Bready bread Goodness Me!

Hello, so here is the recipe that I promised you yesterday.

It’s a very modified recipe that I got from www.allrecipes.com. The instructions that came with my bread machine were rubbish, I did pay only €35 for it, so I can’t complain too loudly. I didn't mind having to look around for a good recipe.

I like the bread machine section there, because it has a very handy function that allows you to scale any recipe to fit your machine. It was a bit of trial and error and then some success, just like life.

The fluff about my machine says that it will make a loaf of 1.5kg and, at allrecipies.com I use the recipes scaled to 19 servings. Something that I will say about some of the recipes on allrecipes.com, and indeed a lot of American food sites, is that they are very heavy handed with the sugar.

That's my opinion, and you are very welcome to it.

Bread for the bread machine

INGREDIENTS
1⅓ cups water
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
¼ cup and 2 teaspoons oil, sunflower, groundnut, grapesead or olive oil.
2 cups strong white flour
2½ cups wholemeal bread flour
½ cup whole rolled oats
1 tablespoon and ½ teaspoon active dry yeast

DIRECTIONS
Place water, sugar, salt, oil, bread flour, oats and yeast into pan of bread machine.
Bake on wholemeal bread setting with dark crust selected.

As you can see from the photo, the bread is a little lop sided and sunken on one side, I am still tweaking the quantities. I will let you know of improvements as they happen.

Last night when Totty came home from work, it was sort of late, and there wasn't anything ready to go in the fridge. So we were quite naughty and went to the chip shop. So we had chipper, chip shop sandwiches with fresh bread, and a big mug of milky tea each, to wash it down with. Of course we spread real butter on our bread.

I would have taken a photo, because this is real food porn of the highest degree. I didn't because we scarfed down the lot, far too quickly to even think about sharing!

Rant of the Day

So I was sitting at work, I have a very dull, office job, this afternoon. I was at my desk, basically sitting it out until 5.30, we have all done it.

Anyway, one of my work friends comes by and we start chatting. Lets call her G for our friendship's sake, this is a rant after all. She starts telling me about how she has mortgages on more than one property.

Now this is such a huge matter of contention for me.

Me and Totty rent. Why do we rent? Well in Dublin, where we live, property is so expensive because there is a shortage of places to live due to the population increasing. Dublin is basically a building site, I can't go out of my front door without literally seeing a building site or very recently completed apartments.

Now most of this building work is necessary. I admit.

But far too many are getting rich off it. FAR FAR FAR too many people are getting rich here.

People who are buying to let apartments are keeping property prices high. You all know who you are. Greed isn't big and it's not clever.

It's the skanks like me and Totty who are fairing badly. We just don't feel that we want to afford to buy a place because, we just can't justify getting a €450,000 or more mortgage for basically a hamster cage of a house.

There I have said it, the apartments that are being built are rubbish. Why is our generation accepting living conditions that are WORSE than our parents raised children in?

It makes me so cross I want to pull a face like this.

This picture is so apt. I could rant about this until I am blue in the face, and it wouldn't make a farts worth of difference.

GRRRRR.

I will leave you on a much calmer note. This morning before I left the house, I put my bread machine to make a loaf to be ready for just after I got home. So I came home to the smell of baking bread. Yum.

I will post more precisely about what I put in my loaf tomorrow. For now, here is the loaf. It's not one of those pretty pictures of food, it's a photo of really tasty food, at least I hope, I'm yet to take a slice and make sure.


Actually that's why it's not a posed picture. I'm hungry.

Looks nice doesn't it? I just about manage to make enough bread in my bread machine, so that we don't eat shop bought bread. Both me and Totty feel better for it. No artificial nasties. And for good measure I add some oats in, which is apparently good for helping to lower cholesterol.

One more calming thought. Here is my cat. Her name is Bean, I can't remember why we called her that, it just felt like the right name for her.

Bean was a rescue cat, that's really the most responsible way to get a pet. When we got Bean, she didn't do much, now she runs the house, and even takes a little pride in giving us both back chat.

I guess it's progress.

OK I'm off to eat some bread.

Hello Crewel World

Heya, so this blog is about me, my life, food, cooking, love, sewing and whatever else comes to mind.

What I am going to try to do is share with the world photos of my sewing projects,

Also I am going to attempt to cook all of the food in my fave cook book "Fields of Greens: New Vegetarian Recipes from the Celebrated Greens Restaurant" by Annie Somerville. It's a medium length story, I will tell you about it one rainy day.


Let me tell you a little about me.

Well, I am English, I live in Ireland, and have done so for less than a year. I moved here because my man, who shall be known henceforth as Totty, lives here.

I have a job, yaaay for having enough money to pay the bills. That means that I will never be rolling in money.

I am very happy in life. I have enough of everything that I need. Enough love, a fab place to live, enough food. What more could a person honestly ask for?