Sunday baking

I wanted some butter yesterday and decided rather than going all the way to the supermarket to get it, I would go to the dairy and buy cream and make my own butter.  I rather enjoy making butter and it certainly tastes nice.

I used the resulting buttermilk to make some soda bread.  I only had 200 ml of buttermilk so cut my River Cottage recipe in half and made a small loaf using some spelt flour that I was given recently. 250g spelt flour, 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda and 200 ml of buttermilk, mixed to a soft dough and put into a preheated 200d oven for 25 minutes resulted in this:

While I was in the kitchen I decided to make some chocolate brownies, using Bill Granger's recipe in The Age, except that I reduced the sugar to 250g. 350g of sugar seemed to me to be unnecessarily sweet!  The brownies were very delicious.  So much so that I can hear the ones sat in the plastic cake box in the office singing to me - and it's much to early to be eating chocolate brownies!!!

While we were in Japan in August, the runner beans were left unpicked and grew rather too large for eating en pod. So we left them for a while until the beans had grown a bit more then picked them all to use the beans.  Some of them had started to dry. The fresh ones are in the freezer. The dried ones I soaked in water for 24 hours and then simmered for an hour. Then I put them and a mountain of fresh tomatoes into the slow cooker for 8 hours with the addition of one dessertspoon of brown sugar.  We had beans on toast for breakfast this morning

We have had to buy a new freezer.  The little chest freezer we bought in 2007 has proved to be too small for this year's harvest.  We have bought one that is three times the size.  I have asked Farmer Jayne to provide me with a sheep and half a pig to fill the bottom of the new freezer :-)