We're Going to the Farmers' Market

 By Stephan Page

You know me.  I'm a pretty big hippie.  And I'm all about fruits and veg and farmers' markets.  But I picked this book up primarily because the art was appealing.  It was the nicest looking book at the library that week and, believe me, I looked through each one.  I thought maybe my son would recognize the food and be mildly interested.  Plus it's in verse, and he will currently only sit still for board books with verse.

Well, the verse is not metered.  They tried and failed.  Badly.  So my son hated it because he's so damn picky.

 But the pictures are still nice.  Lots of geometric  shapes and symmetry and simple colours and patterns.  It's very pretty.

I wish there was no text.  They tried to do a version of "To Market, To Market to Buy a Fat Pig" and got lost in this sustainability message.  It's so heavy handed that it felt like they were trying to make my children feel bad for straying from the 100 mile diet.

Plus, this meal.  Like, I would eat that, sure.  And I always serve good food for my kids.  We eat food from just about any culture and keep a variety of spices in the house.  But my one year old is not eating fish and olives.  In fact, he's teething and refuses anything that isn't blended into mush and snuck into his mouth in between bites of cracker.  And furthermore, with a baby in the house, is it possible to make labour intensive meals?  No, really, I'm curious.  When do I get to stop making casseroles?  Also, I don't take kids to market under the age of 3 if I can help it because grabbing groceries and paying for them with an angry toddler in your arms is the worst experience.

Is this a board book that teaches toddlers about everything they're missing out on because they can't get it together and eat real food and behave at the store?  Or is this is a board book for 6 year olds?  I can't decide.

Friday Post - Pouring - a bread recipe

I took a Montessori preschool book out of the library a while back just to get a bit of a checklist of things that I should be working on, seeing as I'm not sending my children to real preschool.  One of the activities on the list that we haven't been doing is pouring.  They say I should start with large beads, work towards beans, grains, and finally water.

I started with beads and they just ended up being carried around the house.  I gave up.

A few weeks later, I decided instead to get my daughter to help me make bread.  It worked out really well; she was riveted.  The thrill of standing on the stepping stool and being at counter height!  The the look of pride as she holds measuring spoons and dips their contents into the pan!  The squeals of delight as the bread comes out of the machine!

Yes, we have a bread machine.  It's been so completely vital to our routine, that I don't know how we'd function without one.  Oh, wait, I do know; we'd be paying $5+ per loaf of bread.

We got our machine as a wedding present, and we had asked for the Panasonic 'raisin and nut' dispenser model because it has a timer on it (hello, fresh bread baking in the morning), but also because it's one of the few models that doesn't have a poor track record for breaking down.  We priced it out, just because we were curious, and if you're making two loaves a week, you could even get a fancy Zojirushi and break even by the end of the year.

We've come a long way in just two weeks.  My daughter might be able to make bread all by herself in a year, except that the pan is too heavy and the machine is too tall.

We've tweaked the recipe a bit from the book.  This is what we do:

1    tsp yeast (either bread machine or regular dry yeast.  doesn't seem to matter.)
1    cup white flour
2    cups brown flour
1/2 cup rye flour
2    tblsp sugar
2    tsp salt
2    tblsp oil
2    cups water (usually a bit less than that, and then add more depending on how the dough is mixing up.)
1    cup or less of a 10 grain mix, or a handfull of sunflower seeds or whatever is in the house

I measure pour the flour and oil, and I prepare the 2 cups of water to be poured.  My daughter does the rest and has started to memorize the ingredients.  She knows which buttons to press on the machine to make it start, and I like to show her the dough being mixed so that she knows what kind of a consistency it should have for it to turn out right.

I'm in love with this bread.  It's gritty but moist.  It's dark and flavourful, but rises well.  It melts in your mouth.  Plus, it doesn't have that weird cardboard flavour that most store-bought bread has.  Probably because it doesn't have preservatives in it.