaly not that great for most parts of Europe and North America, but I suppose you could grow them in most parts of Australia. They need a long growing season(4 months of warm/hot weather) and apparently they are a sprawling vine sort of vegetable. Also, don’t plant them too early as they don’t like the cold soil and you wanna have the potatoe sprout some shoots and then pick the shoots off and have them grow roots before you plant them. You can also get shoots from some nurseries. Anyways, that’s what i picked up from the videos i watched, i won’t try it, but i thought sweet potatoe is quite a nice vegetable for every now and then.

The video doesn’t really show much, but it’s the best one i found.

I wanna make some vegan spreads next, do you think i need a food processor for that? I hope not, coz i haven’t got one! What are you making this weekend?

Baking Bread

I’m going to bake my own bread at the weekend, see how this goes. The man has been dabbling in pizza breads, maybe i’ll do a post about something like that later.

Seems like to bake a bread you’ll need,

white flour
wholewheat flour
dry yeast
oil
sea salt
brown sugar
water

a mixing bowl
some measuring devices
and a surface to knead the bread on
ah yeah and a towel and an oven of course

I try to stay away from recipes that involve eggs and butter, i mean are we baking a cake here or what?! Also it needs to be vegan and i like the old school version of bread..

Some of the videos i found use fancy instruments like thermometers and measuring spoons, who’s got shit like that at home? Why not make it easy and measure with teaspoons or something?

Anyways, at the moment i like to get organic rice chia bread from the wholefoods shop, it has a nice crunchy, chewy texture when you toast the shit out of it and it’s gluten free too. I also like the rye chia bread.

The lady in this videos puts honey in the dough to feed the yeast, some people put sugar in it, i suppose you can swap that with your favourite brown or palm sugar or rice malt syrup or whatever? Not sure..

 

I like the old lady in the video, she seems cool! I like her approach.

Here is part 2

Once you get good at it and get the basics right you can put all kinds of stuff into your bread, like chia, polenta, grated carrots and nuts.. GO WILD!!!

I’m gonna try this at the weekend and will tell you how it goes.

Not sure how much cheaper it is, but i like the idea of the process, you know, getting connected with your food.

This video is pretty cool too, i like the videos i posted, coz they are really basic and they have a lot of info in them too.

 

Some people seem not to be able to digest gluten, not sure if it’s necessary for the rest of us to stay away from it? I will make some gluten free bread later.

I also bought some breads made from sprouted grains at the wholefood shop, they are stored in the fridge and i find them overly sweet. Not sure if it’s from the sprouting process or the kind of bread i got, but i tried two different ones and they were both basically the same. Too sweet for me!

I wanna make breads with soaked grains though, but i don’t have a grinder at the moment so i’ll leave that for later.

Do you need sugar and yeast to make bread?

What do you do if the yeast doesn’t rise, just chuck the dough out? Seems like a waste..

Have you made bread before? You got any tips?