Breakfast Muffins

Not something quite new....but very tasty! With the early spring glut of eggs from all our feathered friends we are having fun creating new twists on good food....here is another favourite.

Rebel Breakfast Muffins

Ingredients:

Spring onion, mushrooms & red nnion chopped fine (or anything you have)

Cheese 1 cup grated (smoked or strong goat cheese is lovely)

Fresh coriander, parsley, basil etc. diced

Finely chopped sea weed flakes

Bonita Tuna or other fish – 1 cup flaked (optional) 

Eggs 6 to 12 beaten with 2 tbsp milk, black pepper & sea salt to taste

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 200C

Grease your muffin tin – best to not use papers, they stick!

Sauté the veg lightly in olive oil for 5 to 7 minutes, then add the vegetables along with cheese, tuna etc. into a large mixing bowl, pour beaten egg mixture over top – then lightly stir by hand to blend. Place muffin pan on the center rack of preheated oven - bake for 22-27 minutes or until muffins are golden to light brown (they will puff up). 

Let muffins cool for a few minutes before removing from the muffin pan – then turn out onto a board or plate to cool down a bit before eating. Can be stored in the fridge for a couple days – seem to freeze ok, but nicest when fresh with a piece sourdough toast......

Rebel Breakfast Muffins 

Father Christmas Cookies….

Vanilla & Butter Cookies (Father Christmas Cookies)

Christmas to me has become all about the so many things I can do with my children (and should be doing more of)…because I am often rushing around and not taking as much time as I could do at other times. 

I have a singular point of view when it comes to my kids as well – I want them to grow up knowing things….how to do things, make things, create the life, food, home and work they would most like to do.

How to follow their dreams and listen to their hearts as they walk through a better world we have worked so hard to create on their behalf. Because, well, I have long felt as if I was misinformed (or uninformed) and certainly ill prepared with life as I have come to know it.

With this in mind (nothing small around here!!! LOL), I wanted to bake some treats together with them this week for our Solstice and Christmas celebrations (I know, it’s a big cookie to bite off!).

We decided on some sort of butter cookie….well, it had butter in it (lol) and flour, almonds and then the greatest flavour of the season – homemade vanilla extract. I make mine in a large bottle of bourbon – using 8 or 10 vanilla bean pods as well as some scraped out vanilla beans.

These sit for several weeks and then months until you can’t walk by the bottle without smelling wafts of vanilla perfuming the air (available in the market stall on occasion)….lovely!

So, these are butter and vanilla cookies, right? 

Back to the story or recipe….which is really a tale of how to create something magical from ingredients that seem rather ordinary on their own.

To make these cookies we used:

500 g flour (whole wheat/strong white ½ and ½)

250 g raw cane sugar

380 g butter (soft)

125 g ground almonds

 2 – 3 tablespoons  Bourbon vanilla

¼ teaspoon sea salt

dark chocolate (melted in double boiler)

imagination!

Blend the butter and then slowly add the sugar, almonds, flour, salt and finally vanilla – keep mixing until soft and crumbly. Add extra vanilla if this seems too dry. You should be able to squeeze the mixture together into a soft dough.

Onto a floured board or baking paper, knead some of the dough  and then roll it flat…let the children take over with cookie cutters, shapes and fingers to make the cookies into whatever shape they need to create.

At this time of the year we all like stars, ginger bread men, hearts and trees. Once you have enough shapes to cover a large baking sheet – place them onto parchment paper and into an oven set at 180C or so for 10 to 12 minutes.

Watch them closely because they will brown quickly. 

Once done and out of the oven, cool slightly then remove with a palette knife onto a cooking rack. When completely cool, dip in the melted chocolate and decorate with some coloured bits from the organic shop….

They taste as good as they look! We like to make different sized star shapes and stick them together using dark chocolate in the centre….we refer to these as Father Christmas cookies here, because these are the ones we leave out for him on Christmas Eve.

Happy Holidays!

April

Father Christmas Cookies

An Intuitive Bread Baking Lesson....

Ok….I’m back!! LOL

It’s been a long summer and I have done quite a bit of cooking, baking and creating in the kitchen….and I’ve learned quite a bit – being busy means needing to find shortcuts but also something else, that is perhaps far more important.

I don’t really ‘like’ to follow recipes! But let me clarify that a bit better here….I love looking at the ingredients list and deciding if I can make something or other. I enjoy the final product and of course the process in between.

But, being a ‘spiritual’ foodie and interested in this inner connection we should have with our foods – certainly the ones we grow and create ourselves – I am far more interested in putting things together until they ‘feel’ right.

Perhaps the best way to explain this is with my breads….I have long been known to be able to whip up a quick batch of bread and have it come out tasting absolutely fabulous. To be honest….it often amazes me! LOL

Because I really don’t ‘think’ about any recipe…..I just put things together (in this case, flour, water, baking soda or sourdough) and see what happens. It really is quite an intuitive process – but this also means each and every dish may turn our differently.

So….for today’s lesson! LOL An Intuitive Bread Baking Class

Get a bowl – deep and preferably stoneware, a wooden spoon and some water. Take your sourdough starter culture out of the fridge and let it sit for an hour at room temperature.

Next get some flours out of the cupboards and see what you have – I like to mix them a bit especially for sourdough because it is nice if it rises and is soft on the inside – ie. It’s not a brick!

Today I used strong white bread flour, malted grain flour (whole grains) and of course rye for feeding my sourdough starter. I like the malted flour because it contains several dark flours and is made with fermented grains – so the goodness is already present before we even begin.

Into the bowl I pour flour – until the bowl is about ½ to ¾ full. Often about an equal portion of each of the strong white flour and the malted but sometimes a little more white to make a softer bread. Don't measure anything - just fill the bowl to a little more then 1/2 full.

Next, I spoon out my sourdough starter, enough to make at least ½ cup and upwards to 1 full cup if I am trying to keep these sourdough starters freshened. Then I always replenish my starters with 2 -3 tablespoons of rye flour and ½ the amount of water before anything else.

Once the starters are dealt with I can move onto mixing the bread. Which is simple – I pour in enough water to make a doughy substance that is not wet and not dry. Each time this might take a little more or less water. And yes, I use cold water (or whey if I am making cheese that day). 

Then I let nature take it’s course and the  sourdough sponge is placed somewhere warm to rise for the next 18 to 24 hours or so. Again, the length of rising time all depends on the heat in the house, the time I have, the type of bread I want, how active the culture is that day and so on.  

Then I knead it down, add more flour and work with the dough until it is soft and silky. Usually about 10 to 15 minutes or so. Then, back into the bowl for another rise (usually 4 to 6 hours) until it is ready to be kneaded again and shaped for the bread tins.

I bake my breads at 250C for 15 minutes, then turn down the oven to 200C for 20 minutes or so. This seems to work out best (sourdough doesn't rise for me in a fan oven). But each oven is different - so you have to play around with this. 

Is this a recipe? Perhaps or perhaps not…..to be honest when I look at the complicated list of details for making sourdough bread that are on the internet and in the recipe books – my eyes glaze over.

It’s just not that complicated. And neither is life!

April

Sourdough dough after 2 rises....ready to be shaped into loaves

All We Need Is....Bread!

I haven’t been doing much in the way of cooking these days…I’ve been baking bread. A little bit obsessive I know – but with good reason I might add – I have been perfecting my wild yeast culture as well as my sourdough culture…

And it is pretty well – perfect! I just love the taste of the bread but more then that I really like the ‘feel’ of it when I am working with it – kneading it, the pulling and stretching as well as the mixing.

It just doesn’t compare to how bread feels when I have used commercial yeast. This feeling is the first thing I noticed about the dough when I first mixed it – it just felt so different in my hands.

Wild yeast gives the bread a softness and a lightness not found anywhere else and I just know it must also impart far more flavour (it tastes so good!) and along with that the vitamins and minerals that come from fermented grains.

This week I have been playing around with the culture – using different types of flours as well as varying the length of time I have let the dough rise (and rise again). Mostly I have treated it a bit like a sourdough giving it lots of time to develop.

As of right now I have 3 different breads on the go – one in the oven while the other two are at different stages of fermentation. Each one is completely unique in it’s flavour and texture when done but so delicious.

Who’d of thought that bread could be this easy to make, yeast this easy to grow and the taste so superior? And I couldn’t be happier! LOL

 April

Wild Yeast Bread...Yumm!!

Oh. My. God! This is my masterpiece!!! LOL

Well, let me tell you a story….as part of a homeschool experiment, my son and I decided we would try our hand at growing some wild yeast. Apparently you have to capture the little wee beasties….

So here is what we did.

I took a jar of warmish water – to this I added a couple of tablespoons of my own raw honey. Then to create a bit of acid for the yeast to feed off of, I also added some of my own homemade Apple Cider Vinegar (it tastes so good!).

This was all stirred together until the honey was completely diffused throughout the entire water. Lastly I got a piece of rhubarb from the garden, chopped it up and this was also placed into the water (it’s supposed to have some fruit).

The jar was covered with a piece of cheese cloth so it could breathe...

Every day for a week or two – we gently stirred this concoction and watched it carefully. I was checking for any mold growth or something unusual as well. If mold had started to grow, it would kill any wild yeasts….

Finally – there started to form some frothy substance on the top of the jar. I tasted it, and it was wild yeast! This week I was trying to decide what to do with this (it’s not very much) so I poured it into a bowl and made bread with it.

It is quite possibly the best bread I have ever made in my entire life. Seriously. And for the first time in over 2 months, my bread rose as it baked – all from wild yeast I had grown myself in my own kitchen.

Blooming marvelous!

April

Wild Yeast Bread 

Living Bread - More Thoughts on Sourdough

Still on the bread theme here – but learning lots as I go and having some fun in the process. Every day I have been working on making my own sourdough – and by that I mean getting to know my starter, how it reacts with different flours as well as what it can do.

So far, I am consistently baking a great tasting loaf with the best crust I have ever tasted for a bread. The taste is crunchy, sweet and sort of like it has been fried in butter…I must admit, I never thought a sourdough bread would taste this good!

Inside, the bread itself is not overly sour – I don’t let it rise for hours and hours. Usually my bread is reaching it’s peak at about 4 – 6 hours or so. I have been reading how some people let the bread rise (the first time) for about 18 hours or so.

I will probably try that to see what difference it might make with the taste, texture and result of the bread. Right now I am really enjoying this process of learning, experimenting and seeing where it all takes me.

Either way – it is still not rising in the oven as much as I would like it to. So I have been changing flours around to see if that makes a difference. Usually I do all of my baking with organic whole grain spelt (and have for years)…using different flours such as organic wheat certainly adds a new dimension to baking for me.

And we are enjoying all of this homemade bread – well, our bread has always been homemade, but now we have different tastes, flavours and textures for each meal. One thing about my sourdough, and perhaps everyone else’s – the taste changes each time you bake with it….

The bread has become a dynamic, living part of our meals. Amazing! 

April

Sourdough Olive bread made with organic whole grain spelt flour