Reciplace

Whew, it's been a while...

I'm back!

I haven't blogged in so long!!

Here's a bit of an update on the past six months.  As you saw in the previous post, I've had a baby.  He's now seven months old, and is a glorious riot.  The Husband was made redundant from the job he hated, and I'm on maternity leave.  So we packed up our stuff, and the cat, and moved back to Calgary, Canada.

It's great over here... amazing new restaurants have popped up since I left, and the coffee scene is exploding.  Maybe I'm seeing it with renewed eyes, but I think Calgary has turned into a super trendy foodie hotspot.

The bread baking fell off the map for a bit (it's hard to spend ten minutes kneading when you've got an infant shouting for attention), but then picked up again when I was given a splendidly hardworking Bosch mixer for my birthday.

Cooking dipped for a while as we battled with hourly nursing sessions and broken sleep, but since things have calmed down a bit, we're back into the swing of things.  And I've discovered that cookbooks with brightly coloured pictures (Ottolenghi, Maria Elia) are fantastic for entertaining babies.

My new obsession is Baby Led Weaning... no shoving spoonfuls of puree down my Little Man's throat!  He gets bite sized peices of whatever we eat, and eats as much as he wants (or doesn't want).  It's amazing to watch him pick up a spoon loaded with applesauce and aim it right for his mouth.  And his palette is incredible; he loves goat's cheese, coriander, spicy food, and all types of bread - that's my boy!  (And cake, but I'm not about to publicly admit to feeding cake to a seven month old...)

In order to keep learning while off on maternity leave, I've been studying to become a certified Tea Sommelier with the Tea Association of Canada.  This has changed my life - I'm now a total tea snob!  Which caused a bit of a conundrum when my shipping crate from the UK arrived full of my treasured Clipper tea bags....  

So I've made a new years' resolution to make the time to start blogging again.  I don't have the time for lengthy posts anymore, unless the Little Man blesses me with an extended nap, but I will make an effort to at least post a photo now and then.

It's good to be back!

 

My life has changed

My life has changed.  I am now a mum.

Morgan Bernard Richings Farnell was born on June 21st, 2011 - on my mum's 70th birthday, no less!  He was a slender yet long 7lb, and 52 cm. 

So the blogging has been put on hold for a bit, while I try to work my schedule around feeding and sleeping.  I've managed to make two loaves of bread since he was born - yeasted, tinned - no time for sourdough or fancy shaping!  And I've been living off of Angela Nilsen's delicious healthy carrot cake for midnight snacks.  The veg from the veg box has been piling up while we eat copious amounts of beans on toast, and we've been ordering takeaways for the first time ever. 

It's all worth it though.  Welcome, Little Man.

Einkorn Bread

There are so many types of bread flour out there, the mind boggles.  I have an entire rack in my kitchen which holds around twenty different bags of flour, all from various millers and producers.  Some of them are just variations of normal wheat - different extraction rates and different millers - and some are interesting varieties of grain, all with their own unique properties.

So I was super nerded-up to find that Doves Farm are really getting into bringing back ancient grains for bread baking.  I'm a huge fan of ancient grains.  Spelt and Kamut flours are already making a huge comeback for their high nutritional value and unique flavours; and I always find it fascinating to bake with the same flour the Ancient Romans or Egyptians would have used. 

Einkorn is one of the newest (or oldest, depending on how you look at it) of these ancient grains.  Grown over twenty thousand years ago in the Middle East, it's even older than spelt.  The Romans let Einkorn die out, as their newer grains grew faster and yielded larger crops.  (A classic example of history repeating itself when spelt went into obscurity because of the high yields of our modern wheat!)

Einkorn makes a very dense, rustic flavoured bread.  At 8.8g of fibre per 100g, it's reasonably high in fibre - and an Italian study showed that Einkorn has more carotenoids than other grains. 

It's quite heavy on its own, so I mixed it 80-20 with white flour to lighten it up a little, and used a white leaven to raise it.  The result was great - a satisfying, nutty, dense loaf.  I'll be using the rest of the bag to try it out as a pizza base, as Doves recommends. 

Einkorn flour from Doves will be available over the summer, but only in smaller healthfood stores, and not the big supermarkets (the best place to buy your flour from anyway!).   Or you can order it online on their website.

 

Incredible Bread Art

I like to think of myself as someone who knows her way around a dough scraper. But how does one even begin to make bread art like this?

One of the things that attracts me to the skill of bread is that it doesn't require intricate detail and a steady hand.  A masterpiece such as this would be difficult for most people to create using a solid material such as wood or metal. But someone has created this out of dough; a soft, moving, live substance.  And they aren't the first - there is an entire category of the Meilleur Ouvrier de France dedicated to patisserie and bread craftsmanship!

This is a loaf of bread The Husband saw in the Paris Bakery shop in Dublin recently.  The intricacy of it all is stunning - and it's obviously not there for eating.  This is bread for art's sake, and it's incredible.

Rhubarb and Strawberry Layered Dessert

This week, my Riverford veg box blessed me with both rhubarb AND strawberries, and I happened to have a beautiful carton of buffalo milk custard from Laverstoke Park Farm. 

When you have such stunning ingredients as these to hand, the only thing to do is to let them speak for themselves - so I layered them up in a glass with a bit of vanilla yogurt and crumbled digestive biscuit for an indulgently scrumptious weeknight dessert.

 

Royal Wedding Afternoon Tea Baking

Being Johnny Foreigner, I'm not nearly as cynical about the royal family as the rest of my British friends. I love ol' Charles for fighting the good fight against Genetically Modified food, Camilla looks like she might be a bit of a laugh after a few glasses of Pinot, and Kate makes a way more believable normal-girl-turns princess than Anne Hathaway did.

So of COURSE I got myself into the wedding day spirit by baking!

First up, my normal stand-by Victoria sponge cake (my grandma's recipe) with a Union Jack in berries on top.  Moments after tweeting a photo of this, I had a reply from BBC London asking if they could use the photo on the news!  Excitement!

Then came the biscuits. I found these lovely wedding cookie cutters while on holiday in Louisiana. I baked up a batch of sugar cookies, then The Husband and I got to work decorating them with royal icing and sparkly balls. (Okay, it was mostly him - he has a steadier hand and a better eye for detail.)

White wedding doves with green eyes

Wedding dresses (The Husband had a bit too much fun designing a different dress for each biscuit. Should I be worried?)

Champagne glasses

Engagement rings

By the time the wedding had finished, and Will had kissed Kate on the balcony the same way he used to kiss his mum, we had finished decorating everything.  We packed it all up, along with some freshly baked scones with jam and thick cream, and headed over to our friends' house down the road for a Royal Wedding afternoon tea. 

I have now officially made bread from a box

I have made bread from bread mix.   I'm not proud, but I'm not all that ashamed, either.

In fact, bags of bread mix in the bread machine acted as my segue years ago from shop-bought bread to homemade.  Although tastier than a loaf of Hovis, I remember those machine-steamed loaves still having a soft, gummy texture, with no crust to speak of. 

So why, after baking hundreds of hand mixed and shaped loaves, would I go back to the mix?

I swear, this was all in the name of research.  A German friend of mine raves about this rye bread mix - available from Ikea of all places - as being authentic and delicious.  Looking at the ingredients, it really did only contain rye flour, yeast and salt.  So it's officially real bread!  As the package says, all you have to do is add water, shake and pour!

So that's what I did.  First, I poured in the water....

Then I shook it, and poured it into a loaf tin....

I smoothed off the top....

... and baked it.  Forty-five minutes later, the kitchen smelled of legitimate bread!  I waited a day, as you do with 100% rye bread, and sliced it up for a taste.  Skepticism gone - the Ikea rye bread tasted mighty delicious! Strong flavour, coarse texture, great as sandwich bread.

So while I'm not going to start baking bread from a box anytime soon, I can't fault this one.  For anyone who wants to bake bread at home, but has no interest in becoming a bread nerd, this bread is delicious, easy, and is happily missing all of the frightening ingredients that make store-bought bread so bad. 

 

Brioche Loaf

I've made fluffy brioche in tins before, but never a brioche loaf.   Here's my first attempt.

This only lasted a couple of days.  Uses included French toast, scrambled eggs and brioche, and poached rhubarb and brioche. 

Crumpets Part 2

Crumpets on a Sunday is now a monthly ritual in our house.  I whisk up the batter the night before and leave it in the fridge, then cook them up on the stove and serve with fried eggs, or jam and cheese.

Traditionally, I make funny heart or square shaped crumpets - using my egg rings.  But I've finally bought proper crumpet rings, and thought it deserved a photo!

Pancake Day Recipes

I'm already getting excited about Pancake Day (Shrove Tuesday)!!  It's a bit late this year (March 8, 2011), not smushed up against Valentine's Day like last year. 

Every year I like to dust off my pancake pan (circa 1962) and whip up a selection of sweet and savoury pancakes for dinner.   Rhubarb, whipped cream, strawberries, and classic lemon all make wonderful pancake fillers for sweet pancakes - as do ham, cheese, pesto and smoked salmon for savoury ones. 

Check out my favourite list of pancake day recipes - there's guaranteed to be something you'll flip for!  (Har har)

Happy Pancake Day!