Exercising & Bread making & Birds

Today I spent quite a bit of time exercising, bread making, and doing bird related stuff.

Most people probably wouldn't consider what I did today as exercising. But because I'm such a feeble Chinese person (weak Ling), it was exercising for me. As well as doing some weights, I went shopping. This involved carrying a 12.75 kg bag of bird food and two 4 pint bottles of milk back home from the shops, so that counts as exercise as far as I'm concerned.

Similarly, making bread is good exercise as you have to knead the dough for 10 minutes. This gets my poor little arms quite tired.

I made two loaves today. The first was just to use up the rest of a pot of yoghurt. I used a fruit loaf recipe and added the yoghurt instead of part of the milk. I also added in some fresh apple and pumpkin and sunflower seeds I bought at the shops.

I was surprised by how expensive the seeds were in the shops. The seed were 85 p each, and they're only really tiny packets. Pine nuts were £2 for the same size tiny packet!

This got me thinking whether you could just have bird seed instead. After doing some research online, I couldn't find anything saying that you shouldn't eat bird seed. Only that it contains lots of bits of stalk and dirt and stuff.

So I went through some of the bird seed and took out some of the wheat (it seems the bird seed is around 90% wheat) and some small round seeds, maybe millet? Then I made some more bread, and put the wheat seeds in one half and millet (or whatever it is) seeds in the other half. I soaked the millet for about 5 minutes in warm water, but I forgot to do that with the wheat.

After cooking, I think I didn't really have enough seed. The wheat one has a lot more seeds than the millet, but because I didn't soak the wheat, the grains are quite hard and crunchy (not bad, but probably would have been better soaked). The millet one I can't really taste the grains as I didn't get enough.

^ Bird seed loaves and Seed and fruit loaf

^ Seed and fruit bread

^ Birdseed bread

I think in the future I might try making some bread (or other food) using sunflower kernels bird food. It should be much easier to get the seeds from that than the mixed birdseed I used today. With the mixed birdseed it contains chaff, sunflower seeds with the hard outer casing still intact, bits of corn, and bits of plant (I even found a poppy head), as well as the wheat and millet. So separating out the wheat and millet suitable for adding to the bread from the rest of the stuff isn't as easy as you might first think.

Eating a slice of the fruit and seed loaf, I felt like a combination blackbird-sparrow. Does that make me a pigeon?