Rain, Sweet Spice Recipe, Bards and Bread Camp

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It hasn’t just been raining on the Quimper Peninsula, it’s been pouring at a steady pace for 24 hours.

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      I’m so grateful for the rain, for the garden’s sake, for the forests, and all the myriad forms of life who depend upon it! Last year we had the driest spring and summer on record, and it felt so wrong. Yes, those who are always looking for blue skies loved it, but the land was out of sorts and at the loss.
     I’m a native Pacific Northwesterner, and have lived here on the edge of the Salish Sea, in Port Townsend for 21 years. I feel best with a drizzle, grey skies, and dressed in layers. Summer to me is a day no hotter than 75F, but life’s a changing….

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Life is a changing

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      And there’s no greater whirling dervishes of change than children. Next week is my first culinary camp of the season, FEAST’s folk art and food camps “Bards and Bread”. The sign-ups are all 10 and 11 year old boys and girls.    
     They’re coming to spend time practicing the arts of baking and storytelling inspired from the British Isles. I’m now in the habit of creating camps and classes that I would have swooned to take as a youth. I teach adult culinary classes mostly, but love to work with the kids and have a background in alternative education.

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stottie    pikelet    Sally lunn

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I’d like to share a little treasure from her book for Sweet Spice. A spice mix used since the Renaissance for breads and sweets. I’ve adapted it and use it often in sweets and savories. A teaspoon in the teapot also makes excellent instant chai masala. ​

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BArmbrack Bannock  bara birth 

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     This is my camp planning week, so look forward to some insider thoughts and views. I pulled down the cookbooks this morning that I’ll be using for inspiration and reference.
     I have to admit straight off that it’s the curious and romantic names of the British Isle breads that sparked this camp’s focus.
    Names like barmbrack, soda farls, barley bannock, bara birth, stottie, pikelets, Sally Lunn...each and everyone could inspire a fairy story.

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I don't use wheat flour or store yeast

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     My handicaps for this camps are that I don’t use wheat flour or commercial yeast! I have baker’s asthma and can’t breath properly around wheat flour dust, as well as the last time
I ate wheat and  I broke out in a terrible rash.
     Not using store bought yeast is more of an idiosyncrasy than an allergy. I just don’t like the taste anymore, my breads made with natural leaveners are so much better tasting, that I just can’t go back.
So I can think of  it as a  challenge in teaching  a baking camp, or a great opportunity.

     Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery, was a prime inspiration for my delving into discovering alternative baking techniques, and starting The Society for Revisionist Baking.                          
     I read her book like a bedside thriller, and couldn’t get enough of it. My initial spark was just a sidenote that she made about meteil. Meteil, is a field sown with rye and wheat together.  
     She mentioned that early British Isle fields were always mixed because their methods of keeping other grasses out of the fields weren’t developed. Because of this the flours were always a meteil, not just wheat, always a mix.
     This got me to thinking about how wheat is such a monolith in our minds that flour means wheat to us. We never say wheat flour, unless we mean whole wheat. But we always distinguish oat flour, rye flour….
​What were the capacities and flavors of other grains without wheat in the mix I wondered?
​How far can I take this idea?
I’ve taken it quite a ways, and it’s such an inspiring journey. ​