Rebatching soap experiment

I am continuing to make my own soap as I have oils to use up that I bought before they became so very expensive to buy. I was able to buy Coconut Oil in bulk last year so have been making a lot of 100% Coconut Oil Soap  but I still have Rice Bran Oil to use up and a little Olive Oil so I made up a batch a couple of weeks ago but, for some reason, it was a monumental fail. So I decided to rebatch it. 

Halfway through winter

Here we are halfway through winter already. We have had a couple of really freezing days when I actually had to search for my beanie and gloves which I rarely wear but today the forecast is for a 20C day and the sun is shining. 

Wholemeal and Oats Sourdough

I have been in a bit of a rut with my sourdough baking lately. It is just so easy to stick to the same routine every week but I thought I would try something different this time using a recipe that is not too complicated for me. I had a look at some of the recipes on Gina's Home Joys blog as I had used a couple of her recipes before with success and finally settled for a variation of her Oatmeal Honey Sourdough Bread.

Another great sourdough workshop

We held our second last Simple Living Toowoomba workshop for the year today and once again Chris from Gully Grove presented a very interesting and informative sourdough workshop. Chris made her Honey and Sunflower Loaf which featured in a recent blog post.

Not quite Kimchi

Last Saturday I bought a wombok cabbage from Racheal which was picked from their Birdsong Market Garden and I remembered a tutorial Rhonda had on her blog where her daughter-in-law Sunny was using one of these cabbages to make 'Authentic Kimchi'. Sunny is Korean and she really knows how to make kimchi so I thought I would give it a go. I did read a few other blog posts about the process but in the end I was getting confused as everyone seems to make it differently and sometimes I find it is better to just stick to one recipe and tutorial.

 

More sourdough experiments

Anyone who has been reading here for a while would have noticed that I have a sourdough starter called Gertrude who is now an international traveller :-) The CEO can't eat the thick crust on the sourdough I make so I was interested to see a Soft Sourdough Loaf come up in my Pinterest feed a while ago and pinned it for future reference. I had a look at Home Joys blog and found some other loaves there that looked easy enough for me to make and I wondered how the braided Soft Rye Sourdough Bread  I saw on that page was made.

Sourdough Challenge

Mrs.Meagre from Meagre Makes More is currently holding a sourdough challenge on The Home Makers Forum and some members are learning how to make their own sourdough starter which I also did during her challenge last year and, after much trial and error and patience on her part, finally  ended up with my Gertrude.

Crofton Terracotta Roaster

Goat's Milk Soap with Plantain Infused Oil and Pink Clay

After an extremely stressful week there was nothing for it but to make a batch of soap. I mean how else do you destress :-) A while back my friend Barb gave me some dried plantain as I wanted to see if her plant was the same as what I thought we had growing here and it was. So I infused it in olive oil and was going to use it to make a salve but decided not to as I didn't think I would use it so had a look online to see if it could be used in soap. However, every result that came up was for a salve so I decided to go ahead and make soap with it anyway and see how it turned out. I also wanted to use goat's milk and pink clay in this experiment.

Some unexpected finds

The last couple of days we have had a reprieve from the heatwave conditions which will return tomorrow. Temperatures of 35/36C are forecast until Sunday here but it will be worse in the west as usual. As it was cool enough to take a leisurely walk around what used to be the garden and is now a mass of weeds I went 'down the back' to check out the fig trees and then remembered that the CEO had fenced off a small area from the chooks and that there were cherry tomatoes growing there. I noticed some plants growing there beside them which I didn't recognise and was going to pull them out as I thought they may have been weeds but it is just as well I didn't as they actually were Rosella plants. I knew he had bought a plant a while back but had no idea where it disappeared to and just presumed it had died from lack of water. Not so.... the bushes are covered in Rosellas.

A sourdough workshop to end the year

Today we had our last Simple Living Toowoomba workshop for 2016 and it was a very informative morning which I am sure was enjoyed by the 30+ people who attended. Chris from Gully Grove very capably presented a much anticipated sourdough workshop.

Warming up Gertrude

The weather here has been rather cold most days with a couple of T shirt days thrown in just to remind us that summer will be here before we know it and then we will probably be complaining about the heat instead of the cold. LOL! However, Gertrude my sourdough starter, isn't that fond of the cold days after she is taken out of the fridge, so I have been experimenting with ways to warm her up to make her happy and bubbly once again.

 

Underneath the windmills

I have been wanting to go to the Farmers Market at the new venue underneath the windmills at the Cobb and Co Museum since it moved from the showgrounds... so today was the day. After our much warmer than usual autumn it was back to our typical weather today and was cold and windy which was a bit of a shock and I  had to scramble to dig out some warm clothes which were packed away. My friend and I bought some veggies before heading to the coffee shop to warm up. A forum was held before the market finished about the current dairy farmers' crisis  . There is some info about that on 4 Real Milk. It is amazing to see consumers getting behind the dairy farmers by not buying the $1 a litre milk when you visit the supermarket. Anyway back to the market.

A Fortuitous Mistake

Sometimes we make mistakes that turn out to be a really good learning curve and I made one of them inadvertently this week when I was getting ready to bake some sourdough loaves. I ALWAYS add the ingredients in the order given in Celia's Sourdough White Sandwich Loaf (although I have been adding Atta wholemeal flour instead of all the OO flour in the recipe to add more fibre) but this time I was keen to add 1/4 cup sunflower seeds, 1/4 cup psyllium and 1/4 cup pumpkin seeds which Chris had added in her 3 Seed Sourdough Bread tutorial although I didn't have any linseed on hand so used psyllium instead. However, after I had added all the ingredients I saw a bowl of starter sitting on the bench and thought that I must have forgotten to add it as the first ingredient so added that last. Then I looked around for the leftover starter I always have and which I usually put in the fridge straight after I weigh out the required 200g. It was nowhere to be found and then it dawned on me that I had added ALL the starter I had been feeding. Was this going to be a disaster? I had no idea.

Five sleeps to go

Well, there are only five sleeps before I head up to the North West of the state to visit my grandchildren and celebrate the sixth birthday of one of my granddaughters.  Hers is the only birthday I am normally there for as the others are in the hotter months and this Nanna just can't cope with the 40C+  temperatures. As most ladies would know there are a few things to do before leaving the nest for 10 days.

Waking up Gertrude ~ my sourdough starter

A few months ago I read on Simply Joolz about how Joolz had received some dried sourdough starter from a starter called Priscilla which is used by Celia from Fig Jam and Lime Cordial to make the delicious looking sourdough creations on her blog. At the same time, one of our Down to Earth Simple Living Forum members was starting a thread on how to make our own sourdough starter, so I bit the bullet and joined in and, after asking a lot of questions, I finally ended up with a viable starter which I called Gertrude.

Cooking sourdough in a slow cooker

Well, it has been hot, hot, hot for the last couple of days. I mean 36C may not seem hot to someone from Perth, Adelaide and definitely Mt.Isa where the 'normal' summer temperature is 40C or upwards but it is definitely hot for us in our supposedly cool temperature climate. As it was quite mild last week when I took Gertrude, my sourdough starter, out of the fridge to wake her up and she wasn't happy and didn't co-operate until a couple of days later when she was ready to bake, I thought I would wake her up during a heatwave to see what happened. Well, she woke up in a hurry and was ready for baking in no time. The only problem was it was too hot to turn the oven on in 36C heat!

The Rise and Fall of Gertrude the Sourdough Starter

Have you ever made sourdough? I made my first loaf last week and now I know why it is so expensive to buy. It takes forever to make but it is a very interesting process and after a lot of trial and error and flour flying around the kitchen, I created my first sourdough starter ~ Gertrude!