Making our first batch of home made bread

My plans to have a taste and cooking extravaganza while we are here, has got off to a really rocky start.
The funeral feast, while very interesting, is the likely cause of me now being on a 5 day course of antibiotics. I think we can safely narrow it down to a combination of raw and filthy cow stomach, and my competitive show off streak.
Then, on about our forth evening here, I went fishing for the first time, and caught a really nice pan sized fish in the lagoon. This in itself was miraculous as I didn’t have any bait and had simply stuck on a hermit crab that I enticed out of its shell.
After gutting and scaling it I popped it into the freezer when I got home, because we were heading off to Mthatha for two days to pick up the girls.
Not wanting to waste it I gave it to our neighbour, Nonezile.
Then a few afternoons ago I had taken the girls for a walk on the rocks at low tide, and without trying picked up three hand sized fresh oysters and a really nice fist sized Alikrickle. I was planning to show the kids how to cook them the next day, and shoved them in the fridge for the night.
Sadly, that was the night I got massively sick, and over the next 48 hours only managed to get down half an apple and a hard boiled egg.
So again, I donated my loot to Nonezile, so as not to waste them.
I had also found some very big Sea Urchins. I have never tasted them and was keen to give them a go, but again, with my gastro, they seemed about as appealing as a Gordon Brown/George Bush/Julius Malema speech. (Take your pick)

Nonezile paid dividends though, because she popped over this morning with some freshly picked mielies (corn) for us. It was great, and looked like nothing you would pick up in one of our supermarkets

So today’s first attempt at baking bread here, was going to be a big deal. It was our first small step towards making our kitchen and larder self sustainable. And it could also include the kids, which would be fun.
Things didn’t get off to a great start.
I read 750 grams of whole wheat flour, and 750 grams of cake flour.
The recipe called for 750 ml of both.
So I basically used the right amount of yeast, salt etc, and twice the amount of flour.
Difficult to remedy when you are up to your elbows in batter and your three year old son is asking you to take him to the loo every seven and a half minutes.
But we soldiered on and we ended up with two pretty reasonable loaves.

I got into trouble with these ladies before I had even started. I got glared at by the Nonezile's chickens who were roosting on top of my lovely pile of fire wood. Sorry girls.

Caleb, who is a real pyromaniac, sick or not, is like a little freaking fire feeding monster. He loves anything with a flame and constantly feeds little pieces of wood to keep it going. Naughty bugger. Just like his dad was.

As the sun was setting and we were all sitting on the logs around the fire waiting for the bead to finish, our neighbours Nonezile and Nosandise, popped past and were very impressed with our efforts. (Or that a man was making bread. A real man)
I wonder what she thinks of our urban adjustments.

For all of the cock up's, the end result wasn't actually too bad.

Extracting our own wild and organic honey

We had an interesting afternoon extracting some fresh and organic honey this afternoon. This was of particular interest to me because bee-keeping will form part of my agricultural project, and I used to work for a bee-keeper in the early 90’s and have been interested in honey production since then.
Dave had previously introduced the village to the possibility of honey production, but for a variety of reasons this had not really worked out.
Today’s very modest yield of just under 20 jars, was a small victory though, as it was the first successful harvest of honey in the village, and the R400 odd Rand that it earned the bee-keeper, will hopefully spur him and others on.

This is a pic of a hive that I had found in September 2008. All the hives I found then were neglected and empty.

I didn’t have my camera with me today, and so unfortunately missed out on some really cool photo’s.
For a small quantity like this Dave and I settled on a primitive, but very high yield system.
We cut the honey-comb directly from the frames, without capping it first, and placed it all in the centre of a clean dish cloth. We then simply twisted up the dish cloth and the tighter we twisted, the more honey we got.
The honey poured freely from the bottom of the dish cloth into a small pot we used to catch it before decanting it into the jars.
The frames weren’t particularly full, but we still managed to get about 4 jars per frame.
The dish cloth was surprisingly effective and I could comfortably press out a frame in three or four minutes if I needed to.
There was also very little wastage, all that remained was a golf ball size piece of wax.
Anyway, it was very rewarding taking the honey from a comb on a frame and ending up with a jar, ready for sale in the lodge.
It was additionally great knowing that the kids were learning from it.
Hopefully this can grow into a little cottage industry when we established how many hives the countryside will sustain.
There are also definitely a lot of wild bees around.
Within about 15 minutes of noticing the first bee, we had hundreds around us while we were working, all from the forest that borders near the lodge.
One of them even decided to commit suicide on my elbow.
I quickly covered the site up with a big smear of honey to stop his mates from doing the same.

Solar System Operating Well

Our new solar system has been installed and running for the past week.
We have been very happy with it and are more than pleased to give Leon, of Energy Efficient Options, in Cape Town a free plug.

www.energyoptions.co.za

Leon took all of our specs, came up with a suggested system, and made everything reasonably easy to install without any special electrical or solar knowledge.

We have three 80 watt panels, three 12 volt 100 amp hour batteries, an inverter and a digital charge regulator. (The digital regulator has been very helpful as it gives you quite a bit of information about the system)

The system has been working really well and is quite adequate for all of our needs.
We comfortably run both our laptops off of it, as well as charging phones and torch batteries.


Dave came up to help me set the system up, which was a great help. Here we are connecting each of the panels.

Once they were connected we assembled the frame and bolted all three panels into their frame.

We haven't mounted this on the roof yet, as it will move to whatever the site of my new office will be. It is simply on the ground facing North, with about a dozem concrete building blocks holding it down against the wind.

It was a simple job to then connect the battery bank, charge regulator, and inverter.

Not the sexiest looking finish, but a couple of grey building blocks and a nicked shelf and the inside part of the unit is complete. We have a piece of shutterply on top of the battery connections to ensure that there is no accidental shorting (conductive objects that get placed there) accross the points.

On a sunny day we will get about 1200 Watts from the system. A really cloudy day like today only gave us around 360 watts

Quite a tough week this one

As it was Saturday, so we decided to try and spend some time today relaxing and doing something with the kids. We were all getting a bit of cabin fever as the weather had been pretty miserable, and too many of us were sick.
I prescribed myself antibiotics this morning after five or six days of the worst gastro imaginable. So I have been pretty useless. Standing up makes me want to rush off to the loo and a simple 5 minute chore requires me to sit down at least 3 or 4 times to allow the waves of gastro to pass. Very unpleasant. It has also made me pretty useless in helping Sonja. But you can’t do anything about it. You either sit down, or you mess your pants. Simple.
Then the night before last Caleb suddenly got really bad gastro and was running a fever on about 40 degrees Celsius. We called though to the nearest district hospital, which is about an hour and a half away over pretty bad roads. The game plan was to keep him below 40 degrees, and keep him hydrated. If he went over 40, or started vomiting together with the gastro we were to bring him through.
So we spent an anxious night doing all we could to get his temperature down. We had a bowl of water we kept wiping him with and wetting his neck and hair. We had two ice packs in the deep-freeze that we wrapped in dish clothes and put against the front and back of his chest, and we had some of those home made ice lollies in the freezer that you make by freezing juice, which we kept getting him to eat. This worked well as he saw it as a treat, it helped get his core temperature down, and it helped re-hydrate him. It was a long night let me tell you. He was feverish all through yesterday, and then yesterday evening, just at sunset, his fever finally broke.
On top of this Sonja has been battling two deadlines, so she has really been under pressure.
So the miserable weather and two days of strong wind making everything unpleasant were the capping on a tough week.
Today was going to be chill out day (or at least semi chill out)
Things started badly with a quick spring clean turning into a two hour ordeal of crying, whining kids, and short tempered parents.
When we finally got to the forest area, with our packed snacks and drinks, (and lets not forget the ant collecting jar to get ants to house the new ant farm) Caleb was crying and in need of the loo, the Skye had rubbed up against poison ivy, and was very vocally unhappy, and Mila was getting upset because we still hadn’t found her any ants for her ant colony. Bloody hell.
Me needing to squat urgently behind a tree was the last straw, for both Sonja and I.
We managed to wrestle three log seats back to the bakkie and then headed back to the cottage.
As quickly as we could.

When we got back to the cottage, Mila and Caleb seemed happy, and we thought Caleb should get some rest, so I walked down with Skye to have a swim and do some exploring.

She had a really educational and fun time. We helped extract some freshly harvested honey, she spent about an hour with a woman at the lodge sewing garments on an old hand turned sewing machine, we had a great swim and an explore, and then in the late afternoon we made our first batch of bread.

The idea is to try and relax a bit more tomorrow, Sunday, and then get stuck in again Monday morning.