Home-baked bread

Fresh from the oven

I’ve made the odd soda bread loaf  in the past, but I’m currently pretty serious about getting into a routine of baking our own bread, inspired most recently by watching the River Cottage Everyday ‘Bread’ episode. At some point, I’d also like to try establishing my own sourdough, but I wanted to start with something straightforward. I was pretty happy with the look and taste of this chunky little loaf.

So, if you also happen to be looking for a  fool-proof home-baked baked bread recipe then I think that you really can’t go past this Simple White Loaf recipe from River Cottage.

Proving it's child's play! One of these was shaped by a four year old.

I especially love this recipe because it yields two beautiful sized loaves which means that you can immediately freeze one when it’s cool.  Make a few batches of these and you’ll soon have a load of your own bread available.

My nearly-4-year old loved kneading the dough too and got to shape her own loaf by copying me, so the dual loaf idea is great for including your kiddies in the bread-making process.

Dough is the best toy in the world

There’s something very rewarding about slicing into your own bread, the aroma and the taste is somehow more fulfilling when you’ve crafted it with your own hands.

Tip:  If using your iphone/ipad as a recipe book, read well ahead and make mental notes. Scrolling with doughy fingers = not good.

Recipe:  River Cottage Simple White Loaf 

If you need visual instructions, you can watch this six minute River Cottage Bites Basic Loaf video.

Why marriage is like chutney and oatcakes.

I recently bought the River Cottage Everday cookbook because I love everything about River Cottage and Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall’s approach to food and lifestyle. I didn’t expect to get a meaningful, philosophical insight into my marriage from it, but that’s precisely what I got. This is one inspirational cookbook!

As I’ve just stopped work to have our second baby, I’m keen to really revert more to my natural inclination towards living frugally. We have two professional incomes but my soul properly sings when I can grow food, reuse things and hunt for second hand stuff. It just makes me happy.  It just costs a little more time that can sometimes be snaffled during a working/parenting week.

I was looking through Hugh’s cookbook in a browsy way, wondering if I could make something nice for our 11th anniversary on Saturday. One recipe caught my eye as it said “perfect with home-made chutney”.  Richard had just crafted a delicious batch of home-made chutney last week with our plentiful supply of green tomatoes.

The recipe is called Bill’s Rona Oatcakes, and when it dawned on me that this was from the Isle of Rona near Skye, I had to know more. With a quick search online, I found out that the recipe was from Bill Cowie who is the only permanent resident on Rona.

After reading the Isle of Rona website and seeing Bill’s  Images of Rona collection, I was besotted with the place. Next time we travel to the UK (which we do every few years) I feel determined that we’ll have a family holiday there. I feel drawn.

Richard and I have spent lots of time in Scotland and have a deep love of the islands, and they form a large part of my mystic/romantic dreams of the ideal place in terms of the natural world.  Growing up with Scottish parents probably sowed the seeds of my love for that wild landscape, but now having also spent time in Scotland, that feeling of awe and love is so easily conjured. When I listen to celtic music, memories of all the times we’ve spent in the highlands and islands flicker throgh my mind and fill my heart – so brim full. Sometimes I can so vividly summon up the landscape, I feel like I can go there anytime I need to. My favourite holiday of ours was cycling and camping some of the Hebrides, and I have a soft spot for Sutherland on the mainland, and love the islands I’ve so far visited which are Iona, Mull, Skye and the Orkneys. But not Rona yet….not yet…but I can dream!. .

Rona sounds truly like the idyllic wild holidays that Richard and I love. No shops or roads, one permanent resident and only a few holiday cottages – a place where you can walk in rain and sun showers, catch fish and cook them on an open fire, relax by the fireside in the evening with whisky or heather beer, gaze at the clear night sky, eat kippers for breakfast while watching a rainshower, look for plants and wildlife on land and sea – generally just adore feeling little in nature’s big beautiful vastness.

Suddenly, this oatcake recipe was just not about biscuits for chutney  - it had leapt off the page into my dreaming mind – and the oatcakes became symbolic  - little oaty tokens that represented a taste of a future ideal – a family holiday on Rona.

It wasn’t long before I was  infusing the kitchen with some delicate tunes from my celtic playlist –  and the mood was well and truly set.  I had decided to make some of these oatcakes for Richard as his wedding anniversary present!

A well-baked tune -click to listen

Click to listen

Oatcakes made with love

I accept that in terms of gift-giving, some little oaty cakes might sound a bit cheap, and like my frugality has gone a little over the top – but we don’t generally do anniversary presents anyway. Also, being just a week away from giving birth means we’re not really up for going out for a meal anyway, and are planning to have a normal Saturday together with Fionna – and have something with chutney for tea!

Yes, a first attempt at baking oatcakes are probably going to turn out to be imperfect, and experimental as I’ve never made them before – but homemade gifts appeal to my quest to use money for living experiences – like holidays to the Island of Rona!  Lets just hope Richard doesn’t mind a few half-baked biscuits instead of something made of stainless steel for 11 years of marriage! (I did after all make him a minature cosmos for our 10th!)

Anyway, cheers to Shug and Brian for putting this recipe into a cookbook and consequently, mixing all the ingredients in my head into a hearty, wild family holiday dream.

Romancing the oatcakes

Let’s hope Rona oatcakes and chutney turn out to be a marriage made in heaven. But it’s not just about chutney and oats –  there’s more to enjoy – these oatcakes go well with cheese and marmalade too!  This is how I came full circle with my great insight (bear in mind, I have a crazy pregnancy brain) to  think of our marriage as being just like chutney and oatcakes too: we compliment each other, both mature with age, and yet, are equally and individually enhanced by some lovely condiments…er…children.

In my experience of marriage, it’s just as  romantic being a mother and father together as it is a husband and wife. Now to me, that sounds like the right sort of ingredients in a recipe for happy times ahead.

The pilsner drought

Egads! Nearly nine months without pilsner. Now that spring is upon us,  thoughts of this  long-lost summery flavour are torturing me.

I have purchased what has become my holy grail, my golden chalice – a single bottle of Pilsner Urquell, my little Czech friend. This beer (but not this actual bottle) was first brewed in 1842. It’s a timeless classic flavour – one of the staples in my so-called ‘Medieval Food Group.‘ You see, it’s not the alcohol I crave, it’s the pure crisp nutty, fruity, hoppy flavour of this finest beer. All pilsners are lovely – but this is the original.

It takes but one simple sniff and then the first sip transports you to almost mythical wild summery fields of barley and ancient hop vines. Not getting it? For a visual taste, see this photo of a barley field and this photo of hops growing – it’s like they’ve bottled a landscape.

The only drink that has given me anywhere near the same kick in the last nine months is hot Milo. If hot Milo was a landscape it would be warm and wooly in a time of cold – like this photograph. Beautiful, but not half as mystical somehow.

Ok, so I’m getting silly now, but I’ve never claimed to be sane and quite frankly any distraction from impending labour is a good thing, so don’t laugh at my fantasy fields of flavour.

I’m not quite sure when I’ll get to quaff this amber nectar, and it may be many many many months in the future. I’m not really sure if you can have a quick beer to celebrate the birth or not? Is that allowed? I don’t know. More to the point, I don’t really want the little one getting his/her first taste of pilsner by-proxy from me in the first few days of life.

So, although I dearly love the baby in my belly and am looking forward to meeting the new lifeform – reuniting with the nutty golden taste of pilsner will surely be a semi-religious experience for me sometime in future.

For now, I can look at the pretty pictures and dream …

Brew this in your cauldron

I’ve been thinking about beer. Lots of girls don’t like beer but maybe that’s because they have only experimented with the common garden variety. Outside of the garden, in the wild fields of wheat, flowers and hops, grows the finest ingredients that go into the finest beers. Thats right, beyond the garden gate are beers with herbal fruityness, wood, the freshest soil, the taste of fresh rain.

You think I exaggerate? I do not. These flavours are out there. Try James Squire’s Pilsner or the unbelievable Mac’s Blonde Coriander and Orange or their Wicked Blonde (a pilsner I dream of having never sipped it yet), or even any variety of Honey Beer.

Real beers like these taste of the earth.

Proper beer, like the finest pilsners, belongs to what I like to call the ‘Medieval good group (MFG)’. This little known food group consists of foods and drinks that when consumed transport you back to the times of your ancestors. They taste like the earth or fields and flowers, like carrots with their tops on, these are raw beers that grew and were brewed by loving hands, minds and hearts. They have natural stuff in them.

The MFG is fairly specific, in fact because I invented it, I guess I can pretty much include anything. In fact I think the MFG is specific to the person. Not just any foods fit into this group. You don’t know if a flavour belongs until it is consumed. You will know when a food or drink belongs to your own MFG when you taste it because you get that feeling of timeless taste, wholesome goodness, the food is literally growing you healthy.
Example of foods that have made it into my MFG are:

• roasted chestnuts
• pilsner (mainly the boutique brewers who brew from wild)
• Mac’s Coriander and Orange beer
• porridge
• mead
• sweet potatoes
• chick peas
• hazelnuts
• real ginger beer
• Paris Creek biodynamic yoghurt
• okra (it’s so hairy that it’s scary but in a curry it’s gumminess does something amazing)
• heirloom vegetables (I’m looking forward to purple carrots and brown capsicum)

I know there are more. I will find them. If you are looking for your own MFG, start with naturally brewed beers. Once you hop, you can’t stop.