Cooking and Baking for my Family

Over the last few years I have really enjoyed cooking and baking and trying out new recipes, especially from my favourite foodblog. I have to say that I love eating and when I'm not cooking or eating I spend a lot of time thinking about food, looking up recipes and planning the next meals. I only lose interest in food when I'm either very exited or busy or very sad. After my sister got her cancer diagnosis I didn't want to think about food for while. I obviously still had to cook to feed my family, but there was no excitement. Everything seemed to be so purposeless. But when I was trying to find a way to be useful to Marina, I started to get into cooking and baking again. Unsurprisingly she had lost her interest in food preparation as well, and she seemed to be happy when I turned up with breads and cakes and healthy treats. And just in time Minimalist Baker posted this kitchari recipe which I made for her when she was unwell after her second round of chemotherapy.

Home cooking has taken on new dimensions again since I started feeding my baby boy Enda solids. This time I'm relying on two brilliant books: Baby at the Table  by the Chiappa Sisters and Planet Organic Baby and Toddler Cookbook by Lizzie Vann. A lot of the recipes from the first book are also on the Chiappa Sisters' website. I like their outlook on feeding a family: that you shouldn't cook separate dinners for parents and kids. There is still this belief in people's heads that children don't like vegetables and have to be coaxed into eating healthily. In Ireland there is hardly a restaurant that sells children's portions of their normal food: children's menus are mainly sausages and chips and maybe mushy peas if you're lucky. But if you don't give your children a chance to taste "grown-up" food when they're still young, you can't be surprised that they refuse to eat it when they're older.
(Saying all that, I have to admit that Aidan won't eat anything else but sausages and chips when we're at a restaurant which is of course our fault. We got him used to this as it made it easier for us to go out for dinner. Well, at least he's not too bad eating his veggies at home.)

Coming back to the two books on weaning: I really like Baby at the Table and it guides you very well through the first few weeks of weaning, but after that most of the recipes are just lists of what ingredients to put together in a baby  purée and sometimes it's not clear if you're supposed to cook an ingredient or leave it raw. There aren't many recipes for a baby that has moved on from simple purees but can't chew very lumpy food yet. So I'm glad I have the other book to fill that gap. There are loads of recipes that are proper meals with several ingredients and you just mash or purée them according to how much texture your baby can manage. (I still highly recommend Baby at the Table, especially because of the toddler and family sections.)

The decision to cook my babies' food myself instead of buying readymade was an obvious one for me even though it can be tough sometimes. Though I really enjoy cooking for Enda, especially now that he has properly taken to his food, it's not always easy to find the time. Often I have to hastily cook his meal while he is crying and Aidan is testing my patience by chasing the cat or climbing the back of the  armchair. But I want Enda to eat homemade food just like the rest of us. This doesn't mean that I never buy baby food: while it is possible to take homemade food when out and about it is not always very practical, so I do feed him readymade food now and again. I also keep an emergency bag of baby food in the press for those days when I don't have the time or patience to cook and the stash of frozen food happens to be empty. I just can't afford to be too proud to buy readymade food. Being a grumpy and tired mam is worse for my children.

This is something I keep having to remind myself about: Not to overdo the whole home making process. It's easy to fall into the trap of self blame. After managing to keep up baking my own bread for over a year now I always feel I've failed when I do cave in and buy a loaf from the supermarket. But baking bread shouldn't be about stressing yourself, it should be enjoyable and not a chore. So I decided to scrap those late nights of baking when all I want to do is grap a few hours of sleep before Enda wakes up for his next feed. The good thing is that I got better both at baking and at planning ahead. At the start making sourdough bread felt really intimidating and I mostly stuck to the instructions (something I do very seldom), but over time I realized that the dough still rises, even if I don't knead it for 20 minutes or proof it for four hours. Maybe sourdough starter gets easier to deal with the older it gets... I don't know. But after tackling the problem of inflated loaves I never had a sourdough bread that hasn't risen beautifully in the oven. As regards planning ahead, I always bake a big loaf of bread and freeze half of it, thereby avoiding having to throw out mouldy bread as well as always having a bag of sliced bread in the freezer that can be easily defrosted in the toaster.

Getting Ready for the last Month of the Year

Being the 30th of the month, this is my last chance to write a blog entry for November. I've been busy trying to get organised for Christmas in the last few weeks, shopping for presents, knitting, crocheting and sewing as well. And baking. The only thing I haven't done yet is decorating the house which I will start this evening. This is probably the first year that I have all the Christmas shopping done before the start of December but as I'm going to have a baby just before Christmas I have no other choice. It feels good to have everything done early. There are still a few things that I need to finish off but even if don't get time to do them, I will be alright with what I have.

My sewing machine finally gave up just after finishing Aidan's Advent calendar. I'm glad that I got that done as hand sewing would have slowed me down a lot and tomorrow is the first of December.

I got the inspiration for the calendar here. It's pretty straight-forward to make: just a piece of cloth with 24 pockets stitched on (German calendars only have 24 days as we get our presents on Christmas Eve). I used paper templates before I cut out the pockets as I didn't want to end up with too little space.

I'm still planning to do some Christmas ornaments that I need to hand sew now that my machine is broken.

But I'm actually happy with how they turned out, especially the birds. Hand sewing gives you a bit more control and you achieve a softer look with stuffed ornaments. It's slower of course, but at least it's easier to undo when you make a mistake.

Aidan and I already started baking. We did some ginger bread and some traditional German "Plaetzchen". We're going to do more today.

Regarding baking: I'm happy to say that my sourdough bread has improved a lot over the last weeks. It's probably one of those things that need some time and practice to get right. After my first two loaves rose really high with proving but totally deflated in the oven I did some internet research and guessed that I might have let the loaves rise too long and in too warm conditions. I let them rise eight to twelve hours. The next time I reduced it to four hours and just room temperature (with radiators on). The outcome was perfect: the loaves didn't rise that high when proofing, but rose again in the oven.

I also discovered this recipe which makes a lovely mild tasting bread. The dough hardly rises at all when proofing but all the more during baking. I've made it at least four times and it always turned out really well.

Scraps and a new Bread Recipe

When you first start out sewing, you might find it hard to come by materials without spending a lot of money. Yet after a few years most crafters find themselves with an ever growing stash of fabrics, some still sizable enough to be used for future projects, but the bigger mountain is always made up of those scraps of fabrics, too big to throw out but to small and cut-into for most projects. Yet if you throw them out you can be sure that you will need tiny amounts of exactly the scraps you've just thrown away in the near future. I'm always hovering between my tidy minimalistic side that wants to get rid of all those tiny unmanageable bits and my thrifty crafty side that shies away from throwing out anything the might come in useful. So I ended up storing my fabric scraps in various boxes, out of sight and out of mind, which meant that I never really used them at all. After doing some internet research for storing ideas I found this metal basket in a local shop.

It doesn't look the tidiest, but I can just throw the scraps in and they are stowed away but still in sight. And the basket at least is pretty. It would help if I got another one as it's always overflowing. But having the basket in full sight means that I occasionally do feel the urge to sew something with some of those beautiful scraps. Again the internet is great for getting ideas, but my latest idea came from something I've seen in a shop in a town while looking for some birthday presents. They were tiny fabric dogs with a chain and key ring. It's not easy to sew something that small, not for me with my basic sewing machine skills anyway, but I tried some heart shapes, not too small, that came out decent enough. So I did a few different shapes. They're far from perfectly sewn but look alright from if you don't look too closely. 

I used a different kind of scraps (paper) to decorate a folder for my recipes. It was good to cut up some old magazines that could throw out afterwards. While making lots of recipes from the internet I don't like having to use my phone or the computer while cooking. So I usually copy the recipes in handwriting (we don't have a printer), which gives me the possibility to note down all the changes that I might make. My newest addition is a porridge bread recipe that a friend has mentioned when I told her of my decision to make our bread myself. Her mother is making it all the time and after trying it out yesterday I think I will too. The recipe can be found here.

                          

The whole home-baking business is going surprisingly well. I expected to cave in after a week and just buy bread in the supermarket but so far I haven't. It's getting addictive and I find myself looking forward to baking the next bread. Though I have to say that this wouldn't be the case if I had a job. It's easier when you're home the whole day even with a toddler to mind. In fact, baking bread is a way to keep Aidan busy. He loves kneading the dough and always manages to sneak some into his mouth.

The sourdough starter worked out as well after a few difficulties at the beginning. I hated the idea of having to throw out half of the dough at every feeding, so I only fed it a little flour and water every day, but that was wrong. Eventually I followed the instructions here and it worked wonders. Well, that is to say my starter dough was certainly ready for baking.

 

And when I made the bread dough it rose beautifully... only to turn into a brick in the oven.

It wasn't as bad as it looks though. When I cut the loaf, it looked spongey like it should on the inside and it tasted ok. Adrian, who loves sourdough bread, gave it the thumbs up. So I won't regard it as a failure. I haven't baked since and store the starter dough in the fridge. Hopefully my next attempt will make a fluffier looking loaf!

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Home Baking

Lately I've been very conscious about unnecessary additives you find in commercially sold bread. The obvious answer to this problem is of course to bake your own bread. The only problem I had with this is the fact that all my loaves turn out to be quite dense and even when they tasted good spread with butter or as a side to soup they just wouldn't make proper sandwiches. So I started browsing the internet to find a recipe that would make a fluffier bread. I found this site and thought I might give the recipe a try. And I'm glad I did: Usually recipes I make don't turn out like the should even when tasting fine but this bread actually looked like in the picture shown on the site. Even though I substituted kefir for the milk (I do this whenever I can to use up the huge amounts of kefir that my grains yield) and used a cup of wholemeal wheat flour.

As for the taste, I will have to play around with seasonings a bit the next time, but I was very happy with the texture. Adrian and Aidan were too, so there wasn't much left by the time I remembered to take the picture. It did make lovely toast like it said on the website but it also worked as sandwich. So I expect we'll have more of this bread in the future. 

The other recipe I tried out is this one . Not only did it look beautiful but the quick-no-knead-heading appealed to me as well. I had never heard of a Dutch oven but I figured it must be close to a cast-iron casserole dish which it said you can use instead. I was a bit nervous because of the high temperatures and handling the hot casserole but everything turned out fine. The bread rose beautifully even without kneading and it tasted very good. It's not a sandwich-style bread but I did't expect it to be. I will certainly do it again. It does say to let it rise for 12 to 18 hours or 6 hours in an oven with only the light turned on but mine had risen well after two hours in an oven with set to about 30 degrees celsius.

There's another recipe I'd like to try but I have to be a bit patient for that as I need to make the sourdough starter first which will take a few days. I've made sourdough bread before but wasn't very happy with it. It came out very dense and quite hard. After reading up on this useful website  I figured that I probably didn't knead it enough and didn't let it rise enough. I am ready to give it another try now. I've started making the starter dough two days ago with just flour and water and I'm very curious how it will turn out and if I will be lucky enough to "catch some wild yeasts". It's a bit like trying to trap wild birds I think, you just lay the trap and hope some of them will be lured into it. The first day nothing seemed to have happened but this morning there were a few bubbles in the dough and a vinegary smell so I might be lucky.

My kitchen is getting pretty crowded with all the cultures feeding away: kefir, yeast and sourdough. A few years ago this really would have bothered me, but now I think doesn't look messy, just lived-in and cosy.