Two nights in a row...

St Patrick's Night, out without children. Tonight, out for writers' group without husband or children. Went to a bar after writers' group and yackity yacked some more. I feel like a kid who got Christmas and then a birthday straight afterwards. All this adult company.

In other news, I'm playing around with turning a standard modern fast bake bread recipe into a slow soak and ferment version. I'm using this oat bread recipe as my base. I had a phase last year of making this oat bread quite often. It is a Browne/Leach/Titchborne book and one thing I really like is the simplicity of their instructions. I do much prefer to make bread using cup and spoon measures. Measuring 60gm of water and 270gm of flour is just irritating and given my current kitchen tools, difficult. This afternoon I measured the cup of oats and the cup of (cold) water into a bowl with a splash of whey to soak overnight. Tomorrow afternoon I will heat the golden syrup and milk and add all the ingredients (using just 1/4 tsp of plain dried yeast) together and leave it in the cupboard overnight. Then two hours proving on Friday morning before cooking it.

I haven't been near the garden it seems, apart from a few stints of caterpillar squashing. The neglect is showing but the price of working in the garden with Brighid is that anything I plant will be pulled out, so just not worth it. Our chooks are still laying an egg each every day. Favourite Handyman put more wood chip in their run and I can see we may get access to quite a bit of untreated wood chip. Time soon then to dig up the lawn paths on each side of the old chook run garden and lay them with wood chip. Another job is to harvest the comfrey again and make more comfrey brew. I need to use my current brew to feed the brassicas around the garden, especially those which are only a month old or less. Much of the rest of the work is weeding, especially along one fence where the convulvulus from the neighbours is taking hold.

My decluttering is progressing. Two plastic bags of outgrown childrens' clothes went to a work colleague in the afternoon and I finally gave my maternity togs to the sallies. Finally. These togs which I bought new and wore only twice and which have for more than two years hung round the house, mostly the lounge being useless, are the emblem of my ridiculous clutter habit. So I have, I like to think, broken through an important barrier. I put out four bags of rubbish for landfill this morning. Not so very long ago at all this would have seemed a terrible failure. I kept almost everything and prided myself on having half of a bag most weeks for landfill. But the house was growing inside but not in the walls. We no longer had anywhere to sit. Flotsam and jetsam dominated my days and my nights. The cans didn't get recycled anyway, just squashed with the old cars. It will probably ease off a bit now all the lounge wallpaper is gone, but there is much clutter to be disposed off still and for a while yet, lots of bags are symbols of victory over chaos.