"Balmoral Park" farm garden

When my youngest daughter was about six she told me one day that she didn't think she needed to go to school any more. I asked her how would she learn? Her reply, "I will just stay at home and do experiments." Recently when I finished working in a demanding full time role she emailed me to say, "Now you can stay at home and do experiments" and I have to say this is pretty much what I am doing. Experiments in the garden and experiments in the kitchen. This little baking business is an opportunity to experiment, develop skills, achieve perfection and enjoy the feeling of staying at home and playing while still feeling like I am learning and being useful. The kitchen is certainly my focus at the moment and I just love to be in my kitchen. From a pretty unprepossessing space when we bought this old house, it is now a beautiful sunny, light filled space. I have the stove of my dreams and lots of cooking toys to play with. There are beautiful views from every window, ...

Balmoral Park Farm Kitchen has really come into being because of the bread and my desire to achieve perfection in baking sourdough bread. I have filed in my memory bank a quote from someone I admired, I cant remember who it was!! who said they were going to devote their retirement to baking the perfect loaf of bread. I thought this was a pretty worthy goal and that I would emulate it! It quite quickly became apparent that in the pursuit of sourdough perfection we were going to end up with a lot of bread! Far too much bread for two people to eat. Added to that I found some beautiful local, stoneground  flour https://www.facebook.com/artisangrainsau/ and while it is a very reasonable price it adds considerably to the cost of my experimentation.  So I thought I would explore the possibility of selling some of the bread. Now I live in a fairly isolated, small, rural community, you can count the number of cars that go down our road each day on your fingers! Having just left a ...

Well it has been a very long while but I have decided to stay with this old Blog instead of creating a new one. The past few years have held many challenges for us, another drought, the summer from hell that all of Australia endured, a very busy working life, however here we are mid 2020! We have both left full time employment and are  now full time here on our little farm, which presents us with many new opportunities. The drought has broken for now, which brings renewed hope for our garden and farm. Our house is pretty much fully renovated, as much as an old place like this can ever be finished! Since finishing work at the end of February I have had the time and energy to create a little business out of my enduring passions for baking and baking sourdough bread. I thought I would see how it went selling via orders on Social Media and having people drive out here to collect their orders! Five weeks in and its going well.   I have been a passionate cook for as long as I c...