fucked up how cooking and baking from scratch is viewed as a luxury…..like baking a loaf of bread or whatever is seen as something that only people with money/time can do. I’m not sure why capitalism decided to sell us the idea that we can’t make our own damn food bc it’s a special expensive thing that’s exclusive to wealthy retirees but it’s stupid as hell and it makes me angry
bread takes like max 4 ingredients counting water and sure it takes a couple hours but 80% of that is just waiting around while it does the thing and you can do other things while it’s rising/baking
plus im not gonna say baking cured my depression bc it didn’t but man is it hard to feel down when you’re eating slices of fresh bread you just made yourself. feels like everything’s gonna be a little more ok than you thought. it’s good.
bread is amazing and it’s also been sold to us as something really hard to make? Every time I tell someone I made a loaf of bread I get reactions like “you made it yourself???” and “do you have a bread machine then?” I haven’t touched a bread machine in probably 10 years. You CAN make your own bread, folks, and it’s actually pretty cheap to do so. I believe the most expensive thing I needed for it was the jar of yeast. It was about $6 at the grocery store and lasted me MONTHS (just keep it in the fridge.) The packets are even cheaper. destroy capitalism. bake your own bread.
You can also make your own yeast by making a sourdough starter, so that cuts cost even more.
But you have to feed the starter daily/weekly and that means it grows quickly, but there are tons of recipes online for what to do with your excess starter. Cookies, pretzels, crackers, pancakes, waffles, you name it!!
Make it even easier – “No-Knead Bread”. All YOU do is mix the ingredients together and wait until it’s time to heat the oven. The yeast does all the rest.
Here’s @dduane’s first take on itand the finished product. We’ve made even more photogenic batches since.
Kneading is easy as well; either let your machine do it, or if you don’t want to or don’t have one, get hands-on. It’s like mixing two colours of Plasticine to make a third. Flatten, stretch, fold, half-turn, repeat – it takes about 10 minutes – until the gloopy conglomeration of flour, yeast, salt and water that clings to your hands at the beginning, becomes a compact ball that doesn’t stick to things and feels silky-smooth.
Here’s what before and after look like.
My Mum used to say that if you were feeling out of sorts with someone, it was good to
make bread because you could transfer your annoyance into kneading the
dough REALLY WELL, and both you and the bread would be better for it.
Then you put it into a bowl, cover it with cling-film and let it rise until it doubles in size, turn it out and “knock it back” (more kneading, until it’s getting back to the size it started, this means there won’t be huge “is something living in here?” holes in the bread), put it into your loaf-tin or whatever – we’ve used a regular oblong tin, a rectangular Pullman tin with a lid, a small glass casserole, an earthenware chicken roaster…
You can even use a clean terracotta flowerpot.
Let the dough rise again until it’s high enough to look like an unbaked but otherwise real loaf, then pop it in the preheated oven. On average we give ours 180°C / 355°F for 45-50 minutes. YM (and oven) MV.
Here’s some of our bread…
Here’s our default bread recipe – it takes about 3-4 hours from flour jar to cutting board depending on climate (warmer is faster) most of which is rise time and baking; hands-on mixing, kneading and knocking-back is about 20 minutes, tops, and less if using a mixer.
Here ( or indeed any of the other pics) is the finished product. This one was given an egg-wash to make it look glossy and keep the poppy-seeds in place; mostly we don’t bother with that or the slash down the middle, but all the extras were intentional as a “ready for my close-up” glamour shot.
I think any shop would be happy to have something this good-looking on their shelf.
We’re happy to have it on our table.
Even if your first attempts don’t work out quite as well as you hope, you can always make something like this…
can we have more posts like this in future please? this is really useful and could help those who are struggling
Reblogging for truth and adding some recipes! I started making my own bread because I couldn’t afford to buy it from the grocery store. Here’s my “I have all Sunday afternoon free” weekly batch recipe, and here (minus the work/therapy of kneading) is a recipe for overnight-rise bread. ALSO, if, like me, you’re a single person and worried about wasting bread because of having it go stale… fear not! You can turn stale bread (along with vegetable ends and maybe some cheese rinds and beans if you’re feeling like pushing the boat out) into soup, as here. That’s actually a fairly fancy version. My usual ribollita, a.k.a. stale bread stew, relies only on garlic, onions, and carrots, besides whatever dried herbs I have in the cupboard, the bread, and the broth. A cheese rind is great in it, though. @no-more-ramen
Hold up hold up!!!! What in the world is a bread machine???
Very convenient for the unsure baker. You put in the ingredients, set it, and it will need the dough, proof it, and bake it! It was a life saver when my mom had to go on a no-iodine diet for some medical testing. It is insanely hard to find bread without iodine in it, so we used one of these to make our own
Breadmakers are great if you are a student/working a lot too, because it does all the steps for you so you can be out of the house while it cooks. That said, making bread by hand without a breadmaker is awesome!
And honestly, there is something incredibly comforting about the smell of baking bread, and having bread and knowing you made it always makes me feel super accomplished.
with very old (and ugly) furniture, like me, you know how hard it is to make something ‘pretty’. You can’t invest or change much. That’s why I’m super excited about these self-adhesive decorative foils.
Guess what, I bought 5 rolls ($2 each). You can imagine what will the kitchen look like when I’m done with it
Anyway, I just wanted to suggest, if you want to change something, and can’t afford or live in a rented place, a self-adhesive decorative foil is a way to go. It’s plastic and has no problem with water or grease. And it’s fun to apply it! 😀
Have fun getting that off again when you move out.
These are actually very easy to remove 🙂 Leaves no glue on the surface where it was and doesn’t do any damage. I did this before, so I’m good 🙂
Update! I’ve had these foils for almost two years now, and I want to show you how the original surface looks like when you take it off:
See? Nothing 🙂 Easy to take off and no glue residues. I finally got rid of that pink paisley. 😅
Of course, I couldn’t resist of doing the table, too.
Can i get link to where to buy them from?
I bought these in a wallpaper/paint store in Croatia, but it’s called contact paper (just learned that now, thanks) or self-adhesive foil, so you can find it like that 🙂
this is the most sophisticated phishing e-mail I have ever received and if they had sized the logo correctly and actually proofread the fucking thing I probably would’ve clicked that button
actually please reblog this because someone else got it too. do not click on the links in this e-mail if you get one like it, just forward it to spoof@paypal.com and delete it
one of the least helpful things ive been told as a neurodivergent person is “don’t half ass things”
if you can quarter ass something, do it! if all you can do is clean a corner of your room, or only read one of the two assigned chapters, or write the heading for your resume, or put all the papers for taxes in a pile, do it! if today isn’t a whole ass day, take pride in the portion of ass that you were capable of
don’t let neurotypicals work ethic define how you did today
totally, if you can pick your laundry up off the floor and put it in a basket today, it will be so much easier to put it in the machine and wash it tomorrow. If you can stack the dishes now, it will be easier to wash them later.
Half assing as a first stepping stone is so good, it is much better than not being able to do anything because “if you can’t do it properly, why do it at all”.
Do what you can today, to make life easier tomorrow.
“Don’t trace” originally started as a warning against tracing as art theft (as in, tracing someone else’s art without permission or credit is art theft) and then over the intervening years turned into “you can’t use references because it’s cheating” and I think that’s one of the worst cases of the telephone game I’ve ever personally experienced
you are allowed to trace as practice
you are allowed to trace your own work (for example photographs you took yourself or to keep architectural consistency)
you are allowed to trace things the original artist is encouraging you to trace
you SHOULD use references
you SHOULD be allowed to pick up other artists’ artistic tics you like (…as long as they’re not offensive, like blackfacing, but that’s a different kettle of fish)
you SHOULDN’T go around moralizing at other people about how they learn best because you can and will lose friends that way and you can and will hurt other artists’ development that way.
Also other than art theft there IS no such thing as cheating in art okay use sparkle pens and fan brushes to your heart’s content why is that even a thing I have to say (…and yes I’ve had conversations in the analog world about fan brushes as “cheating” I’m so tired of snotty artists who think you shouldn’t be allowed to use tools that make things easier because they can do it the hard way)
But honestly, this need to be said louder, as an artist you end up feeling like you aint getting better, trying to draw in perspective without having a guide line . And when others shame artist for using references its like they are expecting the artist to know by memory how everything works on every perspective.
To Consider that fan brushes, or custom brushes are cheating and expecting the artist to do everything in the “original” way is like wanting the cashier to charge you without using a calculator to do the sum. Tools are invented to be used.
“tools are invented to be used” well put
Not allowing using references is same as telling to a chef they can’t use recipes but they have to pull any dish in the world out of their asses just like that.
The first thing, the very first thing my photography teacher told us was “When photographing was invented, ARTISTS took pictures of cities and traced them on their paintings because hey – easier work! Why bother to work hard when you can make it easy for yourself and save your time and energy?”
I just explained my issues with executive dysfunction to my dad and holy shit he gets it!
I described it like this:
Imagine you’re back at AllPro(where he worked) with fifty phones and they’re all ringing. You want to answer them all because they’re all equal priority. That’s an environmental cue– phones are generally a ‘respond immediately’ cue.
Picking up a phone is a simple thing. You know it’s as easy as deciding which phone to answer and reaching out to pick it up, but your brain is saying “I must answer all of them!” The phones are ringing, and you can’t make your body reach out to pick one up because you don’t have fifty arms to reach out, you don’t have fifty ears to listen with, you don’t have a brain that can process and respond to fifty conversations and you don’t have fifty mouths that can all say different things all at the same time.
Either you do it all simultaneously or nothing will happen. You can want to do it so bad it makes you cry, and you can’t make a decision because no choice seems like the right one. So the task stays unfinished and you get frustrated every time somebody reminds you to “just do it, it’s not that hard!” Because yes, it really IS that hard.
Now, if you had somebody who could point to which phone to answer, you can do it fine. That’s a prompt. Prompting removes the ‘middle man’ thought that says ‘do it all at once’ and gets you to focus on tasks one at a time instead of seeing them as some towering insurmountable mess.
Dad looked at me for a couple of seconds and said something to the effect of, “I didn’t know doing things were that hard for you.”
This is a major, major, major breakthrough between us because dad had it in his head that I left things messy because I didn’t care. While that’s crappy of him to assume, teaching him how that’s not the case and having him really understand it is a huge deal.
okay I’ve never been able to articulate this at all thank you so much for putting words to feelings
i wasn’t really expecting this to get as much response as it did on twitter but it seemed like people found it helpful so!! here you go! some friends were asking about perspective so i drew up something real simplified on the basics of how i usually set up my perspective/bgs !!
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Works for up to 48 – 72 hours after exposure to HIV.
BOOST!
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There’s a FDA approved daily medication called Truvada, or the PrEP treatment, that is 92-99% effective in preventing the contraction of HIV.
Private insurance and Medicaid cover it. You can also get it for free in a lot of high risk cities like Atlanta, NY, and San Fransisco.
It’s the same cocktail they give to medical professionals who have had contaminated needle sticks/blood splashes from potentially infected blood. Very effective.
BOOST !!!!!
Please boost. You may think you’ll never need it, but you never know what might happen in your life
Time's Vengeance 