Bread making

Sherian gave me a thermomix recipe book and most of the recipes in there look easy. I have tried a couple and they worked well.

The last time I went to a thermomix demo, the demonstrator had brought bread that she had made earlier that morning. Oh my Goodness, it was good. The recipe took five ingredients and everything was thrown into the Thermo (Annie)

I am hopeless at following a recipe! One reason is that i often don't have something so I comprise and a further reason is Warren cant have a few items so again I either leave out or swap. My cooking is more the little bit of this, little bit of that, oh, there we go, add a dash of that.

Annie needs a bit more structure to work so I had the recipe and was prepared to cook to the recipe. Sounds too easy, right?

First recipe called for 1.25 cups of water or 300 gms of water, all good, I got out my measuring cup and measured 3 cups of water. Then the yeast, 7 gms or a small packet , throw that in, 20 gms of olive oil, 500 gms of flour.  Oh, SH........., not 3 CUPS of water but 300gms. Recipe writer had said she was used to using cups and spoon measurements so she had given both.

Cant waste it so I increased the flour, doubled it and a bit more. 1.25 cups by 2 equals 2,50 so had to double plus. Continued on, Double checking the recipe!

Annie takes no more than two minutes to mix, then tip it out and leave to rise for 30 minutes. I did use a BIG bowl, the mix filled it! It was to make a scroll, ended up making three scrolls, one with sultanas and cocoa, rolled and cut, filled one tray. Second one was jam roly poly and last one was cheese and corn.

Thankfully I had lots of little plastic bags and now I have a freezer drawer full on snacks, good to have one with a cuppa. I really do need to READ the recipe more than once!

Feeding the ducks

Beautiful day today and we had young grandson visiting. He asked if we could go and feed the ducks, that sounded like a good idea to me so I organized some picnic food and grabbed the bag of bread from the freezer. We don't usually eat the very end part of the bread and I keep a bag just for these bits and any other crusts for such occasions of going to feed the ducks.

Within twn kms of our house is a great lake with lots of ducks and other water birds.

This bird on the rock had no interest what so ever in bread that was thrown to and around him.

Just near the table were we sat to eat was this tree and it was very noisy as there were a couple of nests already there and they really didnt want any more with them.

Young grandson having fun throwing out bread to the ducks. There were quite a lot of families doing the same thing and the ducks were not that hungry.

Hard to think that it is the middle of winter. the sun was shining and it was a very nice day to be out and about.

The Rustic Olive

We had a busy weekend at home and hadn't been out so I suggested we go somewhere for lunch on Tuesday. Warren wanted to go the beach so our favourite place to eat at Redcliffe is The Rustic Olive, a cafe on the water front.

I like it as they bring a jug of water with the menus, not a regular practice in Australia but we had become used to that when eating out in China and I really like it. Often we stick with water with the meal.

We ordered a rustic pizza to share and then thought that maybe we should get some bread as well, seeing that we were sharing. OMGoodness the bread was almost a meal in itself, spinach cheese and ham sandwiched between two very crisp wafers of bread? It was very very nice and of course there was the pizza to come. That also was very nice and we ended up taking enough home for the next days lunch. Didn't take a photo, didn't think about it until it was almost all eaten.

Did take some photos of the waterfront when we went for a walk after our meal.  Nothing like winter in Queensland.

Dockets

Warren has a habit of putting his shopping dockets on the table. I was picking up things for the rubbish and noticed one was for fuel and was interested to see how much to fuel the jeep. Reading it I saw that it also had a loaf of bread, we were out of bread so thought wow he remembered to get bread. Later I was going to make some toast as we now had bread. I had to ask him where he put it, usually bread goes straight in the freezer but it wasn't there.

 He was a bit non- plussed as apparently he hadn't bought any, feeling like I was talking to a child, I said yes you did, its on the docket. No no no he says, just put diesel in, he looked at the docket and said that definitely he had not bought bread. Today after tennis, he dropped in and told the servo that he didn't buy bread but had been charged for it.

They checked the CC video and saw that he had not in actual fact bought bread and they gave him the money back for it, only $2.70 but wrongly charged, a win win.

Breakfast (but not at Tiffany's)

Damned adverting! Last night while watching the news, McDonald's had a series of ads about breakfast muffins for only $3. It was an early rise for me this morning and I was thinking about breakfast and my usual oats and yoghurt really didn't appeal to me, so I suggested to the man of the house a trip out for breakfast and then a walk in the park. His comment "I shouldn't put the jug on for coffee, then?"

This was breakfast, of course we bypassed the cheap sausage muffin, I had the wrap with egg and bacon and coffee and Warren went for the full meal of muffin, hash browns and coffee. Then it was off to the Centenary Lakes for a walk and to feed the ducks. There was another reason for this as well, I am in a challenge to take a photo a day and there are prompts for each day and today's prompt was "Under my feet."

This is the photo that I posted for the challenge. It is a pleasant walk and when we go, I do think to myself, "I should come more often" There are hundreds of ducks, water fowl, ibis's and we even found some geese on the upper part of the lake. It is part of a 10,000 steps walk and we probably walked about 2 kms, stopping every now and then to throw out some bread crusts. I keep any crusts in the freezer so that if we do go, then there is bread to take and feed whatever birds are around. Even though it is late April, the sun was quite hot when we were not in the shade of the trees.

 Curious geese and they preferred to take the bread from his hand.

 The only pelican that we saw, in the first photo I took, he had turned and the photo was a back view, not a good look maybe he was trying to tell me something.

One fountain and a second in the distance. The beauty of our sojourn this morning is that I have two more photos that will be used for the next couple of prompts of the photo challenge.