Tag Archives: sourdough

Friday food links – 30 Oct 2015

It's a rule that making Christmas cake means finding the largest mixing bowl in the house.

My meal plan ran out half way through this week – I just didn’t get around to planning the second half of the week. Which meant we ate pasta on those nights I failed to plan for. What I was doing while I failed to plan meals (apart from going to work) was making the Christmas cake.
I love the ritual of making the cake. Even when all my good intentions of early present buying and homemade decorations go out the window, I feel better for knowing the cake is done. And the process itself is satisfying: wrapping the cake tin in brown paper, like a present. The bittersweet smell of candied peel. Tumbling raisins, sultanas and currants into a bowl, and covering it all with brandy. Just the smell of brandy says Christmas to me – is that wrong??
So this weekend I will be building more good intentions and writing lists. But if all else fails, there will still be cake.

Recipes:

Without a recipe:

  • Fresh pasta
  • Chicken curry – Spice Tailor sauce with some edits
  • Waitrose pizza

Reading:

Friday food links – 9 Oct 2015

Roast pumpkin and honey soup

What kind of week has it been? Clear skies and gradually turning leaves. Satisfying uses of leftovers and vegetables. A collapsed apple cake. A better tea loaf. Chewy cookies. Browned gratins. Fish pie. I think I’m turning into a series of Ruth Reichl tweets. But I think Autumn tends to do that to me: turns each snapshot of the day into a little word picture.

Recipes:

Without a recipe:

  • Tomato pasta
  • Chicken stir-fry
  • Pizza with courgette, mushrooms and bacon
  • Courgette gratin – the courgette plant is still going!

Reading:

Friday food links – 3 April 2015

Spring in full swing in somerset #nofilter

This week should have seen the emergence of Spring in the UK – it’s April, it’s Easter, it’s time. But it’s been very windy, and wet, and generally shown very few glimpses of a better time ahead (that photo above is an exception). Combined with still recuperating from illness, and retreating to Somerset to do so, this has been a bit of a slow food week.

Recipes:

Without a recipe:

  • Me – mostly not cooking anything, but from my mum, pork spare rib chops, whiting with a herb crust, salmon biryani and pasta

Reading:

Friday food links – 5 Dec 2014

A good deal of chopping for this afternoon's cooking, so time to get the good knife out

Last weekend featured some cooking to last through the week – a slow-cooked beef shin ragu, a chicken curry with lentils, and working on the Justin Gellatly sourdough recipe (which was baked on Monday). Very pleased to have reactivated my elderly, frozen sourdough starter, and hoping that I can keep it going with some more loaves through December.

Frozen sourdough

As a follow up to my post on bread, I just wanted to point out Dan Lepard’s excellent video of reviving a lump of frozen sourdough into an active starter:

Awakening the frozen sourdough

Great to see it in action. For anyone wondering, sourdough is simply bread leavened with yeasts from the air and the flour, raised into a starter that you keep alive, instead of by adding dried or fresh yeast. Freezing this mixture is a great way to be able to make sourdough without having to do it every week to keep the starter active. I have some rye starter in my fridge right now, and I’m going to have a go at freezing some this week – will let you know how it goes.