the perfect bread recipe

In my quest for eating better it’s hard to abstain from certain favorite foods.
A staple in my diet has always been bread. I love german bread, the crunchy crusts and the rich taste (seriously, you have to try german bread!).
As a result of my changed diet however I’m trying to stay away from gluten, lactose (often added to bread) and empty carbs as much as possible.
I had already switched to grain/seed bread but I wanted to try and see if I could find a recipe for baking a nice grain bread at home. I love baking at home and it would give me full control over the ingredients. I looked up some recipes and found a winner quickly!

I deviated very little from the original recipe but since the source is in German, here’s my translation:

• 500ml lukewarm water
• 600g flour ( I used half whole spelt flour, half normal spelt flour)
• 200g seed of your choice (I use a mix of oats, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds and flax seeds / linseed)
• 1 teaspoon sugar (can be substituted with honey or other sweeteners)
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 2 packages dry yeast (in german packages that would be enough for 1000g flour)

Dissolve yeast in the warm water with the sugar. Add the flour, seeds and salt. Mix throroughly (the dough is quite wet) and let rise for 30 minutes. Form into a bread shape or fill a loaf pan with the dough and bake at 200°C (ca. 400°F) for 45-60 minutes, until the loaf sounds hollow when tapped.
Yes, it really is that easy!

Let the bread cool before cutting and enjoy a filling homemade bread!

So why is this better than storebought bread?
a. The taste of freshly baked bread is divine
b. I used spelt flour instead of wheat flour. Spelt flour is not gluten free but it is much easier to digest than wheat for most people. I also like the taste better.
c. No additives, no added lactose
d. You get to choose the seeds you like best in your bread

The recipe resulted in quite a large bread, so I froze half of it and ate the other half within 6 days. I don’t know how long it keeps but it was fine for the week.
Ultimately I want to try making my own sourdough starter but right now this recipe feels like a great start!

 

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quiet time

I’m working on my healthy eating posts, but as they take such a long time to write, here’s a jumble of some day to day shots.

I’m already looking forward to a quiet long weekend with hopefully some first spring gardening (please make my seeds arrive by then!) and reading. Always reading.
I’ve been buying second hand books, some old childhood favorites. Just finished reading the ‘Gulla’ Series, a swedish book series set in the late 19th century. I had this down for a girls book, but reading the whole series has made me realize it covers a range of topics, most prominently poverty, resourcefulness and class distinction. The author is Martha Sandwall-Bergström. The original swedish series goes by the name ‘Kulla-Gulla’ but it seems there’s an english translation where the name Gulla has been changed to Anna (‘Anna All Alone’ is one book in the series)

Found the perfect oat cakes recipe by experimenting. Like, healthy and yummy and filling and did I mention yummy? Recipe post coming soon!

I changed up the packaging of my prints and love the new look. More photos here!

Also:

• What inspires you in your work? I talk about my photography style and inspiration as well as the challenges of running an Etsy shop in an interview on Katie’s blog: Do have a look and let me know what you think!
• It’s totally spring here already but I know most of you still have snow, so here’s 10 tech chores for snow days
• Not very practical for me since I commute by car but for any of you commuting by train, bus etc. check out these 10 ways to make it better
• Our body language shapes who we are. Wow!

exhaling

I was so determined not to get caught up in the holiday rush this year, to bake cookies every sunday, to visit christmas markets and enjoy advent.
Yeah, that didn’t happen. It was a stressful time at work and the days just rushed by in a whirlwind, leaving me feeling completely tuckered out.
Yesterday was the last day at work and I am slowly starting to exhale and relax. I’m looking forward to the next few days, spending time with friends and family, going to the cinema, taking it slow and resting.

We did manage to bake one batch of cookies during the month and since I’m restricting myself to one item of sweets or chocolate a day (more on that soon), they’ve lasted us quite a while!

I got some orders in my Etsy shop and managed to send christmas cards to my portrait customers this year, so early mornings were spent packaging and shipping.


We had a christmas party at work, which was great fun.


The theme was “The night before Christmas – Pajama party” and the costumes were such fun! I serged together a blue jersey dress really quickly (as in, I didn’t even finish the hems) using the Grainline Scout pattern and went as starry sky.

I also started knitting my first ever cardigan! Well, I took about a month to decide on the yarn and then 2 weeks to knit a test swatch (got it right the first time, thank goodness) and finally cast on yesterday.
You’ll have seen these photos on Instagram if you follow me there. Looking forward to digging out my “real” camera again in the quieter days to come.
Have a wonderful, relaxing weekend!

craft fair finds

Here the weekend has arrived again already! It doesn’t feel like the past week happened at all, at least I didn’t really register it between being home sick and then trying frantically to catch up at work. But I am getting better every day thankfully, though that cold really was very nasty!
Time to show off my purchases at last week’s craft fair, yarn and buttons and kitchen stuff!

This pan which was actually pretty hard to photograph, is a handmade from black iron / carbon steel / black steel, whatever you call it. I actually googled the material quite a while to find out its name. Anyhow, this is the material vintage pans were made of, it’s nonstick and needs to be treated like cast iron (but contrary to cast iron it’s very light), meaning seasoning it, not using any dishwashing liquid on it and keeping it dry. I still need to “burn it in” and then we will use it for pizzas and pies.

This is gorgeous handspun Wensleydale yarn. I bought two skeins and I am still deciding what to make with it. I’m thinking a triangular shawl like Amber’s beautiful one or another cowl (never seem to get tired of those!). Or maybe a nice 1930’s beret.

And, of course, new sock yarn! It’s a wool / bamboo mix and handdyed in lovely shades of steel blue with a hint of green and dark gray thrown in. It’s already on the needles 🙂

And last but not least six of these handpainted buttons went home with me as well. I have no idea what I’ll use them for yet, but no doubt I’ll think of something!

Quite a successful trip I should say!

recipe: quark pie

Last Saturday we had this delicious pie at my friend’s mom’s house and she kindly gave me the recipe. It was so yummy that I had to share it.

A note on quark: Quark is a german specialty dairy product (it also translates as curd cheese). It is like cream cheese, just fluffier and tastes a bit sour. If you can’t buy it where you live you could use any other cream cheese, though the pie’s texture might be a little stiffer then and I would recommend using less sugar. It is also pretty easy to make at home I’ve read.

Lu’s Quark Cherry Pie
1kg Quark
400g sugar
200g butter
6 eggs
1 Packet (ca. 50g) Instant Pudding Mix (or Custard Powder)
1 tsp baking powder
3 tblsp cream of wheat
juice of one lemon
canned cherries

Stir together the eggs, sugar and butter and add the custard powder and baking powder. Then stir in the cream of wheat, lemon juice and quark.
Pour off the juice from the cherries and place cherries in a casserole dish. Spoon the quark mix on top and bake at 170°C for about 70 min. (until golden brown on top).

The pie will be very soft and has to be spooned out of the dish. Enjoy!

basting and baking

This quilt will probably take me months to complete, so I might as well document every step along the way!

The backing is a thrifted vintage bed sheet. I’ve still got half of it left after cutting it apart and I love it so much, I might just hem the rest and use it as a table cloth.

A little side note on that: we use only environmentally friendly washing powder that leaves little to no scent on our laundry…it smells clean but not much else. I found that makes me very sensitive to strong scents in other people’s laundry, they give me headaches. This bedsheet was clean when I bought it but I washed it again of course and had it lying around a couple of weeks. It still smells strongly of perfumed washing powder and I hope to get rid of that eventually when washing the finished quilt. It only reminds me how long those chemical perfumes linger and lets face it, we wear those clothes and get that stuff on our skin!
Ok, enough moralizing for one morning 🙂
We also finally baked some fresh bread again from Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day.

Baking bread on a weekly basis is part of our plan to eat healthier and with such an easy method about there really is no excuse not to! Lynda did a great post on that book and its successor, Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day.
On weekdays we are often too tired to cook in the evenings so we made a white sandwich bread for breakfast and the european peasant bread (with whole wheat and rye flour) to eat with cheese and salads in the evening. I find that when using whole wheat and rye flour I need to use more yeast than the recipe calls for or the crumb will be too dense. Either the yeast is weaker or the flour is heavier over here!

The bread is only flour, yeast, water and salt, no sugar, no additives to make it last longer or taste better.
We don’t eat masses of bread between the two of us, so what we do is we let the loaves cool down completely, cut them up and freeze them. That way we can toast only as many slices as we’ll actually eat at a time and this amount of bread will last us anywhere between 1 and 2 weeks.

weekend

A special treat: freshly pressed orange juice.

The beginnings of a new quilt (I’ve missed my treadle).


The first christmas cookies.

These are wonderful and very simple: Whisk two egg whites and 125g white sugar until very stiff and set aside two tablespoons for later. Fold in 125g ground hazelnuts and form little balls on a baking sheet using two teaspoons. With a wet wooden spoon, make a dent in each ball, fill with the mix you set aside and place a whole hazelnut on top. Bake at 140-160°C for 20-25 minutes.