Fresh Milled Banana Bread & Homemade Jam | A Slow Spring Morning at the Cottage

Mornings have changed, not all at once. It happened the way spring always does, gradually and then suddenly. The light that comes through the kitchen window now is different than it was a month ago even. It's warmer in its quality and more certain of itself. I noticed it when I first came downstairs. The first thing I do is feed my starter. It's been on the counter overnight and I can tell before I even lift the cloth that it's done well. There's a faint sourness in the air, that clean fermented smell that I've come to think of as simply the smell of the kitchen working. I pull back the cloth and there it is, risen right to the mark, maybe a little past it. A few bubbles breaking at the surface. I tip out most of what's there and save it for later, leaving just a small amount behind and then the fresh flour. I weigh it out carefully and the water, slightly warm, I stir it through until everything is smooth and combined and then cover it back up and leave it in its spot on the counter. It'll be ready by this afternoon. My daughter is already waiting at the table by the time I turn around. She's four and four means that sitting still is something that happens in short intervals, between other more pressing things of course. I've set her up with a few tasks of her own. She did some tracing, some counting work, a pile of things to sort. We're going through our reading work together and we're also listening to our classical conversations work. I love how she bends over them with an expression of complete seriousness that I find quietly one of the best things I've ever seen. We're working through some virtues together. Wisdom, self-control, things that we value. We work alongside each other for a while. She asks questions and I answer them and I ask her questions and she considers them carefully before responding and with the particular kind of gravity of someone to whom everything is still new and therefore interesting. The kitchen is warm, the starter is fed. Outside I can hear birds, more of them than there were last month and louder. The day is beginning properly now. I've had jam on my mind all week and there's something about this time of year, that gap before the soft fruit arrives, that makes me want to use what I've put away to open a jar from last summer and bring it back to heat, make something new from it, a kind of bridge between the seasons. The preserving pan I use is just my very heavy casserole dish but I always feel a small sense of occasion getting it out for making jam. I tip the fruit in and set the heat low to start, let everything warm through slowly before I ask it to do anything more. We're doing raspberry jam today, adding in some sugar and some lemon juice with the children's help of course. I love how the smell changes quite quickly with jam. It's first just warmth and then it goes to something fruity and sharp and then as the sugar goes in and the mixture begins to move it's a deep jammy sweetness that fills the whole kitchen. My son and daughter obviously appear at Elbow immediately and they have an instinct for this sugar sort of thing. Jam doesn't last very long in our house. Today I'm making about a jar and a half that will last us a couple of weeks and then it'll be time to make more. We stir carefully while the heat is still gentle and we all take the task very very seriously. Before we get into the rest of the day I wanted to start here because this is genuinely where the day just begins for me. I've been using this Surrey Sonic toothbrush for a while now and it's one of those small things I didn't expect to notice so much. I switched from a manual toothbrush to quite a bad electric toothbrush and honestly the difference in how clean my teeth feel is something I really can't go back from. It's a proper clean, you know, the kind you come away from and think yeah that's done. What I really love about it though and makes it makes my morning so much easier is that the battery on this toothbrush lasts over a month so I don't have to think about charging it which was the end of my life for my old toothbrush because it would always run out of battery and so that it's just made my mornings so much simpler and so much more stress-free because it's one less thing to think about because mornings as a mum are crazy. The heads are plant-based and Surrey actually recycle them for free when they need replacing which really matters to me so I try to be thoughtful about the things I bring into the house and this felt like it fits with that. Today's video is sponsored by Surrey and if you'd like to try it then my discount code gets you 15% off. I'll have the link and the code on the screen and in the description for you. So I'm watching for the set and the surface shifts from a light restless simmer to something heavier. I drop a little onto a cold saucer that's been in the freezer and wait for a moment and push my finger through it and it holds so that small wrinkle is one of my favourite things. Such a simple test and it never fails. I decided to try and strain some of the jam this morning which I've never done before but I have had this jam strainer to get some of the seeds out but I wasn't enjoying the process and I didn't quite get the knack for it so after doing this for a little while I then decided to take it all out and change it back to with the seeds in. We all don't mind the seeds at all I just thought I'd try a new process. So the jars go in warm from the oven and the jam goes in straight from the heat so it's nice and warm. And then I seal them up while everything is still hot then set them right aside up on the windowsill. There's a question I get asked sometimes and that is why bother? Why mill your own flour? Why make your own jam? Why spend a Tuesday morning doing things that could just as easily come from a shelf? And I understand the question I do but I think the honest answer is that somewhere along the way I stopped wanting to hand that part over the knowing. Knowing what's in the bread we eat what went into the jam we spread on it knowing that the flour I used this morning was grain that I milled an hour before I needed it and then there's nothing in it that I didn't put in there myself. It's not about being precious or performing some idea of the good life but it's quieter than that I think and it's about taking my time on things and the difference between making something and just producing it and when I'm standing at the counter working through a recipe slowly ingredient by ingredient I feel I don't know more present than I do when I cut corners more like I'm actually here. There's also something about the pace of it that I've come to need the world moves very fast and my kitchen doesn't have to and the food tastes better that's true and I won't pretend it isn't. One of the small things I've learned over years of keeping a kitchen is that dinner made slowly through the day is always better than dinner made in a hurry at five or six o'clock not just in taste though that too of course but in the feeling of it when dinner prep is spread across a few quiet hours it stops being a task and starts being just a part of the day something to return to between other things and I start with what needs the most time the stock goes on first but I'm making the stock by boiling up the gammon that we're eating later tonight with onions and carrots and peppercorns and bay leaves and I will use that stock later in the week but I'm just boiling up the gammon to prep it. I pour cold water over everything and set it on the lowest possible heat and it will barely simmer for most of the afternoon and by the evening it will have turned into something quite good. It's a kind of pleasure in peeling and chopping that I think people sometimes dismiss as drudgery but I've never found that when you're not rushed it's almost quite a restful process the rhythm of it the knife on the board the light is different by mid-morning and not the soft slant of early sunrise but something fuller and more direct and it sits on the counter in a way that makes everything look very clear and you know I can see all the pile of vegetables and the grain on the wooden board and the steam beginning to gather above the stock pot. My daughter has found her way to the sofa with a pile of books I can hear their turning pages and occasionally talking to themselves and to each other or possibly to the books it's hard to tell either way they seem entirely content. I think about what slow living actually means and sometimes when I'm doing work like this it isn't an aesthetic really it's not the linen apron or the ceramic bowls though I do love those things but it's this it's choosing to be here in the kitchen on a Tuesday morning in spring doing something ordinary with care and the stock has finished and I've poured that into the jars and the whole kitchen is warm with it and I set the meat aside and score it and I'm adding a mustard and brown sugar topping for it to be roasted in the oven for our dinner there's still more of the afternoon ahead that feels on a day like this kind of like a luxury. This is a really yummy topping to add to a cut of meat like gammon and it's super simple once the gammon is boiled you add on the topping and roast it in the oven for around about 30 minutes or so and it creates a beautiful golden crisp top and we served this with I served it with homemade chips and I was going to do it with fried egg on top because that's a classic dish here in England the gammon chips and egg but I didn't want to waste the eggs my precious eggs on a meal tonight when I knew I was going to need them tomorrow morning for breakfast so I just served it with some simple potato chips and then some green beans it was absolutely delicious and I can't believe it's already dinner time the days fly by I've been thinking lately about where things come from not in an overwhelming way but just returning to that question you know the eggs on the counter are from a farm the milk I used this morning came from the local dairy farm near us and there's something that shifts I think when you start to know the provenance of what you're cooking with and it stops being abstract and we are lucky to live where we do the countryside here is generous if you're willing to look for it you know farm shops and markets down unmarked lanes and vegetable boxes and vegetable markets but none of it is difficult once you've found it it just takes a little bit of intention at the start and it changes how I cook too when you've made the small effort to find something good and local you want to do it justice you think a little more carefully about what you're making with it and it raises the whole thing somehow the bananas for the banana bread that I'll be making in a little while or the exception there won't find those growing here but they've been sitting on my counter all week going exactly where I want them to go I just rubbed through a little freshly ground sea salt and some pepper on these chips and they were absolutely delicious I like to roast mine for about an hour so that they have enough time to really crisp up and all the juices form too so I'm finally ready to start making some freshly milled banana bread and the bananas I'm using have been sitting on the counter for the better part of a week and they've reached the state of perfect collapse the skin's almost entirely dark and soft all the way through when you press them and I've been waiting for this moment and so have my children of course they love banana bread so I set the mill up on the counter and in an ideal world I would use soft wheat berry for banana bread because you want the flour nice and fine not too robust however I'm only storing hard white wheat at the moment so I'm just simply using that today but when I eventually get my hand on soft white wheat berries I will use those instead I'm starting to really love the sound of the grain mill our grain mill isn't too loud but I quite like it when it's turned on and the children are getting used to it too because it can be a bit alarming but the flour that comes out is warm to touch and very faintly golden and it smells of the grain it's faintly sweet and alive in a way that the bag of flour simply isn't at all and I sift it through and it falls in a fine soft cloud so we peel the bananas and mash them straight into the bowl and they give way immediately and all that sweetness just sitting there waiting to be used you've got eggs and oil a little vinegar brown sugars we're out of honey at the moment that clumps slightly in the measuring cup which is something so satisfying when brown sugar does that and we mix it all together the batter that comes together is thick and fragrant and I always taste it at this point just a small scrapey from the spatula but it it tastes even raw like something good and the tin gets a generous amount of parchment paper and a generous amount of butter and I like flour dusting and then the batter goes in and I spread it level with the back of the spoon into the oven it goes the heat closes around it straight away it's only 15 or 20 minutes in and the smell is just beginning to rise in the kitchen it's one of the specific pleasures of this recipe the way the banana and the fresh flour bake into something that smells almost caramelized it's warm and sweet and faintly nutty all at once and after about an hour it was ready and my daughter is clapping in the background wanders back into the kitchen almost immediately when it's ready as if she'd been pulled there by something she couldn't even name and we sit down and we enjoy this together the starter I fed this morning is ready and I can tell by looking it's domed and buoyant and when I drop a small spoonful into a glass of water it floats I don't do that every time because I kind of have a feel for my starter but that's what I'm looking for so earlier on when I knew the starter was ready I mixed up some sandwich loaf bread and I mixed this in my stand mixer I've been experimenting with different recipes and this one seemed to be working pretty well so I'm getting close to being able to share something with you on that one I've still gotten some improvements to make I'm doing the final shape and the stretch and the fold inward we turn the dough over and line it in our loaf pans I like to do this with a wet surface and wet hands trying not to add too much flour because it just makes for more of a dense loaf so today there is a loaf of banana bread on the rack still faintly warm there are jars of jam on the side there are children who have had a good day and is now finally beginning to slow down there is stock in the fridge and vegetables prepared and something for dinner that we enjoyed that was very simple to make it's a full day a kind I try to build not around doing more but around doing what we do here but with some intention spring is here properly now you can feel it in the evenings the way the light lingers just that little bit longer than it did last week the world is waking back up we enjoyed our homemade freshly milled sourdough bread with some homemade butter in the morning with our homemade jam so satisfying thank you for joining today and I look forward to seeing you next time just a reminder before I pop off if you've been thinking about switching to a better toothbrush Suri is really worth it my code is still live for 15% off and I'll leave everything in the description for you god bless