17th January - Making bread, mushroom ketchup and kale juice!!

Today was pretty busy, we made quite a few different things using herbs and other garden produce.

 We made some fougasse bread today and flavoured the bread using rosemary and thyme from our new herb garden,  We also used chili peppers which we have been drying  for the past few weeks.  We also have one jar of our sun-dried tomatoes left from our summer tomato glut.

Here we stretched the bread dough and added the different flavours before kneading the dough again to evenly distribute the herbs, chilies and tomatoes into the bread.

We also made some chili and cheese soda bread using our dried chilies.

Here are our fougasse (not sure what the plural is?) on the left they are awaiting proving, with a bit of olive oil and some rock salt.  On the right they a baked and are cooling.

Chili and Cheese soda bread and all our baking packaged up ready to be sold.  

We decided that making and selling bread was a good way to make a bit of money for our Garden Project.  We are trying to have a bit of  money which can be used to pay for vets bills if any of our hens need to go to the vets.

Today we also had a go at making mushroom ketchup - which is a condiment which can be used in cooking, a bit like Worcestershire sauce?   Mushrooms are diced, salted and left for 24 hrs, then mixed with shallots (some from our garden), cinnamon, peppercorns and a few other spices and cooked for an hour.

We also had a go with a juicer today.  This is some of our kale which has been growing in our garden, we have both green and purple kale.

 We put it through the juicer, the juice was kind of an interesting green colour, the purple kale made dark brown juice.  We also juiced apples and root ginger too,

 The finished juice was a light green colour, and much to everyone's surprise was actually really nice!

We also cleaned and prepared some of our turnips and swedes to sell.