Monthly Archives: April 2015
Olive and Pit
Olive and Pit
Living in the sticks is challenging. We have no cell reception. If the power goes out it can stay off for days and days while PG&E search the hills for the fault. Our cars need new tires… a lot.
BUT we also have found ourselves in an amazing community. We know every one of our neighbors and if we need some support (or they do) then there is always someone who has the knowledge or time that can help. One of our neighbors used his tractor to plow our field the first year we were here; in turn when they were away and a tree fell on their drive M. went up and cut it up and moved it off the drive so when they got home late they would come home to a clear road. We Llama-sit occasionally for another neighbor and in turn they chicken-sit for us. Equally one of our neighbors give E. a lift to her volunteer program in Boonville and we have yet to find something that can repay that generosity.
The Chicks: Stupid, Dash, Newsa, and Nutmeg
So last week when we got the call from one neighbor about another who had been bereaved in January and just desperately needed to be rid of a Bantam hen and her chick to ease her worries: of course we said yes. We really aren’t Bantam people (useless pet chicken anyone?) but the need was there and we had the space and time to help.
Olive and Pit
So it is that Olive and little Pit joined our farm. She is a masterful escape artist and a little firecracker with other chickens but she is sweet and placid with us. We are having to keep her in a separate enclosure as one of the white Delaware took an instant dislike to Olive and while she has that little chick Olive has no intention of making peace. The younger chickens are still in the broody-hen hutch so Olive and Pit are in a rabbit cage adapted slightly for her needs.
The Chicks: Pigwidgen, Baby, Stupid, Dash, and Nutmeg
I know she adds to our daily chore list but really that’s what living in the country is about: we look after each-other and in the end our lives are all the richer for it.
xx Jo
Meritence- Yarn Along
I did decide to cast on Meritence for myself, but I am probably going to have to start the other project before I get too far done with My Meritence. Oh my Giddy Aunt is this pattern a headache! Its all correct and it works just fine but the way it’s written requires so much mental gymnastics I dread picking it up and figuring out where I’m at! I’m sure it will all get easier once I’m past the armpits and onto the looong stockinette section.
I have just finished reading The Forgotten Sister: Mary Bennet’s Pride and Prejudice. For years I have been avoiding Jane Austen spin offs after an unfortunate run in with Pride, Prejudice and Zombies (followed by a sad encounter with Death Comes to Pemberly) but I actually really enjoyed The Forgotten Sister! It is a first person narrative but set against the back drop of Pride and Prejudice it feels much broader because you already know what was happening the room next door! I actually didn’t believe the love story but the rest of it was magnificent!
I’m linking up with Ginny for a Yarn Along.
xx Joanna
Les Trois Soeurs on Etsy
Les Trois Soeurs by Sweet Little Wood are in my Etsy shop.
Les Trois Soeurs are beautiful and elegant earrings designed to look like glass but with a light and easy feel in your ears.
They are designed and handmade in Northern California by my whole family using quality materials and an eye for precision using a unique process and finished with crystal beads. High quality silver-filled hooks ensure a beautiful but affordable finish without the risk of allergic reactions to metal. The resin finish allows light opaquely through the jewelry like stained glass. They are always more beautiful in person!
I also want to say congratulations to Donna of Knit1Spin2 (the recipient of a free pair of Les Trois Soeurs earrings) and thank you for the plug for my Etsy shop on your blog!
xx Joanna
Bread Part 4: Soft Cinnamon Rolls
This is the post K. E. and J. have been looking forward to all week… Cinnamon Rolls.
If you follow the recipe your rolls will be fluffy with a light sweetness but you can adapt the recipe for super sticky sugary rolls too. I like to top them with butter frosting rather than the usual drizzled water based icing which means my kids and M. can have heaps of icing to increase the sweetness and I can have less and enjoy the lighter less extreme version!
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Start with 2 Hour Homemade Bread dough allowed to raise for one hour.
Lightly spread butter in a large dish and sprinkle with flour, ensure all the inner surface is coated and then shake out any excess flour. Gather soft butter, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. Mix 3 Tbs cinnamon, 1 tsp nutmeg and 1/2 tsp cloves.
Roll your dough on a floured surface in a rough rectangle till it is about 1/4 inch thick: It should measure about 2 foot by 1 foot . Spread the soft butter onto the surface of the dough ensuring you have a fairly good coating of butter to every edge. Sprinkle the surface with the spice mixture and about 3/4 cup sugar.
If you like your rolls super sticky and sweet double the sugar sprinkled over the top. If you are a fan of pumpkin pie try mixing a 1/2 cup of pumpkin puree with your sugar, spices and butter and spread that over your dough (my personal favorite).
Slice the dough into strips about 2 inches wide. I use a pizza slice which makes the process so easy and tidy.
Pumpkin Spice Rolls
Roll each strip into a tight spiral and settle them into your dish with about 1/2 an inch between each roll. Its okay to squeeze them a little closer or a little farther apart if you need to to fit them to your dish.
Set the rolls aside for 1/2 and hour to puff up and heat your oven to 350 F. Bake your rolls for about 30-35 minutes. Your rolls will take less time to cook if they are more widely spaced.
Top with your preferred icing. I mix about 3/8 cup of butter with a 1/4 cup of cream cheese, 1 Tbs milk and a dash of vanilla and enough icing sugar to create a thick creamy paste. If you over shoot with the icing sugar and it gets a little too thick add a tiny bit more milk.
I really hope you have enjoyed the 2 Hour Homemade Bread and this week’s tumble down recipes (here and here)!
Have a wonderful weekend darlings! xx Jo
A Worrier Justified
M. and I had a fantastic time away while our children learned the value of having an unpaid slave about the house who does 90% of the house work without being asked… yeah it feels great to have your 16 year old admit she is so glad your back because being Mom is not as easy as it looks!
I would like to say that my worrying was totally justified! I am not kidding that I got 2 out of 5… almost: First of all a man DID break down and knock at our door while we were away… fortunately he wasn’t a psychopath… he just wanted to call AAA… unfortunately K. E. and J. didn’t do the things we had prearranged in case a random stranger showed up at the door. SIGH.
And second: one of our chickens was taken. We don’t know when but we suspect it was at night as one of the Delaware hens was particularly stupid (for a chicken): she would sit on the roosting bar all day and then get stuck outside the hutch when the automatic door closed at night. The girls forgot to check and didn’t do a count in the evening… anyhow we found a mess of feather’s outside the hutch door and a path to where the varmint dug under the enclosure leaving some of it’s fur behind on the barbed wire. So one stupid hen down and one coyote/fox/raccoon/bobcat well fed.
On the bright side we came home to find the baby rabbits had opened their eyes and are so adorable!
They are starting to get out of their nest which makes Champagne a very grumpy Mamma Rabbit!
Sleepy Bunnies. So sweet!
M. and I went to Chico. Its a beautiful town (in the middle) and a bog standard San Joaquin town on the outskirts. M. and I were pretty happy to enjoy the time we had and explore some of the green (and sometimes not green) spaces.
Lower Bidwell Park. Bidwell is the largest municipal park in CA.
The only proof I have that I was even there!
A potentially grungy Highway 99 underpass painted to look like a forest was unexpectedly charming.
Little Owl. x
Sadly Bidwell Mansion was not open when I was there but I enjoyed looking around the grounds none the less.
Afterwards we drove out to Oroville and visited the lake and dam. The situation in Lake Oroville is pretty horrifying: so little water! So take note LA county… your water supply is low… stop watering those darn lawns!
Look at the huge swathe of dry bank… at the end of winter with a 6% snow pack in the Sierras!!
En-route home we stopped of at an awesome little flea-market where I picked up a collection of Spode Fairy Dell china: $20. I am so thrilled!
I was happy to be home and in my own bed but I do miss being away just a little: the hotel room had the most enormous bath in the main bedroom suite without any children knocking to use the restroom, and I didn’t have to think about feeding anyone for awhile. Oh well, back to being the unpaid house slave.
xx Joanna
Bread Part 3: Homemade Pizza
Pizza is the perfect exhausted Mom food! I used to buy it in town and pull it out of the freezer. It was the perfect… “Uh-oh whats for dinner?” meal. After I started making my own bread all the time I decided some day to give home made bases a go with the intention of freezing them as pre-made half baked pizzas. Since then I have never once bothered to freeze a pizza. It is so easy to just churn one of these out in an hour and requires no pre-planning so if I forget to defrost something… pizza it is then. One hour and fifteen minutes start to finish!
The girls like good old Pepperoni or Cheese but when I can be bothered I throw all the good stuff on the adult’s portion of the pizza so the boring picky ones can have their plain pizza and M. and I get to feast on baked olives, pepper and onions!
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One batch of dough will make two large pizzas.
Use the 2 Hour Homemade Bread recipe with the variations noted below:
530 ml warm (to touch) water
2 Tbs dry yeast (If you prefer a slightly less bready- more crispy style crust use only 1 Tbs)
2 Tbs sugar or Honey
1 kg (2 lbs 3 oz) white bread flour or plain flour (Do weigh it out- it is far more accurate than measuring in cups)
1 tsp salt
1/4 c olive oil
For the Pizza:
A little flour mixed with a handful of corn meal
About 8 oz Mozzarella grated
About 4 oz Cheddar grated
1 small tin of tomato puree
1 each: garlic & onion stock cube (or puree a garlic clove or two and a wedge of onion)
Toppings of your choice… Yummmmm
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The Method:
Stir the sugar and yeast into the warm water in a large mixing bowl. Make sure your water is not hot, it should be only a little warm. Let it sit about 5- 10 minutes till it looks foamy. Stir/mix in the other ingredients- the sugar and salt are optional but I find it gives a nicer dough. This dough is a little sticky but not difficult to handle. If at this point your dough feels hard to push into you haven’t got enough liquid if it is difficult to get unstuck from your hands you have too much liquid.
Hand knead on a floured surface for 15 minutes- pizza dough should be springy. In a stand mixer I let it mix for about 8 min. Less kneading is totally ok too: your crust may be a little harder to spread thin without tearing but if you are short on time or energy it will still taste divine!
In a large bowl put a drizzle of olive oil and roll your balled dough in the oil. Cover it and set it aside to rise for about 1/2 and hour to 3/4 hour. If you have time let it rise the whole hour.
Now heat your oven high – our oven goes up to 500 F so that’s what I use but hotter is good too just reduce the cooking time accordingly. Prep your surface with a handful of the flour/cornmeal mix (I am actually using semolina left over from grinding my own wheat and works just as well as the corn meal) and stir the crumbled garlic and onion stock cubes into your tin of tomato puree: Homemade Pizza Sauce that costs about 50 cents to make!
Knead your dough a little and divide it into two balls. If your brave (or totally awesome) you could toss the dough like the pizza gurus do! I am neither brave or totally awesome so I use my hands and just push the dough into a flattish round shape and use the weight of the dough to pull out any too large lumps by lifting it up and working it gently.
Put it on your pan and do the other ball.
Spread the tomato mix thinly split between the two pizzas. Less is more here so it should look thinly spread. Sprinkle your cheeses over the pizza and add any toppings you like.
Put your pizzas in your super hot oven for 10-12 minutes. Our oven is not convection so I do 12 minutes in general but I always check it at 10 because Mozzarella has variable moisture content so cooking times can be different.
I serve it with salad from our Salad Table. Enjoy!
xx Jo
The Knitter’s Dilemma- Yarn Along
I am nearly done with my Margaret Dashwood Shawl. It is going to be delicious. But now I am planning my next project and I am stuck between two:
1: I was firmly determined to make Meritance for me from Knit Picks Gloss Fingering in Hawk. Its just my cardigan. I wear this style ALL THE TIME but I have never tried to knit an every-day-wear for myself. All my knits are special wear or specific outfit knits. For the every day stuff I always go buy cheap cardigans from Target wear them out and throw/donate them when they get too far gone for me. But…
2: I went to Chico and there I found the perfect yarn for a Heliopath Vest which I want to make for a gift. The yarn store (Heartstrings) was delicious! One of the best stocked that I’ve seen since moving to CA and it was really really hard to decide not to buy random stash yarn! There was Sweet Georgia which I’ve never come across before but was so temptingly yummy. Sadly it was faaaaaarrrrrrrrr outside my price range! Instead I got Borrocco Vintage in Caramel: it is mostly acrylic which I usually avoid… squeaky yarn… SHUDDER. It feels very nice though- not squeaky- and it is for a younger girl and summer wear so washing frequently will be an issue.
So now I’m stuck in that delicious dilemma. I have patterns, needles and yarn for both… which to cast on… hmmm.
I am reading very little at the moment that isn’t quick and done in less than 5 minutes. I’ve been busy and traveling but I have still got Sylvia’s Farm on the back burner and a library copy of Folks This Ain’t Normal in my waiting list. I’m linking up with Ginny today.
Have a wonderful downward slide to the weekend!
xx Joanna
Bread Part 2: Naan Bread
Like many British men M. has a fixation with Curry. Hotter is better.
M. spent the first 10 years of his career in food safety and built up amazing relationships with many of the restaurateurs he dealt with. So slowly over time M. started to learn how to make his own curry. Eventually he made his own recipe up from what he learned and called it “Hubby Curry.” Hubby Curry nights meant Momma had enough and had quit for the night so dinner was not on the table and the Husband was on duty. Their were periods of time when Hubby Curry nights happened a lot.
Naan bread (a must for curry aficionado) were always problematic. Store bought Naan were never quite right. Even the nice supermarket Naan were just O.K…. ish. So M. started to learn to make Naan. Its quite a process to do right and kinda complicated. So he landed on what was a totally easy and delicious alternative to REAL Naan… simple home made dough patted into oblong egg shapes fried on a very hot dry pan.
These days M. rarely makes Hubby Curry and it is usually pre-planned when he does. I however cook Indian dishes pretty frequently. I am totally in awe of The Complete Asian Cookbook by Charmaine Solomon its totally thorough and really delicious!
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Easy Naan Bread:
Start with simple 2 Hour Bread dough which has risen for 1 hour. Put a heavy frying pan (M. likes to use cast iron) on a medium-high heat. Do not grease the pan or season it. Divide the dough into 12 balls for large Naan or 24 balls for small Naan. Pat out the balls into Naan shapes and fry on the pan turning it when the first side is a bit browned. Enjoy with Curry or soups! They also make good pitta breads!
xx Jo
The Monday Project: 2 Hour Homemade Bread
It has been awhile since I’ve shared a Monday Project so I thought I’d make this a good one!
I make our own bread.
We eat bread almost daily: sometimes two loaves a day. In total I usually make about 30 loaves a month using about 70 lbs of flour and I can guarantee you if this were a difficult thing to do I would not be doing it!! I only buy two loaves of bread from the super market each month and I put them in the freezer for those days when we need bread to eat but I need the extra time more.
Home made bread is much cheaper: even buying the local organic flour from our Co-op I save a lot of money on bread. Home made bread is so delicious even the artisan stuff doesn’t compare to a hot loaf fresh out of the oven. You can make an organic real food loaf for less than half the price of the shop bought stuff with none of the hidden ingredients. If you find a recipe that works for you its easy to tweak it till it suits your tastes perfectly! For example: M. likes his bread with a little sweetness but when my mother in law is over I bake loaves with no sugar added because she doesn’t like the sweetness.
Until I hurt my back and couldn’t knead the loaves I was doing it all by hand. My back forced me into making the decision to get a stand mixer, I’m super happy to have the mixer but trust me that your bread will come out just as nice (maybe even better) and takes only 5 minutes more kneaded by hand. There is a lot of scary snobbery about bread making: You don’t need to be a baker or wonder chef to do it! You don’t need a special oven that gets to extra ordinary temperatures! And you don’t need to devote half a day to the task! This recipe makes two 2lb loaves and is super versatile and takes 2 hours start to finish (1 hour of which you aren’t even doing anything to it). Later in the week I will share with you some variations on the recipe that we use all the time to make pizza bases, cinnamon/pumpkin rolls, and naan bread.
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Ingredients:
550 ml (1/2 qt) warm (to touch) water
2 Tbs dry yeast
2 Tbs sugar or Honey
1 kg (2 lbs 3 oz) bread flour (Do weigh it out- it is far more accurate than measuring in cups) I use different flour mixes depending on what I want the loaf to be like but if you use less than 2/3 white bread you need to up the water content of the loaf and increase it rising time. I like to substitute 300 grams of white flour for 200 g home-ground whole wheat, 50 g chia seed, and 50 g oat bran and add another 30 mls water.
1 tsp salt
2 Tbs olive oil
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Method:
Stir the sugar and yeast into the warm water in a large mixing bowl. Make sure your water is not hot, it should be only a little warm. Let it sit about 5- 10 minutes till it looks foamy. Stir/mix in the other ingredients- the sugar oil and salt are all optional but I find it gives a nicer loaf. This dough is a little sticky but not difficult to handle. If at this point your dough feels hard to push into you haven’t got enough liquid if it is difficult to get unstuck from your hands you have too much liquid.
Hand knead on a floured surface for 10 minutes- but don’t sweat it- a relatively easy bit of kneading will do. In a stand mixer I let it mix for about 4-5 min. Set it aside in the same large bowl in a warmish spot and let it rise for an hour. When our house is cold I put on a pot of coffee and put the bread bowl on top.
Before you start the next step preheat your oven to 430 F and very thinly smear butter (I use the wax papers that come around the butter sticks) inside your two 2 lb loaf pans and lightly sprinkle flour over the buttered surface. You can make any loaf shape you like and if you don’t have loaf pans just make two rounded loaves on a baking sheet (like the photo at the top).
Knock back your dough (which should be twice the size it was- if it isn’t find a warmer spot for it and leave it till it is. If it doesn’t smell yeasty you may have killed your yeast with too hot water). You don’t really need to knead it again but if you want a finer crumb bread knead it for just a minute or two- I don’t bother I just squish it around in my hands a little. Divide the lump into two halves and smooth them into fat tube shapes. Fold the ends under a little for a nice shape but its really not important how you shape it… its just aesthetics! Plonk one in each loaf pan.
Get your hands wet and just smooth them over the top of the loaf, sprinkle the moist surface with a little salt and then a fine coating of flour. Use a knife to cut a line down the center of your loaf about 1/2 in deep.
Allow the loaves to rise about 10 minutes before you put them in the center of the hot oven.
Cook them for 8 minutes then open your oven door and reduce the temperature to 330 F. My oven takes less than 2 minutes to get down to 330 F before it kicks in heating again. Cook for 30 minutes more. This will give you a light crust which is a little crispy on top and more soft around the sides. If you like a much darker crust you can up the temperatures. I have read (in a recipe that makes a simple white loaf totally hard work) that you can start your bread at 500 F and reduce to 430 F.
Enjoy!
White loaf.
Sweet Little Wood 