Bread

Well, I did it! I just finished my first-ever loaf of bread. Not nearly as daunting as I've always thought it would be . . . most of the time spent on the recipe was simply waiting while the dough was rising. I used the Oatmeal Wheat Bread recipe from epicurious.com, and love it so far. Very excited to have some delish pb&j sandwiches tomorrow with my girls :)

The Bread Experiment

I can't believe it's working!

The finished product

Food

I just finished reading In Defense of Food and am feeling super inspired to try to follow the rules of "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants." If you haven't read it, you really should. The ideas are so basic and common sense that it is truly amazing how they've been overlooked and undermined on such a large scale. It will make you look at your pantry in a whole new way, I swear.

So anyhow, my reading of this book has now inspired my next cooking adventure: bread. I typically fixate on one thing, compulsively compare recipes until I narrow it down to a few, then start the experimental cooking. Well, I should really say the experimental baking, because everything that I have done this with has been a baked good. So yeah, now I'm off of lemon tarts (although I still need to try a delicious-sounding pine-nut crust recipe) and am on to bread. Any good recipes out there?

(I pose this question in a purely rhetorical fashion, because no one out there even knows about this blog!)

Bad luck

So, over the Easter weekend we lost both the aforementioned pot of basil (way too shady in the spot I left it) and our rabbit. So incredibly sad.

In addition, I managed somehow to step on a live, squirmy lizard in my living room this morning. I then proceeded to act like a complete idiot for the next hour while I tried to catch it (unsuccessful, by the way) while my 3-year-old ran around looking at me like the crazy buffoon that I am. It was quite a low moment for me. I am normally pretty cool, calm and collected when it comes to bugs and other creepy crawlies . . . when we're all outside. There's just something wildly unsettling about seeing an animal that should absolutely be outside suddenly inside your house. Embarrassingly, I haven't been able to sit comfortably with my feet on the ground all day today for fear the escaped lizard would run across my toes. And I am not at all looking forward to getting up for my 3-month-old's middle of the night feedings tonight! I seriously feel like this lizard is silently stalking me, just waiting for the perfect opportunity to totally creep me out again and elicit screams from a grown woman that should never be witnessed by anyone, human or reptile.

In more positive news, I did manage to put new cushions on our vintage patio set, allowing us to sit on them for the first time in the 6 years that we've owned them! Nothing like a little procrastination. Although in my defense, I always had big plans to learn to sew and make my own cushions. Thank god I found some at Target that fit correctly!

So for now, those are my exciting moments: lost basil & bunny, stalked by wild lizard, and new patio cushions. Oh how my life is going to change when my maternity leave ends in a few weeks!

Someday . . .

So, the subtitle of this blog might be a tad misleading. Since we purchased it in 2007, the "hobby farm" is little more than 30 acres of wildflowers, oak trees, some old unused corrals and a broken windmill. My husband and I live here happily with our two daughters, my parents, our 6 rescued dogs (yes, 6!) and a porch cat. I have a good job that helps to pay the mortgage and feed the babies, but my dream is to someday find a way to use our property to make a profit or, at the very least, to offset some of our day-to-day living expenses.

In my idyllic dream I would:

-Have lots of chickens to eat bugs and provide eggs (they would, of course, never be harassed by bobcats, coyotes, hawks, etc.)
-Have cows to eat our grass and to provide milk (plus the knowledge and equipment needed to do so)
-Have a well-appointed vegetable garden and fruit trees to provide some sort of year-round nourishment for our family
-And lastly, since this is purely fantastical, a small bee-keeping operation to provide whatever a well-established bee-keeping operation provides. But mostly because bees are just cool.

The only problem: I haven't the foggiest idea of how to do any of that at the moment, not to mention the complete lack of resources.

I'm hoping that with a lot of hard work and a lot of imagination, a scaled-down, realistic version of all of this will someday be possible.