So we went and started a blog

Kicking and screaming into a modern age of…. No hang on….

Going boldly where no one has ever….. Definitely not….

Jumping on the bandwagon?  That’s more like it.

These are the voyages of the…. We’re back on Star Trek again!

This is our blog, we’d like to share a bit of what we do with you, the world.  Sometimes we do stuff and sometimes we don’t, it’s probably going to be a rollercoaster ride of fun and excitement.  We’ll try not to put too many pictures of cats and food on here but we aren’t making any promises.

Welcome to Brambledown Tales.

Swamp Donkey Bread

Here at Brambledown Towers we are embarking on a great experiment, with our bowels.  Mrs Brambledown has got it into her mind that we need to take care of our intestinal passengers since they take care of us.  She’s been reading the “Clever Guts” book by Dr Michael Moseley and it’s very interesting.  It certainly appeals to our scientific nature and makes a lot of sense.

The basic premise seems to be that a good intestinal biodiversity is good for you, since my opinion is that a good biodiversity anywhere is a good thing, I concur!  Since our microscopic friends feed on a variety of different dietary fibres we have to eat a good mix of vegetable matter to ensure the little beggars don’t go hungry.  So we embarked on a dietary adventure…

The first meal we tried were the alarmingly green turkey burgers, next was the gruel like pumpkin/squash porridge (not a fan) and the latest has been Green Flaxseed bread.  I tweaked the recipe a little to my own taste and I’d say it’s not half bad!

I present to you Swamp Donkey Bread!!

Ingredients

• 200g Flaxseed ground
• 80g Ground Almonds
• 50g Chia seeds
• 50g Pumpkin seeds
• 200g Spinach
• 5 Egg whites
• 3 Egg yolks
• 50g Olive oil
• 1 tsp Bicarb of soda
• 1 tsp Salt
• 50ml water
• 2 tbsp Apple cider vinegar

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 170C
2. Add everything into a food processor and blend into a smooth dough
3. Pour into a greased loaf pan and bake for 40-50 minutes until firm, test with a metal skewer (if it comes out clean we have a winner).
4. Eat and enjoy, it’s particularly good warm out of the oven with lashings of butter (I’m pretty sure that isn’t part of the diet).

Once it’s cool store it in a bread bag.  While it is most definitely not going to win a beauty prize* what it lacks in looks it makes up for in taste.

If you try it leave us a comment and tell us if it was as good for you as it was for us.

 

* It’s also green.

A New Beginning! (Or how the Baxter pulled the rug out from under me)

So this week I made the momentous decision to pack in the teaching lark all together and do the Art thing full time!  I say it’s momentous (and it’s my blog, so I can say what I like) and I probably should have bothered to tell Mrs Brambledown that I was doing it,  but nonetheless I forged on with a new found enthusiasm for my scribblings!

So in the stifling heat of the British summertime (note, this doesn’t happen too often) I started.  Typically I cleared up a few jobs that needed doing first but I was definitely going for it!!  Once I got the thingamajig wassisnamed….

Baxter, one of my faithful hounds (we set them upon undesirables here at Brambledown Towers) looked a little peaky.  We suspected the heat (see above) but it soon became clear that it was more than that.  Baxter was rushed off to the Vets and after a couple of examinations and an X-Ray we discovered that Baxter (the smarter of the two hounds) was an imbecile!  Granted he was never going to win a Pulitzer prize but I thought he was relatively switched on for a canine.  It turns out he’d eaten one of the cats toys.  We also have felines at Brambledown towers to set upon undesirables should they get past the hounds.  There are also tropical fish which fortunately have never needed to be deployed in deterrent duties but the line line in the sand is there if need be.

So now I’m sat in the still stifling heat with a very poorly hound who is wearing the canine equivalent of a baby grow whilst he recuperates.

So much for the flying start!!

Next week will be different, I’ll keep telling myself that….

Stardom at last!

If you didn’t know I’m an Artist (Mr Brambledown) and as such I take my wares out to my great adoring public.  A looser translation is, I go to craft markets and festivals and sell my pictures.  Saturday was my first venture into the great outdoors this year, so I left Brambledown Towers all sleepy and bleary eyed from my winter hibernation and headed to Southsea.

I haven’t really been there before, or at least not so much to notice it, it’s rather nice.  I set up my stall and put on my fuzzy hat since it was flaming cold and after a while a nice chap from Portsmouth University approached me and asked if I didn’t mind having my stall filmed and maybe giving an interview.

So short story long I ended up giving an interview about the street market and Portsmouth in general.  It will be aired on the Portsmouth Bigscreen outside the Guildhall when the final film has been edited and bashed into some sort of shape.  Here’s hoping that my first stumbling steps into international stardom don’t end up on the cutting room floor.

Either way here’s a sneaky picture of me filming them filming me, meta eh??