Slow Living in the English Countryside | Summer Baking, Nesting & Homemaking From Scratch

I'm ready for a cup of tea, aren't we? So today is a very, very slow Saturday so far. We've not really got much done and it is basically almost midday. But we are enjoying the slowness and we are going to celebrate the slowness by making a rhubarb spelt cake which has been harvested from the garden and we are in full harvesting season at the moment. The farm shops are selling all the wonderful seasonal foods. It's the perfect time to buy so do make sure you get yourself to a farm shop to check out what's in season and buy all of the vegetables and the fruit that you can. But today we are actually, we've been given lots of rhubarb so we are going to make some rhubarb cake and then hopefully we are going to make some bulk meals later for baby prep. I'm currently, I think I'm about 34 weeks pregnant and feeling like I'm 45 weeks pregnant There's lots of energy balancing and trying to get through the days as much as we can with a good attitude and enjoying it and all those things so, but let's do some summer lovely calm baking. It has been really hot here recently but the weather has cooled down slightly so I'm particularly enjoying that, being so pregnant, but let's get on with it. I'm going to start by sweetening the rhubarb with some maple syrup. I'm going to attempt to make this cake with maple syrup instead of refined sugar so that it's just a little bit easier on our bodies and obviously the freshly milled spelt flour is going to really help us as well. I like to try and adapt recipes where I can without trying to ruin them because sometimes when you change them up too much, turn something into freshly milled or you change all the sugars, it does change the texture and stuff quite a lot so I try and be careful but today we're going to do a healthier version. It's just for us and potentially a neighbour so it does need to be quite nice. We're going to experiment today. This is my own recipe. I'm not following, well I'm following my own recipe. If you would like recipes to things that I bake then I mostly put them on my Patreon as PDF printables so if you'd like to go and check those out you can find them on there but that's where I tend to share all of my recipes at this point in time. I'm using freshly milled spelt for this and I love milling flour, milling grain at home and I love that it goes straight from the grain and into the bowl. Spelt can be a bit confusing if you're in the UK and you've been researching it online, it's quite hard to find. Most of the information that's out there is American and in America they categorise wheat very specifically, hard white, hard red and soft wheat and we don't really use that language here so it took me a while to figure this out. But spelt is an ancient grain and it's a soft wheat. It's lower gluten than modern wheat which actually makes it really well suited to cakes and you get a more tender crumb and a slightly nutty flavour and I've been recently experimenting with spelt bread too. If you don't have spelt or you don't mill your own grains, plain white flour works as a straight swap by weight and the flavour will be a little more neutral but the cake will still be lovely. With freshly milled flour I sometimes reduce the liquid very slightly, around 10% or so because fresh flour absorbs differently to anything that's been sitting on a shelf. And this is the one the children help with. Spelt batter is quite dense and it's also forgiving so you're not fighting against overmixing the way you would with a lighter flour and they can really get involved. And then it's into the oven for 40 minutes. And our son are building shelves today and we've been talking about a little tea station in the kitchen for a while, just somewhere for the teapots and the cups and all of that just to live and have it off the worktops. We currently only use our stovetop kettle so it's not like we need room for a kettle or a plug socket or anything and this is kind of the natural place for our shelves. And I think this is just what it looks like building a home. You don't do it all at once, you think about something for days or weeks or months and then one day it just happens. And my husband worked very hard on these shelves with my son in our busy, busy day so he squeezed that in. But I really don't think that you need to rush any of the building of the home process. We've got the boys making some shelves. We're making some dinner now ready to kind of bulk out a little bit. I actually only have about a kilogram of beef so it's not going to go a huge amount but it is going to be delicious so we're going to get chopping those vegetables and the rest of the house is a bit of a work project so just bear with me. What I've been doing over the last few weeks is just bulking out whatever I'm already making and getting it into the freezer ready for when the baby comes. This is my fourth baby and so I feel a lot calmer than I used to and the newborn phase just doesn't feel as enormous now. But the one thing that I always come back to every time is having some sort of food sorted and it takes that pressure away completely. You're not thinking about what to cook, you're just present and you're able to spend all day with the baby and with the family without thinking or stressing about what we're going to eat. So if you are preparing for a new baby the freezer is honestly where I'd start. Just simple things like soups and stews, things you can just pull out and you don't need to be elaborate about it. Just double whatever you're already making and freeze half. I think sometimes I'm overwhelmed with the idea of prepping for baby and freezing lots of food in one afternoon. I'm not quite at that capacity in my life so just doubling what I'm making and freezing it. But beyond that I think the main thing is to lower your expectations of everything else. The house doesn't need to be perfectly ready. The older children will adjust. What you actually need is rest and food and not very much else. Support is always good as well. There's something about the postpartum season that I think we rush past and that slowness is really important, physically important. Your body genuinely needs time. And I'll talk more about nourishing foods for those first few weeks as I go as I've been thinking quite a lot about what I want to have on hand. Okay so this is a banana loaf. It's flaxseed and dark chocolate and freshly milled spelt. And I've been baking a lot in these last few weeks and there's something in me that just wants to prepare when a baby is coming and I think that instinct is a good one, I think it's a natural one. But the flaxseed is doing a lot of work in this recipe. It is high in omega-3s which your body is genuinely depleted of after birth so it needs them for recovery and for energy and for those first few weeks of feeding your baby. And it also supports digestion which is one of those postpartum things that nobody really talks about but it does matter more than you'd think. And then good quality dark chocolate brings iron and magnesium both taken away from you in pregnancy. And I love a recipe that feels like a treat but is nourishing at the same time and that's what I'm always looking for in this season. And the banana of course gives you that gentle natural energy which you need when you're not sleeping. The freshly milled spelt keeps all of the bran and the germ and everything that gets stripped out when flour sits on the shelf. And if you don't have it, plain spelt from a health food shop works well or plain white flour as a straight swap by weight. Just reduce the liquid about 10% or so with freshly milled as it absorbs differently. But you do get to know the doughs and the batters of freshly milled flour when you're working with them over and over. So I'd encourage you to keep going and keep understanding your own doughs and your own batters. So I slice these before I freeze them and wrap each slice in parchment or you can just put it all into a food bag, labelled and then in those early weeks I can just pull one out and warm it or my children will eat them before they even make it to the freezer which is always tempting in our house. But it's such a small thing but it matters so much when you are tired and you just need something good and nourishing to eat. So this is my fourth baby and I still feel the kind of weight of it. I don't think that ever fully goes away. You just know more of what you're walking into each time. So I've been asking God for grace in these last few weeks and for patience and for rest in moments where rest isn't really possible at all and for peace in the uncertainty of it. And he's been faithful and he always is. But going back to the baking there's something about working with your hands that's grounding that I absolutely love. If you know me you know that I just love it. Baking and preparing and doing something quietly useful is a way of saying I'm doing what I can and I'm trusting the rest and that's the posture that I keep coming back to. And homemaking from scratch isn't about being perfect, definitely not. Or doing everything the hard way. It's about intentionality, choosing even in an overwhelming season to just do something nourishing for yourself and for your family and that choice just, it does really matter. Even if no one else is seeing it. And if you are in a hard season right now, not just postpartum, just a hard season in general, I think the same things apply. Lower your expectations of everything that kind of isn't essential and fill your freezer if you can. Do something nourishing for yourself like that and slow down on the inside even if the outside of your life won't let you slow down just yet. So moving into the granola now. This recipe comes from Christine's Notebook and it uses olive oil and maple syrup and lots of seeds. It's the only granola actually that I've made that my daughter has enjoyed. So I'm not going to go about changing it any time soon. But this batch I decided to add dark chocolate chips to as well. It's not in the original but it's one of the things that I love about cooking from scratch. You can change it, you can make it yours. Say for example with granola, one of the reasons I really like to bake it is because in the autumn I'll swap in more cinnamon and dried cranberries and raisins or something warmer. And then winter I go further into that. You could add cardamom, ginger or dried orange peel. Spring and summer you can lighten it up with things like coconut flakes or dried apricots, a little lemon zest. But the base stays exactly the same. You're just responding with the season which feels kind of right in a way. And a big batch keeps for about three weeks in an airtight jar although it never lasts longer than a couple of weeks in our house because we get through it so fast. And it's so much cheaper than buying it. And you know exactly what's in it. So this is a rhythm I want to keep even after the baby comes. A quiet morning, a loaf in the oven, a cake in the oven, granola in the jars, something on the stove. And not every week will look like that for sure. Some weeks nothing will but having the intention to come back to it, that feels like enough for now. And slow living for me isn't something you achieve and then maintain. It's kind of something you return to. Again, this posture at the heart. Externally things can look busy but internally slowing right down, having joy and having trust after the hard weeks, after the overwhelming days, just come back to it. The kitchen, the scratch cooking, the simple rhythms, that is what it means for me. I'm grateful, I really am, for this home, for these children, for food on the table and hands that can make things. And there are days that I need to remind myself of that and the kitchen is usually where I find it. So thank you for being here. People join me from all over the world and I never take that lightly. That you'd spend your time here in the English countryside with me, it genuinely means a lot. And if you're new do subscribe, I'd love to have you along. And let me know in the comments what you're making from scratch, what you'd like to start making from scratch. Or even what season you're in, I'd love to hear. I read every single comment and although I may not respond to every single one, I do read them and really appreciate them. So thank you so much and I will see you in the next one. Music .