More eggs and rice for lunch you say? Well, yes...

I realise I'm not very imaginative with my lunches, but hey - let's go with what works! Today there was sushi rice in the fridge, some gorgeous golden yolked eggs and spring greens. So it had to be this:

Stirfried Greens with Crispy Garlic and Ginger, Fried Egg and Sushi Rice served with Chili and Soy Sauces

Real Bread

It seems that Britain has retreated to winter. As I type, the wind is howling, the rain is lashing the windows and I have a pile of expensive plasterboard sitting in the rain in the drive-way getting ruined. Yay mid-summer winter weather.

Destroyed building supplies aside, what this weather does for me is make me yearn for comforting starches and being curled up cozily on the sofa (preferably with a good book and a roaring fire. We haven't yet restored our fireplaces yet unfortunately, so I'm having to settle for roaring central heating). And so, of course, I need bread.

Homemade ciabatta is one of my favourites. This is proper Real Bread. It takes a bit of time as it needs to rise in the fridge overnight, but involves minimal effort (no kneading at all) and the rewards for this limited hands-on time is a bread that tastes and looks amazing. It bears the little resemblance to supermarket-bought ciabatta which are almost always fluffy and dry. This has a moist, chewy crumb with big holes, just perfect for holding pools of melted butter or olive oil. It's also perfect for steak sandwiches which I plan on making for dinner tomorrow night...if there's any bread left by then.

This is my recipe - it makes 2 huge loaves, so you could halve it. But bread freezes well, and while this isn't hard, it can be a bit messy, so I always make one mess and two loaves and have one stashed away in the freezer for the next miserable day!

Ciabatta

Ingredients
900g strong white flour
1 tsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp instant yeast
2 1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp olive oil
700ml warm water

Place dry ingredients in a very large bowl (truly - go for the biggest you can find. It will look too big, but the dough rises a LOT). Mix together. In a jug, measure the water and add oil to it. Mix the wet ingredients into the dry. Using a strong spoon (I use a wooden one), mix everything together until it resembles a wet, sticky mess. It will look like you need another 500g flour, but under NO circumstances should you add flour. I don't knead this bread - I really just beat it as best I can with the spoon for a couple of minutes. Poke, prod, beat, mix, stir - whatever you can manage, so that everything is combined and it's had a bit of work. It really is much too sticky to try and knead and I've found it to be perfectly fine without this step, so trust me!
Cover the bowl with cling-film and leave it in the fridge overnight.

When you take it out the next day, you'll have a giant bowl of bubbly batter. It won't look much like bread dough. Don't worry!

The dough after 8-12 hours in the fridge

Heavily flour your bench. Place two tea-towels on the bench and shape them into sort of baskets (see picture for what I'm talking about). Heavily dust with flour - you really need to be quite liberal here. You're going to flip the bread off the towels later, so don't skimp. Gently tip your dough/batter onto the bench and divide in two (I use a dough scraper tool for this and it's very easy). Try to avoid knocking the air out of the dough - that's the key to the holey texture, so just be gentle. I cut my dough lengthwise so that each piece is roughly rectangular shaped, but either way, shape into a rectangle/slipper shape and place on the tea towel. It should look something like this (don't worry about the funny lumps and bumps - the top will become the bottom later on. And in any case, real bread ought to be slightly odd looking!):

Leave entirely alone for 1 and a half hours. Heat oven to 240degC with a baking tray in the oven. I also put another small tray in the bottom of the oven with some water in it - to create steam (which gives a good crust on the bread). Once the dough has had its hour and a half, and the oven is hot, remove hot baking tray and very carefully flip/turn your bread onto the tray. This does take a bit of aim, so it's possible you will make a mess your first time. Bake it even if it's half hanging off the tray - it'll look weird but still taste good! Gently (and with the sharpest knife you own), cut two slashes into the dough so the steam can escape.

Bake for 15 mins at 240degC, then turn the heat down to 200degC and bake another 15 mins. Remove and cool on a wire rack until ready to eat. Then enjoy some fantastic real bread - just try to resist!

California Rolls

There were always bound to be kitchen casualties in the Great Renovation of 2012/13. Today I discovered one thing that did not make it through the process. I can't believe this but...I've LOST my sushi mat! Talk about your first world problems: seriously - what a pain in the arse!

Anyway, not one to be held back by a lack of equipment (or indeed a kitchen), I used some cling film and made my first California Sushi roll for lunch. Granted it was bit more rustic than it should have been using this method, but it still tasted great.

I really will have to get a new mat though...

How to Cook

Delia Smith has been commenting on (lamenting?) the British public's lack of cooking skills this week (you can read a Guardian piece on her thoughts here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/may/14/delia-smith-masterchef-intimidates-aspiring-cooks). It's an interesting argument actually. Masterchef is a show that has increasingly bugged me for this reason. I caught a few episodes of New Zealand's version when I was home a few weeks ago, and found it hair-pullingly bad. Contestants who - from what we are told - are complete amateurs (self taught home cooks with aspirations to chefdom), are told to make something obscure and then are completely ripped apart by the judges. There's zero constructive criticism, zero intervention and guidance during their cooking - even when the judges can see that the contestants are heading in the wrong direction. It seems to me that if you're going to have a show like this, then in part its main point ought to be to take really good cooks and help them to learn the skills of becoming a chef - teach them. Give them feedback they can use - hell, allow them the opportunity to redo the test and see if they can improve. Treat it like a training exercise. In this way, not only would the contestants stand the chance of becoming the chefs they hope to be, but the viewers can also learn and see how to fix a 'kitchen crisis' (and see that not everyone gets it right all the time). It drives me mad. Of course, constructive (as opposed to aggressive) critiques and feedback don't make for good television or produce crying contestants, and that's probably the issue.

The Australian version of MC had it right I think - a much longer series, episodes and challenges which weren't always all or nothing (high stakes challenges in which someone gets kicked off every time doesn't exactly offer the opportunity for development) and judges who would actually give advice and feedback as the contestants were working. Of course, now they've sold their soul to the devil and are running a wholly unenlightened series called "Girls vs Boys" which promises to do little more than reaffirm established and nonconstructive gender stereotypes, so I think it's safe to say I'm not going to be watching that any time soon.

So I think Delia is right and people don't learn to cook as they ought to anymore and the plethora of cooking shows hasn't remedied this problem. But my question is, do people really want to cook? It'll be interesting to see how well her online cooking school goes...

The Results of an Online Book Sale

Last week on Twitter, a kind evil person posted a link saying that the Bookpeople were having a sale on cookbooks. This is the result.

It could have been worse - when I first went to check-out, I had 12 books in my shopping basket. After giving myself a stern talking to, I ended up buying 5.

Oooh, where to start?!

Whoopie!

The cookbook I can't stop flicking through at the moment is Dan Lepard's Short and Sweet. It's a book about baking so it has everything from breads to pastries to cakes and biscuits. Almost every recipe sounds delicious and I want to try it, so I'm slowly working my way through it. His bread recipes have featured on this blog before actually, because they are always brilliant. He has a non-standard approach for kneading bread dough which I love, but more about that another day. Today while my other half patiently slogged away finishing the kick-boards for the kitchen units (the bits that hide the legs on the units and block the gaps that the cat can hide under!), I consulted Dan's book and decided I had the appropriate ingredients to make Whoopie Pies. You heard me; Whoopie Pies. Now, these had a brief moment in food fashion's sun about 2 years ago (before they faded under the Cupcake's unrelenting glow), but I am woefully unfashionable in all respects, so I've never made them before (nor eaten them). They're pretty much small chewy cakes that are sandwiched together with marshmallow cream (which does sound pretty disgusting, I will grant you). You can make all kinds of flavours - I didn't have chocolate in the house, so I made one batch of vanilla, and another called "Raspberry Ruffle" (which is just the vanilla mixture with coconut added and then raspberry jam added to the filling). You can ice them, but I thought they were sweet enough without additional layers of sugar, so mine just have a light dusting of icing sugar.

The vanilla ones worked really well I think, but I went off-book in the raspberry ones and added some jam to the batter as well. That made them too runny and so my raspberry ruffle whoopie pies don't have the same cute button shape as the vanilla. They taste good though.

And hey, I'm improving on the photography too (I mean, I'm not going to be winning awards anytime soon, but it's definitely better than some pics I've taken recently!)! I'll take that as a win!

I should have put something in this to show the size - they're just about a perfect mouthful 

Let me eat cake.

Cake has never really been my thing. I would sell my right arm for a bag of crisps at the right moment, but I've never really yearned for cake. I enjoy making cakes and other baked goods, but I always have to give my efforts away. And yet...

Lately I've had the most ridiculous hankerings for cake.* In a rather shameful weekend not long past, I bought and ate an entire (small) carrot cake, and this week I've become fixated with the idea of an American 'white' cake - the type of frosted beasts you see on TV shows. They always look so good, and you know how much of a sucker I am for American foods (see, for eg., Pretzels and Cookies). So, I'm afraid I now need cake. I've had a relatively productive morning (having finished and submitted a paper as well as doing some tedious teaching-related admin), so I think that I deserve cake. I've earned it.**

But which cake to make? Apparently, to achieve a truly 'white' cake, you have to use vegetable shortening, but I don't have any and after the lard experience, I didn't really fancy it. Butter seems a much nicer option. I have a brilliant cupcake recipe from Magnolia Bakery in NYC which I know works, but I thought I'd try something different for this, and there seems to be two distinct schools in the world of American vanilla cake. There's a version where you make a meringue and fold that through the mix for extra oompf, and then there's a very weird sounding version which appears to rely on witch-craft, in which you mix milk and egg-whites together and then just blend them through the cake mixture without whipping. I haven't made either type of cake before, but the second version is just so intriguing that I sort of felt compelled to try it first. It's also the version that various (relatively reputable) baking bloggers RAVE about. "This is the best vanilla cake recipe ever", they cry! "You'll never need another recipe!". With such praise, I really had no choice but to try the witchy cake.

I was very careful in my weighing and measuring. I even followed instructions online for turning my plain flour (normal baking flour) into the requisite 'cake flour' which American recipes insisted upon. When the batter was finished, it did look, smell and taste like a "proper" cake, so into the oven it went.

This is the finished product (my icing efforts, much like my photography, need work...it's on my to-do list!)

The frosting wasn't quite behaving as I wanted it to, but it came out ok. We cut it after dinner (salmon curry with homemade naan) and I was really looking forward to it. A slice was cut...forks were poised...

And then...this. You can see already from the picture of the cut slice that things didn't quite pan out. It's not fluffy, it's not light, the crumb just looked, well, weird.

The taste was even worse. It was awful. Really really bad. Sort of glue-y and floury and just yuck. We couldn't eat it in the end - even the lad couldn't eat it, so you pretty much know it was a singularly bad cake.

All in all, a very disappointing day in the kitchen. There's nothing that pisses me off more than actually following a recipe closely, only to have it turn out horribly. I should have known witch-craft and cakes didn't mix. Next time, I'll go with the meringue version or stick with my tried and tested Magnolia cupcake recipe, but I think to redeem myself a bit, I might make a carrot cake today instead.




* Before you ask, no, I'm not pregnant. I just want cake.
**unlikely