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Posts Tagged ‘homemade’

Adventures in Bread

Posted in Food, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 10 September, 2013| 3 Comments »

It’s not all cake in the Vicarage. There’s bread too. Last week I made my first couple of loaves of sourdough.

I’ve been making my own bread on and off ever since we lived in Singapore and the only bread to buy was either ridiculously sweet chewy sliced rubber stuff or tastier but eyewateringly expensive. I started with a bread machine that broke from overuse and since then I’ve generally used my Kenwood mixer to make the dough. I very often make dough for pizza at home or for breadsticks for our weekly Cake and Chat community coffee morning. Although, after watching The Great British Bakeoff the other week, I think I may be making the sticks all wrong – they’re doughy rather than snappy. Still tasty though. I hardly ever make a proper loaf.

I’ve been thinking about sourdough for a while. It’s the bread of geeks, as you’ll see if you google it, made without any added yeast but a starter made from flour and water which is left to brew its natural yeasts. And then I was reading the side of my flour bag (I suffer from acute narrative hunger and need to read everything – one reason why the internet is so bad for me) and there it was – a sourdough starter recipe. So I consulted Annalise Barbieri’s lovely blog because I knew she made sourdough and also some recipes I found online. And then I gave it a go.

The flour and water concoction magically became my starter over the course of a week and a very sticky dough became my first loaf.  Although it spread out rather alarmingly, it came out of the oven with a lovely crust and proper airy texture. The second loaf was less airy but less spread too. I’m finding it a fun way to make bread, especially since the recipe I’m using doesn’t involve much kneading, just a brief punch a few times over the course of a morning. It also keeps really well, although there’s not much been kept. Sourdough has a low GI and is easier to digest than bread made with added yeast. And a loaf cost less than 50p to make. Brilliant.

A couple of days after starting my starter, I discovered that it’s Sourdough September. So I seem to have timed it quite well. Anyway, I’ve just pulled a new loaf out of the oven and I’m going to call a friend now and invite her over for coffee and a slice of bread.

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Plastic and Puppets

Posted in Church, Kids, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on 2 September, 2011| 5 Comments »

This week I finally put into action a project that I’ve been wanting to organise ever since our friends the Rocks showed us their fantastic puppet theatre constructed from PVC plumbing pipes. After a bit of internet research we decided that we’d try and make a fairly large theatre, as we usually have two puppets in the sketches that we do in church and school.

A quick trip to our local plumber’s merchants and £34 later (after they gave us a special discount) and we had the piping for a theatre that’s about 2m high at the back, 1.4m at the front (for a kneeling adult or standing child) and 1m deep. Our plumber’s merchant didn’t advise gluing the thin-walled 32mm piping we had, so we had to cut small joining pieces to connect the T-pieces and 90 degree bends.

Yesterday morning we had one of our holiday Cake and Chat sessions. These are pretty much the same as the ones in term time, except they start later (for holiday lie-ins) and we have more kids with us. So we took all the pipes and connecting pieces down to the church hall, together with a couple of hacksaws, and got down to work. Rocky was the man with the saw, and we had a team which included his fiancee Bee and her mum, and various children who particularly enjoyed applying washing up liquid to the joints to make it easier to connect the pipes in.

Once we’d assembled everything, we found that the frame was still a little wobbly (especially at the beginning when we were still missing the strut for the middle of the front). We will be applying some silicone (the sort you use to line the side of the bath) to the T-pieces, which should stop the rotation that caused the wobble by fixing the connectors to the pipes.

Bee and her mum have kindly offered to make some proper curtains (today’s were a random selection from my materials box) and also a kit bag to carry the rather unwieldy piping, so we are hoping to have everything looking pukka in the next couple of weeks. I’ll blog the first official appearance of the theatre so you can see the final product.

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Playdough Recipe: A Vicar’s Wife’s Standard

Posted in Craft, Kids, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on 29 June, 2011| 1 Comment »

Last night we had a great time at Messy Church – the next one in our series on the ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus. This time we were looking at ‘I am the True Vine’ and the craft team decided that they’d like one activity to be making playdough grapes to place on a vine drawn on a paper plate. The Vicar then volunteered me to make the playdough, knowing that I had a recipe up my sleeve.

Every playgroup leader has a  recipe for playdough – that ubiquitous soft dough which mums hate to find in carpets. But many folk I’ve spoken to have found their homemade dough to be too sticky or oily. This recipe always seems to come out well, though, as long as you don’t mind your fingers getting a bit stained with food colouring. It lasts a few weeks if kept in an airtight box in the fridge.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup (250ml) plain flour
  • 1 cup (250ml) water
  • 1/2 cup (125ml) salt
  • 1 tablespoon oil
  • 2 teaspoons cream of tartar
  • Few drops food colouring

All you do is pop all the ingredients together in a pan (preferably non-stick) and heat it up, stirring, until the dough magically forms. You can also do it by heating it in a covered dish in the microwave for 1-2 minutes but it’s so fast on the stove top I use that method. Also, the food colouring can make the inside of a microwave dish look rather interesting.

I know these were meant to be grape coloured, but the local shop only sells colouring for pilau rice and Indian sweets, so the colours are a little lurid and approximate. For Messy Church I made a quadruple batch, which was ample. It’s great fun to hold and knead – we gave a couple of handfuls away to some of the teenage tearaways who were lurking in the church yard. One came in especially as he reckoned it would help him to deal with stress.

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Resurrection Eggs – All set up

Posted in Faith, Family, tagged , , , , , , , on 31 March, 2010| 7 Comments »

My Resurrection Egg outers arrived from Baker Ross yesterday. So whilst the Vicar took the kids swimming, I assembled the egg box with bible verses and visual aids. I also managed to fit three mini-eggs into each egg which I thought might encourage the kids as they go through the box. Not in the last one, though, as it’s meant to be empty, like the tomb. I plan to have other treats on hand to celebrate the last Resurrection Egg when we get that far.

So here’s a couple of rather poor photos, taken on my phone cos I couldn’t locate my camera, so you can see what they look like. In the end, we didn’t open the first one after swimming, because the Queen stayed so long gassing in the ladies’ changing room (and the Vicar couldn’t go and fetch her, obviously) that they were very late home. She had to run straight out to the Kids’ Club Easter Party as soon as she’d eaten her tea, so the Resurrection Eggs will be a holiday activity – term finishes today – hooray!

I numbered the eggs using sticky foam pieces and a marker pen

A close up of the egg ‘fillings’

The fillings were quite straightforward – it took me about an hour to assemble the whole kit. Here’s what I actually did in the end:

Day 1: Cottonwool ball soaked in perfume (not sure how authentic Elizabeth Arden Green Tea is as a fragrance)
Day 2: 5p pieces for the silver – thankfully I had some in my purse.
Day 3: Matthew 21:1-11. Donkey or palm leaf – Playmobil pot plant pieces.
Day 4: Matthew 26:26-29. Cup or bread – a Playmobil wine glass and a piece of bread.
Day 5: Luke 22:39-46, 54a. Praying hands or pipecleaner man – I stuck together some pink foam which I cut into the shape of praying hands. A little lurid in colour.
Day 6: John 19:1-7. Purple cloth. Well the cloth is maroon, but it was the best I could find.
Day 7: John 19:16-17. Cross. I made this by snipping off the bottom of one of the kids’ palm crosses and sticking it together. Shhhh – don’t tell them.
Day 8: John 19:18. Nails. Sourced from the Vicar’s tool cupboard.
Day 9: John 19:33-35. Toothpick (for the spear). Actually I used  half a cocktail stick (no toothpicks in the Vicarage), covered in silver foil.
Day 10: Matthew 27: 57-60. Rock. Some gravel from the drive. Washed.
Day 11: Mark 16:1-3. Cinnamon/cloves/spices. Had plenty of these in the cupboard.
Day 12: John 20:1-8. And nothing in the egg! This was easy.

I’m looking forward so much to starting this tonight.

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