She Brings Me Water
An aeclectic look at the nearby worldArchive for October, 2007
Crock Pot Bread?
Who’da thunk it? Not me, but apparently others have and did and now, I have not only thunk it but done it. In our on-going search to find ways to cook things without using the big oven (Reason 1: it’s not working right now {or maybe it’s just our continuing fuse box problem?}; and 2: it uses beaucoup electricity), I found out that the crockpot that we have, a Rival 3 and 1/2 quart model, could be used to make bread. Rival used to make an insert that you could buy (I don’t think they do anymore, this is an old crockpot) called the Bread ‘n Cake Bake Pan, which the e-Bay meister found on e-Bay (surprise!) and purchased for moi.
Kinda purty, eh? Here’s another view looking down inside:
The pan came with an instruction and recipe sheet, and after perusing the recipes we decided to start with the Boston Brown Bread one. Hey, who’s in the World Series, eh?
1 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup yellow cornmeal
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup dark molasses
1 and 1/2 cups buttermilk
1 cup chopped nuts (I used walnuts)
1 cup raisins
Combine flour, baking powder, soda and salt. Stir in cornmeal and whole wheat flour. Add molasses and buttermilk, beat well. Stir in nuts and raisins. Pour batter into a greased and floured Bread ‘n Cake Bake pan. Pour one cup of water into crockpot, set pan inside. Cover and bake on high 3 to 4 and 1/2 hours or until pick inserted in center comes out clean.
I used a butter-flavored pan spray to “grease” the inside of the pan, and began checking it with a long skewer after 3 hours. I think it was actually ready at 4 and 1/2 hours, but we let it go another 15 minutes which was a little too long. But it was good, dark and chunky with the raisins and nuts.
Looks a little like a birthday cake, doesn’t it? A little cream cheese icing, some candles…
Anyhow, it worked very well, and was a pleasant surprise. The whole learning experience is a pleasant surprise, and my next culinary creation a la the crockpot will be the Pumpkin Tea Bread. Halloween treat, n’est-ce pas?
PS~ Here’s a link to a PDF file for instructions and recipes: http://www.endtimesreport.com/Rival_Bread’n_Cake_Bake.pdf
A Visitor from Australia
This week we’ve had a visitor here at our house on the island. She came all the way from Australia, and her journey was sponsored by a group called Soul Food. She came for a purpose, besides just wanting to see the world. Soul Food is a community of artists, writers, and creative people of all stripes who have expressed a desire to commit to a practice of daily writing or of daily art work. Some people in the community write on blogs (like this one) for the world at large, some write in journals just for themselves, others use their creative abilities to inspire others. There are also visual artists, photographers, digital artists, textile artists. You can visit Soul Food here, or visit Riversleigh, an online community where many of these artists have virtual rooms where you can read or see their work.
The visitor, whose name is Priscilla, has undertaken this journey to foster unity within this artist’s community and to spark their creativity through her adventures as she travels the world. She came from Australia, and is now here in North Carolina, and she’ll be traveling to other states here in the USA, then on to various countries in Europe, and then back to Australia. She has a blog, which you can visit here, and she also carries with her a small journal to draw or paint or visually record her journey in. She’s very artistic.
She’s also somewhat of a character. Here she is, communing with the dead cornstalks in the garden.
I encourage you to check out her blog if you are interested in reading about Priscilla’s adventures and to see pictures of her touring Knotts Island, and visit Soul Food and Riversleigh to spark your own creative muse. G’day, mates!
Blog Action Day
On October 15th - Blog Action Day, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind.
In its inaugural year, Blog Action Day will be co-ordinating bloggers to tackle the issue of the environment.
What Each Blogger Will Do
Bloggers can participate on Blog Action Day in one of two ways:
- Publish a post on their blog which relates to an issue of their own choice pertaining to the environment.
The above is from the Blog Action day website (www.blogactionday.org) and this post is in response to the first way in which a blogger (that would be me) can participate. The second way is to donate the profits from your blog for this one day to an environmental charity, but since I don’t make any money here, I’ll just have to write instead.
So far, this blog has mostly been about the Native American garden that we planted this past summer. If you’ve been following along, you’ve probably gotten the idea that we try to live “small”, i.e. keeping our impact on the environment low and trying to be aware of that impact in all aspects of our life. For Blog Action Day, I’ll elaborate a bit on the other ways we try to live small
We live in an old house with no central heat or air conditioning, we use space heaters or window air conditioners only as needed and only in the rooms we need them in. We use a woodstove when it’s really cold. We drive well-maintained older, small cars that get good gas mileage, and only use our newer, small truck when a truck is called for. We use a clothesline instead of a dryer as much as possible, and usually only do two loads of laundry a week. We buy most of our clothes at the Salvation Army, and we try only to buy clothes that are needed. We are semi-vegetarians (we eat fish), we try to grow our own food, eat local when available and low on the food chain (which is also for our health’s sake as well as the enviro). We try to fix things when they get broken instead of throwing them out and buying new; we buy used things when something really needs to be replaced. We try to be aware of our energy useage to keep it low (which is somewhat helped along by the fact that this old house has a old fuse box, and the fuses blow if we turn on too many things at once!) We use flourescent light bulbs…
I know that some of these things aren’t choices that are available to everyone, so here’s a link to an article at Zen Habits that has many more options and choices: http://blog.blogactionday.com/environment/50-quick-painless-ways-you-can-help-the-environment-today/
In my humble opinion, and the opinion of Union of Concerned Scientists (http://www.ucsusa.org/, one of the biggest choices you can make to have the largest impact on the environment in a positive way is to go meatless. I quote from them: “Meat production can deplete environmental resources more than other food production, so consider a meatless main dish.” Not only would making this choice, even just a few times a week, help the environment, it would make you healthier and save you money, not to mention saving an animal’s life. That’s a lot of bang for a small buck.
If you need help making this choice, or just want to learn more about the food you are actually eating, I highly recommend Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. And in the coming days I’ll be adding more information about the way we eat here at home, and some recipes, so check out the All About Food page now, and drop by later for recipes and more. Enjoy (and participate if you can) Blog Action Day!
Changing Seasons?
I had this post all planned in my head. We’d had some cool days, lower humidity, and the evenings were coming earlier, all adding up to a change of seasons. Fall coming! So I was going to write about preparing to move indoors, books waiting to be read, recipes to try, artwork to do….about planting the fall garden, starting soups to simmer through the afternoon and evening, turning our thoughts inward just as our bodies are drawn inside…and then, back comes the heat, and even worse, the humidity, and even worse than that, we’re still not getting any rain. Despite watering our collard and turnip seeds, they aren’t sprouting. And who wants to think of preparing or eating a hot soup when being outside is like being in a hot soup? On the plus side, our cherry tomatoes are still bearing and some ripen everyday. Some squashes that I started in peat pots and that Rod transplanted outside are doing very well (so we’ll see if it’s true that if you treat them as a fall plant, they won’t be bothered by vine borers. A scientific experiment I know you’ll want to stay tuned for). And the biggest plus of all, for me at least: I don’t like cold and northern winds. I like the heat, although as I get older it affects me more. Fall will come, and then winter, and it’ll be cold enough, soon enough, too soon for me.
So, to get ready for fall when it does decide to arrive, and for Samhain (also known as Halloween), here is a night picture of the Native American garden, with the dead and dying corn stalks and the waning green bean harvest:
And a picture of the harvest moon from the night of September 26th, through the top of a corn stalk:
