English Countryside Spring Day | Slow Homemaking, From-Scratch Cooking & Family of 5

It's late May and the countryside is at that point where everything is just full. The hedgerows, the garden, all of it. I've been moving a bit slower this week. This pregnancy is really making me be intentional about how I spend my days and honestly I think it's been a gift. So this week I wanted to bring you along. There's bread to make, meals to cook from scratch, children to look after the ordinary rhythms of this little life. Just slower and a little bit more deliberate than usual. Come and spend the week with me. One thing I've learned being pregnant with little ones already at home is that you need snacks constantly and they need something every couple of hours and honestly at the moment so do I. I've been trying to keep things simple but nourishing we have boiled eggs and they're pretty much always on the go and ready. Especially for me they just live in the fridge. Today I'm making deviled eggs so with a nice filling in the middle. My children aren't always keen on the yolk when it's hard boiled and cold so I experimented with deviled eggs today. They, I thought they were delicious. I think I'll just stick to plain boiled eggs for my but I also like to make granola bars and I make that in batches and store it in the freezer. I like dates and honey and peanut butter with dark chocolate as kind of a squished down bark and the children think they're a treat which I love. We also have lots of vegetables just cut and ready, simple bread and things they can reach for themselves. It's one of those small rhythms that makes the whole day run more smoothly. If the snacks are there nobody's desperate and nobody's grumpy. Lunch today is a bit more of a project. I milled the flour this morning for a focaccia. Focaccia? How do we say it? We're not sure. There is something about freshly milled flour that I just can't get past and it smells completely different and it tastes completely different. I've never used freshly milled flour in a focaccia before and so this is my first time. I think I'll let it rise a little longer next time but we were just a little bit desperate for lunch today so we just needed to get that done and I've also served it with a local chicken from the butchers crisped up with a sticky sauce and this is the kind of meal that looks like a lot for a nice little lunch but it's really just good ingredients treated simply and that's all it ever needs to be. I used to think cooking from scratch every day was something you had to be a certain kind of person to do. You know, kind of organised and patient and lots of time as you'll see later in the video. It's not easy with little ones but I do think it's kind of the opposite of being a certain kind of person. It's kind of what brings the day into a focus and especially right now when I need something to kind of anchor me throughout the days. Before I carry on I just wanted to tell you a little bit about today's video sponsor Sina crisps. These are absolutely delicious and have just three ingredients. They have potatoes, coconut oil and sea salt. Organically grown. That's it. I can read it in one breath and that's all I need in a snack these days. There aren't any seed oils, any numbers, nothing I have to google. Just real food in crisp form and they taste absolutely lovely. We've been eating them for a while now and my children love them, I love them, my husband loves them. I've been giving these to the children which I'm always a bit weary about doing with other types of crisps because they are full of things. I don't want to be giving my children but these ones I feel perfectly happy. We have them as a side with lunch, they have them as a snack on its own, we have them with sandwiches, anything really. If you'd like to try them I'll leave the link here for you and I'll put it in the description and you can get 20% off your order using the code Mia20. Thank you to Sina for sponsoring this portion of today's video. This day has not gone exactly how I'd have planned it. I did film something earlier where I was talking to you guys for a while and then the audio didn't record and then the day got away with me and there were lots of moments where I was doing lots of homemaking that I could have filmed but I needed to get the homemaking done more than I needed to get the filming done. So I decided to just get the jobs done because I only had short periods in which the children weren't needing me but right now it's a relatively quiet moment. The children have had quiet time, I've had a little rest because this pregnancy has me so tired. I've set the children up on some painting, we had our focaccia for lunch which was really yummy actually, I really enjoyed that with the chicken but we need to make some bread, some emergency bread. It's not going to be a sourdough because I don't have time for the long ferment but it will be 100% freshly milled which I'm still experimenting with but I'm going to do 100% because I'm out of any other type of flour and I'll just use 100% hard white, just white wheat berries to do that. So let's get on with that and join me for a bit more homemaking. I've also got laundry and all the things to do but it's quite a cosy, rainy, cloudy day today so it's quite a nice day to have spent it inside. We're doing lots of inside activities and I think we're having a nice day so far, albeit we are all very tired. I'm really tired and needing lots of tea. So let's start some bread. If I can put my tea down. Not sure I can because it's so delicious. Okay, Jude is up from his nap. So he's playing with wheat berries while we get on with making bread. I'm sad because I'm from a charity shop the other day. I bought two lovely farmhouse style kind of gorgeous creamy coloured bowls and in the last week they have both broken which is fine. It's why I get them from charity shops but it means that my nice bowl collection has diminished significantly by mixing bowls so we're making do with Pyrex bowls and other things. I have a couple of big ones that I think will be just fine but not ideal. Oh, we'll add another one of these and then a big one of these and they're both broke. It's okay. We'll use the small one, shall we? Let's go ahead. Hoping this recipe works this time. Let's try it. So this recipe calls for 540 grams of water, 110 grams of olive oil, 160 grams of honey, 16 grams of salt, 600 grams of freshly milled hard red wheat flour and then 200 grams of freshly milled kamut. I'm just going to combine those and do 100% whatever I've got. One tablespoon of instant yeast and one and a half, wow he's so good Caleb, one and a half teaspoons of apple cider vinegar. Got it? I'm actually working with paper. I had the recipe on my phone and I don't know if I'm just too old or just unable to go through a recipe on a website. Unable to scroll through a website when my fingers are full of dough and I'm mid recipe and I don't know where I am and all the ads come up and it's very annoying. So printed it. Let's get started. So we're going to use my stand mixer bowl. I have about half the amount of honey that I need so I'm just going to stick with that. Maybe add a little bit more brown sugar when the flour goes in. Handing out snacks. We are going to get back to this bread after cleaning up a lot of mess. We want it to mix until just incorporated. Leave this for 30 minutes. I was making bread a long time ago now actually. It's been a few days since I last picked up the camera. Do you want some milk honey? Should I fill up some milk? Tea. I need to stick with milk right now. This milk is absolutely delicious. It's from a local farm. Well, semi-local and it's A2 dairy and it's raw. It's delicious. Here we go. You like those ones, don't you? Okay. So yes, it has been a little while. It's been a few days. We have consumed those two loaves of bread that I made, but I need to make more today anyway. So once I've finished that process, I won't take you through the whole process again. But once I've finished the loaves, I will film what they look like and they are absolutely delicious. It worked really, really well actually, that recipe. So I was really pleased about that. I haven't picked up the camera in a while because it has been a little crazy here. It's still a little crazy. Last week I had a really rough week. We had sickness in the house. I was feeling super tired. I shared it over on my Patreon, the reasons why I took a week off. But I just definitely needed it and my husband and I decided it was a good idea for me to just take a week from filming and from editing as well. It takes a while. So I'm hoping to jump back in to a few of the activities that I've been doing that I need to do. I've got some things in the kitchen that I need to do and around the house so much, so much around the house. But a curve ball, another one is that I hurt my back and so I'm really struggling to move around a lot, which with three little ones, you're getting hungry for your lunch. So with three little ones, it's proven to be really tricky. I can't pick up any children. I can hardly, I can't really do much, but it's okay. So would you like a little spoon? So I've had a super slow morning. Okay, so basically I'm just going to take you through on the rest of what this very slow week is going to look like. But for now, my children need me, so I'm going to go and do that first. We're going to go and sit in the lounge and have a cup of tea, play with... Shall we go and read some books? Shall we go and read some books? Shall we go and find a book? In the past few months, I've been trying to find some electrolytes that have Celtic sea salt that are within our budget, but I haven't been able to find them. So I've decided to just start kind of making my own because I find it helps me so much in pregnancy with my energy and things to be taking regular electrolytes. So I'm just going to pull one together. I'm experimenting with this recipe, so we'll see how it goes. I'm pretty much going to go for, I've got this Celtic sea salt here that I got from Amazon. It's a coarse light gray, vital blend of H2 minerals. It's a nice salt. It's very coarse. So I do like to just kind of grind it down a little bit for all of our recipes and also for the electrolytes. So I'm just going to start with a teaspoon of that with just a smidge of orange juice and then some raw honey, and then I'll fill it up with water. And then I'm pretty happy with that, honestly. I think you can do lots with lemon juice and lime juice and all things, but I'm just going to keep it simple today. So let's get that done. You can also add coconut water to this. I didn't find a good organic coconut water brand that I was happy with, again, within budget. So I just, I'm going for a dash of orange juice and then the rest filled with water. I have to forgive my very tired-looking self. I ordered a vegetable box from Riverford, I think. And we ordered a vegetable box from Riverford, which provide organic and seasonal vegetables straight to your doorstep, which is brilliant because our local market doesn't really have the organic vegetables that I'd like to have on hand. But it's really fun to receive a box of, actually, you don't really know what you're getting, or I chose that option. And so I'm just having fun creating different meals each evening. But tonight I'm doing some courgette, some sweet potato, some red peppers, and some organic quinoa that I got from Costco. And I've also marinated some pork that's going to kind of slow cook in the oven. It's going to be like this kind of delicious, I suppose, semi-seasonal with the seasonal vegetables I have meals. So let's make that together. I'm not getting much active homemaking done in terms of cleaning and decluttering and things that I wanted to that have been on my list this week because of my back situation. But I have just had a lie down for a couple of hours while the children were sleeping and in quiet time and my husband was around. So I do feel up to making some dinner. So that's good. I have washed and prepped these vegetables too. I will save my vegetable scraps for making stock. And I have some lamb bones, which I'm really excited to make stock with. I've decided to do rice instead of quinoa just because, well, that's what I prefer with pork. I'm going to do about two cups of rice for our family. This isn't really a cup measurement, so I'm just going to add a bit more to make it about a cup. And then I'm going to cook it with some homemade stock for some extra nutrition. I run back to you and you come back to me again. Wildfires burning and they're packing up for war. Seems like nobody's learning from the ones who came before. But I run back to you and you come back to me again. Up before the sunrise on another working day, trying hard to hold tight to the one thing that remains. So I run back to you and you come back to me again. Head down, dream about a love song. I'm writing to a friend. I run back to you and you come back to me.