Bread!

As promised, a taste of my foray into the daunting world of breadmaking.
This is an easy, no-knead recipe which yields three delicious loaves. You can use plain flour but as the nutritional value of that is approximately zero, I use half plain and half wholemeal - fully wholemeal tends to have trouble rising but hey, it's all about experimenting so go nuts.

Credit for the recipe goes to Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François, the authors of Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a day - see the background to it, a complex version of the process, plus other recipes on this series of pages: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/Artisan-Bread-In-Five-Minutes-A-Day.aspx?page=1 - there are 8 or so pages which follow that one, links at the bottom of the first page.


Step 1:
Put 3 cups of warm water (I use very warm water) in a large bowl. Sprinkle over 1 1/2 Tbsp yeast. You can also add 1 1/2 Tbsp salt but I cut this out with no obvious change to the loaf.

Add 6 1/2 cups of flour, cup by cup, stirring in between each one until evenly moist. I find I need to add a bit more water at the end to bind the last bit of flour in.

Cover and leave to rise on the bench. It takes about 2 hours.

Step 2: Keep the bowl in the fridge until you're ready to bake a loaf - allow around 2 hours before you want to eat it. Cut out 1/3 of dough from bowl. Roll in a bit of flour. With your thumbs on top and fingers on the sides, stretch the top around to the base, rolling the sides underneath as you do this. Rotate the loaf and do the same again - the base will be a collection of folds and the top will be smooth. Leave to rise in your pan or on the oven tray (1-1.5 hours is usually enough). After rising, dust top with flour and slash deeply with a serrated knife.
 

Step 3: Preheat oven to 200°C. I cook my bread in a toaster oven - this is great because I'm not heating a large oven to cook a small loaf. We measured the electricity used to cook a loaf in this oven and it was something like 12 cents. So it's cheaper than buying bread.

Place bread in oven. It takes about 30 minutes to bake through in my oven. Have a play and see how long you need to allow. It will still rise more in the oven. I have found that covering mine with tinfoil for the first 15 minutes allows it to get a bit more volume before the crust forms. You can tell when it's done by tapping the bottom of the tin or tray with a knife - if done it will sound hollow.

Voila! Fresh bread. I bake a loaf most days as it disappears pretty quick.  We also use our breadmaker (that's Ning's realm at the moment) to keep up with our hungry winter tummies.

I'd love to know how you go so be sure to post your pics and thoughts on your blog. Next round - sourdough from scratch! :D

Practical skills and getting out of bed.

A little while ago I decided that I was tired of being a science academic and thus having no practical skills whatsoever. So I learnt some. I’m still a science academic, but these days I can actually do some useful (and eco) things too. Some examples:

I built a single-speed bike from a combination of new and second-hand parts. That was fun. Although, sanding the nasty, degraded coat of paint off to repaint it again was a pain in the arse. It looks good now though. And the fact that it’s a single-speed means that it never, ever breaks; except occasionally, when I try to make it run better.

I try not to get too attached to objects, but I probably love this more than a person should love a collection of metallic parts.

More recently, I’ve been taking a night course in woodwork at Papanui High. The fees were minimal, and they’ve got an awesome workshop set up there. My plan was to make pelmets for my room, but an initial tea tray project ended up taking a wee bit longer than I’d expected. The course is over now, but I’m hoping to continue at home. I might even have my pelmets finished by the end of winter.

It's a thing of beauty.

That’s about the limit so far.

Some news on my getting out of bed issues. I broke my oath of not using a radiator. I tried an oil one on a timer for one morning. It didn’t even make a dent in the cold, so I don’t really see the point. However, I have discovered that if I set my coffee machine on a timer so there is a steaming cup of delicious black stuff waiting for me next to my bed when I wake up, then I can get out of bed. Is that eco?

Win.

Other good news: the hard lemonade that I was so disappointed with has finally got its arse in gear and started bubbling away. I’m looking forward to trying it. Although, I worry that it might be stomach-turningly acidic.

The electric bike project

Today I spent a few hours with the famous Eco-Ants of former Tauawhi fame (he used to live in our flat years ago). We've been working on assembling electric bikes over the last month or so, which so far has consisted of a few hours figuring out which extra bits we need, a trip to the hardware store or electronics shop to get them, then a good feed. So progress has been a bit slow. In short, all the bits are still sitting on his bedroom floor and I'm still doing all the work when I'm on the bike!

Here's the rationale of building an electric bike and selling Molly, my van:

You spend $100 on petrol. Petrol engines average 20% efficiency so $20 of the petrol actually moves you and the car forward. A small car weighs 1000kg plus a driver of say 70kg. That makes you 6.5% of the weight the engine is moving. Of the $20 of petrol doing that moving, $1.30 is moving you. That's $1.30 of your $100 petrol spend.The rest is wasted as heat etc. 

As far as why electric if I already support biking over driving, for me it's about range and speed. On my last placement it was realistic to ride 15 minutes each morning, even if winter makes it a little chilly. However when I was at a school in New Brighton, it was a long haul from Bryndwr each day, around 45 minutes. I'm not the most organised person and allowing 45 minutes to ride is hard enough without the fact I love my sleep.

 Once electrified the bike will be capable of a range of 50km at speeds of up to 40km/h. This, along with the fact that 3c worth of electricity will give me about 100km of speedy goodness, will make taking the bike a much more attractive option in the aforementioned circumstances. Bulk shopping trips will also be more enjoyable with 50kg of flour trailing behind me.

Bye bye smelly car! (this refers not only to my car but also to the smelly cars I will be passing as they wait in the infamous Christchurch gridlock - at least, it seems like gridlock when I'm driving and cyclists are passing me!)

ahhhh holidays

That's right, I'm on holiday at last. Two sweet weeks of project time... and more than enough to keep me busy. Here we go...



As I write I have a fresh egg from our chickens sitting on the desk in front of me. How romantic :) Our chickens stopped laying around March-April when moulting - we used to get 3 eggs a day from the 4 of them - and recently I was advised that dogroll gives them a protein boost and restarts laying. This seems to have worked to some extent. Apparently they need 10-12 hours of light each day to lay so I have added a light on a timer to their coop - a couple of extra hours in the morning and a couple in the evening. We now have 3 of 4 laying. Today I took our neighbour to pickup wheat for our chickens and his too. Good deal of $20 for 40kg from this guy - http://www.trademe.co.nz/Members/Listings.aspx?member=1368997 - pickup Sydenham so I also saved lots of petrol after switching from a supplier in Leeston.

Here are the beds the girls have finished:

Joylon mentioned on the Quiet Place blog that he put plastic over the top of his shower. We did this sometime between last EMF and the end of summer. Super highly recommended! It recently unstuck itself from the wall and I had a couple of showers without it. Not recommended! It's so cold losing all that steam! My theory is that as you don't need the shower temp up to prevent hypothermia, you save money in the hot water heating department.

In the food department I have been going hard on the bread making for the past month or two and have now achieved delicious white and wholemeal sourdough - yum! It's so fun and I like the idea of wild yeast working their magic.
More on that later in the week including a comprehensive how to!

Today's project was ditching the fridge. These websites are totally worth a read. There's heaps out there!  http://ditchyourfridge.blogspot.com/
http://savefoodfromthefridge.blogspot.com/

Last years glasshouse is still giving us tomatoes! Who would've thought? Slow but steady :)

We're thinking of taking out everything else and making tomatoes the main crop in there, nothing else was quite as good as those and we figure the massive root system established over summer and autumn will give us bumper crops earlier than if we planted new ones in spring.

 

Finally I planted a miniature orchard of cherries a couple of weeks ago. One day whoever lives here will appreciate the literal fruits of my labour :) There had been some black plastic laid to stop weeds, then covered with gravel so it was a bit of a mission to destroy someones hard work but it's for the best!

Keep your eyes on the blog - more to come!

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

Hey all,

In case you didn’t know, plastic is graded into seven types. However, not all of them are safe for reuse. Remember the motto-reduce, reuse, recycle? Well, here’s another one- 2, 4, 5, keep yourself alive. David Suzuki’s handy guide to reusable plastics can be found here. Essentially, the idea is to reuse plastics that are safe for you, and recycle ones that are not. There is a caveat though; some recycling facilities cannot manage some types of plastic, so you should refer to the local council recycling guide to see what can or cannot be recycled. (If in doubt, I just throw it in the recycling)

Reuse comes before recycle, although reduce comes before both of them. We’ve been trying to reduce our waste, by various methods. We tried to see if we could stop taking out the rubbish for the entire EMF competition, but it’s getting perilously close to the point where we have to sneak off rubbish bags into our neighbour’s bin. 

We have also been shopping at Bin Inn, which is a bulk food/household product shop. Basically, you take your containers there, get them weighed at the counter, fill it up with whatever you need, and then the weight of the container gets subtracted from the total weight when you are ready to pay.

Another way our flat reduces material consumption (is there a pun here?) is by using jars for preserving food. The ones with the pop up lids can be used to store beans (yes, no more beans in a can!) or tomatoes or whatever you like. Hopefully Emma will elucidate everyone on the exact process, because she does all the preserving. The beans (which are all she does and all we need in terms of preserved protein) that she uses come from Bin Inn. Great Idea ™, don’t you think?  

That’s all for now, ladies and gentlemen. Remember, first reduce, then reuse, lastly recycle.

Ning