Give us this day our daily bread

Having scared myself witless reading this lately, I picked up some spelt flour at Sainsburys today with the good intentions of making wholesome food with which to feed my menfolk. 

If you have no knowledge of this book, it is basically about giving up wheat.  Last autumn, Mark went wheat free and dairy free for a few months.  I tried wheat free for a while, and it would be fair to say that we both felt 'better' and lost a bit of weight.  A pain though, as an incredible amount of foodstuffs contain wheat.  'The book' says that the main cause of any food intolerance is overconsumption.  Certainly in Mark's case, having gone veggie around 14 years ago, his diet has centred on meals around meat-free processed foods and they all contain wheat.  Of course they do, it's a filler ingredient, a bulker-outer.  Apparently there is more of a problem with food intolerances in the US with peanuts and corn because of the same theory - overconsumption.  In addition to this, the wheat we use today bears little resemblance to the wheat used by our forbears, the healthy wheatgerm 'bit' is discarded from it and as the kernel is so small it absorbs much of the pesticides and nasties we use for crop control.  As the body recognises these nasties as toxins, the liver tries to cope with them, and when it cannot, it stores them in fat cells where they sit.  Forever.  Being evil, and fat.  I shall never look at a loaf of Hovis in the same light. 

I was also inspired by this post over on the Quince Tree blog, (see blog feed on the right) which is such an unfussy and sensible approach to food.  I have been massively put off of making bread in the past because a) I am quite lazy and b) I am crap at it.  It's the kneading, you see.  It's hard.  I puff, I pant, I sweat and then I get cross and then I think '**** it, that'll do', and it never does.  Bread making machines?  Don't even go there.  I used my bread maker to make jam in, and it was bloody brilliant at that.  Shame it was so rubbish at the job for which it was created....

Sooooo, freshly buoyed up with enthusiasm, I managed to produce these results:

Not too shabby, but I think maybe it would have done better with more than two and a half minutes kneading.  Still, at least I haven't contributed further to the load of toxins making merry in our livers already.

He liked it.

That's alright then.  My poor boy is already having to eat and drink enough chemical-filled products because of the diabetes.  If he needs it - I'll knead it.