Good for the Soul

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Posted on 22 June 2016 by SJPONeill

So far this winter has been more wet than cold…three winter’s ago, we had already had some serious snow by now…

This is a time when root vegetables, carrots, potatoes, parsnip, kumara, etc, are seasonal and thus cheap at the moment. I’ve been investing heavily in freezable storage containers to store the vegetable largesse as soup…

I scored half a large bag of potatoes that survived the ‘Kune Carrot Carnival a couple of weeks ago and scored the net for a variety of tasty light things to do with potato. There are surprisingly few variations on the theme of potatoes, less than consume large quantities of the target vegetable….

Although not a big consumer, this recipe combined potato with chicken and cheese. Like most soups, it is simple and quick to make.

Ingredients

100 grams of butter (probably should have used coconut oil but didn’t think of that at the time)
1 onion diced
3 carrots diced
3 spring onions (the recipe calls for celery but I’ve gone off that for now)
1/3 cup of flour
2 potatoes diced
2 cups of coconut milk (the recipe calls for cow but I don’t have that in the fridge anymore apart from occasional small quantities for guest brews)
1 teaspoon of black sea salt (yes, you could be boring and just use normal salt but I’m trying to stay away from processed foods: if it’s white, it’s bad)
3 cups of chicken stock
1 decent size organic chicken breast (after the Hot Doc’s warning about the growth additives that go into commercial chicken, I avoid it now) diced
1 1/2 cups of grated cheddar/Colby/tasty cheese
Fresh parsley and or coriander, finely chopped

Directions

Melt the butter in the pan
Add the onions, carrots and spring online and cook for 3-4 minutes
Sprinkle the flour over the vegetables and stir it in.
Add the coconut milk, chicken stock, potatoes and chicken.
Bring to the boil and simmer for 12-15 minutes.
Slowly add and stir in the cheese until it has all blended into the soup.

Sprinkle with the parsley and coriander. Serve with stick bread sliced longways, or toasted jalapeño cornbread

I’ll be making this again, for sure, not only is it tasty as and filling. I’ve already had a few requests for it and one can’t ignore one’s fan base. Changes I would make apart from those listed above? Probably only to add a diced parsnip: I forgot I have a bag of them in the pantry: it’s sweetness will go well with the chicken and cheese flavours…

Natural | The Daily Post

Posted on 22 June 2016 by SJPONeill

Write a new post in response to today’s one-word prompt: natural.

Source: Natural | The Daily Post

My first thought for this prompt, since I have now apparently joined the ranks of the indoor beanie-wearers, was to simple post a shot of me and my beanie. I must admit that, even though it has only been a week or so, wearing the beanie inside feels so natural that I feel a little lost without it – as I do at the moment after I leaving it at work last night, still plugged into the USB charger…

I’m subscribed – who isn’t? – to a range of forums and sites that have – or had at some point – some fleeting interest to me. Hardy’s is a chain of health food shops and my purchase of flax seed, coconut oil and natural antallergen caps found me subscribed to their blog. Most of the time, I barely scan these things and rarely click on any of the links but Hardy’s caught me in a moment of weakness.

This post is better written than much similar fare and it’s content struck a chord. If you’ve been following my green journey, you’ll be aware that my life has taken a turn for the better following a friend’s chance comment last year. As cynical as I might be about the ‘health’ industry, I can not deny the positive effects on me by reducing the quantity of processed food and sugar in my daily diet.

Of the three changes that the article recommends, I am already sold on the benefits of reducing sugar. It’s not hard and doesn’t require much more than a little thought: sacrifices are minimal and there are still sweets to be had: they just rely less on processed sugar. Occasionally, I miss having instantly accessible munchies in the pantry – it’s been over six months since I last knocked back a big bags of crisps – but an apple or orange fills the same gap and it’s not hard – just needs a little forethought – to bake some healthy cookies…

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…although growing external demand often means that there are none left for me…

Brain exercise is an area where I have been negligent…with a lot of other things going on the last couple of years, I have not been as intellectually active as I once was. As much as I love the people side of my job, it does lack on the intellectual front and I am starting to yearn for the same cerebral workouts that distinguished my Army and Air Force roles I don’t want to go back…I just miss the mental workouts…

I know I’ve said it before but one way of taking the grey matter for a run is blogging and if the good people at WordPress are happy to spam my inbox with prompts and number of times a day, that I should be taking some of those ideas and converting them into coherent thoughts and tap them out…I just have to force myself back into the habit..

The final change relates to getting enough sleep. I think that this may be a little chicken and egg, for me anyway. Since starting my green journey, I have been sleeping a lot better but not a lot longer. If I go to sleep before eleven o’clock, I’ll wake around four or five and stay awake, only starting to doze off thirty seconds before the alarm goes off…

Tips for good sleep…?

Make the bed properly…a mussy bed and slip-slidey covers are not conducive to restful sleep.

In winter, crank the ‘lectric blanket: easing between hot sheets is a pleasure I anticipate every night – although Louie has now worked out which beds are warm, which is why the ‘kids’ are now banned form upstairs after lights out.

Build a regular sleep routine. Do one thing, the same thing each night so that your mind learns this as a sleep trigger. For me, it’s to read a little each night before I kill the light; for others it might be a hot chocolate or light coffee before nigh-nighies…each to their own: just kept it consistent…

And here’s a shot of the beanie in all its high tech glory…

Disaster | The Daily Post

Posted on 21 June 2016 by SJPONeill

Write a new post in response to today’s one-word prompt.

Source: Disaster | The Daily Post

“…sometimes the measure of success is how well you respond…”

That was my parting shot in The magnificent seven ride again…, the tale of a 2011 pub crawl against a backdrop of NATO’s Libyan ‘intervention’ and the lone wolf terrorist attacks by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway in July 2011.

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Five years later, those are still true words although I see response from a different perspective now…once, response was force projection, rapid deployment, targeting; now response is something we manage every day…

Today’s prompt is disaster…the biggest disaster to hit this region in the last 2000 years was the Taupo eruption around 182-300AD, depending on whose book you read. Of course, if disaster strikes and there is no one there to suffer from it, is it really a disaster or just a large scale natural event..? I mean, we’re talking seriously large scale here: the biggest explosion that the world has experienced in the last two, possibly more, millenia.

When we talk eruptions here, it is always in the context of when, not if: we know that the three volcanoes – Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe and Tongariro – will erupt again. The iffy bits are when exactly and how much…questions that can only be answered after the fact. Predicting eruptions is much like predicting earthquakes: often we can see a shift from what’s considered normal, maybe an increase (or decrease) in gas emissions, a cooling (or warming) of a crater lake, more (or less) volcanic tremors: but what it means is very difficult to determine.

Because prediction is problematic, a lot of resource goes into response. The timelines are pretty tight. A lahar (big volcanic mudslidey thing) coming down the western side of Ruapehu will hit Whakapapa ski field in about 90 seconds…that’s not enough time to check your phone for directions, call a friend or update your Facebook page about the big black shadow coming down the mountain…part of the disaster response on the ski field is to ensure that people know what to do beforehand…

Further down the the hill, residents of Whakapapa Village have a whole twenty minutes to evacuate everyone from the danger area along the Whakapapanui Stream, essentially the Holiday Park and the housing area across State Highway 48 from the Chateau. Twenty minutes doesn’t sound like much time but after a fortuitous (probably didn’t seem like it at the time) series of false alarms in 2015, Whakapapa residents know they can do this at nine at night, in winter, after dinner and maybe a few beers.

There may be no warning. An eruption may occur on a beautiful blue sky day, or in the middle of a black, freezing, sleeting, icy night. Luck ran twice when the Te Maare craters erupted in August 2012. Lucky once because an eruption at 11-30PM meant there were no walkers on the Tongariro Alpine Crossing as rocks hammered down onto the track. The biggest of these weighed three tonnes, enough to hurt if it landed on your toes. Lucky twice because, even though it was night, the bunk room at Ketetahi Hut was unoccupied as a rock slammed through the roof.

It’s been many years since we have had a disaster in Ruapehu – some tragedies, yes – but the last real disaster in terms of loss of life and damage was probably Tangiwai in 1953. Once of the reasons that we haven’t had any real disasters since then is our ability to respond. The March 2007 lahar had potential – it was certainly much larger – to be as deadly as its 1953 predecessor : that potential was mitigated, some might say neutered, by a effective well-planned, well-practised response. In fact, between exercises and false alarms, the disaster response was so well-practised that when the main event event occurred, it all seemed a bit boring…

So, when you visit our maunga, take a moment to read the signs and be aware of what’s happening, what might happen around you…if you’re here for your fifteen minutes of fame, don’t let it be in 5000 years when some alien archaeologist chips you out of the remnants of the great Whakapapa Lahar…

Curve | The Daily Post

Posted on 18 June 2016 by SJPONeill

For this week’s challenge, get inspired by the curves around you. From curves in architecture to bends in nature to man-made undulations, you have lots to work with!

Source: Curve | The Daily Post

A real score!! Le Spiral 016

Eight years ago, I stumbled across an auction on a local site for a rimu spiral staircase…there were no bids on it and even with only a few hours to go, we tossed a pretty large maximum bid in on it. In New Zealand, most rimu is recycled and exotic (the handrail is a single lamination) structures like this are few and far between, affordable ones even less…To our intense amazement we won the auction for the opening amount.

We drove down the Wellington to collect it and were even more amazed: the seller had only put it up for auction on the advice of a friend thinking he might get enough for a few beers for it: his original plan had just be to convert it into firewood! He also had a full set of rimu kitchen doors that he said we’d be doing him a favour if we took them as well. Only too happy to help there!!!

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The dismantled staircase languished in the garage next door for a year or some while we considered the best location for it. We decided to use it to replace our front stairway from the lounge up to the mezzanine. As you can see below, there is quite a drop down the centre axis and with small children running around…

Le Spiral 002

Despite his stated intention to burn it, the seller was a retired engineer and, despite himself, had meticulously named and marked all the parts in relation to each other. The joiner scratched his head with it for a while before deciding it would have to be assembled vertically and then installed complete. Away he went with all the parts to assemble in his workshop…as it came together in his front window, it became the subject of much interest, including a few offers that showed just what a good score it was…

Seven years later its curves are still as smooth and it still looks great…

Pure | The Daily Post

Posted on 14 June 2016 by SJPONeill

For this week’s challenge, share a photo of something pure — it can be a person, an object, or a moment.

Source: Pure | The Daily Post

Pure…strawberries…no additives…just naturally pure…sweet and tasty…

Thinking about pure got me on the thought path of purify and a chance to review when I am on my green journey. ‘They’ say that you need do something for six weeks before it becomes habit…I’m now six months in to the journey, taking its start from when I purged – in a most unhealthy manner – all the junk foods from the house. It’s now been six months since I had crisps/chips where I used to knock off a big bag at a time; and maybe three months since I last had a chocolate bar: those Whitaker’s L&P slabs are still just too good to walk away from entirely: who would ever have thought that anyone could successfully combine a chocolate bar and a fizzy drink to mindlessly well..?

The journey is pretty stable now: I’ve settled on the core elements and binned some the trial components. I never much liked the rice milk and so that’s gone and I don’t miss the coconut water even though there’s still a bottle in the pantry I need to polish off: for the most part, good old-fashioned filtered water does the trick – pure as well as it come straight off the roof. I’ve stocked up on bulk chia seed, black rice and sliced almonds from Happy and Healthy, and bulk coconut milk powder from Naturally Abundant. Fresh fruit and veges depend on what’s in season – with just a few out of season treats – bananas being the core staple for smoothies and sugar for baking.

I am becoming a creature of culinary habit – not necessarily a bad thing – starting with porridge and stewed apple mixed with a little coconut milk: the cocnut milk adds a great and unexpected sweet twist to the texture of the porridge and semi-tart apple. I follow this with a slab of homemade herby wholemeal toast with apple butter – a new addition to the pantry that is so tasty and simple, if time-consuming, to make; depending of my degree of personal organisation in the morning, toast may be consumed in the car on the way to work. My morning cuppa is evolving as well – it used to be simple Earl Grey with a little cow but now I am looking for a black tea that will blend well with the coconut milk that has replaced cow’s milk almost entirely now. I still keep some 250ml bottles of milk in the freezer for just in case visitors who still prefer something a little more conventional.

I think that I have finally mastered the coconut bannofee smoothie: the key was the coconut milk powder. I now dice a single banana (reduced from the original two) into the blender with a heaped teaspoon of Jed’s #5 coffee and a table spoon of coconut milk powder and zoom it all together for 30 seconds. It’s quick, it’s easy, it tastes great with competing hints of banana, coconut and coffee.

Lunch now is a bannofee smoothie and either a vege smoothie with cabbage or spinach, carrot (for its the ‘Kune carrot season), LSA or flaxseed, and water; or Jen’s pineapple, banana and tumeric smoothie mixed with a 50/50 combo of coconut milk (from the powder) and homemade almond coconut milk. Pre-assembling and freezing a couple of dozen smoothie bags – just add LAS and water – was a good move and, as I polish off the last of the first two batches, I run up some more – I just have to remember to take one out to thaw the night before…

If personal organisation in the morning trends towards zero, and I don’t the smoothies done, not too worry: the Pihanga Cafe in the side of the Chateau does a great and very filling kids menu (burger and chips, pasta, pizza or chicken tenders on a potato mash)for $8.00, $6.00 with a Whakapapa Village community card! Occasionally, I might supplement this with one or two apple oatmeal or almond coconut cookies – both very chewy and filling – or a couple of slices of my jalapeno or kumara bread – now that I have them sussed – toasted…

Dinner is where the variables come out – I am still slowly working to consume all the meat stockpiled in the big freezer. Items like chicken pieces that can be fried go into the air fryer with kumara and potato chips – just got given a big bag of spuds left over from teh ‘Kune Carrot Carnival so need to work on consuming these…watch this space for variations of potato soup themes. Other things that be can be diced or otherwise mixed in, go into one of my repertoire of stews and curries, to be eaten with rice – still currently white but switching to brown once the last of the white is finally gone. That’ll just leave a few small roasts to find something creative and healthy to do with…

So back to my ‘purify’ thought…yes, I think that I am slowly purifying my diet, reducing if not entirely eliminating processed foods and working more and more with the raw (literally) materials…I still get the munchies some evenings but an orange generally deals to these. I know there’s ice cream in the fridge and that I can make a dessert in a cup in minutes but I just can’t excite myself about that sort of food. Don’t panic though..!! I haven’t totally gone off either ice cream or dessert but I’m certainly not hanging out for or consuming either in anything like the quantities that I used to…watch this space for my crack at raindrop cake dessert with ice cream and a passion-fruit (or maybe tamarillo, I haven’t quite decided yet) coulis…

Is it actually achieving anything..? Well…yes…most definitely…although it’s getting into winter here and temperatures are dropping, I’m not eating more so my weight is holding around 87kg; I am sleeping less but way better, and I feel good…thanks Bubble...

Blank | The Daily Post

Posted on 10 June 2016 by SJPONeill

Write a new post in response to today’s one-word prompt.

Source: Blank | The Daily Post

Blank: something from which something else is created, raw material, what comes before the product…a piece of firewood perhaps..?

I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to look at firewood in quite the same way again…in some ways I’m reminded of the story that Trautman recounts to Rambo in Thailand..

There was a sculptor. He found this stone, a special stone. He dragged it home and he worked on it for months until he finally finished it. When he was ready he showed it to his friends. They said he had created a great masterpiece, but the sculptor said he hadn’t created anything. The statue was always there, he just chipped away the rough edges.

It’s known as the Full Circle speech and goes on further but it is always this bit that I remember…that an artist, a creator needs good material to work with and that you can never know what may be hidden away with a block of stone or a piece or wood or even a person if you look at it in the right way and with an open mind…

As I slowly work out from the house in tidying up this property, I often uncover chunks or hardwood, mainly rimu and matai, that were dropped to clear the way for the house or, much earlier, for the section of the old State Highway 4 that now forms the driveway after the road was straightened some decades ago. Until now, the fate of such recovered wood has been conversion to heat and light.

About a month or so ago, I picked up a chunk in the woodshed and realised “this is good wood” sowing the seed of “I wonder what I could do with this”

Since 2014, I have been applying a ‘teach a man to fish’ philosophy and investing in tools so that I can be relatively independent in doing work around this place. So far, the cottage project has been the major beneficiary and recipient of this philosophy.

Perhaps an unintended consequence of my green journey has been a growing revitalisation of my interest in ‘arty’ things. I ran a couple of these logs through the table saw to see how they came out and how thin I could slice them. At the back of my mind was a thought that perhaps they might form the basis for book covers or something similar…

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After some experimentation and confirmation that I could still count to ten, I had a small pile of sliced matai…

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I didn’t photograph all the steps but I used two strips to mount another six strips and dedicated a number of night in front of the fire to sanding them smooth and removing all traces of the saw blade. I had intended running this through the saw again to square up the edges but I quite like the way it looks…

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To bring out the grain and add some colour, I’ve rubbed a 60/40 mix of meths and linseed oil into the front and back…I’m assuming that I can darken it further but rubbing more of this mix into the wood…?

Still not sure what I’ll do with it but I have enjoyed using tools and my hands to get it this far…from a blank that was little more than a piece of firewood…

Edit…a day later

Someone at work pointed out that I’ve (so far) created a blank from a blank…if i was sharper I could have done that “see what I did there” thing…

Playful | The Daily Post

Posted on 9 June 2016 by SJPONeill

Write a new post in response to today’s one-word prompt.

Source: Playful | The Daily Post

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This is Louie…our latest addition after Kirky passed away…

Louie is a clown.

Louie loves to play…and, having been brought up in a gated community, loves being here with ten hectares to play in…more so after we have had some long chats about boundaries…

Balls are his favourite toys…the average life of any Swiss Ball that he catches is about three seconds and tennis balls aren’t much fun unless there is someone to throw them for him…soccer is his game and he will happy kick around a soccer ball on the concrete – he just has to remember not to park them under the car because they go BANG! when Dad drives away…

Louie has tons of energy, being only four years old, and needs a good run outside every day to burn it off. That makes it a bit interesting when it has been so wet over the last month but these things have to be done – a lesson hard learned after he tried a couple of laps inside the house…as the twins used to say “uh-oh”…

Definitely a bit of uh-oh…I had to shift my bed as it used to lie perpendicular to the doorway: Louie would bound into the room, up of the bed and then skate across the room on it…a big clown on the biggest skateboard..!

It’s good to play…

Let them eat cake…

Posted on 8 June 2016 by SJPONeill

Impressed with the therapeutic effects of my Wednesday night bake-athon, I lined myself up for another the following night…

I’m much more a savoury (un- some may say…) character than a sweet…so I don’t cook a great amount of sweet items, even less so now that I am withdrawing from the attractions of sugar and processed foods…however, in the interests of science, and interested to see how some of my hoovered recipes might turn out…I dallied with the sweet side of the Force…

darth sugar.jpg

…and that’s where this image came from…googling for a header image took me to I Quit Sugar and then to some very (chocolatey) dark recipes…watch this space…

So anyways…baking cakes…I had two targets in sight…one driven by a preponderance of feijoas in the fridge (’tis the season) and the other by a ‘waste not’ recipe for banana peels that flicked across my radar on Facebook…

I found a good mix of feijoa recipes at the Waikato Times and intended (and still do) to make something from here but the absence of sour cream in the pantry for the chocolate feijoa cake nudged me towards this one from Melanie Khan. It’s pretty simple and i made it as writ, less using three-quarters of a cup of raw sugar instead of the directed full cup of white processed sugar (white is bad).

It was quite solid when it came out of the oven: cooked but it didn’t rise as well as I think it was meant to…I’m attributing this to the moist mass of feijoa being disproportionate to the quantity of flour…it had a good strong feijoa flavour so next time – if there is one: so many feijoa recipes and only so much time – I might reduce the amount of fruit and/or reduce it before adding it to the mix so that it is least moist…

Banana peel cake on the left, spicy feijoa on the right

The main appeal of the banana peel cake was its ‘no waste’ theme – we go through a lot of bananas here on the Green Journey and the peels go directly into the compost to nourish future generations of food – and as we make more and more of our own food, an additional benefit is the reduction in waste, especially packaging for things like pre-packaged products like not-milk milks…so in for a penny…

Although punted around on Facebook, the actual recipe lives at Love Food Hate Waste which has some other interesting recipes for food items that may be approaching their final best by date…as we hit the Central Plateau carrot season (through til October), one that has a real appeal up here is the carrot cake cookies.

The ‘Kune Carrot Shop

Fair warning though, even though it is great that people are publishing recipes that promote using and not dumping food, these recipes are on the Dark side of healthy with a very high sugar component. I’d be looking at reducing some of that using maybe a couple of bananas perhaps..?

You do have to peel bananas for the banana peel cake…and, if necessary, can save peels in the freezer until you have enough…making sure that you allow time for them to thaw before blending them. I forgot and waiting to the peels to go from rigid to gooey is the main reason the spicy feijoa cake hit the oven first – normally I would do the more complex recipe first: just in case it all goes horribly wrong, at least, I already have something cooking…

Again, I made the recipe as writ with no major issues once I was able to get the skins mushed in the blender…one tip for young players would be to not tutu with the tensioning clip on the cake tin once the cake mix is in: very messy trying to refit the base and close the tension clip again…

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The cake rose nicely but I probably left it in a little long as it was a tad dry inside…tasted OK but you’d expect with the amount of sugar in it. I don’t think that the banana peels added anything that could not have been achieved using the normal part of the banana, or even a handful of caraway seeds or something similar…

The creamy substance around the edges is my attempt at a lemon icing and possibly evidence that you can’t believe everything that you read online. My second choice for a feijoa cake recipe was this Lemon Iced Feijoa Cake from the Chelsea site (which sole purpose is the promotion of sugar!) but I had no milk, forgetting that I now have a large bag of coconut milk powder for just this contingency, nudging me towards Door #3…

I did, however, like the sound of the lemon icing as a finishing touch for the banana peel cake, and made this as writ but there is simply too much fluid for the dry content and even after three days, the icing still hadn’t set and most of it drizzled off the sides and soaked into the base – which was not unpleasant…

This chealsea icing versus not chelsea icing

Comparing the Chelsea recipe on the left with this lemon icing one from All Recipes, you can see that it has only a quarter the dry content of the other one…an interesting experiment and one that I will file away from when I need a super-sweet lemon effect to soak into a target dessert…

Just for the record though, if I had made the banana peel cake as writ plus the lemon icing recipe on the right, the total sugar content would be 5 1/2 cups of sugar…HOLY MALLOLY!!!! My butterscotch pudding only has a half cup (reduced from a full cup in the original recipe) plus two tablespoons of syrup for the sauce and I thought that was sweet..!!

Not being overly-sweet oriented, I kept the lemonised half of the banana peel cake (all gone now! #sugarcraving ) and gave the other half and the feijoa cake, less a couple of taste-testing slices, to my flue-ey friend to maintain energy levels until a full recovery is in effect…

Fresh bread

Posted on 7 June 2016 by SJPONeill

Jalapeño corn bread on the left, kumara bread on the right, each less an initial tasting slice….

Life is a little intense at the moment so I have been working quite hard to keep busy…idle hands and all that…

I tend to hoover up recipes that interest me and then have trouble find an opportunity to both cook and consume them…last week a flu-ey friend provided an excellent justification for a bake-athon…which proved unexpectedly therapeutic as well…I didn’t finish til after 1AM but was surprisingly refreshed when I emerged from under the covers into the brutal cold of Raurimu at 6AM…

I liked the concept of Jen Rice’s jalapeño cornbread and liked my first attempt at it but it didn’t rise very well. I’m not sure if that is just down to me, the use of beer as a yeast, or the specific beer that I used. It did have quite a good kick though, which is kinda the whole point of putting jalapeños into anything…

To address the rising issue, the next time, I just added the corn and jalapeños into my normal bread mix for the breadmaker. I didn’t reduce the water enough to compensate for the moisture in the corn and jalapeños but it still rose OK although the greater bulk meant that the jalapeño effect was a lot more subtle – it still got a thumbs up from the taste team though…

So, last week, I was keen to master breadmaking sans breadmaker – mechanical breadmaker, anyways – and I had this recipe from the Nadia Lim collection to try.

Ingredients

orange kumara (sweet potato) 300g (about 1 medium), peeled and chopped

active dried yeast 1 tablespoon

sugar 1 teaspoon

lukewarm water 1 cup

high-grade flour 1 cup + extra for kneading and dusting

wholemeal flour 2 cups

salt 1 ½ teaspoons

Rosemary 2 tablespoons finely chopped

extra-virgin olive oil 2 tablespoons

Method

Cook the kumara in boiling salted water until soft, about 10-15 minutes. Drain well and mash with a little salt to taste.
While the kumara is cooking, combine the yeast, sugar and warm water in a bowl. Leave on the bench for about 10 minutes until frothy.
In a large mixing bowl, combine the flours, salt and rosemary. Add the oil, mashed kumara and yeast mixture, and mix until well combined. If the dough is too wet, you may need to add a little more flour.
Knead the dough for about 10 minutes on a floured surface, adding a little extra flour as needed, until dough is soft and elastic.
Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover it with a tea towel or clingfilm, and leave it to rise in a warm place for about 30 minutes – it should have doubled in size.
Line a baking tray with baking paper. Cut the dough in half and shape into two loaves. Place the loaves on lined tray and cut a few 1cm-thick slashes on top of them with a knife.
Now would be a good time to preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celcius
Leave the dough to rise for a further 20 minutes or so.
Dust the loaves with a little flour. Bake for about 25-30 minutes or until a crust has developed and the base sounds firm and hollow when tapped. Remove from the oven and allow to cool a little before slicing.

The only changes I made to the recipe were to zap the kumara in a microwave steamer instead of cooking it in a pan; using only high-grade four with a 1/4 cup of bran flakes to add the wholemeal content – this is how I do my wholemeal bread and it seems to work out OK; and I’m using black sea salt for all my salt contributions…

Pink…

…pink…

…turns black when wet

I had bought some active dry yeast last year for my pizza experiments – although I had done a few pizzas since, I hadn’t checked the ‘best by’ date which was some time in February. The yeasting issue was in doubt for a while – we can’t just pop down to the supermarket here: the closest one is 40km away, the closest 24 hours one a good two hours away – but everything eventually frothed up nicely after a half hour or so…it helped, I think, putting the bowl up in the mezzanine for a while in the warmer air from the fire…night-time temperatures here have been below zero the last couple of weeks…

Once the kumara bread was safely in the oven, I made up another batch of dough, waited another 30 minutes for the yeast to do its thing and swapped out the kumara and rosemary for a can of drained corn kernels and a half cup of drained pickled jalapeños – you simply cannot buy them fresh here, it would appear – and completed the recipe as above…

As you can see above, the finished loaves look pretty good and they taste pretty good too…I have been toasting 3-4 slices each night to dip into my dinner soup and lunch today will be toasted cheese (still trying to polish off the last kilo brick that I had in the freezer) on jalapeño bread…

This recipe seems to be a keeper for bread from scratch. It is very simple and painless and makes two loaves versus one from the original recipe I was using. The loaves will freeze well and so I may do a stock-up bake in the next couple of weeks: even with the cost of the can of corn and the jalapeños, it is way less expensive than buying speciality loaves from the supermarket…