A plastic-free day today! But it does feel a little like we are limping to the end of plastic-free July. I suppose part of the issue is trying to change so many things at once, which is precisely the approach we have avoided up until now (we have been gradually decreasing waste for the last year). First there were the yoghurt issues, until finally the yoghurt ran out so we couldn’t make any more, and today we have had serious bread issues. Two rather flat loaves. I swapped flour after the first one, in case that was the issue, but still the same issue with previously tried and tested flour. They have risen a bit, but not the full whack, and they crust on top looks a little ‘stringy’. Please feel free to comment below with any ideas of what may be wrong. I’m wondering if the amount of water was too high. The other sadder possibility is that I broke our bread maker yesterday when I forgot to put the stirrer in.
Little MIH and I started preparing today for our camping trip today, by making some flapjacks to take with us, so we have some useful snacks to hand. It turned out we didn’t have enough porridge oats (luckily before we started melting anything), so we had to have an emergency trip to get some. Luckily, we now buy these from Aldi, rather than our local zero waste store, who we order from and then go and pick up from several days later.
Little MIH did complain and say that she just wanted to get the ones in plastic, as it is a longer trip for us to Aldi (I’m hoping we minimise our vehicle impact by having an electric car, charged with solar). They turned out a little crumbly, but tasty. It is a long time since I have made flapjacks. Mr MIH got rather into it at one point before Little MIH was born. There were lots of elaborate additions, including venturing into chocolate drops at one point. We stopped making them though when we realised our waistlines had crept up and this was probably attributable to the flapjacks! And tasting these today, I can see where the issue lay – they are extremely tasty, in an oozing butter and sugar kind of way. Definitely a holiday-only treat!
Mr MIH had some issues at Sainsbury’s today when getting his lunch supplies for the week, after thinking he had cracked it last week. This week the issue was that they did not want to put 2 different items in the same container. He pointed out that they had done it last week (as could be seen by the two stickers still on the lid!), which is why he only bought one container this week, but no go. I think this has been one of the most frustrating things about trying to go no-plastic in supermarkets – the inconsistency, between different branches of the same chain, and also between different people at the same shop.
Little MIH has been pretty on board with trying the toothpaste tablets recently, despite finding them ‘too spicy’. In fact, the spiciness has had the added benefit that it encourages her to spit out the paste made from the tablet, rather than swallow toothpaste like she normally does. So even if the tablets do have more fluorine than kiddy toothpaste, she is probably actually consuming less. We just have to get in there really quickly for the brushing before she spits! Mr MIH also noted that her bamboo toothpaste has lasted a lot longer than her plastic ones used to. I think the plastic ones had a nice soft plastic moulded head, which was just nice and squidgy to chew down on, and so the bristles would get wrecked very quickly from the chewing. Although she has never complained about the bamboo brush, and has embraced it, I suspect hard bamboo is just not that tasty and comforting to chew on. So although the price of the bamboo toothbrush was three times that of the toothbrushes we used to buy for her (we bought this one), long term I don’t think the cost will be three times as much (until she gets to the point she would have stopped chewing her toothbrush anyway of course which, who knows, may have already happened, and was nothing to do with the bamboo toothbrush!).
Any bread maker troubleshooters out there with some top tips on how to fix my bread?!
Make It Happy 