And Then There Was Bread

Day 6 Take 2 

September 19, 2022 

It was the moment of truth. I had been playing mad scientist both in the kitchen and outside with Tonka’s pony cart. Both of which had proven very successful so far. 

I hadn’t worked out. I didn’t get my kilometer but I made some real progress in getting myself set up for the long haul in both these important aspects of my health goal. 

Tomorrow I had to go back to work after nearly a month off but first I had to deal with it. I had put it off all day, leaving it for fear of what I might find, let alone taste. 

I had made excellent high protein bread and sliders this afternoon and I was on cloud nine. This could cause me to come crashing down if it was another atrocity. 

I opened the door and walked into the dark sun room. The sun had gone down over an hour ago. The sound of the hot tub humming along with the beat up old dehydrator was surprisingly pleasant. Grabbing the machine I went back inside to face what had become of the dead zombie goo. 

I opened the dehydrator lid and looked at the hard rippled disks. I stared at them for a moment then broke off a corner. Thank goodness I had had the good sense to spread the good as thin as possible because had it been any thicker these rippling disks could be easily made into weapons. For a moment I thought about the possibility of hunting with bullets made from dehydrated dead zombie goo.

The taste was doable. It was almost green tasting if that makes any sense at all, green as in green grain, or something unripe. How on Earth could it taste unripe? It did, ever so slightly but it did. 

I broke the incredibly hard disks into cracker size pieces and thought about all the success I had. I made bread. Yummy, wonderful, not too gritty, high protein bread. Depending on the size of the slices there is anywhere from 6-10 grams of protein per slice and roughly the same in carbohydrates on most of those carbohydrates are fiber so do they really count? 

Lentils flours have always been kind to me. Time was ticking away, if I was going to start work on rebuilding Tonka’s pony cart I was going to have to stop messing around and just pick one. 

I chose red lentils and as a whole grain to accompany the lentils to complete their protein I chose rye. Rye flour is a gluttonous flour but I have never had a problem with it.

Two parts lentils, one part rye. I milled enough to make a test recipe and two batches of bread. 

The red lentil flour was the most beautiful color of creamy orange. Hot shoe orange is my favorite color (Or hot poker orange for those of your who have never seen a horse get shoes) but red lentil flour orange is a very close second. 

I mixed the freshly ground flours together by hand in the flour catching compartment of the old flour mill. The orange of the lentil flour held its beauty even with the gray of the rye flour mixed in. I stirred and sifted the flour with my fingers, feeling its warmth and softness on my hands. 

Wanting to increase the nutritional content of the recipe and give it some bend and stretch I decided to add my Super Seed blend. 

Super Seed Blend 

2 TBS Chia seeds

2 TBS Flax seeds

2 TBS Pumpkin seeds 

2 TBS Sesame seeds 

¼ cup Sunflower seeds 

¼ cup Hemp hearts 

Not wanting to eat all these seeds in my food I decided to put them all into the coffee grinder instead of just the flax. 

Being a little gun shy from yesterday's dead zombie goo, I decided it would be a good idea to test this flour. My dad’s special pancake recipe always worked perfectly for testing flour. I went with 1 part super seeds and 3 parts lentil blend. 

I was very pleased that the pancakes cooked all the way through and rolled up beautifully! We had a winner! 

Next I dug out my old lentil bread recipe. This is another item I had miraculously put away.  With a few tweaks on the old recipe I came up with this: 

Red Lentil Rye Bread 

In a small bowl put: 

2.5 cups warm water 

1 TBS Coconut sugar 

1 tsp dry instant yeast

In a larger bowl mix together: 

(If you didn't mill you flour together - if you did then it’s 3 cups of the lentil rye blend instead of below) 

2 cups red lentil flour

1 cup dark rye 

1 cup super seed blend 

1 tsp salt

Poor you yeast mixture over your flour mixture and blend well with a serving fork (Or whatever you like to stir things with) 

Then add ¼ cup of olive oil. 

Poor into parchment lined loaf pan and cover gently with plastic wrap. Just enough to keep some of the heat and humidity in there - don’t let it touch your batter. (Like a nosey neighbor peeking through the blinds I couldn't take my eyes off it while it rose - and to my delight it did rise!) 

Let rise for 30 minutes. Then preheat the oven for 325. 

When the oven is preheated put the pan in and bake for 30 minutes. Turn up the temperature to 350 and bake for another 30-40 minutes. 

Take it out of the plan and paper and let it cool on a rack before opening it…. if you can - we couldn't. 

While the bread was in the oven I put on my head lamp and headed outside. There was a project I promised both myself and Tonka I would start on tonight. 

The flaming orange and white sparks flew from my grinder and into the dark. I put down the grinder to clean my safety glasses. I had been so excited to start this that I didn't even clean my glasses first. The second shaft of the pony cart that Tonka and I had been using for the past 19 years was now removed from the body of the cart. I started chopping at the cart some more and to my amazement the grinder blade ran out before the bread was ready to come out of the oven.

“Brent do we have more grinder blades for the grinder” I asked him, and you could tell he thought it was way too late for me to be this excited. 

“Yes” he said “but you should use the metal blade for the sawsall” He told me a with a quick explanation as to why it made more sense. 

I was cool with that. The sawsall and I get along really well. So excited to continue working on this project I told him I was going to call it my Chopper. Every girl needs their own Chopper? Mine just has a pony power instead of horse power. 

Now all I have to do is figure out how to give it a super slick paint job that’s Chopper worthy. 

*****

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Dead Zombie Goo

 Day 5 Take 2 

September 18, 2022 

I decided to try and make some high protein bread. Not having any of the necessary ingredients I decided to use what I had. 

Having made beautiful things out of quinoa in my past I figured I had this and would use flax and chia seeds to sub the eggs and psyllium husks to bind it all together and fall apart when you’re eating it. 

I cooked up the quiona and put everything into a blender. Then added some water, and more water and more water. 

The thick warm paste of mushed quinoa and seeds filled the blender and still wouldn’t fully mix. So I did what any mad scientist would do in her ktiechen and I threw some yeast into it and mixed it by hand. 

Taking the blob of yeasty quinoa goop out of the blender with the spatula I stirred it with I moved it into the parchment lined loafs pan. I had a good feeling about this bread. After all, my other quinoa breads were quite tasty. I let it sit on the counter for about 45 minutes hoping it would rise. It didn’t. 

So I popped it into the oven and let it bake for over an hour, quinoa tends to be a little on the moist side so I left it in a little longer than I should.The toothpick came out clear so I removed the loaf from the over and plopped it on a cooling rack. 

It spread. Like hot thick goo overflowing the boundaries or a crusty shell it spread right before my eyes. Slowly it started to sink through the rack. Crap I thought, what now? 

I put the crusted gooey blob onto a cookie sheet and popped it back into the oven. Maybe that will dry it out enough to eat. 

HARD NOPE. Maybe I could save it. 

I scooped the contents out of the hardish shell into a bowl and added more water in hopes that I might be able to balance the batter with something that creates horribly dry baking. This would normally be a job for coconut flour but I couldn't find mine. The last time I saw it I think I cursed it and sent it to the basement with the quail food making ingredients. Having deemed it unfit for human consumption because it was far too dry would have made it the perfect candidate. Instead I used dehydrated black bean powder, which can end up dry or moist depending on the recipe. 

The black bean powder had turned the goo a dead gray. The dead gray color you would expect to see of a decomposing zombie. Dead zombie goo I now called it. 

Having properly bloomed the yeast this time I had faith that it would work. 

My faith was once again misplaced but that didn’t mean that it wasn't going to rise in the oven. So I put it back into the oven and left for well over an hour. Nothing could still be goo in an oven for that long? Right? 

Wrong! I pulled the dead zombie goo out of the oven and just like before it was still a hot mess of mush, only this time it was well mixed and looked like death. 

Now these ingredients are expensive and sometimes difficult to get where I live. Wasting them was not an option. I pulled out the dehydrator and spread the dead zombie goo ever so thinly over parchment paper on the racks. 

My dehydrator has been making me crackers from this sort of concoction for years. It was my last hope. I sprinkled each rack with light dusting of sea salt and whispered to my dehydrator “Don’t fail me now” as I plugged it in and left it to run in the sunroom overnight. 

Horse O’clock which had started as a minimum of 1km has now evolved into “lets see what we can do in an hour”. Setting time boundaries with myself is a big part of my balance experiment for this cycle and so far I think they’re working really well. I let go of my tension and then like I had hit a secret button Punkin let go of hers too! There we walked, long and relaxed in an effortless fast gait. 

4.12 kilometers we walked tonight working on releasing tension while moving. Which puts us at 34.6% of the way through our Valkyrie Challenge and only 63.6 more miles of ground work left until our nightly walks will transition into nightly rides. And to think I almost didn’t go because of today’s earlier failure. 

*****

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