The days are like a concertina – stretching and collapsing in unpredictable time warps. Sometimes I feel myself in the crush of it – the rush of home schooling and meal preparation and a house that is never clean. And other times I look behind me and can’t tell if we had that meal yesterday or last week.
With P watching the world-map as COVID19 clouded Asia and then Europe and the USA, we talked about shopping and how we would manage the virus when it got here. We decided to buy a bread maker – partly because of it being a safe way of ensuring we wouldn’t run out part way through a week but also because bread is wrapped in plastic and making our own would reduce our consumption of single-use plastic.
The test loaf (a simple white loaf which had a recipe in the machine’s manual) was not a success. Our daughter deemed it “too sweet”. So I halved the sugar in the recipe and put a mixture of seeds and some polenta into the food processor, adding the mix in replacement of three quarters of a cup of flour. Since then, it has become a very popular item at any time that we are hungry. We store it in the freezer so it can last 1 hour or several days.
I think, for Easter, I will try to make some hot cross buns. Many years ago, we bought the cheap Aldi version of a Thermomix. It was horrible to clean and eventually we were grateful when it was recalled due to some potential fault and we got our money back. But during its stay in our home, I made hot cross buns at least twice. Oh the bliss of fresh-baked buns!! An four-day weekend in isolation seems the perfect time to revisit this joy.
We also want to try making hot-dog rolls for a massive pack of hot-dogs that P found at Costco several weeks ago.
Yes, we are enjoying our breadmaker. It’s not the first time we’ve had one. But, at this very odd time, it’s nice to take pleasure in homely things.
Out of the Cave 