A rainy day of baking...

The weather this weekend was crazy. On Saturday, we had rain, hail, winds, intermixed with bursts of sunshine. The wood heater has been going flat out all weekend. The 15000L water tank we plumbed into half the roof a week ago is now half full. The vegie patch is happy (and a little battered).

After looking forward to spring so much this year, I rather enjoyed this weekend back in winter. I nested a little, baking, and making soup, and filling the house with warmth. I ran out to the garden to pick some salad greens and radishes between downpours, but mostly took an easy weekend. I also fed some king parrots that used our deck as shelter from the rain…

So food wise, first up I decided to bake a loaf of bread in the neglected bread maker. We prefer to make bread using our own hands but it does take a lot of time. This sunflower and burghul wholemeal bread recipe came with the bread maker, and was easy and reasonably good for a bread maker bread. It was a bit heavy though, maybe my yeast was a bit old and maybe my flour was too (have gone and bought fresh everything now)

Nathan then decided to make Anzac biscuits. We used Belinda Jefferies recipe from ‘Mix and Bake’, and the results were fabulous. Anzac biscuits are so easy to make, and were perfect for this rainy weekend (and for morning teas during the week if Nath doesn’t eat them all)

Back to the bread maker, I decided to make pizza for dinner. Using the recipe from the instruction manual, two thin based pizzas were made with absolutely no effort. The base is not as good as the base I prepared by hand using Maggie Beers recipe for the pissalidiere but it was reasonable.

For toppings I decided to try one of our favourites – potato and rosemary. I also dropped some garlic on it and drizzled a fair bit of olive oil and salt, and a little parmasen. It was pretty good, but would have been better if the base was better.

The other pizza was a tomato based pizza with pancetta, mushrooms, olives, sundried tomatoes, artichoke and mozzarella/ parmesan to finish. This was pretty good and not too heavy which was nice.
I served these with a fennel and anchovy salad.

Much too much baking for one day, and I am all carb-ed up now, but it was just what we felt like! Hopefully the next two weeks will fill our tank up so we can set the drip irrigation going for the vegies. So far we are just harvesting the quick green leafy vegies and radishes but the longer growing plants are looking good (apart from some pest problems).