Lena's Homemade Bread

Hello Gentle Readers. Lena has been baking up a storm with her Rice cooker and today she made her own bread.

Ingredients
250 ml warm water
5 g dry yeast
half tbsp sugar
half tbsp salt
3/4 tbsp olive oil
5/6 cups of plain flour

Method

Add the sugar and salt to the water and stir. Add the oil and stir. Add yeast and stir until all the sugar, salt and yeast has dissolved.
Add flour a cup at a time and stir. Keep adding flour until it is not liquid. Kneed the dough until it is a roughly round shape.
Put a little oil on your hands and kneed it. Oil stops it sticking.

Place dough in a bowl cover with a towel and put in a warm place so it will rise.
Lena's dough took an hour to rise and she kneeded it a few times during this period to allow air into the mixture.

Place the dough into the rice cooker for 15 minutes on the yogurt setting. This will aid with rising.

Change setting to Bake and bake for 40 minutes. Open cooker, turn off cooker, remove bread and turn over and cook again for another 40-50 minutes.

Then take it out and leave to cool before you eat it.

Yummy Nummy Treats.

#lenasbread #ricecooker

Lena's Rice cooker fruit cake

Cake....in a rice cooker!

Hello there Gentle food lovers. It's a fun family baking recipe today and its being cooked in our Rice cooker. When we bought it Lena noticed that it had a cake function.
So today she made her first rice cooker fruit cake and I am sharing the recipe with you.


Ingredients
2 glasses of flour
200ml milk
3 eggs
8 tablespoons sugar
A handful of raisins
a few dried strawberrys
A quarter of a dragonfruit
a tea spoon of olive oil
1 teaspoon baking powder

Method
In a bowl mix the egg sugar flour baking powdee and milk into a cake mix. Add the fruit and some of the red dragonfruit juice to colour your cake.

Pour the mixture into the rice cooker and using the cake function cook for 90 minutes. Halfway through you can take out cake and turn it.
The time may vary depending on your rice cooker.

#ricecookerfruitcake

Today in History: 7th October

Hello to all the Gentle Readers. Its time once again to try on the embarrassing clothes from the back of our wardrobe and hope nobody sees us.

The "Full House" Girls

3761BC: The official start of the Hebrew Calendar.

1931: Archbishop Desmond Tutu is born.

1952: Russian leader Vladimir Putin is born

1959: Soviet spacecraft Luna 2 photographs "Dark Side of the Moon" for the first .

1996: That perfectly impartial news channel Fox News airs for the first time.

#fullhouse #90sfashion #october7th #todayinhistory #hebrew #desmondtutu #vladimirputin #luna2 #foxnews

Neil's Chicken and Sausage Fried Potato Fusion

 Hello Gentle Readers, time for another recipe.

Ingredients
1 chicken fillet
3 cooked sausages
1 whole green pepper
Half a large red onion
3 large potatoes
Half a carrot
2 garlic cloves
2 tea spoons Hoi Sin sauce
2 tea spoons tomato ketchup
olive oil.

Method
Peel and chop the potatoes into thin chip like chunks, crush in a garlic clove and fry them in a shallow pan with a little olive oil.

Chop the remaining vegetables, the chicken and sausages, and fry with the other garlic clove and some oil in a wok.

When the chicken and vegetables are fried off add the ketchup and hoi sin sauce and s cup of hot water and stir. Turn the heat right down and let it simmer until the potatoes are cooked

When the potatoes are fried and brown...

...pour them into the sauce and stir so tjat all the potatoes are covered by the sauce.

Cook for a further ten minutes on a low heat stirring constantly.

#recipe #hoisin #friedpotatoes

Guangzhou day 2

Hello again Gentle readers. Today we went to Yentai Garden in Guangzhou which is an amazing garden at the foot of Baiyun Mountain.

Here are the best pictures.

#guangzhou #yentaigarden #baiyunmountain

Wednesday Thought: The Moon

Happy Moon festival Gentle Readers. Here are some thoughts about our closest neighbour in space.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

Buddha

Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.

Hal Borland

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.

George Carlin

Yeah we all shine on, like the moon, and the stars, and the sun.

John Lennon

I think we're going to the moon because it's in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It's by the nature of his deep inner soul... we're required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

Neil Armstrong

#moon #buddha #johnlennon #neilarmstrong #georgecarlin #halborland #wednesdaythought

5 star in Guangzhou

Hello there Gentle Readers, as I said in my post a few days ago, Robert, Lena and I are on holiday. So we decided today to spend a couple of days in Guangzhou and we booked into the very luxurious 5 star Royal Mediterranean hotel in the city. It was an incredibly good deal and we got a deluxe room for ¥1200 (€153 or £137).

The view from the room.

Another view

Looking down from the 39th floor.

We headed off to Canton Tower to go up for the view but the queue was just mental and we decided not to bother.

Just one of at least 4 different queues we saw at Canton Tower

We took the tour bus (an amazing ¥30 each for 24 hours, Robert is free) and got onto the red line for a different view of the city. We went to Baiyun and we will go back tomorrow to see the gardens.

Lena saw this and took a photo.

Man with his T-shirt pulled up

This has bothered me since I arrived in China. Men everywhere exposing their bellies. I can understand going shirtless altogether but this.....is weird.

We stayed on the bus and once again
 people tried to take Robert's photo without asking so I took theirs. We dont mind when people want to take a photo...blonde boys are very rare in China....but please ask permission first.

Snapped!

We went to Beijing Lu which  is a famous street in Guangzhou and its a very popular place to meet friends and people watch.

Beijing Lu

Beijing Lu too

Robert meets a Minion robot.

More from our trip tomorrow.

#royalmediterraneanhotel #cantontowerqueues #beijinglu #guangzhou #china