Reciplace

Breadsticks! The good kind!

How cool are they!  I made those! 

I'm so obsessed with bread lately.  There's something so satisfying about delicately, yet firmly, kneading a blob of wet mess into a beautiful ball of dough.  These are some yummerific breadsticks I "threw together" when I had a few people around last weekend. 

One of the nerdy boys from work was there.  I'm surrounded by boys talking about firmware and cloud computing all day - but the Aussie Nerd is the only one who pretends to be interested when I talk about what I cooked for dinner last night.  He's really good at that.  Much better than pretending to be interested in the bag of new clothes I came back with after lunch from Uniqlo. 

So I thought I'd show off some bread skills by whipping up this batch of ridiculously easy breadsticks.  The recipe is from the new Bread: River Cottage Handbook No. 3 by Daniel Stevens, and uses half bread flour, half white flour.   They recommend curling the edges over like candy canes.  These don't look anything like those uniform sticks that come in a box from the supermarket! 

First batch had Parmesan shavings and salt, second batch had fresh rosemary from the garden. 

I thought I'd go one step further and make a big bowl of Aioli to dip the sticks in.  An hour later I was still pouring olive oil in one drop at a time, with my other arm about to drop off from whisking, and remembered why people buy mayonnaise these days.  It tasted pretty darn good though.  Well worth it.

The world's best food and recipe site?

I have a lot of strong opinions about food sites.   I have my favourites, (BBC Good Food... BBC Good Food... BBC Good Food....) and I tend to go back to those favourites rather than use google to find things.  Some sites are fantastic from a usability point of view (BBC Good Food... Epicurious), and others are a great example of social communities within the site (Recipe Zaar, AllRecipes). 

UKTV Food has always made available an incredible amount of recipes.  It's one I use heavily because there's no shortage of ideas for even the most obscure ingredient, and most of the recipes are created and endorsed by celebrity chefs.  Oh, and because I work for UKTV.  I wasn't around when the current incarnation of the site was developed, and I've always had strong opinions about how it should work.

I can't even explain the current level of excitement around here at the moment.  In a few months, we will be unveiling what I think will be the world's best food site.  The UKTV Food website is getting a complete overhaul, and we are obsessing over every tiny detail to make it the prettiest, most usable, feature rich site out there. The new site is going to be in conjunction with BBC Good Food magazine, and will be the Good Food Channel.

My Friand-baking friend is holding the reins and doing a killer job, and we have a team stacked full of talent.  We spent hours agonising over tiny details on how the site should work, but I know it will all pay off.  I cannot WAIT to start using it at home.  It's going to be the BEST food site EVER!!!

Sundried Tomato and Spinach Muffins

I *heart* muffins. Me and the husband even have matching His and Hers plastic muffin containers that we take our muffins to work in. It's true!

I normally stuff muffins full of bran and leftover fruit, but this time I decided to go a little whacky and do some very savoury muffins.

For these muffins, I mixed together:

• 500g plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt

Then I put half a bag of baby spinach in the food processor until it was nice a pureed.  I added that to the dry mixture, along with 300g plain yogurt, an egg, 300mL milk, and some tabasco sauce. 

When it was all mixed up and ready to put into the muffin tins, I only filled each muffin case half way.  I then put a few chopped up sundried tomatoes in the center, and then filled up the rest of the muffin.  Then I baked them for 25 minutes at 200°C.

Next time I'm going to put little cubes of feta cheese in them.  Will the feta melt at 200 degrees?  Will it then harden again when the muffin goes cold?  Watch this space, muffin fans.

In other muffin news, my mum is putting together a list of common leftover fruit, and the quantities and other ingredients that go nicely with them in muffins.  It will be the ultimate muffin guide!  She seems to be taking forever to pass it over to me though - as a librarian and semi-perfectionist, she won't let it out of her hands until she's decided on the perfect title for the document.  My dad's suggestion of "Muffins: Whatever Shit You Got" didn't go over well.

Easy Peasy Cheese Souffle

I've heard it so many times.  "The secret of making a souffle is that it's not as difficult as they say it is."  Hmmm.  It looks difficult.  It looks like the kind of thing that's going to take calm preparation, not the panicked disorganisation that goes on in my kitchen. 

So I thought I'd give it a whirl. And you know what? It wasn't difficult. It wasn't even time consuming.  Whipping those egg whites to perfect stiffness was a bit boring, and I wouldn't do this on a weeknight or anything, but it wasn't exactly some kind of gourmet dark art.

Tasted pretty nice, too.  We had it with steamed buttered french beans.  It tasted a bit like a really posh bowl of cheesey scrambled eggs.  Each ramekin only held one egg each, but we were stuffed after eating!  It must have been all the air in there, because after a few belches, we were starving again. 

Not sure I'd make it again, but at least I can say I can do it. 

Note:
It's a bit painful for me to look at these photos, as only an hour later, the black Le Creuset ramekin had a fatal accident with the ceramic tiled floor.  Goodbye, sweet raemkin. 

White crusty bread!

It's finally official... we've left beautiful Brighton by the sea and moved much closer to work, in dreary ol' London.  The downside is that I no longer have a Waitrose, M&S, and Topshop within metres of my house.  Upside is that we now have a garden, and a kitchen to DIE for.... which is making me feel extremely domestic. 

I left work early on Thursday, and thought I fancied a bit of Stepford bliss in my gorgeous new kitchen.  What could be more domestic than baking bread!

I used a combination of white flour and strong bread flour - which made it nice and squishy.   I also sprinkled lots of flour on top, and put a dish of water in the oven, which made the nice crusty top.  And check out the lines I made with a knife!  Makes it look like proper artisan bakery bread!

And boy does kneading feel properly good after a stressful week at work!

But the taste.... mmmm the taste.  Homemade bread is just a completely different food than store bought bread.  No improvers or masses of water to give it structure.... just good old fashioned flour and yeast.  Yum!