Busy first day of my holiday - courgette bread recipe

I am sort of on holiday this week.  In actual fact I have only to work for 4 hours, split between Tuesday and Thursday as my other clients are on their holidays or have family coming to visit who will take on their care in the interim.

I celebrated the first day of my holiday by nipping up the road to the local farmers' market and car boot.  In the end I bought the bits and bobs as in the photo and 2 kilos of apricots.

Our new chicks were introduced to the existing flock this morning and no casulaties so far (touch wood), just a bit of pecking order to be sorted out, and the pans I bought above are to be a new set of feeders and drinkers for the housing reshuffle now imminent amongst the rabbits and the quail with the hutches freed by the chicks now.

It was once again a very hot day, so in a burst of insanity I decided to make bread and do some baking - well I do have 2 kilos of apricots now to do something with, as well as a garden full of courgettes.  

So with thanks to the original poster on selfsufficientish.com (here) - I adapted this recipe and baked it in my bread machine on the wholewheat setting.

Courgette bread recipe  

7 tbspns milk
1/2 cup water 
1 1/2 cups grated courgette 
4 cups unbleached bread flour
1 cup wholemeal bread flour
5 tbspns mixed seeds (I used sunflour and sesamen)
1 tspn salt
2 tspn sugar
2 tbsn olive oil
1 1/2 tspn dried yeast

Well at least that is another lot of courgettes used up - while the force was strong in me I continued grating and filled a couple of empty ice cream tubs with grated courgettes for the freezer to use another time.  The courgettes don't seem to add any flavour to the bread, but they do leave what could be a heavy loaf light and moist. 

Very delicious was the verdict all round.

Obviously I did serve it with a side order of courgettes too!

Wednesday morning in my studio for a quickie.....

Before shooting off to work this morning I had a couple of hours to myself so I got out the materials and the patterns for the bags that I want to make in the next couple of days and started to snip away.

 This bag will be made from a pair of old black trousers, a shirt in abstract greys and blacks, and the lining from a skirt.  Here are all the layers when I had finished cutting. 

 While I was in the studio I finished off the top that I made the other day with some little belt loops in cotton ready for the satin ribbon that will tie around the waist to finish it off - watch out for the appearing in my shop in the next couple of days - when I can get my model to stand still for long enough to put it on so I can photograph it.

The first photo you see today is a selection of the treasures in my bargain buy of the car boot at the weekend.  A bag of miscallaneous sewing items for one euro.  In there were some nylon threads, some cottons, some wools, some hook and eyes, some mohair sewing thread, some elastic, some ribbon, some bias trim and of course some buttons.

Not that I am button obsessed you know - after all - doesn't everyone have a kitchen drawer packed to the gills with buttons?