Friday, November 26, 2010

I Want This, Yesterday!

I want this SO bad.  I know it's not strictly food-related, but imagine storing your recipes on this and touching just a few buttons to display them!  Plus, the Star Trek geek in me (or, rather, that is me) will find any excuse to share this with as many people as possible!  One day it will be mine!

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Starter Update

So, I tried a loaf of bread the weekend before last (6/7th), but because I had never made bread before and the 'recipe' was actually just a formula of ingredients with no instructions, I think I over-proofed it.  It was edible, but I really didn't like the texture, so it's in the freezer to be used as breadcrumbs.  This weekend just been I made English muffins and baguettes.  Both turned out fabulously!!  I'm so happy about both of them.  The English muffins were really really easy - a matter of mixing some of the ingredients and leaving it overnight then adding the additional ingredients (and a whole lot of extra flour because I really think NZ flour absorbs less moisture), roll it out, cut it into rounds, and dry fry.  Lovely, even Mum says we shouldn't buy them any more.  Very happy!  Baguettes tasted great, especially right out of the oven.  Much more work required for these, with two or three wet kneads the night before.  I need more practice in shaping them because they came out much thinner than I had expected - they didn't really change size after they went into the oven either.  They seemed to be much smaller than the photographs on the website.  Recipes to come.

This Blog

I've just deleted all of the non-recipe, non-cooking posts on this blog because a cooking/recipe book blog seems to be working for me right now and looking back on my earlier posts they were boring and embarrassing.  So they're saved on my hard drive.  Now, back to our regularly scheduled recipe posts!

Monday, November 8, 2010

Starter

So my starter actually worked!  Third time IS lucky!  I finally posted at the Fresh Loaf to get some advice and the advice was - wait and see.  So I did.  And although it didn't go EXACTLY as it did in the instructions, I have actually made a loaf of bread with the starter and it worked.  Well...  by worked I mean it rose and I baked it and it was edible.  But, it wasn't very nice.  Not very sour, and I think I may have 'over proofed' it.  I think this means letting it rise too much.  It has very few bubbles, but you know what?  Who cares, I made bread!  And it didn't taste all yeasty like it does when I make it with dried yeast.  So that's a win in my book.  Speaking of books, I have a book on hold at the library about bread making, so Mum will most likely bring that home for me tomorrow (she's got a headache so stayed home today).  Also, on Friday she brought home a new Nigella book - Kitchen.  I made the last recipe in the book last night for dinner - Italian pasta soup.  It was yum, just tomatoes, onions, a little tiny bit of garlic, and pasta, and some of the pasta water (she cooked the pasta in the soup, but we screwed that bit up).  It was nice and light and summery, but still filling.  I will try it again and follow the instructions next time!  A few more recipes look good, and I'll note them here when I make them.  I think I am over Indian and even Asian food to some extent, on to a new theme - European.  I haven't been into European and English food in ages, since before I started cooking dinners, so it's time to learn to make things like fish pie (my favourite!).  I think Nigella's books will help me here.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Fruit

Tonight on Campbell Live they had an article about fresh fruit and veges and how few of us consume the minimum recommended daily allowance.  I doubt day to day I do, but I know over the course of a week we average more than the minimum, so I'm assuming we're okay.  But here are two recipes I've found that are totally decadent, but as they use fruit you can feel a bit better making them!


Seems that the second link doesn't work any more and because of my slack record keeping, I have no idea what it was.  I will endeavour to find this out though!  12/12/10

Well that didn't take long to find, here's the real link:

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Chocolate chocolate chocolate!

I made the chocolate gataux from the Chocolate and Zucchini cookbook and it's... nice.  I was expecting, with four eggs and very little flour but a whole lot of butter and chocolate, to get something moist, flavourful, but still kind of light.  But because the eggs are simply stirred into the chocolate and butter and not whipped into a frenzy, it turned out more like a chocolate hedgehog slice with berries in the place of biscuit pieces.  Which is to say, still nice, but not what I was expecting.  Again.  Either I chose recipes from that cookbook that were just destined to be not what I expected, or I did them all wrong, or it was simply a difference in the quality or nature of the ingredients between what we get in NZ and what the author had available in France.  Maybe when I finally go to France I will find out by making these recipes there!

Because we ran out of broadband internet quota a LONG time ago and our month starts either (later) today or tomorrow, I have a billion pages open waiting to be loaded and read, mostly articles on steampunk and science fiction book reviews or new releases, essays, or short stories.  But I found that I had a link to chocolate biscoti open from the Cook Yourself Thin website.  So, in an attempt to keep a record of things I want to make, I am adding another link:  

Looks fabulouso!

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...