Howdy.
Them/They s'il vous plaisez.
East-coast Canadian, 32. Forever an English nerd and licensed bisexual. Crafting side blog is @crispystitch for things I like and things I make. Blogs with no posts and no description will be blocked until Tumblr sorts out its bot infection!
fucked up how cooking and baking from scratch is viewed as a luxury…..like baking a loaf of bread or whatever is seen as something that only people with money/time can do. I’m not sure why capitalism decided to sell us the idea that we can’t make our own damn food bc it’s a special expensive thing that’s exclusive to wealthy retirees but it’s stupid as hell and it makes me angry
bread takes like max 4 ingredients counting water and sure it takes a couple hours but 80% of that is just waiting around while it does the thing and you can do other things while it’s rising/baking
plus im not gonna say baking cured my depression bc it didn’t but man is it hard to feel down when you’re eating slices of fresh bread you just made yourself. feels like everything’s gonna be a little more ok than you thought. it’s good.
bread is amazing and it’s also been sold to us as something really hard to make? Every time I tell someone I made a loaf of bread I get reactions like “you made it yourself???” and “do you have a bread machine then?” I haven’t touched a bread machine in probably 10 years. You CAN make your own bread, folks, and it’s actually pretty cheap to do so. I believe the most expensive thing I needed for it was the jar of yeast. It was about $6 at the grocery store and lasted me MONTHS (just keep it in the fridge.) The packets are even cheaper. destroy capitalism. bake your own bread.
You can also make your own yeast by making a sourdough starter, so that cuts cost even more.
But you have to feed the starter daily/weekly and that means it grows quickly, but there are tons of recipes online for what to do with your excess starter. Cookies, pretzels, crackers, pancakes, waffles, you name it!!
Make it even easier - “No-Knead Bread”. All YOU do is mix the ingredients together and wait until it’s time to heat the oven. The yeast does all the rest.
Here’s @dduane’s first take on itand the finished product. We’ve made even more photogenic batches since.
Kneading is easy as well; either let your machine do it, or if you don’t want to or don’t have one, get hands-on. It’s like mixing two colours of Plasticine to make a third. Flatten, stretch, fold, half-turn, repeat - it takes about 10 minutes - until the gloopy conglomeration of flour, yeast, salt and water that clings to your hands at the beginning, becomes a compact ball that doesn’t stick to things and feels silky-smooth.
Here’s what before and after look like.
My Mum used to say that if you were feeling out of sorts with someone, it was good to
make bread because you could transfer your annoyance into kneading the
dough REALLY WELL, and both you and the bread would be better for it.
Then you put it into a bowl, cover it with cling-film and let it rise until it doubles in size, turn it out and “knock it back” (more kneading, until it’s getting back to the size it started, this means there won’t be huge “is something living in here?” holes in the bread), put it into your loaf-tin or whatever - we’ve used a regular oblong tin, a rectangular Pullman tin with a lid, a small glass casserole, an earthenware chicken roaster…
You can even use a clean terracotta flowerpot.
Let the dough rise again until it’s high enough to look like an unbaked but otherwise real loaf, then pop it in the preheated oven. On average we give ours 180°C / 355°F for 45-50 minutes. YM (and oven) MV.
Here’s some of our bread…
Here’s our default bread recipe - it takes about 3-4 hours from flour jar to cutting board depending on climate (warmer is faster) most of which is rise time and baking; hands-on mixing, kneading and knocking-back is about 20 minutes, tops, and less if using a mixer.
Here ( or indeed any of the other pics) is the finished product. This one was given an egg-wash to make it look glossy and keep the poppy-seeds in place; mostly we don’t bother with that or the slash down the middle, but all the extras were intentional as a “ready for my close-up” glamour shot.
I think any shop would be happy to have something this good-looking on their shelf.
We’re happy to have it on our table.
Even if your first attempts don’t work out quite as well as you hope, you can always make something like this…
can we have more posts like this in future please? this is really useful and could help those who are struggling
I know I just reblogged this but the idea of recreating art from your ancestors FIFTEEN THOUSAND years later is quite beautiful. Like, imagine someone in the year 17,025 recreating art you did just cuz they like it.
You may have liked your artwork or you may have been like ‘meh, not my best work’, but literal hundreds of generations after you died, a person speaking a language you cannot understand, living in a future so alien to you that you couldn’t possibly imagine it, made a sculpture of your art and shared it with thousands and thousands of people on a communication network that uses lightening inside flattened rocks and invisible waves of light that travels to where the stars live and back. And they all love it. Everyone who sees it is like 'aww, that’s nice’ or 'holy shit I love this’.
They never knew. They, their kids, and their kid’s kids never knew that this would happen to that art.
Much the same as you’ll never know if your fun little bits of art may survive a crazy long time and be loved by future people.
you’ve all seen Listers, right? the self-published youtube documentary? about writing down the birds that you look at?
it’s subtitled “A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching,” an inaccurately voyeuristic title, because the glimpse is at Themselves.
two unemployed brothers (one an unemployed videographer, one nonspecifically unemployed who has a ferocious new interest in birds) decide: firstly, they are now birders. secondly, to start their birding adventure in a maximalist way by doing A For-Real Big Year.
what’s a Big Year? they don’t know, they just heard of it now. oh, what’s that? they’re going and seeing the greatest number of birds from Jan 1 to Dec 31 in the lower 48 by way of their shitass van. they also have about my own exact knowledge of birds, which is: there are bald eagles, great blue herons, crows, and a lot of small brown birds which are all called “sparrows.”
a youtube comment correctly remarks that it’s like watching oldschool skating videos, where you got maybe 480p of the finally-stomped kickflip down the stairwell, but the joy isn’t in that, it’s of the camera following the guy as he jumps into the bushes with three cheering friends. they are uniquely new to birding AND uniquely good at cinematography.
the documentary works because These Guys Love Birds. they love birds so much. they are signing up to rare-bird-sighting email lists. they are taking hour-long detours to find a kind of grackle that they later learn lives in every single gas station dumpster they’ve passed. they’re interviewing just about everyone they come across, from award-winning birders to a guy walking down a freeway. they have an instinct for jon bois style stupid-but-emotional bits—they are calling every defunct bird hotline in old birding guides to see if any of them can give them a tip about a local bird; or to see if any of them are still connected at all. they are making fun of quails.
this all works WELL. it is beautiful wildlife cinematography cut with handheld camcorder-quality ski bum video. it is what documentary is for.
If you’re a serious birder, especially one active in the Facebook communities, there will be a lot of “oh I know that person” moments
i love poison control. one time i was eating soup and i found glass in it (??? we to this day have no idea how) and i called them like “i might’ve swallowed a lot of glass” and they were like “without noticing?” and i was like “the pieces were small and i wasn’t chewing because it was soup” and they said “oh what kind of soup?” and i said “butternut squash. i made it!” and they said, “did you…put the glass in there?”