All Day Homemaking in Our Cottage | Fresh Milled Brownies, Sourdough & a Cottage Refresh

Being gentle with how we feel. I breathe out till my energy slows. This weather, only I'll miss till this weather. Delicious. Well, good morning. That was fun making some nice slow roasted coffee. Hello and welcome to an all-day homemaking day at the cottage. It is lovely to see you this week. I'm so glad you could join us today. We have lots of fun things planned. It is a little bit later in the day than I would quite like it to be. So we have already had the morning so far and that consisted of making breakfast. We had sourdough bread and eggs and bacon and sauerkraut and things like that. And now the children are playing and we've done laundry together. I've been teaching the children to do laundry so that obviously takes a little bit more time than just doing it myself. But that's always fun to do and today I would like to make some stock, make brownies, do some sourdough, put up some curtains, just do kind of homemaking tasks that I've been meaning to get to. We spent the day out yesterday so there's a little bit of catching up to do. Obviously, I think as always in the videos, you can hear my tumble dryer down here, just working away for me, which I'm very thankful for. And it is a very rainy day so the washing is definitely not going outside today. But it is summer. But that is a British summer for you. Some days it rains, some days it's super, super hot. I think it's supposed to be really hot this weekend. But for now we're embracing the rainy day with nice cosy drinks. But the temperature is still okay. It's not too hot, it's not too cold. So we can be thankful anyway. But let's move on. I think I'd like to start with getting some stock together and then moving on to baking my favourite, favourite brownies. Although I'm a little low on cocoa powder. And, like, I have probably a quarter of what I need. So I might try subbing in a few things and see how it goes. But my husband is craving brownies, he said to me this morning, which is quite funny. And I love these brownies so I thought we'd make them together. So let's get started with the day. Or the rest of the day. This might end up being a few days of homemaking. Before my stock, I tend to just collect vegetable scraps throughout a few weeks, really. I make it every couple of weeks. And then add in maybe an extra onion and some extra garlic with water and any leftover meat bones I have. I'm pretty sure I have a lamb bone that's going to go in this one. And then in a few days' time, I'll also have chicken bones. So then I'll do the next one, chicken. I don't really mind what it comes out like. It's always going into the rice and pasta and soup and things. And then I always add just a little bit of salt to mine so I don't have to salt the meal as much, whatever I'm making. So I'm going to pour it into my pressure cooker pot here and put it on high for four hours. And then leave it for about four hours as well, or until it's completely cooled down. But pressure cooking on high for four hours. The most ideal thing is to roast the bones beforehand. But I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to skip that step today. And just whack it all into the pressure cooker and get it on and get it going. So let's go ahead. Okay, what I said is not true. We are going for chicken bones today. I have some leftover chicken here that I cooked. We did a whole chicken a few days ago, so I'm just going to save a lot of the meat that I can, put that into a dish, and then add the bones into our stock. I do think we're going to get much chicken from here, but we'll see. My children have created a band over there in the lounge. And we're going to add some apple cider vinegar to our stock as well. A couple teaspoons-ish. Today's video is sponsored by Get Healthy UTV. And I wanted to share it with you properly, because it's something that is very useful to use at home. 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The brownie recipe that I love to use, and I pretty much adapt every single time I use it, so it's not that helpful. But I will tell you where originally it's from. And if you start with that recipe, it's always amazing. It's from, what's the website called, Mia? King Arthur, there we go. I should have known that, I use that website all the time. It's from King Arthur Baking Company. And they have many brownie recipes on there. But the one that I really like to use is just their simple fudge brownie recipe. And the way to make it amazing, if you just follow their recipe on the website, is to put in chunks of chocolate plus chocolate chips. It's just incredible. I like to do chunks of dark chocolate with the chocolate chips. I don't have any chocolate bars, like full bars, to break up into chunks today. So I'm just going to do chocolate chips. And I'm going to sub out the flour for freshly milled flour. And possibly some of the sugar for, in fact it might need to be all the sugar. I'm not sure I have any sugar left at all. So it might have to be, I'll sub it with maple syrup or honey actually. And I also don't have much cocoa powder. This is going really well so far. So this recipe is not going to be the exact one from their website. But go and try that one because it's incredible. I shared it on my Patreon a few months, weeks ago now. Hello Mr. Broom Face. Hello. Yeah. Brownies. You want to help? I haven't got loads of the ingredients so I'm just going to make it up as we go. Ooh. So because I'm very low on cocoa powder, I'm just going to sub in some delicious melted chocolate. Just to keep the colour and the flavour going through. These are organic dark chocolate chips. And in here I'm just going to use some, we have instant coffee grinders in here. Do you need that? Don't know why but I always use this bowl for brownies. And I always think, oh this is just a little bit too small. Every time. One day I'll learn. Yes honey. Remove any of it, that might eat any of the brownie batter. Right, so it has swiftly moved on to lunch time. We're going to have a really simple lunch here. I made some sourdough bread yesterday. I'm going to just put kind of a platter together and put it on the table for everyone to share. So let's get on with that. Carrots have seen better days. Need to go. Right, we're missing protein so I think I'm just going to throw in some boiled eggs as well. There's some chicken here that I'm going to leave plain for the children to help themselves. And then we'll probably do like a nice mayo herby sauce with it. OK, here I'm just doing a little chickpea salad. My children may or may not eat this and that's OK. I like to offer it to them anyway. I'm just going to do some olive oil and some salt. And then we'll do a bit of some of these slow-roasted salt and vinegar nut mix, which the children quite like to have. This is a bit of a different lunch for us. The children haven't tried like a chickpea salad before, but they do enjoy salad a lot and they eat sourdough bread and things like that all the time. So it's nice just to have a little platter of food, especially after our big breakfast this morning. Let's get this serving. The eggs are still going over here so we'll just add that when they're finished, but for now we just need to get started. Lunchtime! Hello, just a few days later. We need to process this stock that we did and then... Yes, honey? OK, so as I say, we've got some jobs to get on with. All I really, really, really, really, really want to do right now is sit down and read a book with my cup of tea. But it's best to get the things done that I need to get done first and then move on to the things that I really want to do. I also have a midwife appointment in like an hour, so we've got a few things to get through. But we need to make some bread this morning. It's Monday morning, so Mondays we're always in need of bread and food after a weekend. And then I need to process the stock. And then we added curtains to our kitchen and we've added some to the dining room as well, so I wanted to take you through those as well. In fact, why don't I show you the curtains that I got first? They are from Amazon. They are absolutely beautiful in design. I had to get quite long ones because we've got... Because it's a really old house, our windows are not standard sizes. We've got all sorts of different types of windows. So in here, we've got kind of old single-glazed sash windows in the dining room. In this one, we've got just a huge one here. And then we've got a tiny one over there, so we have to get lots of different sizes. But for the kitchen, I decided to go for kind of a cafe curtain sort of vibe just to let in still some of the light but to give some privacy with this beautiful curtain design from Amazon. It's sort of a linen blend. They are very, very beautiful. And they just add kind of a little bit of texture in the kitchen. Our kitchen can be quite plain, but I don't want to overdo it because I like this kind of simple neutral look and I think when I'm overstimulated, I like to have more of a neutral house because it makes it feel a little bit more calm. But it kind of adds that sort of cottage feeling that's really quite nice and quite pretty. So I bought some for the windows here. And like a ninny, I didn't get the short ones for the windows just at the back there. So instead, I put them on our washing machine and tumble dryer, which I will show you. So I have lined the washing. They're the same, aren't they? I've lined the tumble dryer and the washing machine just with a tension rod kind of precariously going across here and that drops all the way down. And I just think that adds quite a nice feature to the kitchen and a little bit of a cozy vibe as well. It was my original intention when we designed the kitchen to put that there. But obviously motherhood, just sometimes you don't get to these things or at least sometimes you spend a long time putting something off that's actually really, really, really easy to solve. I'll link these below for you if you would like to get some for yourself. They have other beautiful designs and colours and they're just really nice. We've put them up there and then we've got two spare ones. I've got a bin and a dishwasher opening here. I'm unsure whether to kind of slide one of those across there, but that might be too much because we've got them there, there and there. And then because those windows are so small, I'll show you the size of the small one. I'm not sure whether to put those ones over there. For example, this is one of our windows here, which is obviously very small. That's a candle holder, so you can see the size of that. It's very, very, very small. I still need to remove the tags over here because I was just testing it, but remove the tags and kind of fluff them up a little bit.