Daily Bread Details - Part Deaux

(Click here for Part 1.)

So you've gotten some shut-eye, shipped the kids off to the schoolbus, and now you get to greet your little creation:

Coochey-coochey-coo, isn't it adorable? It seems like they grow up overnight, doesn't it?

Time to shape that baby into the loaf you want it to be when it grows up! These steps come from The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. (I highly recommend this book!)

First stretch the dough out into a rectangle:


Then fold one side over, just past the halfway point:


and fold the other side over:


Then, starting at the top, roll the dough down about a third of the way, pushing the top edge into the dough:


(Obviously, you won't be wielding a camera and will do this with two hands.)

Repeat:


And repeat again. You end up with a nice, well, bread-shaped loaf:


Put it into your greased bread pan, cover loosely with a towel, and set in a warmish place to rise for an hour.

Now I'll show you my secret bread-baking weapon:


No, not that...behind the curtain:


The kitchen radiator! It makes a nice, warm, cozy, undrafty spot for rising bread. I can fit 4 loaf pans on that puppy! As you can see, I like flour sack towels for bread baking. (Cute, embroidered flour sack towels make bread taste even better!)

But if you don't have this secret weapon in your kitchen, just set it on top of your oven while you're preheating it.

After an hour you are ready to bake:


Preheat your oven to 450 degrees at least 30 minutes before you're ready to bake.

I always temperature check my bread loaves the first time I try a new recipe. For this loaf you want the temperature in the middle of the loaf to be between 200 and 210 degrees. In this case I baked it for 30 minutes to reach that temperature. Then slather the top of that beauty with butter. Remove from the pan and let cool completely.

Or, if it's your birthday, you slice right into that baby. A nice hunk of cheese, or some butter and honey and hot chocolate, and you've got yourself lunch.

Daily Bread Details - Part 1

This daily bread recipe is fantastically elegant in it's simplicity. I usually start it before bed and finish it when I wake up. But you could also start it in the morning and finish it after work. Whatever timing works for you so that you have 8 to 10 hours for the first rise and an additional hour for the second rise. I use my stand mixer to make the dough. A food processor would work similarly. A bread machine would work, and of course you could do it by hand. See the King Arthur website for specifics on those two methods.

I increased the original recipe so that it would fill my bread pan. So this increases the measurements as follows:

1-1/2 c. warm water
1-1/2 t. yeast
1-1/2 t. sugar
3-1/3 to 4-1/8 c. flour
(all-purpose, or half A-P and half wheat -
use the lesser amount in winter, more in spring/fall, most in summer)
2-1/4 t. kosher salt

Put 1-1/2 cups warm water in the mixing bowl. Warm enough to make a slumber party early sleeper wet her sleeping bag when you put her hand in it, but not so scalding hot that it kills the yeast. Then sprinkle 1-1/2 teaspoons yeast and 1-1/2 teaspoons sugar over the water.

This is the yeast I use - I buy a big bag of it from the local Mennonnite-owned bulk goods store (that carries our meats) and keep it in the refrigerator.

Mix for a couple of seconds, just long enough to wet the yeast.


Then sprinkle 1-1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour over the top of that. Mix for 10 or 15 seconds, until most of the flour is mixed into the water/yeast/sugar mixture:

There's still some flour clinging to the sides of the bowl. It's okay. Everything will be okay.

Then go do something else for 10 minutes. 10 minutes is just long enough to take out your contacts, wash & moisturize your face, brush & floss your teeth and quick wipe down your sink and toilet because you spent a solid 2 hours cleaning the bathroom last weekend and vowed never to let it get - TIME'S UP! Now it looks like this - a tad darker in color, a tad bubbly:

Maybe not so much in these pictures, but really in real life it does. Really!

Next add 2-1/4 teaspoons kosher salt,


and 2 cups wheat flour (I mail-ordered mine from Paul's Grains of Laurel, IA - local flour!) and an additional 1/4 cup of the unbleached all-purpose flour. Or you can use all AP flour if you wish. Whatever combination floats your boat. This time of year you'll want the total flour to come out to 3-3/4 cups. A little more in summer, a little less in winter.


Mix it on low until the flour is incorporated, and then crank that puppy up. I think I went to 4 or 6 on my KitchenAid. Mix just until it comes together into a cohesive ball of dough - it only takes a minute or two.


Place that beautiful doughball in your favorite vintage Hamilton Beach bowl - grease the bowl first! - then cover with plastic wrap. I usually let it set on top of my stove for the night because it's the least drafty place in my kitchen that's out of reach of the Big White Dog.



Now go to bed! Part 2 tomorrow...

Loaded, the back story

So I'm at work (which means I'm here at home, upstairs in my office at my work computer). My office window overlooks the creek and pasture and the road beyond that. And I'm on the phone with my boss, who lives in California. All of a sudden I let out a gasp.

Boss: "What's the matter?"

Me: "I just glanced out the window and saw Matt coming down the road with a load of giant cornstalk bales and the girls sitting way up in the air on top of the bales."

Boss: "Dads have a higher risk tolerance than moms."

When I relayed this little exchange to Matt he said, "When I let the girls ride up there I told them don't get hurt or your mother will kill me."

Meanders had a cute comment on my "Loaded" post the other day, about not going down hill with a load of those bales. I asked Matt about it and he said he only had one small hill to go down in the couple of miles between my dad's cornfield and our farm. The bales are so heavy that it wasn't really a problem as long as he went slow.

He hauled 80 of those bales home, with a heavy-duty hayrack borrowed from my Uncle Lyle. First, 6 at a time in a single layer. That went okay, so he decided to try 8 and stack 2 on top. (No more passengers at this point!) That went okay so eventually he tried 10, stacking 4 on top.

I just try to avert my eyes from all windows.



Once home of course it's time to unload. Once again they wait until I'm not looking. I didn't see it so I don't know for sure, and nobody is volunteering any information, but I think perhaps the girls got to "ride" a few bales as they were unloaded. (Shudder) Fortunately Rafe is too scared smart for that. (But apparently not smart enough to put on a coat - he's in short sleeves and the girls are bundled up in Carharts.)

Then again, it's possible they're just trying to mess with me.

Then it's just a matter of stacking, something boys big and little seem to have fun doing. He's got bale spears on both the front and back of the tractor, and carries a hay bale on the back for weight and balance while unloading and stacking the cornstalk bales with the front spears.



Click here to see the finished stash.

A few of you wanted more info on my daily bread. So now I'm off to make bread and take pictures! Details tomorrow.

Daily Bread

Thanks to a link over at Fat Guy on a Little Bike last month, I found a great daily bread recipe. I use the mixer method (since I lost the paddle to my bread machine). Very simple to mix up the dough before I go to bed and bake when I get up in the morning. No kneading!

Last week I made a loaf nearly every day. This week has been busier and I haven't done it, but hopefully I'll have a chance tomorrow night. I think I'll make 2 or 3 and freeze the extra's after rising and shaping, but before the second rise.

I made the recipe as is first, then fiddled with it the next couple of loaves. The recipe makes about a 1 pound loaf. I increased it to 1 1/2 pounds so that it would fill my Pampered Chef stoneware bread pan. I also replaced half of the flour with wheat flour. I rubbed a stick of butter over the top when it came out of the oven, resulting in a nice soft crust good for sandwiches.

Loaded

That is one hard-working little blue tractor!

Thank you to all of you that have ordered calendars already! It is so exciting for me. Your support and encouragement in this new endeavor mean so much.

I never really explained the title of my last post, "Diversifying". I think a small farm's success lies in appropriate diversification. The whole don't put your eggs in one basket thing. And what enterprises are appropriate for your farm depend on both the strengths of your particular piece of real estate and the strengths of its caretakers.

Photography and writing are two things I love to do. So diversifying our farm by publishing photos I've taken of our farm makes sense. And now that I've gotten my feet wet with the calendar, my head is swimming with ideas for future projects. I would love to hear your suggestions!

Diversifying

Every now and again someone will say to me, "You should really turn your blog into a book." I haven't the slightest idea what they mean. Just take what I've got on the website and transfer it directly into book form? Or a coffee table photo book? Or...? (Suggestions welcome here, people.)

One thing I have done the past 5 years is make a calendar for family & friends using pictures of the offspring, and give it as a Christmas gift. As I was clicking through all the pictures on my laptop looking for this year's calendar shots, it occurred to me I could also do a farm calendar this year.

So I picked off my 13 favorites from 2007, added 12 of my favorite farming + food quotes, and voila! - the first annual Sugar Creek Farm Calendar!



(Don't worry, friends & family, you're still getting the offspring version of the calendar as usual.)

I love things like calendars for Christmas gifts - it's like getting a new gift every time you turn the page to a new month! So click here to get yours, or to finish off your holiday gift buying the easy way.



I'll leave the commercial at that. Hope you all have had a filling and fulfilling Thanksgiving!

I have to share...

a little brag on our eldest daughter. Read all about it here .

The article doesn't say that out of those 3200+ auditions, only 720 are selected - 180 voices in each choir.

Matt and my mom and I attended the concert. It was so so good! I think the best testimony came from Matt, who turned to me and said, "I had no idea it was going to be like this!" Let's just say that his appreciation of this type of music has always been a little lacking. Especially for the pieces sung in French or Latin. He was duly impressed.

Madeline thoroughly enjoyed herself and her comment for the day was, "It was so awesome, because everyone was there to sing. There wasn't any messing around like in school choir."

She was up at 5 a.m. that morning. They left Osage at 6 a.m., arrived in Ames between 8 and 8:30, spent the day in rehearsals, and performed a 2-hour concert at 4 p.m. We had a celebratory dinner at Red Lobster and got home around 9:45. A long day for Madeline but one she won't soon forget!

You just never know

what each day is going to bring. In my case, I need to learn to avert my eyes from the kitchen windows. Some days I just don't want to know what's going on outside.

This particular morning, however, I looked. Do you see in the picture what I saw? Go ahead. Look. I'll wait.

The harvested cornfield in the picture is not ours. (Oh, how I wish it was, but that is another story for another day.) And yet there's a critter in that cornfield that is ours. Oops.

At first I thought it was a calf. I headed out, and as I got closer I realized...



...it's not a calf, it's...



...our boar Oliver!


You don't realize how big a boar is until you're trying (by yourself) to get him to travel in the direction you want him to go. But Ollie cooperated pretty well and soon we were back on our own ground.

I couldn't put him back in his own pen, because obviously he had broken out of it already and I was going let Matt fix it after work. I didn't want to put him near the sows, because it's not quite time to re-breed yet. If he could break out of his own pen he could probably break into one of their pens.

So I ended up putting him with the feeder calves. They got along just fine and Ollie enjoyed the day cleaning up spilled corn in their winter lot.

I think I need to put shades in the kitchen windows and keep them pulled shut!

Stockpile (or piled stocks)

80 cornstalk bales, ready for use this winter.

The feeder calves have their own diet of premium alfalfa hay and just a bit of corn. So the cornstalks will just be bedding for them (and the pigs).

The cows & bull usually get grass hay. With the drought this year we've already fed all of the hay we baled and have started having to purchase it. The price of hay - both grass and alfalfa - is way up there this year so we're going to stretch it a bit with the cows by supplementing with cornstalks.

Second harvest

Cleaning off the garden for the year is like getting a second harvest, because most of it can go to the cows or pigs. They really enjoy these "leftovers"!

Even though we don't like Swiss Chard, apparently cattle do.

Madeline had old Bully eating that Swiss Chard right out of her hand.


Notice she's showing him how to stick out his tongue.


He's a good student.


That's a good Bully.


He likes the hot pink chard, too!


What, that's it, no more?

First video!

Today I finally got around to purchasing the cable I need to hook the video camera up to my new laptop. Yer in for a whole lotta fun now! Well, depending on your definition of fun I guess. But I have plans for next summer to show you my "Pied Piper of the Chickens on Pasture" routine. Can't wait, can you?

However for my first video share we'll go with Madeline singing at this summer's 4-H Share-the-Fun event at our county fair. Pardon the bad videography. I was being a bad stage mom, trying to videotape with one hand and give her a hand signal with the other to stop clapping and pick up the microphone already. As usual, she ignored me. And as it turns out, she didn't need my suggestions. She earned a trip to the Iowa State Fair for her performance.

Are you ready for some football?

Fall equals football around here. Once afternoon chores are done it's game on.

Rafe is all about the football this year. When I gave him a task to do the other day, he replied, "But Mom, I've got stuff to do! I've got to go out and play football by myself, and then I've got to hang with Dad!" (Mom wins, of course, and the task got done before football.)


Kicking and punting are his favorite things. Must be genetic. Matt and his brother were both kickers. First...a practice kick.


Then the real deal.


Olivia, still in chore boots, joins in the game.


A miss...


And then the tackle.

In beef news, I've got 2 in the "win" column now. We took a heifer to the locker tonight. Matt guessed 1280 pounds, I said between 1225 and 1250. She was 1260, which put me within 15 pounds again!

Switching gears

Louisa

All right, all right, enough pig pictures. How about a nice heifer? Lousia is a beauty.

Sunday we took the first beef to the locker, and will continue with one each week for 6 weeks. It's always nice when the beef starts to go in. This time of year is when the cash flow crunch is heaviest, and week by week the beef sales start to alleviate that.

Whenever we take an animal to the locker we always go to the elevator first, weigh loaded, unload the animal(s) at the locker, go back to the elevator, and weigh empty. In between the two weigh-ins we each make a guess as to how much the animal will weigh.

Now I know nothing about cattle, don't know how to look at one and decide if it's "ready". Matt picked out the steer he thought was best finished - a round rump, hip pin bones not protruding too much, nice smooth cover. Matt guessed 1305 pounds, I guessed 1365. This steer weighed 1380 pounds - I was only 15 pounds off! I won't let Matt soon forget that :)

We still have a few quarters or bundles (essentially an 1/8th of a beef) available for February and March. Just holler if you want to reserve one!