It's A Grind!

I love Freecycle!

I bake bread. Before Bilby I used to make a loaf every two days... I was in the routine and all was good. I lost that while I was pregnant, but breadmaking is something I love doing. When I was getting into the habit originally I saw lots of discussion about people grinding their own flour. It looked interesting, and I definitely considered the possibilities but I figured I probably shouldn't investigate too much... I was intrigued, but it would be a fair commitment.

Then, earlier this year, someone freecycled a stone mill. It was nearby, and I was at the point of wanting to get back in the swing of breadmaking after Bilby, so I replied—and I got it:-) Then of course, I had to source grain... One of those jobs I figured would be pretty straightforward, I just had to do it!

Last week after Co-op, one of the others was mentioning that her electric mill was due to arrive... I mentioned ours, and my stalling point, and she pointed me in the direction of a shop that was almost on my way home! So of course, I stopped and got some:-)

I planned to do it the next morning, but we couldn't wait. I knew there wouldn't be a lot of time, so I thought we'd just try a little bit. I put in a small handful, and had no success... I was quite disappointed:-( We didn't get to it the next day (Puggle was invited to his grandparents to watch ditch digging and mud sucking and couldn't be torn away from it!) I did some online searching, and asked questions in a few places to see what I might have done wrong—to no avail.

The other outcome of the conversation after Co-op was the decision that we would grind wheat, and make pancakes (we currently have Pancakes, Pancakes out of the library, a fantastic book!) as our activity this week. Even though I hadn't got the mill to work, I decided to take it as the kids could at least see how it used to be done:-)

I set it up, and decided to put a pile of wheat in (I filled the bowl)—and lo, and behold, upon grinding, out came flour!

We moved it to a child-friendly height, and almost all the littles had repeated turns. They found it reasonably hard going, but they could see the result of their effort:-) I'm thinking it will be a good job for children as they get older—the eight year old was able to keep going with it for extended periods:-) (They were also very impressed with the grain rolling function on the electric mill! I was impressed with it!)

We came home and finished enough, so that tomorrow I'll bake bread with our own flour:-) Very cool indeed:-)

(We do still need to work on a better place to mount it during use, the dining table is a bit unstable, and I wasn't at all satisfied with the kitchen bench...)