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Archive for 2011|Yearly archive page

Today is brought to you by the letter B(aked goods)

In Hand-made life on December 28, 2011 at 06:18

<Mmmm Bread White Whole Wheat Bread

Vanilla Cranberry Rye Scones Vanilla Cranberry Scones with Whole Wheat and Rye Flour.

I also made some yummy granola with raisins, dried cranberries, almonds, cashews, and sunflower seeds. Seasoned with cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger. Yum! (sorry no photo)

Uber NerdHip

In photos on December 26, 2011 at 05:27
If Ben were a Hipster by Quinnwick
If Ben were a Hipster, a photo by Quinnwick on Flickr.

I found this photo in one of my photo stashing accounts that id forgotten about. Look its what Ben would look like if he was a hipster! So cute.

Voisilmäpulla

In finland, Hand-made life on December 16, 2011 at 23:16
Voisilmäpulla by Quinnwick
Voisilmäpulla, a photo by Quinnwick on Flickr.

Sometimes i get homesick for places i have lived. There were things i hated about Finland, but when i remember.. i remember the friends i made (and miss), and the things i loved. And i loved voisilmäpulla. “Butter eyed buns” They are sweet buns spiced with cardamom. You poke a hole in the middle stick a cube of butter in and cover with sugar. They are lovely indeed. This was my first try and i think they turned out nice enough. But next time ill add more sugar.

 

Bike run grain mill!

In Grain mill, Hand-made life on December 16, 2011 at 02:04
DSCF3002 2 by Quinnwick
DSCF3002 2, a photo by Quinnwick on Flickr.

It works finally. It took longer than planned and it was harder than i hopped. I admit that i caved in today and bought flour form the store. Then i came home and was more determined than ever to get it working. Its not perfect but it works, and thats what matters. I think in order to improve the smoothness i need to get a few parts from the store. The trouble is that i’m not quite sure what they are called. One day ill figure it out.. maybe. YAY BIKE POWER!

What does one do with 10lbs of mushrooms?

In Hand-made life on December 7, 2011 at 05:10

So before you ask… the bread kind of sucked. The texture was very much improved by the finely ground flour, and it turns out the old yeast was in fact too old and new yeast worked much better. But the bread still tasted kind of blah. I think i don’t like hard white wheat. I will go back to hard red wheat, and rye. But i wont give up.

You know how they say you shouldn’t go grocery shopping when you are hungry? Well you really shouldn’t go to costco when you are hungry. On sunday we walked out with a 10lbs box of mushrooms.
mushrooms!

So what does one do with 10lbs of mushrooms you ask? Well you make a lot of ummm.. cooked mushrooms?
mushrooms in a dutch oven

I spent a lot of monday making cream of mushroom soup. And mushroom broth. And mushroom spread. And im still trying to figure out what to do with the last 2lbs. The cream of mushroom soup turned out  quite nicely.. but i am already sick of mushrooms.

Hand-made country living… in the city

In Grain mill, Hand-made life on December 5, 2011 at 04:43
So i finally did it.
I have this sense that the world is changing. I know i’m not the only one, but the world is changing, and some things we have become dependent on wont be as readily available as they used to be. A few years ago i told myself i was going to start learning how to do things by hand to assure myself that if things got tough i would still be okay.  I already knew how to knit, and i can manage sewing by hand and using a machine. (Well, i can make pieces of fabric stick together in a specific form.. just don’t look on the inside to see how i did it.) I can bind books by hand, and i am usually pretty good with modifying things to serve the purpose that i need. I love acquiring  new skills. Im that person that gets so excited about learning a new skill that i go out and buy anything and everything i could possibly use possibly even before learning the basic building blocks required to do anything.
I took a woodworking class 2 years ago to learn the basic blocks on how to construct things. I found the class very rewarding but slow. By the end of the course i had built a tool box. It is a lovely tool box, but i wanted to build a dresser full of tiny drawers to store my craft things in. I was excited about the idea of building things, but it wasn’t possible for me to buy all of the machines that we used in class. And i can’t saw through a 2×4 with a hand saw to save my life. So i gave up on wood working. This was the first time id ever given up on a new crafty skill ( unless you count crocheting, which i don’t ).  I decided that i had made a leap too far from my skill set, so i went back tot he drawing board.. or rather, i went back to the kitchen.
Already an enthusiastic baker of cupcakes and cookies i decided to try a go at bread. I borrowed bread book from the library, bought some flour, and had a go. The first batch of bread was edible. It was tasty. But it was also dense. Most of the books i had found required a mixer with a dough hook, and i only had my hands. It frustrated me a little as i knew for a fact that bread was made before there were machines to mix dough. But with no hand kneading instructions ( or experience) i had no way of knowing what was good enough. I made more bread, with different books and the next loaf was wonderful. It was exactly how i thought bread should be. It was perfect in every way. It was also made with the whitest cheapest flour money could by. It was delicious with butter and jam, but nutritionally blank.  I started buying more and more whole grain flour, and the bread tasted even better. I started to search for locally grown and milled organic flours and was overwhelmed by the prices. There was just no way i could justify paying that much even though i knew it would be better in every sense of the word. Better for us, better for the environment, and better for the farmers who grew the grains.
I had heard that you could buy whole grains and mill them yourself at home. I did some research on grain farms in washington, and also some on grain mills. There are a ton out there. I fell in love with the Country Living Grain Mill. I began to dream of my (future) country kitchen complete with the hand cranked mill with the hopper overflowing with organic local grains… with the smells of home baked bread filling the air, freshly baked pies on the windowsill cooling, and chickens  running around the yard just outside the window.  But the mill was $350. So i continued to make bread, and cookies, and cupcakes with cheap inferior flour grown and milled in some far off place. They were still so tasty, but i kind of felt guilty.
In september i started down the slippery slope. I bought 4 baby chicks. I worked through their stinky poopness by reminding myself of the wonderful lush eggs they would give us one day. We moved into a rental house in november, and suddenly slightly depressed and flush with cash left over from our failed attempts at purchasing a house i decided the chickens would get a lovely new coop, and i would be buying a really expensive grain mill.  I ordered some grains from Blue Bird Grain Farm.
The mill arrived in the mail, and i quickly opened the box and oohed and ahhed at my new toy. The mill arrived before the grain, but i had some farro in the kitchen so i grabbed some of that and  had ben hold the mill tightly to a table so i could grind some. It was not attached firmly in any way but i was still surprised at how .. easy isnt the right word. It wasnt easy, but i had expected it to be harder.  It took a few more days to get it mounted.
country living grain mill by Quinnwick
I spent a lot of time playing with the grinder once we did mount it and, made the first loaf of bread the next day. It did not turn out as yummy as i thought it would. There are a few things that went wrong and a few things that could be the cause. The dough took forever to rise. I think my yeast might be too old. The dough did not get to that window pane test i read so much about. This could be because i am using whole grain flour, or it could be because i didn’t knead the dough enough. The bread is dense. This could be because i did not let the dough rise enough ( see yeast problem) or it could be because the flour is not fine enough. We got new yeast. and yesterday we set out to grind the finest flour the grain can mill. It took us an hour to grind 434 grams ( aprox 3 cups and something) of very fine flour. That time includes rest time, weighing time, swearing time, and laughing at each other. Total actual work time was probably like 30 mins. We mounted the mill onto a work island, but we cant attach the work island to the floor or the wall, so its not as stable as it needs to be. This means the table moves around and we have to split energies to grinding and holding the table in place. Its hard work. Its a lot harder than my country life dream vision told me it would be. But unlike the wood working fiasco i am determined to make this work. I am currently making bread with the brand new yeast, and the finely ground flour from last night. It has been pre fermented per the recipe and it better be the best tasting bread i have ever had or i just might cry.
I believe that it will work out, but i also know that i cant keep up the arm power required to finely grind whole grain flour for a “perfect” loaf of bread. Our next project will be trying to figure out how to hook the grain mill up to a bike. I admit that i have flabby weak baby arms, but i have calfs and thighs of steel!

There’s no place like home?

In Uncategorized on November 11, 2011 at 05:28

After days and days of looking we managed to find a house to rent that would allow me to keep the chickens. It took us two days but we managed to move all of our things. We still are not fully unpacked but its nice to finally have a place to settle into. I had been living out of boxes since mid may when we started preparing to buy a house. We kept getting word that the process was going to be finished soon so i kept living out of boxes in anticipation of the big move. The place we found to rent is much larger than the house we were trying to buy. I was worried that there would be too much empty space. But as it turns out, we have a lot of stuff. I appear to have a thrift store addiction, and more specifically a kitchen ware addiction. In all those boxes there was enough kitchen stuff to fill about three kitchens. Luckily for me i have two kitchens, one cooking kitchen and one craft kitchen. Lots of soap making will happen in the craft kitchen as soon as i finish unpacking.

The New Cast.

In chickens, family, thoughts on November 1, 2011 at 17:00

I used to write here a lot. But then life got a bit more complicated and time got a bit too short and then i realized id forgotten to post about what was happening. And so you no longer know the full cast of players.

Almost a year ago you met Ben. Ben is a music nerd. He is very sweet and caring, but memory is to his brain as water is to a sieve. Oh, and he has the polar opposite of fashion sense. I’d like to blame this on his inability to distinguish the color blue from purple or shades of green, but then i would just be lying to myself. But lucky for us both, my taste in fashion is also questionable, as is my taste in friends. Somehow we work, and while there has been no official ceremony or legal documents, for all intents and purposes we are married.

With Ben comes one 13 year old son, Armand. Armand is a free spirit. He loves animals. He likes to bounce on trampolines, read books, watch tv. He loves school, and is obsessed with using the paper shredder. Armand is also autistic, and he can not talk. Life with Armand is difficult at times. I’d like to say that he means well, but the truth is that i don’t really know. I do know that his brain doesn’t work the way that my brain does. We are often both at a loss with understanding the other. But we try.

Then there is me of course. I mean well but i can become quite obsessed with the idea of something and then it takes me a while to amend my thinking, motivations, and actions to something else. But i usually get what i want eventually. Right now i am pretty determined to become more self sufficient. The urban farm i’m planing in my head is off to a start.

In mid September i got a peeping box in the mail. Inside there were 4 cute little chicks. I had set out to get chicks that all were different but in the end i ended up getting 3 that looked very similar and one that looks drastically different. I named her Granger. Granger is a Speckled Sussex. She is my favorite. She is very friendly. But she also insist on scratching everything until it is a mangled mess. This would be fine normally but she keeps filling the water with wood shavings or news paper.But we cope. Hilly is a Plymouth Barred Rock. She is ok with people, but isn’t nearly as friendly as Granger, though she isn’t anywhere near as messy. I also have an Austrolorp named Erwin. She started out being very skeptical of people, but the other day she flew over and sat in my lap. Since then she has been more open to allowing me to pick her up. And last we have Tilling. Tilling is a Silver Cuckoo Maran. She followed Erwin’s lead and doesn’t enjoy being picked up so much. The chickens are still young. 7 weeks at the moment. They wont start lay eggs until february or march. Right now i’m just hoping none of them is a rooster, but knowing my luck if anyone is.. its probably Granger.

I promise, this time i’ll stay.

In family, thoughts on November 1, 2011 at 02:58

I thought i would have very exciting news to post about. I thought i was going to have Very exciting news to post about at the end of June. And then i thought for sure by the end of July. But then August came and went, then September. By the middle of October it was becoming more clear that the news i would be posting about would not be so much exciting as sad and frustrating.

Ben and I worked for a year to fix up his old house and sell it. Our intention was to buy a new house just north of seattle where i could grow food, raise chickens, have a tiny urban farm and eventually start crafting things to sell. We had this whole plan to start our life together. Better school for Armand, much shorter commute for Ben to work a nice (but small) bit of land to grow food and become more self sufficient. We sold the house with many complications but it sold. We saved a ton of money (not really a ton but a lot for us especially in such a short time). It was going to be wonderful. But then things went horribly wrong again. Due to a mixup in bank paperwork, miscommunication, and possibly blatant negligence on the part of a bank concerning the sell of the previous house we found out we would not be allowed to buy a house. After 6 months of waiting and doing everything we were told or asked to do we found out that due to a bank error we were not eligible for a loan for the next several years. To say that we were devastated, that I was devastated would not begin to express the despair i felt (am feeling). Suddenly all that i had built up in my head was crashing down around me.

Where would the chickens go? Can i even keep the chickens? Can we afford to rent a house? Would i be allowed to grow food at a rental house? IS there even a house we can rent in a neighborhood with good schools?!?!

Its been a very stressful year. And an even more stressful week. We are putting the pieces back together, we will make it work. I decided i am not willing to give up the chickens. Nor the desire to try and grow our food. Im still going to try and craft things to sell. I was about to give up, lay down, and surrender. But then someone said something to me about how if they couldn’t get this one thing that they weren’t going to even bother trying to figure out how to do the rest of what it was they wanted to do. And i found myself thinking “well that’s stupid” And then i realized that that is what i was being too.. stupid. Yes, not getting the house is a huge setback. And YES, not being able to buy any house for the foreseeable future is a colossal setback, but we can make it work. I think… We can make it work, right?

…and then i remembered.

In thoughts on June 28, 2011 at 05:52

Its been nearly a year since i posted anything here. I have to admit that my life has been so busy that i forgot i even had a blog. Things are still hectic, but the calm is in sight.. well at least the more predictable hectic is near. I shall return soon with adventures galore… Stay Tuned!

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