Slow Living in the English Countryside 🍂 | Homemade Butter, Sourdough & an Autumn Woodland Walk

This was filmed when our little boy was just over one week old. My husband is on fraternity leave and we have nowhere to be and the days were as slow as they've ever been so I thought I'd bring you along for one of them. There's sourdough, a walk in the woods, granola, vacatio bread and a whole litre of cream that's about to become butter. So autumn is properly here now and I love how the house changes with it. There's more candles, more soups, blankets just on about every armchair and we've been bringing in all the cozy layers. We've been lighting the fire more and doing read alouds in the afternoons which the children love and every walk ends up with pockets full of leaves and conkers so we've been doing things like a few seasonal crafts with them too and it's actually still been quite warm which has been lovely so we've been out a lot wrapping up a little bit and splashing in the puddles whenever it rains. So this little guy he was somewhere between one and two weeks old here and it's just been such a gentle start. I'm not up early in the morning at the moment, I'm not trying to be and the mornings have just been happening super slow and the thing that's helped most is accepting help actually and having lots of cups of tea too and just not being strict about anything. Home school has also slowed right down for now and we'll pick it back up in a few weeks. The children have been brilliant at tidying up their own things which makes such a difference in our home and if you've got little ones it's worth getting them into that habit quite early even small children can put their own things away and it takes so much off of your plate. If you're in that newborn stage right now let it be a slow embrace, what a beautiful phase of life it is. The routine will come back eventually. So my sourdough starter has been sitting in the fridge for a little while and it's definitely time to wake it up. It's had a bit of a break like the When I feed my sourdough starter I always like to use a 3-2-1 ratio. A 3-2-1 ratio is three parts flour, two parts water to one part sourdough starter and I just use plain flour, nothing special but when it's been left like this it can look a bit sad and flat and not very bubbly but don't be tempted to throw it out, they are much tougher than people think. I got a question on Instagram about this and when your sourdough starter is feeling a little bit flat just think about being consistent and what I like to do is feed it every 12 hours morning and evening for a few days and each feed it perks up just a little bit more until it's kind of rising and bubbly again. So if yours has been forgotten at the back of the fridge this is your sign to get it out and I'd love to know do you keep a sourdough starter going and how do you feed your sourdough starter? Mine works really well on the 3-2-1 ratio like I said in my climate but I'm intrigued what works for you. So once the starter was fed we got everyone wrapped up and headed out and we love finding places where the children can just roam in the woods, in quiet villages, anywhere they can run on ahead and I don't have to worry about them and I'd always pick that over walking through a town or you know as much as I love a village with lots of charity shops that's sometimes not as easy when you have four children under the age of five but they're so happy out here in wide open spaces with no plans and nothing to rush off to just collecting leaves and sticks and anything else they can find. Inspiring old woods, old villages, it's just a nice reminder that people have been living simply for such a long time. So back home I'm making granola and this is an olive oil granola and my daughter and I absolutely love it and we have it most mornings at the moment. So in this recipe you've got two and a half cups of old-fashioned oats, two cups of mixed nuts and seeds, I use anything really but I'm using a lot of flax seeds and sunflower seeds at the moment, we have one and a half teaspoons of salt, one teaspoon of cinnamon, half a teaspoon of ground cardamom, I don't actually use the ground cardamom, I don't think it needs it, and half a cup of olive oil and half a cup of maple syrup, one teaspoon of vanilla extract and the thing that makes it slightly different in this recipe is one egg white. I always add lots of extra seeds especially flax seed, flax is full of fibre and omega-3 and oats and flax are both things lots of mums reach for while breastfeeding but for me it's a really nourishing breakfast while I'm recovering after having a baby. I'm trying to look after myself a bit more this time around and this makes it super easy and to make it a bit more autumnal I've added extra cinnamon because who doesn't love cinnamon in the autumn and that's honestly all it takes, the whole kitchen smells amazing while it's in the oven and you can make it your own for the season too, you can add a bit of nutmeg or some dried apple or dried cranberries would be super delicious once it's cooled and I love having a big jar of this in cupboard. Some days you just don't get much done especially with a newborn and it's nice to know that there's something good and homemade there for breakfast. If you'd like to see kind of what I'm cooking on a bit more of a regular daily basis or you'd like to stay up to date I've actually started an Instagram, it's super new for me so have patience while I figure it out but if you'd like to join me over there as well then I'll leave the link down below for you and please do come and say hello. Something that's been on my heart lately is actually trying to smile more even when I don't really feel like it, smiling at my children and smiling at my husband, finding joy in normal days just like this one and there's a verse that says that this is the day that the Lord has made let us rejoice and be glad in it. It doesn't say let us rejoice only in the perfect days or when we're feeling like life is going smoothly or when I'm sat with my tea and everyone's happy and not arguing but it's just the ordinary days just like this one and as mums we can set the temperature of our home a lot more than we realize and I want to be a presence, a happy presence in mine. So later on I mixed up a sourdough focaccia again just with plain flour today but I'll be honest my starter wasn't quite back to full strength yet and it was still kind of waking up however we did need lunch on the table so I wasn't expecting much from this one but that's kind sourdough isn't it? Sometimes you work with what you've got and you learn something every time and that's really what I love about it as well. So the focaccia went into the bowl and I left it overnight and the next day it had risen not loads but enough to go with it and your space but plenty of olive oil in the tin but I actually ran out of olive oil as well so I just did a lot of butter which was super delicious and then you tip the dough in and then you get on to dimpling it and this is my favourite bit getting your fingers in and dimpling it all over it's super satisfying even though it hadn't risen much it was still really satisfying and then the generous serving of salt and rosemary on top and into the oven. It wasn't the most perfect focaccia I've ever made but it was tasty and with a newborn tasty is good enough for me and I think that's worth remembering actually not everything you make has to be perfect if it's homemade and everyone's happy eating it and you've got those cozy flavours coming through then it's a total win for me and we had it for lunch with soup and lots of butter which is pretty much my favourite autumnal lunch. So focaccia needs lots of butter but I was actually out by the time we got around to eating this so I did need to make some butter and focaccia needs a lot of it so I made mine in the stand mixer today. Today I'm using a whole litre of cream and you just let it run it goes past whipped cream past stiff and you just keep going. I've got little Silas here so you might hear his wonderful baby newborn noises but I make mine in the stand mixer and you just leave it and let it go and then all of a sudden it's one of my favourite noises to hear in the kitchen it splits and then you have your butter and your buttermilk and I just find that so satisfying and I always like to salt my butter and I try to never throw the buttermilk away either sometimes it goes into pancakes or what I like to do if I'm not thinking I'll make pancakes in the next few days is I freeze it in big ice cube trays and pop a few out whenever a recipe needs it if I'm organised. So my best tip is to keep a few litres of cream in the freezer and if I run out of butter I just defrost one and then you can have fresh butter pretty quickly. So he's three weeks old now as I'm recording this and I'm starting to want a bit more routine back but I'm so glad I got to film those first few slow weeks because they just go so fast and they are so precious. Well thank you so much for spending the day with us wherever you are and whatever season you're in I hope you get to slow down a little and slow down with us here so don't forget to come and find me on Instagram I'll leave the link below and I'll see you next week. Have a blessed week.