Our daily bread and vegies - UPDATED ... AGAIN!

I love that first day after work is finished for the week when I get back into the garden again. That space is where I grow too. I have a garden bench out there and I sit and think, talk to the animals, watch the chooks and generally just luxuriate in the natural wonder of it all. Oh, and sometimes I help with the gardening. ; - )

It's looking good out there now that the plants are starting to put on good growth. The silverbeet in this photo will be picked today for dinner tonight. I love the coloured stems of silverbeet (chard). Here we have rhubarb chard, which is the very dark red one, ruby chard, a lighter brighter red, the plain white stems and hidden in there are yellow stems as well.

Just at the side of the chard we're growing button squash and when I picked some for dinner last night, I noticed powdery mildew starting to grow on them. I'll have to do something about that today.

A bit further over there are cucumbers just beginning their climb to the top of a trellis, guarded at their front by a thick row of French radishes; at the side sweet capsicums (peppers) are ripening in the sun.

For dinner last night we had steamed potatoes and pumpkin dressed with parsley and butter, button squash and red onions - lightly sauteed, and brussel sprouts. That was followed by a simple rice pudding (recipe given a few days ago) with warm peaches that I preserved last summer.

I made bread rolls for lunch that we had still warm from the oven. I had fresh tomato and avocado on mine, with a cup of black tea. Delicious. The rolls were very good - crispy on the crust with light and fluffy bread inside. They were sprinkled with a little polenta. When you grow some of your own food and know how to cook, one thing is certain - you can always rustle up a decent feed.

At the end of the day, when I went out to pick our dinner from the garden, I took a couple of these bread rolls out for the chooks to eat. They enjoyed them too. No doubt Hanno will polish off the last of them for breakfast this morning.

The rest of the day was taken up with a bit of cleaning and a lot of knitting. I'm knitting some dishcloths with a new bamboo and cotton yarn. It's very strong and comes in some beautiful colours, but it's a bit fiddly to knit. I hope to do some knitting today as well but I have to start a magazine article so my day will be fashioned around getting that done.

Thank you all for dropping by and for the comments you leave. I read every single one of them. I am sometimes sent links to various sites and videos by my regular readers and I always look at them when I have time. However, I am also being sent a lot of email requests to do paid reviews, put links on my blog and generally promote a lot of commercial topics. I will never do any of that, so to all those people who drop by to promote their own product or website, save your time and try elsewhere.

LATE ADDITION - BREAD ROLLS RECIPE:

I'm making these again today to make sure of my amounts. I'm pretty sure this is what I used yesterday. I rarely use written recipes so this is just from my head. If there needs to be a change, I'll let you know later this morning.

Recipe for bread rolls in the bread machine

• 3½ cups bread flour - can be white, wholemeal, rye, grain - whatever. If you use a heavier flour you'll need to increase the amount of water used.
• 1 teaspoon salt. Please use good salt, not table salt. Even cooking salt is better than table salt.
• 1 tablespoon butter

Put all the above in your bread machine bucket.

In a teacup add and mix up:

• ¾ cup lukewarm water
• ½ tablespoon sugar
• 2 teaspoons yeast

• plus another cup of warm water - I can't tell you the exact amount of water you'll use. That will depend on your flour and the weather. Start with the 1¾ cups and you might have to add more.

Mix the ingredients in the cup and allow to stand for 5 minutes. You want your yeast to prove - it will look like this:

If the yeast doesn't froth up, it's dead and you'll have to buy new yeast. Always store your yeast in the fridge, it will keep longer. When the yeast is frothy and bubbling, add it to the dry mix, making sure all the sugar is either dissolved or added to the flour mix. Turn your machine on to the "dough" setting and let it mix the dough.

When it's finished, remove the dough and roll it into a long cigar shape - about 12 inches long. Cut into about 8 pieces for large rolls or 12 pieces for small rolls. Take each piece of dough and work it with your hands into a nice round ball. Place all the balls on a baking tray, add seeds, polenta or a criss-cross and allow to rise for about 30 minutes - depending on the temperature in your house. If you can put them in the sun they'll only take about 10 minutes to rise.

Turn on your oven so it's hot when you put the rolls in. Bread has two types of rising - one is from the yeast you use, the other is called "oven lift" - you get this when you put properly proved bread dough into a HOT oven. The heat immediately starts to lift the bread. That, my friends is what you want. Adding dough to a warm oven won't give you the same result.

Good luck with your rolls, everyone.

OOPS - ruralinspirations has just reminded me I didn't tell you about the temp for baking these rolls. As I said, put the rolls into a HOT oven (that is one that has been sitting on at least 200C for about 10 minutes). Then cook on 200C (395F) until they're golden brown and you can smell baked bread.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE...

I tested the above recipe and everything is fine. Just monitor the water yourselves as it's always a bit different. Pictured below are today's bread rolls, just out of the oven.

Happy baking everyone!