Bread revisited

Perfect Bread!  I've found it!!!  I have been using a bread recipe by Chef Tess where I make my bread dough in a bucket (you could use a crock or covered dish), leave it to rise slowly overnight and then bake it the next day.  This bread was incredibly tasty but it was heavier than my usual recipe, mainly because we now grind all of our own flour.  I decided to try out a recipe from Nigella Lawson that I had used for years but this time with our home-ground flour.  If I am in no hurry for bread I still use Chef Tess's recipe but if I have the time during my day to mix, kneed, rise, bake, then the recipe below has given me great results.

Nigella Lawson is one of my favorite writers/presenters.  We are both British and love to cook so we're probably sisters, separated at birth.  Nigella has written many fabulous cook books but my favorite is "How to be a Domestic Goddess".  My bread recipe is adapted from her recipe on page 296. 

Ingredients:
2 and one quarter teaspoons of active dry yeast or one tablespoon of fresh yeast
1 and two third cups of warm water (or 1 and one third cups if using store-bought white bread flour)
1 tablespoon of unsalted butter
Half a tablespoon of salt (omit this is using salted butter)
3 tablespoons of wheat gluten
3 and one half cups of bread flour and/or wholewheat flour
Optional extras:
Quarter cup of teff
One half cup of oats
One eighth cup of flax seeds
2 tablespoons of honey


I begin by placing my yeast into a large mixing bowl and adding the water.  I am not scientific about the temperature but I like to be able to hold my finger in the water for a few seconds to ensure that it isn't too hot. 

I mix the yeast into the water and then add the butter and gluten.  Another mix to help the butter melt and then add the salt and one cup of flour. 

Here's a little side note on flour and water:  You may have read my previous post about grinding our own flour.  I use soft white wheat and hard winter wheat.  I tend to ratio my bread 2:1 so two cups of soft white wheat flour to every one of hard winter wheat.  Any optional extras (teff, flax seeds or oats) will take the place of some of the flour).  If you were using store-bought white bread flour you could get away with using slightly less water. 

Now I add the extras and they can change depending on how I'm feeling.  I love teff in bread and often add a quarter cup.  Teff is a fabulous ancient grain which gives my bread a light nutty flavor although this flavor could also come from the flax seeds which I often throw in too.  So in go the oats, teff and flax seeds.  You could add pretty much anything you wanted: sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, raisins. 

Once my extras are mixed in I continue to add the flour, half a cup at a time, mixing it all in before adding more.  If you have a Kitchenaid mixer (or similar brand) you can put everything in the bowl, in the order mentioned above, and let the dough hook do the work.  I have always made bread dough with a fork.  It's just how I do it and it's what I'm used to.  Once the dough starts to come together, I ditch the fork and use my hands. 

You can either turn your dough out onto the counter or you can continue to mix in the bowl.  I usually turn out at this point.  You may have used all of the original three and a half cups of flour by now or you may have some left.  I find that the amount of flour I end up using changes with each loaf.  I always have extra on hand and you'll be able to feel when your dough has enough flour.  It will be a bit sticky but holds a ball shape.  Now it's time to knead. 

I sprinkle a little flour onto the counter-top and onto the ball of dough itself, then I knead until that flour has been incorporated.  I will quote Nigella's words about kneading: "Kneading is easy to do but hard to describe.  Basically, what you do is press the heel of your hand into the dough, push the dough away, and bring it back and down against the work surface, for at least 10 minutes.  You may need to add more flour as you do so; if the dough seems stickily wet, it means you do want a little more [flour] and often a lot more [flour].  When you've kneaded enough you will be able to tell the difference - it suddenly feels smoother and less sticky.  It's a wonderful moment."

Once your dough has been kneaded to that wonderful point, you can put it back into the bowl that you did your mixing in and leave it to rise.  You can cover it with anything from Saran-wrap to a damp cloth.  I have reuseable plastic covers that I pop over my bowl.  You want to leave the dough until it has risen to about two-thirds of its original size.  The time this takes will vary for each and every loaf of bread your bake.  There are lots of factors but the heat of the day or your home play a huge role. 

Once your dough has risen to two-thirds it's original size, you knock the air out of it and shape it into a ball, loaf or whatever shape you would like your bread to be.  If you're baking your bread in a loaf pan, now would be the time to pop it into that pan.  Cover it again and let it rise again, until it is puffy to the touch. 

Preheat your oven to 425 Farenheit.  Slash your bread three of four times across the top with a very sharp knife.  This is not just to look good.  It actually helps the gases escape from the loaf as it is baking.  If you don't slash the top, your dough will decide where to split by itself which can lead to mishappen loaves.  Nothing wrong with that but if you would prefer a uniform loaf that is easy to cut, I suggest the slashing. 

Pop your bread into the oven and bake for 35 minutes.  I usually check my bread around the 25 minute mark and if I've used a bread pan, I remove the bread from the pan and finish cooking straight on the oven rack.  When your bread is cooked, it should sound hollow when knocked with your knuckles on the underside. 

Leave your bread on a cooling rack for at least an hour before you cut into it.  Honestly, it's worth the wait. 

This method of bread-making is certainly more time consuming than the overnight bucket method, but the resulting bread is just fabulous.  I would love it if you give it a try and let me know how it turns out for you.

Frugally Sustainable Blog Hop #57



Farm Girl Friday Blog Fest # 12

Chicken: from field to freezer

Dominiques, Australorps, Buff Orpingtons and Delawares

Last week, some of our beloved birds fulfilled their purpose in their life. 

The day started incredibly early, before dawn, rounding up chickens into cages ready for the journey to the farm where they would be processed.  We rounded up twenty-nine birds: nineteen Australorp roosters, nine older laying hens and one Australorp/Leghorn rooster.  The layers and the A/L rooster were my sister-in-law's.  We use a fantastic chap to process our birds, Benjamin Shaw of Garden of Spices in Greenwich, NY.  He and his family run a speedy and efficient poultry processing service.  It took less than two hours for the twenty-nine birds to come back to me neatly packaged and ready to take home. 

A short while ago, I processed three of our roosters myself and it took me approximately one hour per bird.  I am quite chuffed with my time but twenty-nine chickens would have taken me at least two days so for the small fee of $3 per bird, all I had to do was sit, enjoy the scenery and drink my coffee. 

Here I am, plucking one of the Dominique roosters earlier in Fall

Our chickens have been fed an organic, non-GMO diet since they arrived.  With the exception of my SIL's laying hens, the oldest birds were the Australorps at 26 weeks.  I opted not to take any of the Dominique's because they are all laying beautiful eggs and I had already processed the roosters that we did not need to keep.  The Buff Orpingtons and Delawares are 24 and 20 weeks, respectively, not quite big enough to process.  I will winter them and then take another group of chickens to Mr Shaw in the Spring. 

 

One of our processed birds

 

My SIL and I weighed the chickens when I got home and were pleased to find that their weights ranged from 3.3 to 4.6 lns.  We were very pleased indeed.  My family and I had our first roast chicken from the new batch on Friday evening for our Shabbat dinner.  He was an incredibly tasty bird and we felt incredibly blessed to be eating something that I've spent the last six months raising.  Taking a picture of the said roast would have been a fantastic idea, but we were all to eager to taste our feast so I'll have to take a picture next time I roast a bird. 







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Fresh Eggs Daily: Farm Girl Blog Fest

Grinding our own flour

We have a great local health food store where we buy our grain, rice and legumes in bulk.  Once we started buying bulk grain we knew we needed grain mill.  My sister-in-law and I went into this purchase together.  We live very close and will share the mill through the year. 

Here's our Country Living Grain Mill with motorization kit:

We have had our mill for about three months and I grind flour two to three times a week.  I buy organic hard red wheat and organic soft white wheat.  I use the soft white wheat more for pastry and cakes. Below is a picture of some hard red wheat and the flour from these berries.



The next two pictures are soft white wheat and the flour.

 

I know, there's not much difference. Here's our mill in action. 

 

Before our mill arrived I was using a much smaller hand crank grinder from Back to Basics.  It worked beautifully, although much smaller amounts were produced.  I love being able to plug in my mill and let it do the hard work.  We have the hand crank for tougher times. 

 

It takes approximately 30-40 minutes to grind 4 cups of wheat berries to flour.  I bake bread often using this recipe from Chef Tess.  I love the fact that I use much less yeast than before and leaving the dough to rise overnight is so much more convenient.  Check out her recipe and technique if you haven't already.  I store any leftover flour in the freezer but I generally use all of my ground flour each week. 

 

Here's a photo of my most recent loaf of bread. 

 

 

 

 

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The start of homeschooling

I have a few friends who had homeschooled and at first it seemed too much to think about.  I convinced myself that the local school was just fine and I would go to work when Chicken Man was in Kindergarten. 

I began to do some more research and came across a chap called John Gatto.  He has written many publications but the one I found, "The Underground History of American Education" was intriguing and confirmed the niggling feeling I had about the public school system.  More research and reading followed.  Here is Mr Gatto's thesis on what compulsory schooling does to children.  This excerpt is taken from his book "Dumbing us Down":

1. It makes the children confused. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials that programming is similar to the television, it fills almost all the "free" time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.
2. It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
3. It makes them indifferent.
4. It makes them emotionally dependent.
5. It makes them intellectually dependent.
6. It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
7. It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised.

Mr Gatto was not alone in his thoughts which I found I could not and should not ignore. 

Our decision to homeschool was heavily influenced by our faith.  We do not celebrate easter, christmas, birthdays, halloween, mother's day, father's day or thanksgiving.  Most of our family and friends do.  I understand that everyone is different and you can read more about our faith here. 

I had already researched homeschooling material and curriculum.  I chose The Robinson Curriculum as a base (it covers reading, writing, spelling, the English language and Math with Saxon Math).  Due to NY State homeschool regulations, from grade 1 through 6 we also have to cover: geography, United States history, science, health education, music, visual arts, physical education and bilingual education. I have ordered the Lifepac K grade language arts and math books and I expect to use Lifepac for 1st grade as well. 

When we started homeschooling back in Spring of this year (2012), we began learning letter sounds with Hooked on Phonics and then started using the McGuffy Readers.  Chicken Man has been learning to read for 8 months and we are nearly at the end of the Primer.  McGuffy Readers can be found free online here.  There are so many great online resources for homeschooling and many of them are free.  I love this handwriting worksheet maker. 

I have been enjoying our homeschool experience and from the enthusiasm of Chicken Man, I can only trust that he is too.  I give all thanks and praise to my Heavenly Father for blessing me with the passion and ability to teach my child. 

Frugally Sustainable Blog Hop

"So you don't celebrate christmas?"

No, we don't celebrate christmas, easter, birthdays, halloween, mother's day, father's day or thanksgiving.  Our faith and our trust in our Heavenly Father Yahuah is what drove us to make these changes in our lives.

We keep the weekly Sabbath or Shabbat (which is Saturday) and the festivals of our Heavenly Father which are given to us in Leviticus 23 namely Passover, Matzah (Feast of Unleavened Bread), First Fruits, Shavu'ot (Pentecost), Yom Teruah (Feast of Trumpets) Yom Kippor (Day of Atonement) and Sukkot (Tabernacles). 

Rather than re-type or paste pages of others' information, I will post links to their articles.  We have learned so much from so many including: Lew White of Fossilized Customs; Walter Veith of Amazing Discoveries.  His Total Onslaught Series is fantastic; Avi Ben Mordechai of Millennium 7000.  His video and books on Galatians and understanding the Law are exceptional; Jim Staley of Passion for Truth Ministries. Jim's video presentation called Truth or Tradition is concise and informative. 

The following selection of articles may be informative reading for you. 

http://www.seedofabraham.net/christmas.html

http://www.fossilizedcustoms.com/christmastree.html

http://www.fossilizedcustoms.com/easter.html

http://www.yaiy.org/literature/CelebrateBirthdays.html

http://www.fossilizedcustoms.com/HALLOWEEN.htm

http://www.fossilizedcustoms.com/thanksgiving.html

We also follow the dietary laws given to us in Leviticus 11.  Jim Staley has another great video called To Eat or Not to Eat part 1 and part 2. 

Reading material that we enjoy includes: Halleluyah Scriptures; The Restoration Study Bible; The Complete Jewish Bible; the Companion Bible; Strong's Concordance; Aramaic English Bible; Hebrew English Bible; Dake's Annotated Reference Bible; The Apocrypha and books from the Ethiopic Bible; The Book of Yasher; Vain Traditions; The complete works of Philo; The complete works of Josephus; Should Christians be Torah Observant by Carmen Welker; Come Out of Her My People by C.W. Steinle; The Drama of the Lost Disciples by George F. Jowett; The Traditions of Glastonbury by E.Raymond Capt; Yeshua: A guide to the real Jesus and the Original Church by Dr Ron Moseley; The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop. 

Homemade Herbal Remedies

 

Over the last few months I have started to look closely at the ingredients in our food, cleaning products and medicines.  Once I started down this particular rabbit hole I knew that the only way forward would be homemade-almost everything.  I try to make as much as I can from scratch and I am constantly inspired by the growing number of bloggers out there who have been doing this for years. 

 

In the summer I began to learn about the herbs and plants that grow in my area and what I could use them for.  The most obvious was Mullein.  I have used it in tea for headaches with great results. 

 

 Mullein

 

I then read about and discovered Red Clover, which I again dried and jarred so it could be used in cold or hot drinks.

 Red Clover

 

By far my best find was Yarrow.  I used this to shake a particularly nasty chesty cough that I developed and although I felt like death on day 1, by day 3 I was feeling back to my old self.  Yarrow comes with warnings not to drink too much.  More information can be found here.

 

 Yarrow

 

A great source of information and inspiration is Andrea Muse's website Frugally Sustainable, with the highlight of my week being her weekly blog-hop where I can see lots of different ideas and blogs in one place.  I recently made a few different herbal remedies that required a little more work on my part. 

 

The first recipe I tried was for Andrea's Cold and Cough Syrup.  I tweaked the recipe slightly and used echinacea, chamomile, ginger and cinnamon.  It was a great success and has been loved by my family. 

 

Next I made Andrea's Horehound Lozenges.  Now, Horehound really is very, very bitter.  You have to really want to get better to be able to handle the taste but it does work.  I made the lozenges one evening and then thinking they were set, popped them into a mason jar.  Of course, the next morning I had a big mass of horehound lozenges stuck together!  I managed to get them unstuck and then wrapped them individually.  Of course some of the mini cupcake wrappers that I used stuck to the lozenges too.  At this point I decided that there had to be a different way to get this wonderful herb into our systems without all the fuss that I was creating for myself.  I used Andrea's Elderberry Syrup recipe but substituted horehound instead and although it is very bitter, I can stomach a spoonful in my tea or even just straight from the spoon.  Big Chicken has started dissolving one horehound lozenge in his morning coffee. 

 

Cold & Cough Syrup, Elderberry Syrup, Horehound Syrup

 



Now, Elderberry syrup is a whole different story.  For anyone that has ever had Ribena, you'll know what I'm talking about.  I've had to hold myself back from drinking all the syrup I made last week.  I love it and so does Chicken Man (he calls it the red juice).  I will be making more of this as the winter season continues. 

 

Last, but not least, I made Andrea's Decongestant Salve or in this house we call it vapor rub.  This is just fabulous.  I had used the stuff in the little blue bottle all my life but this is a fantastic alternhiive without any chemical ingredients.  It is also much easier to wash off your skin and clothing. 

 

Vapor Rub

Also in the main picture is lip balm (another Andrea recipe) which I love and costs pennies compared with the tubes of lip balm in the health food stores.  This also worked great for chapped skin from too much nose-blowing. 

Myself and Chicken Man have recently had the sniffles and a cough but with the herbal remedies that I have recently made myself, we have been able to get better and avoid commercial pharmaceuticals.

If you have any other recipes, tips or information you would like to share I would love to hear from you.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a medical professional and do not intend for my comments and opinions to be used for any diagnosis or treatment of any individual(s) illness.  All statements made here are my opinion (except where I have linked an external website).  You should always do your own research and consult your doctor or medical professional before using herbal remedies. 


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Do I have time for a blog?

I have wanted to keep a blog for quite some time.  We have spent the last few years changing our lifestyle for a healtier, more fulfilling path and I have often wanted to write it down.  Many times I have started a post and then deleted it half-finished, convincing myself that I really don't have time to record all the wonderful details of our day-to-day or week-to-week activities. 

My husband, the Big Chicken, works full-time and I am a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom.  I'm the Frugal Chicken.  We have one chick - Chicken Man, who is 5. 

I try my best to make as much of our food, cleaning and beauty products myself.  I was inspired by the wonderful website Frugally Sustainable (www.frugallysustainable.com).  This year we have raised an exceptionally large number of chickens in the hope that they will have their own chicks next Spring.  Chickens are a huge part of my life, aside from the Big Chicken and Chicken Man.  I have nurtured tiny chicks watching them grow into beautiful birds.  I have even tried my hand at processing some of the chickens myself but I'm just not as quick as the wonderful farmer that has the machinery to make everything happen much faster.

I am raising Dominiques, Australorps, Buff Orpingtons and Delawares.  The Doms and the Australorps are my favorites.  My sister-in-law has an Australorp that we call Mama.  She took herself off, laid a clutch of eggs and successfully hatched 6 little chicks.  She had made a home for herself in an old wood and brush pile near the garden but alas, a fox found her and her chicks one night and four were killed.  The two that survived are beautiful roosters (Australorp/Leghorn). 

I recently lost a handful of chickens to a hungry skunk who was passing through the area but we have around 90 chickens left.  Some will be processed in a few weeks and the rest will be wintered.  I am still very excited each day when I go and collect eggs.  They are still quite small (the chickens ages are between 18 and 26 weeks) but so very tasty and I feel a real sense of achievement.  I am confident that with the Australorps and the Dominiques we should have some Mama action going on in the Spring, relinquishing me of some of my chicken-mother duties.

The sun is getting ready to rise and that means I need to go and tend to my flock. 


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