Okrararara Bread

So. When you make soy milk, you are left with ground up soy beans, otherwise known as okara. Rather than put this to waste, I googled about the internet and found that it can be used for a number of things, one of caught my interest; bread. People who have far more time than I, have listed recipes where they have pounded their work surfaces with hand cared and crafted dough.

So I did this.

1. Find list of ingredients
2. Adapt it to my own successful bread machine recipe
3. Make loaf in the bread womb (otherwise know to you as a bread machine)

The general consensus was to exchange a cup of flour for a cup of okara. Not forgetting to decrease the amount of liquid that you use. No don't forget that.

In fact, when it came to press the start button, I panicked. Not only did I forget that I shoud DECREASE the amount of water, infact I did the total opposite. I was worried that all that okara just might decide to suck up all of the water that I had put in the pan, so I may just have put in two more tablespoons of water "just to be on the safe side"

WHOOPS!

As Totty takes a look into the bread machine window close to the end of baking
Me - "how is that bread looking?"
Totty - "Ermm, you might want to take a look"
Me - "Oh ok"

Not only had the top sunk, but it had really sunk. You know how a brick has an indentation on the top? Well my loaf of protein rich okara bread had that. A big whopping indent on the top, big enough for a medium sized kitten to sleep in.

Even worse, the kitten size indent wasn't quite cooked! So I had to turn on my house womb(oven to the rest of the world) and let the loaf finish off.

Apart from the indent, the loaf didn't look too bad, yes I did forget about it while in the oven. Unlike other bread, it did brown very quickly. Perhaps a tad too brown.

Now this morning, when Totty had left, I sliced myself a couple of slabs to see if the verdict was as bad as the diagnosis.

Remember when I should have reduced the amount of water? Remember that? Well I really should have, this loaf is just too moist. The flavour isn't fantastic, it could use something in the mix. The okara is rather bland, so I should have expected this.

Overall, this is a "not bad" failure. I would really prefer not call this a loaf. Rather a ploaf, because this ploaf is an insult to a good looking loaf, with it's high crusty crust, and it's dense flavoursome innards.

Soy Milk

Not that I was a huge milk drinker, but to ensure that as a proper vegetarian, I feel that I do need to replace milk and dairy in my diet so that I don't feel deprived.

Now I know that Vegans do not live a life feeling deprived of anything, but I still remember when I decided to stop eating meat my Mother and older relatives telling me that I would lac this and that, and that I would wither and waste away. Well neither has happened, I have most certainly not wasted away, in fact the opposite. I have found quite enough non-meat foods to sustain an overweight body. Not that this is at all healthy, especially considering the amount of rubbish that I have shoveled into my mouth over the years. It does prove a point though, vegetarianism isn't unhealthy.

Anyway, now that I know the bad news about milk with respect to cruelty and to health, I made some soy milk.

Yield about 1.3L of very concentrated soy milk.

Ingredients
Soy Beans
Milk
Biggest pan that you have in the house (think about getting a bigger one)

So, after lots of looking on the Internet at various sites, everyone who makes soy milk has their method and their preference. This is what I did. I don't know if it is right or wrong, but it's my method.

I would like to say that I soaked the beans overnight, but it was more like 24 hours by the time that I got to attend them. They came from the Asian market behind the Georges Street arcade. Initially I wanted to get a huge bag, but there wasn't one to be had, so I made do with a few smaller 500g bags. I soaked one 500g bag full.

I measured out 4 cups of soaked beans, and 8 cups of fresh water, I made sure to get rid of the soaking water. Using my stick blender, I ground up the beans. Now I was expecting for this to be too much for my little blender, but it managed perfectly. Some people have fantastic small appliances in their kitchens, I didn't realise that I was one of them until this little tool over performed! I kept an eye on the time, and I spent just over two mintues grinding.

When I was finished grinding, I had a pale yellow liquid with a frothy layer of unxious looking foam.

Then came the messy part! There is an enzyme in soy beans that has to be destroyed to avoid a bitter taste, and may sources advise boiling and stirring until the "dangerous foaming" stops. Now I wouldn't say that the foaming was particularly dangerous, it was messy. I looked away to watch Totty playing x-box and in those few seconds foam carrying ground up soy beans covered the outside of my pan, and a fair percentage of my stove top. MEH!

Overall, I stirred and boiled for about 20 minutes. You will know when the "dangerous foam" stage is passed because the mixture will bubble up like normal milk but won't cover your kitchen.

Then I lined my colander with a double layer of cheesecloth and strained the "milk" from the okara (left over ground beans).

The overall taste wasn't bad, it's not something that I would gulp down, but it's a nice enough taste. I did add a little Splenda, maple syrup would have been better, but there wasn't any in my house, so I couldn't use that.

So an overall thumbs up!

Edit: This did make a very concentrated soy milk. To drink it like milk it did need to be watered down one part soy milk, three parts water. Because I didn't flavour or sweeten the milk, I did add a tinsy bit of Splenda. What I did find very nice was to add a little eccinacia syrup instead of the Splenda. I do have a taste for things like this, and as it's cold season, it can't hurt. Also, do be aware that home made soy milk does not keep long, so drink up or use up!

What was I thinking?

While I was at work yesterday, I was browsing the web.

I found myself looking at Peta's site, which is awe inspiring to say the least. In between calls, I watched their video "Meat your Meat" and I was appalled and sickened.

For a long time I haven't eaten meat, from time to time I have eaten a little fish, and I have worn leather. I had no idea that the choices that I was making on a day to day basis were making monstrosities like this continue.

I remember when I was a teen, I was passionate about environmental issues, animal rights and to a point fairness in life. As I have lived a bit longer, I have taken my eye off the ball, and I have been giving companies my money who just don't give a shit about making anything else but money.

Seeing their site has really made me remember why I chose to be a vegetarian. Someway between choosing vegetarianism and now, I had forgotten the reasons. I've been lazy about who and what I am.

Because of having seen Peta's site, I will be much more careful about my power as a consumer. I will not buy milk, or eggs or cheese. I will not buy leather or suede anything. I will do my hardest to take cruelty to animals out of my diet and way of living. I will stop consuming animal products and I will ensure that anything that I buy from this day onwards is as cruelty free as I can find.

Now, I do own leather goods, and I just refuse to throw them away. Not because I don't feel like it, it's just that I have already done the dead as a consumer, and lets face it, I'm not going to throw away perfectly functional clothes and shoes. As a member of this species I will act more responsibly.

I would like to say thanks for the people at Peta for making me remember about cruelty. Please do go and look at their site. www.goveg.com or www.peta.com.

It really is important that you take a look.

Purdy Burda Coat

So I have been very quiet on the sewing front. Partly because I haven't sewed anything really in ages, also because I am trying not to build up a huge stash of fabrics, part made projects and patterns that I cut out and couldn't find any fabric to fit the bill.

The last thing that I did was precisely that. I decided to make a blouse from one of the Burda World of Fashion Magazines. I did lots of prep work, made pattern adjustments checked them with a muslin which is something that I hadn't done before, but I am very glad that I did. Then when I went to cut out the fabric I figured that the stripes on the fabric that I had weren't really right, seeing as the stripes went width ways and not length ways. The fabric was just too narrow to accommodate cutting out the pattern pieces rotated by 90degrees. So the fabric went back to the stash.

I'm sure it will get use soon enough. Just not in a blousey incarnation. Anyway, here it is, it's got quite a nice sheen to it and a fair bit of body.

I was looking through my stash, seeing what else I had that called out to be made into something. I found 3.5m of deep purple fabric. It's got a bit of stretch to it, and I can remember buying it with a jacket and skirt in mind. But I can't say that I fancy making either now.

The January 2007 Burda dropped through my door on Monday and I have spied a coat pattern which will do nicely for the spring. It's item 101, and it's got a two dot rating, so it should be well within my capabilities. For some reason Blogger didn't want me to upload a photo of the actual Coat, so here is a moderately bad photo of a line drawing!

I have the pattern mostly cut out the pattern, and I am about two thirds of the way through amendments. I am tall above the waist and somewhat larger than the standard B cup that patterns are drafted for.

The patterns in the section for slightly larger women just don't appeal, so I spent some time this evening scaling up the regular size patterns. Perhaps I should take a closer look a the patterns on offer and think less about the often bad choices of fabrics that they use. Well it's my opinion and you are very welcome to it.
I'm a bit sorry about the not very good picture, I have no scanner and no motivation to get one, I just don't have the room in my little house!

I did initially plan to also make the shift dress which is also featured in this month's Burda, but I am about 1m short for making both projects. So I will have to save that other 1.5m for another outing. I know that it's plenty enough for a skirt, but I can't see anything else that I would want to make with it. I will make this up next, probably in a fabric that will work with the jacket that I am working on now.




That is all for tonight. I have done a fair ammount of things, and now I must sleep.

My Green Curry

So, Totty made himself a very nice looking green curry, I thought that I would do the same.

I used:

A little spray oil for frying

Quarter pint of stock

About 3 tablespoons green curry

1 medium onion

3 cloves garlic

3 small green chillies

1 aubergine

1 courgette

1 can of coconut milk

Now because the curry paste was already made, and the vegetables concerned don't take a lot of time to cook. I made this in about 20 minutes.

First I gently fried off the onion, then when is was a little tender, I added the garlic and fried away until that also was soft. Now spray oil doesn't really add a lot of moisture to the pan, so you could either omit this and fry in the stock, or you could use the oil initially and them add stock tablespoon at a time to keep everything from sticking.

When the onion and garlic are a little soft, add in the green curry paste, stir so that covers everything then add other vegetables, and stir over a gentle heat about half a minute, they will absorb all the good flavours at the bottom of the pan. Then add the rest of the stock. I do it this way around because I worry about the coconut milk splitting. Also before you add the coconut milk, be sure to keep the heat under the pan low, there are lot of fragile aromatics in the curry paste, you don't want to destroy them.

Next add in the whole can of coconut milk. Keep stirring at this point, the coconut milk should get to everything in the pan.

You should now have a nice smelling green liquid barely coating the vegetables. Stir will, reduce the heat and leave well enough alone for a few minutes, be sure to put a lid on the pan. In this time the vegetables will absorb flavour.

When you come back to your pan, you should find, that the vegetables have softened, and the whole thing looks fantastic. If the sauce looks a little to thin for your liking, cook for a couple of minutes with the pan lid off. You don't need to add anything to make the sauce thicker, everything that you need is in the pan already.

I had this with some brown rice and naan bread. The curry was indeed very nice, I would in future reduce the amount of chillies and put an a fragrant herb in at the end of cooking something like basil or mint. Also, I thought that this needed something green and a little crunchy, so in the last few minutes of cooking, I would, in future add some fine green beans or some mange tout.

Green Turkey Curry

So last night Totty decided that he would make himself some Green Curry for dinner. He took some of the Curry Paste out of the freezer and away he went.

1 meduim yellow onion
300g Raw turkey Breast
2 medium carrots
1/2 can Coconut milk (about 1 1/4 cups)
1/2 pint stock (from cube)
1/3 cup green Curry paste (see recipe from 7/1/07)

All of the really complicated work was done with the curry paste, so this is a nice and easy dinner, and with rice this would serve two polite people.

Chop the onion roughly. Think chunky here. Fry that off with a little sunflower oil, don't let it get colour, you just need to start the cooking off. Throw in the peeled and chopped carrots, cook for a few minutes.

Put in the stock. Now Totty used half a pint, and later on in the cooking he said that everything was a little watery, so I would guess to use about half, and adjust for taste.

Add the Turkey and the Green Curry Paste at this point. The reason that I say to add now and not to fry it with the onion is this; the turkey that I bought was VERY lean, no bones no skin and I didn't want Totty to have dry turkey. I went out and bought some fresh turkey, you could certainly use leftovers, or a different meat for that matter.

Perhaps it would have been fine fried a little, I don't know. It's been such a long time since I have eaten meat, I've kind of lost an idea of when some things are good.

Add the Coconut milk, turn the heat down and let everything simmer for a while. Totty had a bit of a taste and said that everything was a bit mild for his taste, so he added a couple of small chilies finely chopped. By the time the rice was done, the curry was. So simmer time was about 25 minutes. Just enough time to play a little Runescape.

Verdict from Totty "Bang on". So this Curry paste is worth making.
I'm planning on making myself a vegetarian version this evening, and I am really looking forward to it.

One thing that I really liked about this was that it didn't stick to my stick to everything pans. HUZZAH!

**Bread Recipe Update**

I have made a bit of a tweak to the bread recipe that I have been using. The quantities previously have been a little unreliable. It's surprising how small tweeks can make such a big difference, and that's why accuracy in measuring is so important.

Brown Bread Machine Bread

1 1/2 cups water
2 tbsp + 2 tsp sugar
2 1/4 tsp salt
2 cups white bread flour
2 1/2 cups brown bread flour
1/3 cup rye or oats
1/4 cup + 2 tsp oil (I use plain olive oil sunflower)
1 tbsp + 1/2 tsp yeast

Put everything into the machine in the order listed (unless your bread machine tells you otherwise), so that the yeast is sitting on the top of the ingredients dry. Use the wholemeal cycle and choose dark crust if you have that setting.

As I said before my machine advertises itself as making a 1.5kg loaf.

Green Curry Paste

Now, I got a goo on to make some curry powder. Seeing as I had just gone through my cupboards and checked what spices I have, and that there was a nice bunch of coriander sitting on my counter top. It was only fitting that it turn into a green curry paste.

I have no clue if this is how green curry paste is made. And quite frankly, I don't give a hoot if this isn't the way that it should be made. Experimentation is a fantastic thing. So this curry paste is a bit of a work in progress.

I hope that this tastes OK, because the quantities seem to have got away from me a bit. That's not uncommon though. Often I will start off in the BIG pan because sooner or later I will end up using that one.

So here we go.

Ingredients
2 tbsp Coriander seed
1 tbsp Fenugreek (whole)
1 tbsp Whole Black Pepper
1 tbsp Black Mustard Seeds
1 tbsp Yellow Mustard Seeds
Ginger - Pealed amount about as big as your thumb
4 fat cloves of Garlic
1 Bunch Coriander (use everything, the leaves, the stalks and the roots if you are lucky enough to have them!)
1 Green Finger Chili
2-3 Small chillies (the ones that I have are about an inch long)
Sprig Mint
Oil

I toasted the spices in a dry frying pan, shuffling them around on the heat. I declared them done when I heard them pop. With the mustard seeds I used a splatter guard because the mustard seeds jump out of the pan.

After partially grinding this up in the pestle and mortar, my arms were aching. So, I tried adding a bit of sunflower oil to see if that would help. Which it did a little, but not enough to make much the job to hand much easier. Then I decided to use a much easier method and used my stick blender, to make everything into a pulp.

I think that I must have used about a third of a cup of sunflower oil, I didn't measure it. Instead I kept adding it until there was enough for the blades to make a nice paste.

The aroma was fantastic. My little house was smelling lovely and the nice mellow smell of the spices stuck to my pestle and mortar. Yum.

The only thing that I can't give you is a good photo of the end product. I tried, and, tried and tried. I just couldn't get a dark green paste to look appetising at all. Here it is anyway!

Seeing as me and the lovely Totty had already had dinner this went straight into two small freezer bags, all ready to pull out and use as and when.

Properly Back and on Track

Hello, and I wish you all the happiest of a new year. I hope that you all get rid of the extra padding that you have aquired over the festivities, unless you got a boob job, then I hope that they stay pointing the way that you paid for them to point.

So back to business, back to food!

My laziness over the Christmas and New Year meant that I took photos of people and not food. Ahh well, I'm sure that you don't all want to see the pictures of comedy Christmas presents, and comedic pictures of Christmas drinking. Needless to say, I am still making small trips to the bottle bank. Next year I WILL buy cans because Dublin City Council has a recycling scheme that will pick up cans, but not glass, or plastics for that matter.

Anyway! Cooking thought the book.

I made Polenta, Page 278 in Fields of Greens.

Now Polenta is new to me, I've always been a bit aware of it, but I've never eaten it, and never really seen it, so I am flying blind here.

I spoke to an Italian friend of mine about what to do with Polenta. Her advice was that it is very demanding visually, meaning that you shouldn't take your eye off it. And to put something really tatsy with it, because it is quite bland.

Now the recipe goes as such:-
6 cups water
1 and a half teaspoons salt
1 and a half cups coarse cornmeal
Quarter teaspoon pepper
2 Tablespoons butter
Half a cup Grated Parmesan

Now what you do is this.

Boil the water, until it is at a nice rolling boil, and whisk in the cornmeal. Add salt and keep on a low boil for 20-25 minutes stirring frequently until the grains are open and the Polenta is smooth.

It is at this point that I was pleased that I had not really thought much when I was buying the cornmeal and luckily I had bought the quick cook variant that advertised itself as ready after 3 minutes. Phew, that means a lot less stirring and less scrubbing because I am not the proud owner of nice pans. My pans are NOT to be trusted unattended and in charge of small children.

Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the cheese and pepper.

Anyway, here is the resulting goop.


So that wasn't bad, about 6 minutes whisking, yes I did it a bit longer than the pack recommends. I then left it to cool covered in cling film.


Now when it came to eat, yes it was just to bland to contemplate, and I couldn't put something that dull into my mouth. So I put a bit of uncommon sense into action and ground up some black pepper and garlic in my pestle and mortar with some fairly nice olive oil, put that on top of the Polenta in a fairly hot oven and cooked it until it was a little crispy round the edges.


Now I can kind of see what the fuss is about with Polenta. I will admit to more additions to this dish.

With the worry about it being just too bland, I made a quick tomato sauce, and had that and a bit of aubergine antipasti.

All in all, not a bad dinner and a recipe ticked off.

A tiny bit of a PS. I really didn't follow the recipe too well. Now that I have finished cooking and now that I have eaten, I distinclty remember not putting in the butter or cheese. Next time I will try hard to put lots of good stuff in the actual mix.

Long Time Not Blog

Yes indeed. A long time and not a word from me.

Were my fingers cut off? Did I get indoctrinated by a strange cult? Perhaps my mouse (cordless as it is) ran off the desk.

In fact none of the above. I just didn't blog, in fact I didn't do much at all. So regular reader (ahem can I say that as a new blogger??), I have been silent due to apathy. And that is one of the things that is wrong with society.

We are just so used to the concept of "vegging out" and "relaxing" that we have all just got to comfortable with sitting on our backsides and doing basically nothing. Yes indeed, I'm sure that my Nan (rest her soul in a peaceful place) would be shocked at my lounging about the house doing "nothing much", watching oodles of rubbish daytime TV and spending hours and hours in chat rooms.

Now after an enormous 11 day break from work. I would like to thank the powers that be for making the break so long and I am getting back in the swing of doing things every day. In fact, I am getting back into the swing of getting dressed before midday. To be more honest, I am getting used to getting dressed. Yes frequently I am lazy enough to prefer not to get dressed. Isn't laziness a self feeding ailment?

Duck Stew

I didn't mention, yesterday me and Totty had a nice cosy lazy day in, the weather was rubbish, so we had a Sunday lunch. That in itself is a bit of a rarity.

We had the normal, nice veggies, bit of stuffing, that I sexed up with a bit of garlic. Totty had duck that I roasted.

Now there was a lot of duck left on the carcase, which was fine. Totty had indeed had his fill at lunch time, and there was enough for a couple of weekday sandwiches.

I popped the carcase in a pan with four small onions just quartered, three carrots unceremoniously hacked up and thrown in and of course almost enough water to cover the whole thing.

That was left on a low heat to do it's own thing for a couple of hours.

This morning it was cool, so I put it in the fridge and revisited it when I got in from work.

What you can't quite see from this photo is that the liquid is jellified. so I would guess that there is a lot of flavour and goodness. I expected a lot of fat, but there wasn't.

So in a larger pan I fried off three small onions with a little oil. The pan got a bit dry, so I slugged in that bottle of wine that is having quite an outing this evening.

When the onions were looking to be a little transparent, I strained in the stock from the pan that you see above.

I picked off the remainder of the meat from the duck, and added a little of the smooshed vegetables to the soup pan.

At this point it is important to mention that I had a little helper. Yes that's Bean, giving me the evil eye and ordering me to give her some duck. Isn't it fantastic how a cat can look menacing and cute at the same time?

In went about a medium handful of pearl barley, and another slug of wine, lots of pepper. Four or five peeled potatoes and six peeled carrots, in large batons.

The whole lot cooked away to itself while I made myself busy doing other things.

Totty didn't proclaim his hunger when he got in. I wasn't surprised, because he did get in late and past the hungry time of an evening.

A quick whiff of this duck stew and suddenly his appetite returned.

Roasted Peppers filled with Eggplant, Summer Squash and Basil

This recipe calls for:

3 medium size red bell peppers, I used 4 regular size.
1 Tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

Halve the peppers longways and remove the seeds and membrane. Coat the peppers in the olive oil and seasoning and roast in a hot oven for about 7-9 minutes.

Filling
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup medium sized yellow onion chopped
3 Fat Garlic cloves (Original called for 5, but this is a school night!)
1 Medium sized eggplant, diced (original recipe called for Japanese this wasn't available)
3 medium size courgettes, diced
Small handful of black olives (the original called for "Gaeta" olives, I didn't have these and I have a sick soft spot for those dark ones in the jar.)
2 ounces Feta cheese, diced small (original called for "Fontina" but I've never heard of this)
Half a cup grated parmesan
3 tablespoons Basil (left out)

Heat oil in large frying pan, cook onions until transparent, add garlic.

When the garlic is looking cooked, the recipe is saying to add the eggplant. I found this all a bit too dry, so I slugged in some week old wine that I had in the fridge to add something extra.

Then I added the eggplant, stirred this about for a while, slugged in a bit more wine. In went the courgette when the eggplant was looking fairly well cooked.

The olives were roughly chopped up chucked in, as was the feta.

When everything had seemed well acquainted in the pan, I turned off the heat, added most of the parmesan into the mix and started filling the peppers with the mixture.

This is what it looked like in the oven. I cooked it for about 40 minutes because I was indeed lazy and I didn't precook the peppers.

I must say, that it didn't look as pretty as I would have liked. When Totty came in he said that it looked fantastic.

The overall taste was nice. The filling wasn't overly cheesy, which is a gripe that I have with a lot of vegetarian food.

I think that if I make this one again, I will add something to the filling, perhaps some thyme, and perhaps a pepper and olive oil dressing drizzled over the top to lift the flavours.

Cooking the Whole Book

OK, so one of my goals that I intend to share with who ever reads this far is my cooking through one of my cook books, "Fields of Greens" by Annie Somerville.

YIKES!

Well, there is a very good reason for this. All of us who have a real interest in food, have a huge pile of cook books. Books that we turn to for inspiration, and books that we look up old favourites. Often we make one or two, things from a book.

So, this being my favourite cook book, I intend to cook EVERYTHING in it. I will of course make substitutions for ingredients that I can't get, or for things that I just don't like.

Since I have owned this book, I have made just two things out of it, the Winter Vegetable Curry (page 190) which was delish, and I had a little spate of making my own sourdough bread, including starting my own culture (page 312-315). I don't intend on repeating these.

I would also like to add that my kitchen is tiny, and to have two people in my kitchen area is a stretch. I know that you can make spectacular food in a small area, you just have to be creative with space, and meticulious about the order in which you do things.

OK, so the actual book is 3.7cm thick, that's including the cover. The pages measure 3.2cm, so that's not too bad. Let's be honest here, cookbooks have nice thick pages. Without the appendix, that's 2.5cm of pages to cook through. Doesn't sound too hard.

So, where to start?

This week I will try to do two, maybe three things.

I will make Polenta (page 278) and Roasted Peppers Filled with Eggplant, Summer Squash and Basil (page 268) and possibly Fall Risotto with Chantrelles and Late Harvest Tomatoes.

Seasonal everything would be fantastic, but because I don't have a car, I am relying on local high street supermarket, I will make do with what I can lay my hands on!

All Bagged Up!

My sewing career has gone through fits and spurts.

Whenever I feel inspired, or the circumstances are good, I sew. The rest of the time I wish I sewed, or that I sewed more.

At the moment, my circumstances are right for sewing.

Indeed life has been good since I moved to Ireland this year, so I have completed a few pieces.

The first thing that I made since I got my machine was this beige striped shoulder bag.

As you can see, there are free form flowers on the front. These were made from the selvages. I like the way that they add a rough edge, and of course use up some of those left over scraps, that would otherwise go in the bin.

Yes it's a lot rough around the edges, I am not particularly patient finishing things off, but it's a good first project after years of doing no sewing. The bit that I like to boast about the most is this. I drafted the pattern myself.

In the future, I will return to this bag, and add an insert to the base so that it holds a little more shape. But for the mean time, I am very happy with my first project in about 6 years.

What is important these days anyway?

OK, stay with me on this one.

Yes, that is a pile of clean dish cloths. To be more accurate, it's a pile of my dish cloths. I use them about the house, for just about everything. If anything gets spilled, out comes a dish cloth. Need something to wipe your face with, clean the kitchen surfaces, damp dusting, you name it. I mostly don't use disposable paper products out of the bathroom.

As a planet, we are running out of resources very quickly. In my life time, if I don't witness oil running out, I'm sure that I will see it's prices soar so as to be far too expensive for most people.

It's little things like my dish cloths that have the potential to make a difference here.

Every time that you buy something, a lorry has to bring it from the factory, to a distribution centre, to the store, and a lot of the time, you come along in your car, on your own, and drive home.

So, I am trying to make less of an impact buy having these handy little cloths clean, dry and ready to use. They simply go in the wash with everything else.

I'm not saying that I am a green goddess of the environment. Indeed, there is a lot more that I could do to reduce my impact on the planet.

My point is this. I do something, every day that might be considered environmentally helpful.

It could really slow down the depletion of oil reserves, and reduce the damaging effects of human population of the Earth if everyone did a little more.

The other thing that I do regularly that is very important, is use a very common, inexpensive way to get to work.

Coffee

About three years ago, I decided to take my love of good coffee to another level.

I bought an espresso machine and grinder.

"Right", I thought to myself. "Thats the most time and money that I am ever going to spend on coffee."

I couldn't have been more wrong.

After a couple of months of buying very fresh beans, I dipped a toe into roasting coffee at home. Now I'm not saying that the coffee that I was drinking before I started home roasting was bad. It's just that I now have more controll over how my coffee tastes. And that is a beautiful thing.

At the time, I was living with my parents, and I felt that I had to go outside rain or shine, to roast coffee. Seeing as they are tea drinkers, I think that was fair.

I started off, with a popcorn maker, progressed to about 4 popcorn makers. Then I struck gold!

There was something better out there for home roasters who didn't want to spend hundred's more on coffee equipment. a heat gun.

Yes indeed, the very gun that you use to strip paint, could be better used to roast coffee. So now, once or twice a week, my house gets filled with the most fantastic coffe smell.

At the moment, I am using an Ethopian coffee.

Even though I have some of the most fantastic coffee at home, I would be happier with an updated espresso machine, and a few more coffee gadgets to play with.

Oh well. Coffee Nirvana is a long way off.

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?