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).

So what did we do with all that fruit? Part 3 - raspberry vinegar

Once I had made the raspberry jam and vodka, I had a few hundred grams leftover. I remember seeing in my River Cottage Preserves Book a recipe for raspberry vinegar. I have seen these in delis but are they are quite expensive. So we gave it a go. For the first part soak the raspberries (slightly crushed) in cider vinegar for 4-5 days. For every 1 kg of raspberries you use 600 ml of vinegar.

I then deviated from this recipe, as I had been told by Andrew's when they made their raspberry vinegar it was very sweet. I then followed Maguerite Patten's recipe which uses less sugar. To 600 ml of juice you add 225 g of sugar. This is dissolved by heating and then tipped into a sterilised bottle.

So far we have only used it to dress green salads as part of our meals. It does make a great alternative to the usual balsamic or wine vinegars. But I am currently searching for some specific recipes.

So what did we do with all that fruit? Part 1 - Jams and Jelly

As I said in an earlier post we had been to a PYO and returned with loads of fruit. With my birthday money I bought a jam pan and was waiting for the soft fruit season to put it to good use. I have learnt that jams are quite easy to make, contrary to what some manufacturers would have you believe. We have been finding it great fun too. I think its the geeky scientists in us that like to watch it set. We understand the science, yet it still seems like magic. How sad?!

We staggered the jam making over two days. We started with the raspberry jam as they were likely to go mouldy first.

We then entered new territory, jelly making. Redcurrant jelly is great to stir into gravy. The first thing to do is extract the juice which means simmering the redcurrants in water. You then strain the juice overnight using a jelly bag. You can buy jelly bag stands but we used Andrew's mum chair technique with the help of some climbing gear.

After the juice is strained, you just have to boil it with sugar until it reaches the setting point. We made another batch of strawberry jam. The last jam we made was blackcurrant. There were loads of blackcurrants on the bushes at the PYO and we were the only ones picking them!

This jam turned out to be the best value jam to make. It produced 6.5 lb. The ingredients for 1lb cost just 73p.

In total we made:

• 7 jars of blackcurrant jam (6.5lb)
• 4 jars of strawberry jam (4lb)
• 6 jars of raspberry jam (6lb)
• 1lb of redcurrant jelly

We used recipes from the River Cottage Handbook and Women's Institute.

A new book and jam making

Andrew and I both have book collections, Andrew's is full of climbing guides and mine is full cookery books. As you can see from the photo my cookery books fill more than 2 shelves. Whereas Andrew's books only take up one. My collection has had a recent addition: River Cottage Handbook no. 2 - Preserves. Its a really great book and goes beyond jams and chutneys, though of course it does cover these too. When we had our first glances through the book there were a lot of 'oh I want to make that' or 'that looks great'.



Examples of recipes that are on the hitlist are:

• Cider apple butter
• Spiced pickled pears
• St Clement's squash
  
• Souper mix ( which is a puree of veg to be used in the place of stock cubes)
• Blackberry and apple leather

The recipes are easy to follow and there are a lot of suggestions for variations. Like all the River Cottage books its easy to read and very inspiring. I would definitely recommend this book.

After we got this book we really want to try it and decided to make a classic, strawberry jam. We went to Craigie's Farm for PYO. This also meant I got to use my jam pan which has not really been used. The recipe takes some of the strawberries and mashes them with some of the sugar, then you add the rest of the strawberries.

We can't wait to move to our new flat as the jam making in our small kitchen was really hot.

We managed to fill five jars with our first jam of the season. I have only ever made jam once before at school, which was quite a while ago. So this is a new first for our household.

Now we have tested one of the recipes from the book, we want to try some more. I have two other preserve books and although they won't be made redundant by the new arrival. I will definitely consult the River Cottage book first, before the others. I am sure it won't be long before we are driving back to Craigie's to pick some more fruit destined for jars.

Homemade Ricotta

I am willing to give anything a go and when I was reading the River Cottage Year book, I saw a recipe for ricotta style cheese. When I was in my local branch of Peckhams I noticed that they sold rennet. So I decided to give it a go.

All you do is bring 2 litres of milk to body temperature, stir in a pinch of salt and 4 teaspoons of rennet. Leave for 15 mins.


The milk will then have separate into curds and whey. I then spooned the curds into a cloth bag which is meant for jelly making (muslin will do) and hang for 2 hrs.


It didn't really take much effort to make at all. I used it in a spinach and ricotta cannelloni, which we had on Friday night.


The rest we had this evening with gnocchi in a tomato sauce. It was really good fun to make and easy. I would love to be able to extend to making other cheese but our limited time and space becomes an issue. I am sure that one day we will be making all our own cheeses.

Farmers Market at last!

I've been counting down the days till this weeks Farmers Market. We haven't be able to go the market for about a month. The meat drawer of our freezer has been getting low and need of re-stocking. I had a massive list but I had to restrain myself. We got to the market nice and early as you can see from the photo.
The first stall I went to was Puddledub Pork, I bought some bacon, bacon bits, pancetta, chorizo sausages and their dubliner sausages. I bought chicken thighs from Gartmorn Farm, I think these are destined for a curry. I bought some lamb neck fillets to make Jamie Oliver's kebabs. Braising steak and topside for roast tomorrow! Smoked haddock, toulouse veal sausage, arran blue and finally rhubarb which will be used to make rhubarb vodka. Here I am at the front of the queue paying for my rhubarb:

After the Farmers Market, I went over to the lab to try and get some more work done. When I do lab work at the weekend I seem to get so much more done. So I managed to prepare enough samples for the next week.

We had a chilled out afternoon. Then pasta with pancetta, leek and mushroom with creme fraiche for dinner. This recipe was taken from Gordon Ramsay's Fast Food Book. Something simple, before a nice Sunday roast dinner tomorrow.

An easy weekend!

We have spent the last few weekends away from home or with people visiting us. So this weekend we decided to take it easy.

Andrew did some work on his thesis and I made some quick visits to the lab, just a couple of hours. Basically to check that the machines were working and to do a small amount of lab work. On Saturday I came back via Kember and Jones with some bread for a cheesey lunch. Normally we would have this kind of lunch with an nice English cider for example Westons or Dunkertons but we wanted to do some work afterwards. The cheeses were Cornish Yarg, Shropshire Blue, Arran Blue and Somerset Brie. With this lunch we had some fennel salami and hazelnut saucisson, also some homemade spicy apple and walnut chutney and Andrew's mum's spicy pickled onions. Yum, yum, yum. I may have a cheese addiction!


We spent the rest of the afternoon chilling out, looking through our theses (or whatever the plural of thesis is!) and watching Britain winning lots of gold medals in the cycling. For dinner that night we had a beef stew made with Guinness, containing carrots, celery, parsnip and swede. We washed it down with Arran Sunset Ale.


Today I popped into the lab to check that everything was ticking over. Andrew continued to work on his thesis. I am wondering what we will do when we finish our PhD's they have been such a big part of our lives. I am sure that we will find something to fill the gap.I made lunch for the next couple of days, a vegetable broth containing swede, carrot, parsnip, cabbage and pearl barley. All I did was slowly fry the veg for 5 mins then added vegetable stock and pearl barley cooked for one and a half hour, adding the cabbage ten minutes from the end.

Dinner tonight was inspired by a blog I read regularly The Cottage Smallholder. Andrew and I try only eat meat that has not been subject to intense farming. We get the majority of ours from Farmers Markets. This means that we can't afford to eat meat everyday. I personally don't think that this its a bad thing. So I made Delia's (before she went to the dark side) vegetarian shepherd's pie. We didn't have the correct beans so we used a tin of pinto beans and also yellow split beans. It was still delicious. This was accompanied with an onion gravy and purple sprouting broccoli. The onion gravy comes from one of my favourite food writers and possibly one of my favourite cookery books. Its from Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater. I love this book some much, when I got it for Christmas I read it cover to cover. Nigel writes so beautifully about food. Its a great book!


By the way we will be creating a separate blog for our climbing exploits, so this blog will be purely about our food.