Jane Mulberry

I'll be interested to hear how that works for you, Nancy!

I haven't tried growing them again because I disliked the taste so much. Possibly the taste of mine was affected by lack of water.

Ted Davis wrote:... we went with an earthen floor mix of clay, sand and chopped straw. Tamped it really well and let it cure before sealing with a few coats of boiled linseed oil and beeswax.

Ted, could you provide more information about the mix you used and how many applications? I have a couple of very dusty earth floors in my Bulgarian house to finish, and I don't want to resort to using concrete.

In my new kitchen, I'm going to have an old-style woodburning cook stove with oven for winter cooking and heating. We don't have room for that and a gas or electric range, so we also have an airfryer, an Instant pot, and an electric frypan to cook with when it's not cool enough to want the wood stove burning.

For summer use and for canning I also would like to set up an outdoor kitchen.  The Lorena stove with canning option would be good. I have the plans, but I'm not sure I have the capability to build one.

Jay Angler wrote:When I'm baking something in a medium oven, like apple crisp, I will put 6 bulbs in a small casserole dish with a lid and let them bake. Then I peel them all, and freeze them, so I have baked garlic to add to pesto, bean dip, garlic bread etc and it's easy to grab as much as I want.  

Yesssssssss!!! Roasted garlic is soooo good. I have to cook a lot at once, because we will eat a whole head of it each in one meal, given the chance.

I'm Aussie living in the UK, I'd call it a baking tray, too.

You might be wise to put a glossary at the front of terms that might vary internationally. I write fiction, and my main market is the US. My fiction set in the UK uses British English, and a glossary for US readers is a must!

Or in the recipe itself put the different terms in brackets, as you'll need to do with US & metric measurements for ingredients.

I do know what a baking sheet or cookie sheet is, but mainly from reading a bunch of US cooking sites.

I've never stayed in one for more than an hour or so, but when I lived in the Outback I visited a couple of underground houses in Australia in a similar opal mining area to Coober Pedy.  They didn't seem to worry too much about ventilation in the small houses. There were no internal doors and the main shaft into the house was enough. Bigger houses with deep inside rooms incorporated some air vents to the surface. No air pumps or anything I saw, everything was simply left open for natural ventilation. Maybe a simple fan.

But the situation there is very different. It doesn't get that cold in winter, and there's no radon issue in that area, as far as I knew. So their methods are probably not relevant to your land and your underground rooms.

Amazon calls them latte spoons, but to me they're sundae spoons!

It seems most likely to be a response to the grain in the chicken feed, especially as you know you react to soy and wheat. I would be surprised if the feed didn't include wheat gluten and possibly soy as well to up the protein content. Changing their feed to something either homemade or with a proper ingredients list so you know what the hens are getting is probably the best thing you can try. Some chicken keepers here have also commented in the past about fermenting the feed being helpful.

If it was an infection like Salmonella, I'd expect you to be a lot sicker.

Another interesting article! Random and irrelevant to the oatcakes discussion, but talking of etymology,I noticed that the main Anglo-Saxon word for bread, hlaf, is very similar to the modern Bulgarian word for bread, хляб hlab.

I will try some of the recipes for the poor person's bread, made without wheat, as hubby is wheat-intolerant.

Tereza, I was really glad that Leigh's question sent me off looking, too! The blog has some fascinating info and is still a work in progress so I'm looking forward to more.