Bready Lovely

Welcome back! Since I was last on here telling of my cooking tragedies and triumphs, I have taken delivery of a rather fabulous food mixer (even though this means I cannot afford anything to put in it). Like a child with a new toy, I have been playing with it at every opportunity and this week we have  fresh pizzas (not a new recipe), hot cross buns -- definitely a new venture -- and ciabatta rolls. So this week I'm focusing on all things bread.

Hot cross buns. Cooking bready things with yeast in inevitably takes an afternoon, or if not longer, but is something which I am finding increasingly satisfying. If this year teaches me nothing else it has taught me that the preparation and eating of fresh bread is more satisfying than any trip to a baker, and a food mixer will save you from tennis elbow. Enough whimsy. The process ran something like this: mix, knead, prove, knead, divide into 12, mark with a cross and leave on a baking sheet for another prove, bake and then immediately paint with sugar syrup. I overruled Delia on the amount of spice in these and was very glad I did: one rounded teaspoon of mixed spice just wouldn't show up.  The recipe made nice sticky buns, although I can't help but wonder whether strong flour (the recipe uses plain) would have produced something less dense. Also as you can see, my crosses didn't show up and I marked them so deeply some buns went into the oven quartered. Delia suggests that if you want to make a more distinctive cross then to put it on with a flour and water paste. I suggest you do that if you want any cross at all.

On Friday, I made this ciabatta recipe. I was really, really convinced that straying from the BBC (and other mainstream) cooking websites had cost me dear. The dough was more like a batter, looked like baby sick (see pic) and was borderline impossible to shape. I lost a third of it as it stuck to everything and was hard to scrape up: it's consistency was rather like something from a joke shop. BUT it turned out nice ciabatta rolls which had an aerated texture and did not need to sit overnight, as many ciabatta recipes require. I had a wonderful time eating one with jam seconds after it came out of the oven.

I am in two minds about the next recipe, shooter's sandwich. It's apparently an Edwardian recipe for something to keep the gentlemen going when they are out huntin', shootin', and fishin'. Anyway, you make this sandwich the night before by filling your bread with two rare steaks separated by a layer of cooked mushrooms and onions -- the recipe said shallots, but I maintain that when they're used in a filling which contains Worcestershire sauce you can't tell the difference. Having filled the bread, the sandwich is then squashed under a board and kept somewhere cool. The writer specifies not a fridge, but Sam and I don't live in a country pile with a larder, we live in a centrally heated flat, and I didn't want to give us food poisoning, so in the fridge they went, and they came to no harm. We ate them with pickle and salad, and they were tasty and satisfying. They'd be splendid on a picnic. However, we came to the conclusion that they would be nicer as a sort of hot Beef Wellington sandwich: there is no need to eat them cold, as Edwardian gents would have done, unless you ARE on a picnic, of course.

So now I've racked up 30 recipes. Next weekend Sam and I are holding a Mothering Weekend extravaganza and our respective mothers and my Grandma will be dining on experimental recipes. I hope you like the new look of the blog -- if you're on Twitter, I've set up a profile where I'll be tweeting as I cook my recipes each week, and you can also now follow this blog without having to have a Gmail account.

The Italian Job

For reasons too tedious to explain, this week has been rather stressful -- as a weekend treat, I planned a day of cooking on Saturday, culminating in dinner and poker game with friends. There is a wonderful Farmer's Market which pops up in Headingley for a morning on the second Saturday of every month. I nearly always miss it (which is perhaps fortuitous as it's always at the end of the month just before payday, and I have no self control when it comes to buying nice food). This week, though, it was there and so was I. And I bought half a pig.

Supper also consisted of a starter of focaccia bread with oil and vinegar. If you only take one of my recommendations, click on the link above and make it this one. It does take an afternoon of tender kneading and proving in a warm place, but the result was genuinely one of the nicest things I've ever baked. It even elicited the compliment 'I thought it must've been from Waitrose'. Proud? I nearly burst.

The pork came from Swillington Organic Farm. I really believe you get what you pay for with meat and this was happy meat. I'd never roasted a pork joint before, so I was a bit nervous about risking burning two expensive ones. But the lady on the market stall was quite correct when she told me to stick them in the oven on 170 and forget about them for three hours. I gave the crackling a bit of a rub with some oil and salt, shoved some herbs and veggies in my roasting tray for gravy purposes, and let it get on with it. It turned out very well -- there was even some crispy crackling, which was pure luck, as I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I was trying for an Italian-esque menu, so I served it with some roasted potatoes and peppers and onions.

I rounded off the evening with vanilla panna cotta from The Silver Spoon. Easy enough to make: it just involves heating up milk, whisking in gelatine, adding to boiled cream and sugar, and then chilling. I served it with the recommended sauce, a sort of boozy should-have-been-hazelnut custard. (My sauce ended up being almond based, as I burnt the hazelnuts I should have been toasting -- c'est la vie, it still tasted nice.) The panna cotta tasted good, although it was extra firm and a bit too set for my tastes. The Silver Spoon is an Italian cookery bible in translation and does have various errors in it -- I suspect the large amount of gelatine in this recipe may be one of them. Or of course, there is the very real possibility that the Italians make the authentic version of the desert a lot firmer than we do over here. 

There are no pictures this week -- I'm afraid that a combination of red wine and a desire to be the hostess with the mostess meant that photographing my wares got forgotten. However, that's twenty seven recipes done and dusted. There won't be a blog next week, so I'll report back in a fortnight with news on recipes which I have cooked or cocked up.

Sort Of, but Not Quite

I had never made a curry from scratch before Wednesday. When I was a student, I was of the opinion that the only way to have curry was to either arrange a delivery or visit one of the many fine curry establishments in Leeds, or to open a jar of sauce, shake it all over some chicken and eat with some boil in the bag rice. Following those lost cooking years, I have lived always lived with at least one of A, F or Sam who can all cook the most delicious homemade curries (F has even been known to pick the whole spices out before serving for extra eating pleasure) so there really was no need for me to cook one! But resting on what others can do for me is not what this year is about, so I decided to cook my very favourite curry: chick pea masala (usually brought to me by Nazam's of Woodhouse). Never wanting to do things by halves, I chose to make some chapattis from scratch as well.

As usual I didn't have all the ingredients necessary (no coconunt milk, just some cream). And I used half fresh cherry tomatoes and half canned tomatoes (because the cherry tomatoes needed eating up as much as my desire to use fresh ingredients, although the flavour they gave the curry turned out to be very good).

Just when the spices had all gone in and the tomatoes were becoming nice and 'stewy' and it was beginning to smell like a proper curry, A and H turned up to be fed. I'm afraid I wasn't a very good hostess after they arrived: I was getting to grips with making chapattis. The recipe for these claims a ratio of half flour to water, but I had to add in two or three tablespoons of flour after the water went in before I could really knead it. As I was getting ready to roll them out, prior to cooking them and serving everything up, I tried my curry and although it was flavoursome, it did not taste right for a curried dish. Knowing nothing about the wizardry of spices, I gave A a teaspoon and he said 'it tastes like sausage casserole'. I told him 'fix it', and he shook my spice jars over the pan and made everything better. I missed what he was doing as I was rolling out the chapattis with tender care to make sure that they didn't stick or tear. I suspect I was making this look like hard work, as A then offered to fry the chapattis as I rolled them out and passed them to him.

The curry and chapattis turned out well. Both the boys had seconds (Sam had been out when the others were round, but later returned and ate nearly half a pan full), so I'm counting it a win. Although I'm not sure about recommending the recipe, as it needed adjusting.

I made a pudding out of the meringues from last week's recipes, which I clamped together using whipped double cream and a tiny bit of peppermint flavouring and food colouring and then I drizzled them with white chocolate. I do commend this to you.

However, this talk about  meringues has probably not distracted you from the fact that I became my own sous chef halfway through cooking the curry supper, much more so than when A and I made gnocchi, although I am very grateful to him for preventing me from serving a 'sausage casserole'. So this week, I'm docking half my points and ending up on 24 recipes.