Breadmaking

I love my bread books (Dough and Crust) and Andrew's favourite carb is bread, so they come in handy.

I made some Fougasse. These are pretty looking breads and dead easy to make. All you have to do is make a batch of white dough and divide into four pieces. You then flatten a piece of dough and make some slits opening them to form holes. These are baked @ 230 degree C for 10-12 min until golden brown.

Andrew thinks my Fougasse look like the Scream mask, which I suppose they do.


I am not sure they are supposed too but at least they taste good.

I have also made some rye flour breads. I made some olive breads to go with some pasta. They were dead simple to make, all you do is flatten the dough and spread some olive paste and fold the dough.

The last different bread I made was a cider bread. I made this to have with cheese and pickles. Again these breads were easy to make. Though quite involved (4-6hrs for the ferment, 1 and half hrs for resting, proving of 1 and half hrs and 45 minutes baking).

This was another rye bread and went very nice with the selection of cheese from the deli and homemade chutneys (rhubarb and raisin chutney and green tomato chutney).

Pumpkin risotto and biscuits

After the pumpkin pasta, I was thinking of what else to make with it. So I decided to make a risotto. I roasted the pumpkin whilst I was making the risotto. The pumpkin was then stirred in at the end with the cheese and lemon. I saw a recipe for a risotto served with a pesto, I like the idea so I stole it! The basil plants are doing well enough that I can use them to make pesto. Still not bored of the pumpkin!

Pumpkin risotto

• 1 Small onion, chopped
• 200 g risotto rice
• 1 Wine glass of vermouth
  
• Vegetable stock (approx 500 ml)
• 1 Lemon
• Pecorino Cheese, 2tbsps
  
• Enough pumpkin for 2, chopped

Roast the pumpkin @ 180 degrees C for 30 mins.

Meanwhile, soften the onion in a little olive oil in a saucepan. Add the rice and cook for a couple of mins. Then add the vermouth. Once this has been absorbed add the veg stock one ladle at a time. Once the stock has been absorbed, add another ladle until the rice is cooked. Stir in the lemon juice, cheese and pumpkin. Serve with the pesto.

Basil Pesto

• 1 Large handful of basil
• 1 Large handful of pinenuts
• 2 Cloves of garlic
• Lemon juice
• Olive oil

Blitz in a food processor, using the olive oil and lemon juice to taste.

For a few weeks Andrew has been making gingerbread biscuits. So I decided to give Andrew a break and make some biscuits. I saw this recipe when I was having a read through some of Stonehead's older posts. These biscuits were dead easy to make and were very hard to resist when they came out the oven. This photo doesn't do them justice.

Sweet Nothings

When we went down to Andrew's parents I acquired a new recipe, for teabread. I have been told by Andrew that this is a Broadway speciality. Apparently if I am ever to get Broadway behind my name I have to learn to make this and also pavlova, another Broadway speciality. So one down, one to go.


Teabread

• 6 oz Currants
• 6 oz Sultanas
• 8 oz Dark brown Sugar
• 1/2 pint Hot black tea
  
• 10 oz Self raising flour
• 1 beaten egg

Put the sugar, currants and sultanas in a bowl, pour on the hot tea, stir well. Cover and leave overnight.

Grease and line a loaf tin. Heat oven to gas mark 2.

Stir in the flour and egg into the fruit and sugar mixture.

Mix thoroughly, put in the tin and bake for an hour and 45 mins.

Turn out onto a wire rack to cool.


Last week, I also made a carrot cake for a lab meeting. My supervisor had been given some very special chocolates from a swanky meeting he went to in London. He took them to the meeting but nobody touched them but my carrot cake went down a storm. I will definitely be making it again. I used a recipe from BBC Good Food. If you make it be warned that the recipe seemed to make too much icing, I would half it.

Double Chocolate Chip Cookies

My mouth started drooling as soon as I saw this month's recipe for Sweet and Simple Bakes. Andrew has a bit of an issue at the moment. He is getting more and more patriotic. He has now taken to calling pain au chocolate, chocolate bread. As he doesn't see why we should have to use the French words for things that can be translated into English. I think his PhD has effected his brain too. So when I told him that this months challenge was cookies, he pulled a face and said that we should call them biscuits!!! You would think that there were bigger issues in the world, but I think this is important to him! I do agree that we seem to put some cuisines on a peddlestool, especially French cuisine. As good as it is, we do have food to be proud of in Britain. Anyway I digress back to the cookies, oops I mean biscuits.


I owed my friend after she read 2 of my chapters, in fact I owed her big time. So I thought I could pay her back with the cookies.


After saying that I don't like white chocolate I decided to add dark and white chocolate. So I suppose these were triple chocolate, instead of double. I used chopped chocolate rather than chocolate chips.


I made them quite big. They were lovely and chewy. They seemed to go down well. I think that I have paid off my debt.

I asked Andrew to let me take a photo so I could show someone enjoying these lovely cookies but he couldn't stop laughing. You can't get the models these days . . .

Check out the round up which will be posted on the sweet and simple bakes website and the recipe can be found here

Ciabatta

It's always nice to have some bread with a meal. So as well as my soda bread rolls I also make ciabatta. I have used this recipe a couple of times. On Tuesday I made the ferment, a mix of flour, yeast and water that would need to be left covered for 17-24 hours.

Wednesday night I finished making my ciabattas. Next I had to make the dough which consists of flour, yeast, salt, olive oil, water and the ferment.

This is dough after it has proved for 1 and a half hours:

Then after it has proved I shaped it. I decided to make two loaves that are big enough for me and Andrew to share. I also made some rolls which should be enough for 1 person. After shaping I left them to rest on floured tea towels for 30 mins.

I part-baked them and then wrapped them up ready for the freezer. This means I can cook them from frozen, which takes about 15 mins.


The rolls look huge, but I am sure that Andrew won't mind. Andrew loves bread it's his favourite carb. Personally I couldn't choose but Andrew loves his bread.

I have to say its very rewarding making your own bread. The recipe I used comes from one of my favourite books: Dough by Richard Bertinet. The recipes tend to make a lot of bread but its handy if you don't have time to make bread everyday. I am sure that I will have many more posts of bread that I have made from this book.

Some fishy looking pasta!

Yesterday I made the first soup of the week. After reading a recipe for parsnip soup on Musings from a Stonehead's blog. I was inspired to make my own. It was pretty much the same recipe, except I added 1 tsp of mild curry powder after the garlic was soft and let it cook out for a minute before adding the potato and parsnip. I left out the bacon, only because the freezer is low on meat at the moment so we don't have any!
I had the soup for lunch today, it was superb. Today I had a really busy lab day. I only had one tea break! It seemed to working well when I left at 7pm, so fingers-crossed. When I got home, Andrew was dishing up, perfect timing. As you can guess from this blog, Andrew rarely gets in the kitchen. Not because he can't cook far from but because I like cooking so much. Dinner tonight was tuna balls with pasta and homemade ciabatta from the freezer. It was really good. I was so tired from the lab that it was good to eat straight away.

After dinner I decided to make some seeded soda rolls to go with our soups at lunchtimes. I usually make these in batches, normally when one of the food shops in byres road has buttermilk. I made 20 rolls, which should last us a couple of weeks. Right, I need to go to bed. Lab work is tiring.

Preparing for the week ahead

We had a day outside yesterday, trying some climbing at a new venue though we didn't get much done there. So today we got some chores done. I went into the lab in the morning to run some more samples and check the instrument was behaving itself. I came back and Andrew had cleaned the flat. Then we had cheese and pickles for lunch.

Andrew wanted to make my blog look a bit prettier, so I thought I should make some rock cakes. These are one of Andrew's favourite cakes, so he didn't mind either. As you can see from the picture that he even likes the cake batter! It is one of the joys of making cakes. I think you will agree that blog does look much nicer now, All due to Andrew's hard work!

I also made some savoury muffins for Andrew's lunch. They were sweetcorn, ham and cheese muffins. Andrew is on site at the beginning of the week, so th should make a good lunch.

• 200g self-raising flour
• 50g cheddar, grated
• ham sliced, couldn't say how much about 50g.
  
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 150ml yoghurt
• 1 tbsp wholegrain mustard
• 198g can sweetcorn, drained

• Heat the oven to 190oC/gas mark 5. Grease a muffin/bun tin.
• Mix flour, ham and cheese in one bowl. Mix the other ingredients in another bowl with 4 tbsp of water.
• Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix to combine.
  
• Spoon into the muffin tin and bake for approx. 20 mins until golden.
• Cool on a rack.
  

Tonight's dinner was a Moroccan inspire stew with lemon cous cous. This months beansprouts challenge is to eat one vegetarian meal a week. So this is a nice warming recipe to try.

• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic
  
• Veg ( I used 2 carrot, 1 small swede and 4 smallish potatoes), chopped
• 2tsp ground cumin, 1tsp turmeric and paprika, 1/2 tsp ginger and allspice
• 1 tin of chopped toms
• 150ml of veg stock
• 1 tin of chickpeas
• a handful of apricots
• 2 tsp harissa paste

• Gently fry the onion and garlic until soft. Then add the veg and fry for 5 mins.
• Add the spices and cook for a minute.
• Then add tomatoes, stock, chickpeas and apricots. Cook until veg are soft.
• Just before serving, stir in the harissa paste.
• Serve with cous cous.

OK, I have an addiction . . .

Its not too bad, but I feel I should acknowledge it. So here it goes . . .My name is Serena and I am addicted to blogs.

It doesn't take over my life. But I do like to read them, a lot! My lab work usually requires an instrument to run the samples that I have prepared this means that I spend a lot of time in front of a computer analysing the data. So to break the monotony, I check google reader to see if anyone has written something new. I have 3 different folders, climbing blogs to see what local climbers have been up to. What I call self-sufficient blogs like Beansprouts, Musings from a Stonehead and The accidental smallholder. These blogs contain useful tips which I hope to use when I realise my dream of having a smallholding. These blogs are a bit life envy really. But I am sure that my dream will happen, though I am far from it right now! The last folder contains my food blogs, this includes blogs from The Guardian and Good Food but also from individuals like We Are Never Full and Domestic Goddess in Training.

It is this last blog which I found a recipe I had to try. Irish Mocha Cupcakes, as soon as I saw these I had to make them. The recipe did not disappoint. I made them on Thursday evening and I had with tea in the afternoon on Friday with the girls at work. They had 2 each so they must have liked them! I didn't pipe the icing, so they don't look as fancy as the originals. I added walnuts on the top.




See my addiction isn't that bad, it ends with cakes for everyone!

A Busy Few Days

My parents and my sister were coming to visiting this weekend. So for my mothers day present I decided to make Jamie Oliver's Pepper and Chilli Chutney from Jamie at home. My mum text me to tell she thought that it looked yummy and she would make it. But I know my mum and so I decided to make it. Its not that she can't cook, far from it. She just isn't into it! Luckily it made 2 and half jars, so I'll let you know what its like.

On Friday evening we went to see Jason Byrne, so I made a pizza dough for calzones for lunch tomorrow. By the way, Jason Byrne was hilarious. If you are not too sensitive to swearing, I would definitely check him out.

Saturday we had calzone stuffed with olives, salami and mozzarella. I made the dough from my favourite book, Dough. The bread is amazing. I have made some ciabatta from this book. I love it and I got the second book, crust. Unfortunately we didn't take a photo. I am sure I'll make them again so I'll put one on then.

Today, I made a root vegetable lasagne for dinner. I don't think that Andrew was convinced when I told him what was for dinner, but he liked the end product.



Root Vegetable Lasagne:

• olive oil
  
• 1 onion (chopped)
  
• 2 sticks of celery (chopped)
  
• 2 carrots (chopped)
  
• 2 parsnips (chopped)
  
• 1 swede (chopped)
  
• 1 head of spring cabbage (sliced)
• 3 garlic cloves (crushed)
• splash of vermouth
  
• 1 carton passata
• dried thyme
• dried oregano
• sugar
• dried chilli
• lasagne sheets
• creme fraiche
• parmesan
• cheddar

I heated the olive oil in a large saucepan over a medium heat. Then I added the onion, celery, carrot, parsnips, swede put on the lid and let sweat for 10 min. Then added garlic, vermouth, passatta, season and add a pinch of thyme, oregano, sugar and dried chilli. This was cooked for 15 min until the sauce has reduced. Then add the cabbage just for a few seconds. I then layer this filling with the lasagne sheets, finishing with lasagne. I then topped with the creme fraiche and cheese. I like a lot of cheese!!! Then I baked for 20 min at gas mark 6.

I also made some brown bread rolls from the book of the moment, Dough. We tend to have soup and roll for lunch, both home-made. Though Andrew has opted to have a piece of the lasagne for lunch rather than soup. So here are a couple of pics of them to end this very long post!