After the bread round - more baking

Three walks last week, no yoga and didn’t manage to head to the offices, I didn’t even plant those poor daffodils – and the exhaust fell off the car. Good week all in all. However on the plus side, one of the more business minded members of our staff took on the delivery plans and is powering  ahead with new contacts and plans  - and the exhaust very kindly fell off the car when the much more car capable – and level headed - husband was driving it. All that’s left to me is last weeks paperwork and the daffodils.

After the bread round mostly heads on to other things when that same bread round is finished but last Saturday, when all the bread was gone to market and the two bread rounds had left the premises, we turned around, cleaned the bake house and welcomed bread baking enthusiasts and learners for a baking afternoon where they get an idea of how to work with yeast and sourdough, how to make soda bread and scones and generally become confident working with bread. In the baking world, we divide ourselves into gut bakers and techie bakers and I am most definitely a gut baker. I bake like everyone’s grandmother used to do and use retro weighing scales, which look great but deal in hundreds of grams rather than grams or ounces. I use spoons and pinches, blobs of this and handfuls of that and I describe the ready dough in terms of looks and feels. After many years of running our little bakery, I am still at a loss during insider debates that mention hydration phases and moisture and protein content and am prone to say things like “I just bake”.

So when people arrive with very detailed recipes that talk of preparing sponges and fuss about with many ingredients and temperature changes, we go right back to the start. Bread should contain flour, salt and water for sourdough and flour, salt and water and yeast for yeast breads. Know a few things about those ingredients, mix them and knead them and learn to like your dough. Leave it rest and rest again and bake it out. Bread making is simple, very basic and very easily learned to a level where every practice loaf is very eatable and every next one better than the one before. During our baking afternoons you do not bake perfect bread. We bake many and none of them – by defintion of a baking afternoons that only lasts 4 hours -  has had enough time to rise and rest and develop into that perfect loaf. However, you will still like and most certainly eat your non- perfect first loaf and hopefully go home with many of the mysteries debunked and your confidence well up and able to go again and give that loaf another chance. After one of our baking afternoons you should have the knowledge and the tools to make a handful of scones for the unexpected visitor, a quick soda bread for the hungry lads and that yeast loaf or sourdough for the weekend fun baking time.

Astonishingly enough, I love this baking after the baking, I love passing on the interest and the skill and so far no one has come out after the few hours saying “ I can’t do this”. Bread making is fun and easy and we can show you how – every last Saturday of every month. So, get planning – while I wait for it to get bright so I can plant those daffodils.

To the start of hope

After the bread round had a busy week with just one walk and absolutely no yoga - quite a pathetic effort really. However the paperwork is up to date – which seeing it is only January is nothing really to crow about but the bread is as good as ever, this weekend we have our first baking course of the year and today, I shall head out to advertise our new delivery service to some office blocks and see how we go.

The week always starts well with a day devoted to catching up and prepping all at the same time, a day without the really early morning and with lots of energy after the weekend. Then, the week picks up and by Friday afternoon, I often have done two 15 hours days on 4 hours of sleep and one more day to go. Last Friday, I came home at 4 pm, after a very long if very productive day,  and sat down to watch what everyone watched last Friday – the impossible inauguration, the one that we thought we never see. The inauguration,  where a man with no manners, no style and with a hugely overinflated sense of his own importance took high office. Every last little bit of hope that he had just played the masses to his own advantage and was not really that bad fled beyond hope with his speech - short, infantile and nasty as it was. On Friday evening I thought we were heading into disaster but over the weekend I read a lot, followed the women’s marches all over the world, the protest, the reaction and today, I see the daffodils emmerging for another year, and hope resurrects itself.

One piece written by Peter Leyden and widely shared on social media claims that rather than ending an era and dying a death, we are in throws of growing pains as one economic period replaces another, i.e. we are starting new things and for this the Donald Trump era is the one we need to activate and energise the change. In California ( where apparently everything happens years before everywhere else) the change happened, the republican got so bad( for Donald Trump read Arnold Schwarzenegger)  that people stood up and the ultra conservative era ended forever. The same he claims will now happen in America as a whole where the last conservative nasty stronghold of the republicans will die under this disastrous administration that in a very short time nobody will be able to support any longer.
I like hope, I like optimism and I like this sliver of a silver lining, which was also shown up again and again during the women’s march on Saturday. Gloria Steinem remains in my memory as she, among many other, insists on staying positive and believing in her fellow Americans. “Very often”, she said, “we elect a president and go home. This week, we elected a president and we are not going home. We are staying here and planning and we will succeed”. I do hope she is right and I am grateful for that little bit of optimism and hope. Today, the sun is shining, the birds are singing and there is definite signs of spring. I found a pot of daffodils in the garden which I had thrown out – planning no doubt to plant the bulbs somewhere. Time passed, I didn’t plant them and now they are flowering again. I will plant them today. 

Keeping in touch

        

At the risk of sounding like Brigit  Jones, here is the review of last week: Walks: 0, yoga sessions: 0, Bookkeeping: moved from table to big box behind the sofa. Summary: must do better. Whichever way, the accounts from last year are finally submitted, New year cards ( haven’t called them Christmas cards for years) finally finished and a very enjoyable staff Christmas party finally had. You get the trend? We are late for most things but have ceased to stress about those that don’t matter. Accounts could have gone in earlier but the staff do was as much fun yesterday as it would have been any other day and probably more so than in the reasonably busy time leading up to Christmas where hundreds of mince pies needed to be made and where everyone is busy with their own private run up to Christmas and who really minds whether the card arrives in December or January? 

Greeting cards at Christmas time are probably our last bastion of written communications. In a world of quick emails and texts, this one may well be the only opportunity to go through that address book and remember people that might have fallen out of our busy lives, people that we’d like to get back in touch with. In our family it is has been tradition for many years to send a picture of the children and write a card, summarizing the year in general and our year in particular.  We keep in touch, we add a personal note to the card and we follow up with lunch dates, weekend invites and the general feeling that we are keeping family and friends in some kind of fold. And of course we get other cards from people who do the same thing – but generally get around to it a little bit earlier. 

As life gets busier and busier, keeping in touch is so important and it feels great to stick those stamps on over 50 envelopes and send our good wishes into the world. It feels even greater that it is Monday morning at 7 0’clock and that I smell the breakfast that someone else is cooking and that the school uniform is being ironed by someone else too. Today is obviously the day for that box behind the sofa to be dealt with and for that elusive walking programme to start. 

New Years resolutions - the tool of the optimist

Some people claim with great pride that they never make new year’s resolutions. “ I won’t keep them so making them is silly, I just carry on”., is the tone of their plans and pride is the feeling that they never fail. I, on the other hand, love new year’s resolutions. A new start, the best of new intentions and a new plan are a wonderful thing. With the new year approaching, I try and reorganize a busy life, try and squeeze in time for excersise, time for relaxing, time for chats and time for the dreaded book keeping. Because , I am such a fan, I have other times over the year where I review, replan and restart. At Halloween, which is the celtic new year and a a time of beginnings when we move from darkness to light , lends itself terribly well to new plans and Easter also, the time of renewal and resurrection. So I combine all different belief systems to divide my year into three new starts, three little flashes of optimism and three times of the year where I review, realize that the grand plan didn’t work so well but that it hopefully will this time.

So today, close enough to new years, today is the day, the kids go back to school.  One of them starting the last preparation phase for the leaving cert in earnest while the other tackles – I hope – his strong belief that school is a waste of time anyway. Me, I’m back baking since last Thursday, have great plans to not let the papers get out of hand – again and to not work late into each evening and – to get up early every Monday and write this blog, record how I get on and share how I managed to find more hours every day. Convinced that there is a secret supply that I only have to tap into. “I have to be more organized” is the new mantra and more organized I will be. So watch this space to see how this slightly chaotic life will change into one with daily excersise, organized paperwork and evenings dedicated to choir, help with school work and relaced conversations. Once an optimist, always an optimist and nothing is as good as a new start.New Year’s resolutions – the tool of the optimist

Some people claim with great pride that they never make new year’s resolutions. “ I won’t keep them so making them is silly, I just carry on”., is the tone of their plans and pride is the feeling that they never fail. I, on the other hand, love new year’s resolutions. A new start, the best of new intentions and a new plan are a wonderful thing. With the new year approaching, I try and reorganize a busy life, try and squeeze in time for excersise, time for relaxing, time for chats and time for the dreaded book keeping. Because , I am such a fan, I have other times over the year where I review, replan and restart. At Halloween, which is the celtic new year and a a time of beginnings when we move from darkness to light , lends itself terribly well to new plans and Easter also, the time of renewal and resurrection. So I combine all different belief systems to divide my year into three new starts, three little flashes of optimism and three times of the year where I review, realize that the grand plan didn’t work so well but that it hopefully will this time.

So today, close enough to new years, today is the day, the kids go back to school.  One of them starting the last preparation phase for the leaving cert in earnest while the other tackles – I hope – his strong belief that school is a waste of time anyway. Me, I’m back baking since last Thursday, have great plans to not let the papers get out of hand – again and to not work late into each evening and – to get up early every Monday and write this blog, record how I get on and share how I managed to find more hours every day. Convinced that there is a secret supply that I only have to tap into. “I have to be more organized” is the new mantra and more organized I will be. So watch this space to see how this slightly chaotic life will change into one with daily excersise, organized paperwork and evenings dedicated to choir, help with school work and relaced conversations. Once an optimist, always an optimist and nothing is as good as a new start.

A cold day at the market

After the bread round  yesterday, I made an executive decision not to worry about the weather. The bread round took me to Waterford, as always on Wednesdays and it took a bit longer and was bit slippier but so much more beautiful than normal. Short and sweet as that winter was, it soon turned back to Irish weather with wind and rain and more red, orange and yellow weather warnings. We had a minute amount of snow, we had temparture that dipped under 0. We had rain and storm. It’s winter not a national emergency. Yesterday, as Rebecca stormed over the country and we had to decide whether or not to  bake our usual market load, I turned off the radio and the multicoloured weather warnings. Instead, I went outside, looked at the sky with a bit of optimism and reckoned that the wind would blow itself out by tomorrow. So we put on the sourdoughs, weighed out the flour for the rest, lit the fire in the bakehouse and prepped for apple pies and our stromboli .  Then we spent a typical winter evening by the fire, refusing to be paniced by the weather warnings Come 2.30 am, the wind had calmed, the rain had stopped and a beautiful night sky was more reassuring than the met office which again was warning to stay indoors, to mind the roads, to watch for fallen debris, to maybe close schools and to generally not say we weren’t told!! . We baked for 4 hours, went to the market – so cheerfully confident that we nearly forgot the weights. As I write this blog, the junior baker is still out there, selling the last few loaves as one after the other of our hardy customers come out, wondering where all that weather was. You can still buy meat, fish, veg and bread on the market today, the day is actually a beautifully clear and crisp winter day with some little gusts of wind. In other parts of Ireland the weather might be red, orange and yellow, In Kilkenny it was grand. Sometimes, very rarely in Ireland,  do we get real dangerour weather events. Most times, we just get normal weather. Three customers warned me today about the trees behind us. We should go home soon, they worried. Very kind and much appreciated - but that wind only existed in their imagination and on the radio. On the parade in Kilkenny – there was little wind today. There was no yellow, no orange and certainy no red situation. Juts a normal - very cold - winters day on the market. 

Another start to another year

After the bread round is back in work after Christmas. It’s Wednesday and I should be at home doing prep for the market, making pizza bases and cookies and generally doing the “Wednesday is our busy day” thing. Instead, I am in Tower hotel in Waterford, enjoying a really nice and boiling hot cup of hot chocolate, writing my blog and listening to at least three conversations going on around me. The car, you see, is charging. I deliver to Waterford every Wednesday with the E-van and while I make it back on good days, today it was dark and wet and between the lights, the windscreen wipers and my enjoying the torque of the van, the battery was well over half empty by the time we got here. It is one of the unexpected beauties of this electric van, that it slows me down whenever I may not actually want to go slow. Today, I might have wanted to head home quickly, but instead I snnozed in the van for  a short while and then go for hot chocolate and a quick blog before heading home. With any luck the junior baker will have put on the pizza dough and have everything well under control by the time I roll up – all rested and with the wonderfully good conscience that comes from having writting this blog – long overdue as always. This year we are planning great things. First off is the Bia Beag Meet the Bakers session on the 24th of this month and the promising start of a Real Bread Ireland group. Next – just as soon as the paperwork is all organised – we will hopefully join the Food Academy with the Local Enterprise Board and learn to be more professional when it comes to the business side of things. We are planning to start baking courses next month so do pass that news to anyone who might be interested please and we also have a job vacancy again come late spring, early summer. Finally, this small bakery has to employ non-family as the junior baker is planning to take off. All very exciting plans and a good year ahead for Speltbakers – we hope. We wish everyone a very happy new year and put “weekly blog” on the list of new year’s resolutions. The van is charged, the bar in the tower hotel is filling up with lots of well dressed family parties coming in for lunch. I listen in and listen in some more and finally decide that they are parties of recent graduates from Waterford IT. Having solved that problem, I head off to the bake house, the pizza  bases and the cookies. Could do worse on a rainy Wednesday in January.

An Advent weekend in Germany

After the bread  round,  last Wednesday turned into a logistic excersice as we started a little bit earlier than usual, baked our bread, send one basket off to Waterford and one to the Truffle Fairy in Thomastown. Another car went off to Kilkenny very early while the rest of us changed into happy clothes, grabed our suitcases, packed the car, turned around five times in case we forgot something and headed off to Kilkenny. We found the lads who had at this stage deliverd the bread and together headed off to the airport. 9am in the morning, one job done and a long weekend to come. Feeling self righteous and marginally worried about the car which had been driven nearly empty the day before and was protesting with slightly sluggish behaviour, we got to the airport nice and early, parked the car, found the shuttle bus, checked in and settled in to wait. Travelling by air you can choose between frazzled panic or boredom and we opt for boredom any time, incorporating enough time into the schedule to deal with all evenutalities and mostly ending up with no eventualities but with a massive amount of time. So we read, we play, we windowshop, - and we found an amazing new waiting area in the airport. Cooled down to nice temperature and sporting big, colourful sofas, a play area, wifi access, computers and cute holes in the wall, this place was virtually empty because not ascotiated with any restaurant and actually made for the poor travellers with their own sandwiches. The perfect place and the start for a perfect weekend. We travelled on to Charleroi and Mechernich near Cologne for a few packed days with all the family. We ate way, way too many Bratwurst and drank enough Sekt to make it through the entire Christmas. Speltbakers had their promised Christmas outing on the Christmas market in Bonn with hours of food, stalls and ice skating, with Christmas present shopping and hint dropping and with a nostalic look at the carrussell that we are now all too big for and the historic ferris wheel that we will never be too big for but which appears to have shrunk and turned from gigantic to quite small – as so many things do when you grow up.

We met even more family when we celebrated a cousin’s confirmation and are now on our way home. Slowly and with time in hand, we will work our way back to Charleroi, to Dublin and to Bramblestown outside Gowran. Speltbaker’s bread will be  back in the shops on Tuesday, 9th and through to Christmas as we come back full of energy, Christmas spirit and Bratwurst.