Month: August 2016
Get back on the bike…
You know what they keep telling you: if you fall off your horse, you must get back on. We were not rich enough to have horses… we had to get back on bikes. Anyway… I had a bread recipe go hideously wrong a week or so ago.
This is the recipe, and it’s one I’ve used quite a few times. It’s a tasty bread that uses both yeast and sourdough starter, the latter for its flavour, rather than to raise the bread. It seemed a little wet when I took it from the fridge after its overnight stay, but it shaped in the usual way, and I put it into the proving basket. At this point, as the saying goes, I must have lost my presence of mind, as I forgot about it for a couple of hours…
The result of that was that it grew hugely, stuck to the proving basket, and made a remarkable mess when I managed to get it out. Scraping the rest out of the proving basket, and adding more flour as I tried to shape it again, I scraped the thing into a baking tin. Well, it was obviously not going to cook on the baking stone in a civilised manner.
Here it is. There was no point trying to score the top. I just cooked it, convinced it would not be worth eating anyway.
It came out like this, with a good big crack caused by the oven spring.
The crumb was very dense, and the crust could do with stronger teeth than I possess, but the flavour was reasonable.
Yesterday, I jumped back onto the bicycle, and used the same recipe. It came out of the fridge looking like dough instead of soup, and it didn’t stick to the proving basket either. Here’s the result. It’s lovely.
Slut’s spaghetti
This was a dish I had been wanting to make for a while, although I was told I had done it before. Well, I’m allowed to forget things sometimes. As you can see, I’m using a Nigella recipe. It’s all over the internet, along with the scene from “A Series of Unfortunate Events” in which the children serve it. The recipe is everywhere, too, and is very simple.
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My favourite bouzouki player
If you know me, you probably thought that would be Markos Vamvakaris. But you would be wrong. He was great, but Halikias played some instrumentals that made a huge difference to Greek music, and he played them in America.
Lamb Tagine
Lamb Tagine needs harissa, and I didn’t have any in the fridge, so I made a batch. This is the red pepper being roasted so that it can be skinned. You just keep it in the flame, twisting and turning, until its skin is blackened in most places, before putting it in a plastic bag to cool. It will take ages to cool, and if you try to do anything with it before it has done, it will injure you with the steam from inside.
Here’s the pepper, waiting to scald the careless cook. Once it is cool, it has to be peeled, or you can look at it as scraping the cooked flesh off the burnt skin. The resulting chunks of cooked red pepper flesh should be chopped up. I didn’t chop this one, and discovered that the big chunks can somehow avoid the blades of the blender completely. I ended up having to fish them out and chop them.
Here are the coriander, cumin and caraway seeds, being toasted. Since I’m not giving you the full recipe, you can look at it here. There’s also chilli, garlic, lemon juice, and tomato paste in the harissa.
For some reason, no fresh chillis had grown in the garden, or appeared in the fridge, so I used dried ones, revitalised with some boiling water.
The tagine recipe is very similar to this Nigel Slater one. He must have a lot of money, to be able to put saffron in something that will totally obscure the flavour and colour, I think. My secret ingredient, that he doesn’t use, is preserved lemons, which you can see in the jar, here. They are wonderfully lemony, and you can taste them in the finished dish. They are also rather salty, so no extra salt is needed in the dish.
Dinner time! Cheers!
The cous cous is a good accompaniment for the tagine, but everyone seems to know their own way to make it. This one had our first broad beans in it, and a couple of runner beans.
Yes, thank you, I did enjoy it!
