Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Baking bread, writing invoices, and being a mom!

Baking bread, writing invoices, dinner and sleeping boys

The title is more or less my day today.  I love having the ability to stay home with my boys and invest in them.  I get to watch them grow in to young men, all the while maintaining a thriving home and business. 
As I sat down this afternoon to send out our weekly Restaurant/Buying Club invoices, I paused a moment to see myself from an outsiders view.  There I am, bread rising for sandwiches tomorrow/the rest of the week, little ones napping soundly, errands already done for Tupperware and Young Living, and about to sit down to invoice the customers for delivery tomorrow.  Few people can say that! 
We are blessed to have the ability via technology to easily receive orders, save them, weigh & pack them, and invoice folks for them by merely the click of a few buttons.  All the while, I’m making bread, finishing dishes, getting the boys to nap, and thinking about dinner.  Multi-tasking at its best.

To zoom in on 2 areas of today’s event for a deeper look:
1.       Bread baking.  I may have shared this in a previous post, so I am sorry for the repeat, but I love baking bread!  All the bread-ish items we eat I make.  Biscuits, breads, rolls, tortillas, buns, etc.  All are homemade by me!  Our farm has an inspected kitchen so we are able to sell our baked goods and I’ve actually opened an Etsy shop to make, bake and ship them right to your door!  Bread is such a staple in many homes.  Sadly though, if you look at many bread’s ingredient labels, what you will find may concern you.  Preservatives, Unnatural ingredients, Chemicals you can’t pronounce.  Ugh!  That’s not how bread should be!  Basic bread should have 6 ingredients:  Water, a sweetner (I use honey), an oil ( I use peanut oil), salt, flour and yeast.  Simple wonderful bread.  Mmmm… I wish you could smell it baking right now.  I make a white/wheat mix bread so that the health benefits of freshly ground wheat flour are present, and the unbleached white flour gives a smooth texture.  It is yummy!  If you’re scared of making bread yourself, go to your local thrift store and get a bread maker!  Turn it to the dough setting, put the ingredients in and let it do the work for you.  After about 20 minutes turn it off and take the dough out.  Let it rise in a greased bowl in a warm place for about 35 minutes.  Roll it into bread shapes and let it rise again the bread pans.  Rise this time for about 40 minutes.  Then bake for 20 min.  It’s so simple!  Great tasting bread is only about 2 hours and a thrift store away!
2.       Invoices.  This is a part of my job here on the farm.  I send out our weekly email to all our Buying Club Customers.  This email tells them where we’ll be delivering this week and what items we have available.  They then can reply to me with their order.  I respond back, answering any questions and put their order into a table that holds all the orders for the week.  On Wednedsay, I print the table out with an additional blank one for the restaurant orders my husband has accumulated via texting the chefs.  He goes and weighs out all the products, packing each order and getting it ready for Thursday.  He gives me the weight sheet and I use my invoice software to invoice the customers/restaurants for the items they’ve ordered by the pound.  All invoices for individuals are emailed and print ones are done for the restaurants.  It is a busy part of the day but I love getting to talk one on one with these customers.  They become friends of ours, they appreciate the foods we’re raising and we appreciate their business. 

That’s a glimpse & zoom in on a typical Wednesday afternoon.  J
Till later,

Tara

No comments:

Post a Comment