Take a holiday - get off the hamster wheel!

After the bread round is turning to before the bread round as the blog returns and the short interruption due to technical inability is over. 

As a reasonably new and definitely very tiny business in the food sector , I often get asked how I can afford to close for three weeks and take a holiday. Yes, it is expensive and we save for those three weeks all year long but it is definitely worth it. As I get off the hamster wheel once a year,  I relax for a short while, recover and recuperate and then turn and have a good long look at the wheel and the why, the who, the “Whose idea was this” and - we make changes. This year, we brought back a new recipe and we changed the sourdough process to make a better bread and a tighter work schedule. We changed a few hours and gained an extra pair of hands in son no 2, who very kindly is taking a gap year in the business. He started as second baker in third year in school and is now training up as first baker - moving his start time from 4.15am to 2am and moving me to the office.  

Once a week, he takes an early morning and once a week, I take an office night. I start at 2am also – theoretically to be there as back up, in practise to tackle the VAT returns ( last week) and the social media and the blog this week. VAT returns are easy compared to twitter and instagram and blogger. 5 hours later as the rest of the house rises for breakfast and the amazing peace of the night house is broken, I have reconnected with my twitter account, decided to abandon instagram and have actually managed to put a follow button on my blog!!! You may laugh, but that counts as an achievement and please – if you like what I write at all, try that button and follow us on After the bread round. 

On my travels this morning, I also discovered that our website seems to be deactivated, that I had over 50 notifications on twitter, that there are lots of blogs that I’d like to follow and why didn’t I - and that a night spent in the bake house, producing steaming, wonderfully fragrant and crusty loaves, baguettes and Stromboli is massively more satisfying than a night struggling against my technical inabilities in trying to keep up with modern media. 

So, if you watch this space, you’ll see an active blog, a buzzing twitter account and a website which will hopefully be up and running again once all these helplines that I emailed this morning get back to me. Now, as the bakers outside finish off and the cars head to Waterford, Kilkenny and Carrick, we get back to important stuff  like our new Super bread or athletes bread as it is called in Germany. There the bakers association and the Olympic council got together to devise this energy boosting bread, based on rye and spelt and brimful with seeds and sprouted seeds. We got the recipe from a German baker in Mechernich and we’ve been practicing for a while. This week the bread made an outing to Inistioge on Tuesday and Kilkenny on Thursday. Tomorrow you can taste it in Carlow and then it will be part of our everyday offerings. Good things happen off the hamster wheel.