Bread: Here's one I made earlier . . .

Good honest home made bread. . . .


Below - this Cheese loaf rose beautifully. My son will say that's because HE knocked it back. His style is . . . rough and ready! - but punching and pummelling the dough does seem to work and the best-risen loaves are the ones he's had a hand in making! Just think of the dough as your worst enemy and take out all your angst : )



First of all, Dartford Warber asked for a recipe for a pizza base. I generally just make white bread dough, and break off a piece and roll it out, but if you just want to make pizza, here is the recipe:

8 oz (225 g) strong plain flour
1/2 level teaspoon salt
1/2 oz (15 g) margarine or a dessert-spoon of olive oil
1/2 oz (15 g) fresh yeast
1/4 pint (150 ml) warm water
Cooking oil, for brushing

Sift the flour and salt into a large mixing bowl. Rub in the fat. Blend the yeast with the water and mix into the flour to make a dough. Put the dough on a lightly-floured worktop and knead until smooth. Cover and leave in a warm place until doubled in size.

Knead the risen dough again and roll out into a long narrow strip. Brush with oil, then roll it up, just like a Swiss roll. Roll out flat again and repeat the rolling-up, without oil. Now roll out the dough to a large circle, about 1/4" (0.5 cm) thick.

Put the dough on a large greased baking sheet (I have a nice circular pizza pan with a holey bottom, to give a crisper base). Brush with oil and add the topping of your choice. Turn on oven to 425 deg. F (220 deg. C) Mark 7. Leave pizza to rise in a warm place until oven reaches temperature and then cook for 20 mins. Now turn down oven to moderate 350 deg. F (180 deg. C) Mark 4 and cook for another 15 to 20 mins. (PERSONALLY, I just break a bit off my bread dough, roll out, bung on the greased tray, put the topping on and let it sit whilst the oven's warming and then cook for 20 mins. Ahem, and mine is normally a . . . robust . . . base. Not thin and interesting, but DEEP base!!! I have a badly-behaved Fan oven though and have to usually cook for LESS time than is advised. 40 mins in my oven would reduce this to charcoal.)

Sorry there's no illustration, but I don't know which of my hundred or two folders the piccy's IN.




CHEESE BREAD

This is something I make regularly, but be warned - it won't last 5 minutes! and you will be badgered to make MORE!

1 lb (450 g) strong plain flour
2 level teaspoons salt
1 level teaspoon English mustard powder
Pinch of pepper
6 oz (175 g) strong Cheddar cheese, finely grated
1/2 oz fresh yeast
1/2 pint (300 ml) warm milk

Grease 2 x 1 lb (450g ) loaf tins (personally, I just use a 2 lb loaf tin and have done with it). Sift the flour into a large mixing bowl with the salt, mustard and pepper. Mix in most of the cheese.

Blend the yeast with the warm milk and pour into the flour. Mix to make a dough. Put the dough on a lightly-floured worktop and knead for 10 mins. Cover dough and leave to rise in a warm place until doubled in size.

Give the risen dough another kneading, then shape and fit into the tins. Cover and leave in a warm place until the dough rises to the top of the tins.

About 15 mins before the end of rising time, turn on oven, set at moderate, 375 deg. F (190 deg. C) Mark 5. Sprinkle the rest of the cheese on the tops of the loaves. Bake in the centre ofo the preheated oven for 30 - 35 mins or until golden brown. Turn out to cool on a wire rack.

Recipes taken from the Woman's Realm Book of 101 ways with Bread, a booklet which cost me 60p back in 1980 and leapt into my hand of the stand in the little corner shop at the top of our road . . . It is one of my most-referred to books.

Oh, and somehow these chaps got in on the act. As you can see, they are so badly-treated that they have had to make a home on my kneeling mat in the porch. It's a hard life for a cat around here. . .

The first gooseberries, picked in the rain yesterday. 3 1/2 lbs, and these were just from the very bottom-most branches which were touching the ground with the weight of fruit. Topped, tailed, washed and frozen already.

In praise of home made bread

This week the Daily Mail ran an article on the quality of bread - in particular, the sort of bread many of us buy in the supermarkets through choice or necessity. Although I knew much of what the article outlined, to see the stark facts in print made me squirm. I make my own bread and have for 30 years now. Not every day and sometimes if life gets in the way, we buy crusty supermarket loaves, usually granary or wholemeal (a nod to the conscience) though G & D prefer white Tiger bread. It's not a religion with me, but I have to say that even the best supermarket loaves (and we do have a soft spot for Organic spelt and pumpkin seed loaves) can't compare with home-made.

With home-made bread, you can choose your flour - for preference, organic (though I'm not hard and fast over this), but it must be stone-ground and if I can get it from a local source, so much the better. I usually use Bacheldre Mill flour. It makes a very good loaf, and is full of flavour and goodness. Try Spelt wheat, which makes a very good loaf and rises easily. I usually use fresh yeast, but always have dried yeast in sachets in the store cupboard and that is perfect to use as well. Sometimes I make Irish Soda Bread, which doesn't have yeast in at all. Sometimes I make Cheese bread, or an Oatmeal Plait, or Pizza base, or milk rolls, or a Sunflower Loaf. Sometimes it is "sweet" bread in the form of Cinnamon cake, or Orange teabread, or Apple Yeastcake or occasionally Malt loaf. With home-made bread, you know when you have eaten a slice as it fills you up in the way that the spongey filled-with-air supermarket loaves never do.

Personally, I don't have a bread-maker, mainly as it would just be another thing to take up space in the kitchen and it only takes a few minutes to get dough mixed and started by hand, although in my dotage I may put a Panasonic (apparently the best) on my Christmas list one year! It's not "cheating" using a bread-maker, and of course they can be programmed to come on in the darkness of the night and give you a fresh loaf for breakfast. My quibble over them would probably be that the size of the loaf is limited and if you have a big (or hungry) family, then you would need to make more than one loaf.

So what goes into a supermarket loaf?

The white flour used has as much as 80% or 90% of the useful vitamins removed - by the speed of the processing I assume. Stone Ground wholemeal flour is slowly ground, ground so it keeps cool, and with the endosperm, bran and wheatgerm left in.

Supermarket loaves have added sugar and plenty of salt (presumably for "flavour"). I just add two teaspoons of salt to my 1 1/2 lbs (675g) of strong bread flour.

They contain hydrogenated fats (NOT good for you as they turn into harmful saturated trans fats - widely used in processed foods). They have emulsifiers, reducing agents, improvers and flour treatment agents to fluff up, soften, pad out and stretch the dough. They contain added enzymes, which have links to gut problems and asthma and the mould inhibitor calcium propionate which is linked to asthma and behavioural problems in children (this gleaned from the Daily Mail article).

Do you really want to give this to your family if you have any choice?

Making bread isn't difficult. The kneading process, which is what deters many people, is shown on the Bacheldre Mill website above. Go to You-tube and type in bread-making and there are many videos to watch - a couple on no-knead bread are brilliant but be warned, as it is a very sloppy mix and seems to have a life of its own after a couple of hours! Makes a wonderful loaf though.

I'll post a couple of recipes over the weekend.

Mostly "kittens"

Jarvis in the jungle . . .



I took quite a few photos of the kittens the other evening. Well, I call them kittens, but of course they are fully-grown now and about 14 or 15 months old. They are such lovely boys, and love to keep me company out in the garden. They're always prostrating themselves on the ground at my feet, to have their tummies tickled and to be made a fuss of. They are full of curiosity and fun, and love to play together and sometimes with mum (Miffy) too. She now allows me to stroke her and is finally no longer afraid of people, which is good, but it took 18 months, from the time we first saw her lurking at the back of the garden, and she used to hurtle off the moment the door opened.

Today I've done the usual housework, plus more gardening (tidying up and edging and weeding), and yet more painting - a bit I'd missed on a windowframe (from leaving the window open!), then a door frame and finally the first coat on a once-white door which I hadn't noticed needed doing as I only ever see the front of it and not the caramel once-white back!

Alfie

Jarvis

Alfie and Tippy

The Three Muskateers




There's a tiger inside every cat.

Below: My poor little pear tree - they are forever launching themselves into this one and swinging like Tarzan from the branches!



I ended my afternoon watching the menfolk at work at the paddock-edge, trying to remove some dead/dieing branches from a very elderly Willow which has succombed to disease. Fortunately they were using the bow-saw and not the chain saw or I'd have been having kittens! I looked up at Swallows swooping in a game of chase around the house, swooping and tipping a wing and jinking like a Whippet does when it's running flat out. They made me smile.

After the rain

I must be on a roll this weekend, after having some "me" time. I looked out of the window tonight, and jotted this down (needs polishing) :


AFTER THE RAIN

The wind has tossed the rose petals
So they fall like confetti.
The roses shrug their shoulders,
Stare rain-sullen at the ground.
Foxgloves race to the tips of their stems,
Compressing summer like a coil.

Yummy Lemon Iced Ginger Cake

The recipe:

175g (6 oz) butter, softened
175g (6 oz) soft light brown sugar
Finely grated rind 1 lemon
3 medium eggs, beaten
1 tablespoon black treacle
115g (4 oz) preserved ginger in syrup, drained and chopped, syrup reserved
225g (8 oz) S-R flour
2 level teaspoons ground ginger
60g (2 oz) ground almonds
3 tablespoons milk

ICING:

115 g(4 oz) icing sugar, sieved
4 teaspoons lemon juice
30 g (1 oz) preserved stem ginger in syrup, drained and cut into thin slices

Preheat the oven to 160 def. C (325 deg. F, gas mark 3). Lightly grease an 18 cm (7 in) square, loose-based cake tin. Line the base and sides with nonstick baking paper or greaseproof paper, and grease lightly.

In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter, sugar and lemon rind together until light and fluffy. Adding a little at a time, beat about 2/3 of the egg into the creamed mixture, beating well after each addition. Gently mix in the black treacle the chopped stem ginger and 3 tablespoons of the reserved ginger syrup.

Sift the flour and ground ginger into the creamed mixture, add the ground almonds and fold in gently, then mix in the remaining egg and the milk to make a soft dropping consistency. Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin, level the surface and bake in the centre of the oven for 1 - 1/4 hours until firm to the touch, or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin for 10 mins, then remove and put onto a wire rack to cool completely. When cold, remove the baking powder. (Hah! Alistair just pointed out that I should have said baking PAPER!!)

In a small bowl, mix the icing sugar with the lemon juice to make a smooth icing, thick enough to coat the back of the spoon. Spread the lemon icing over the cake, allowing it to trickle down the sides. Scatter the thinly sliced ginger on top of the icing and leave to set.

Store in an airtight tin until ready to serve, then cut into squares or slices. The cake will keep for up to a week.


This is a delicious cake, very gingery, and with a lovely texture because of the almonds.

Enjoying a "ME" day

Isn't she lovely? This is the unfurling flower of my new rose Absolutely Fabulous. Sometimes Floribundas hit the spot . . .

Ab. Fab. behind the willow branch planters.


Something I am proud to show you - the weed-free and well-planted veg. plot at the top of the yard. Growing here are: front left Pot Marigolds grown from seed; front left behind them - rampant raspberries which seem to love it here! Further back are just-sown peas, Cauliflowers, French beans, Runner Beans and spuds. Out of sight on the right, Onions, which I started off on the top of boxes of soil and which are now plonked on top of the soil here so as not to disturb the roots. Normally they refuse to grow for me at all - don't know what I do wrong - but this year they are doing well.

This is the WEED FREE and hopefully CAT PROOF seed bed. It used to be my raised herb bed as it is in the very sunny south-facing yard. I've bunged my Courgettes in at the far end (they are sulking for lack of sun now!), and this end is Pak Choi, Spring Onions and the only TWO carrots to germinate and a rogue Welsh poppy I will move once it's finished flowering. I have sown more Pak Choi, Carrots and Spring onions, and there are some baby Leeks under the netting too.



I can't remember when I last had a chance to really be ME for the entire day. I am more or less on top of the housework and garden, and there is such a good crop of Elderflowers I was desperate to do something with some on my trees at the bottom of the yard. I picked 20 Elderflower heads (giving each a good sniff to make sure that they were all young blooms and hadn't got to the slightly-yellowing-and-smelling-of-cat-pee stage of older blossoms which will totally ruin Elderflower cordial if they slip through the net). Anyway, on Friday afternoon I did stage one of the cordial, which is to snip the flowers from the main stalk and then put them in a pan with water and simmer for a while. Then I put that through a scalded jelly bag and left it to cool overnight. Yesterday was stage 2 (if you're not busy you can do it all in an afternoon!) where I added the sugar and lemon juice and simmered again, and then skimmed and bottled it.

The recipe came from this book. Doesn't Hugh look young there?


I also raided the freezer for the remaining gooseberries from last year's picking. This yielded 5 1/2 lbs, so as my recipe called for 3 lbs goosegogs, I then had to do calculations on the back of an envelope to work out how much sugar etc I needed. So now I have nearly a double quantity of what will be sparkling Gooseberry wine on the go in the fermenting bin, and have persuaded a neighbour to make some sparkling Elderflower wine, so I am off to hers with a spare demijohn and airlock this morning. If you look at the price of a good bottle of wine in the shops, it is certainly worth making your own, and I can see it coming back into fashion again. I've been making wine - of the drinkable and less-successful varieties - since the 1970s now. My mum used to make it too - our efforts at Dandelion wine when we used entire heads rather than just petals - dissuaded us from ever trying that one again!


Gooseberries in the fermentation bin. I have a Champagne yeast to use and make the usually-excellent Sparkling Gooseberry Wine.

I wanted to do some baking and as my darling husband always says he doesn't want a cake - too sweet and FATTENING (he is annoyingly slim still, unlike me!) - he did succomb to the temptations of Aunt Arabella's Iced Lemon Gingercake. Mind you, I had to halve the sugar, and forget the icing or he wouldn't have gone within ten feet of it! (I'm wasted on him, truly I am!!) So that satisfied my creative baking urges, especially as it was quite a tedious recipe with lots of different stages.


I suppose you would like the recipe too? I'll jot that down in a posting later on today.








Paul's Himalayan Musk nearly at its zenith, romping across the garden from one side to the other.

Close-up, with bee (look at his big pollen bags on his back legs).

Another view of PHM.

Happy little Viola faces.

I was SO frugal with the shopping this week, I was able to shoe-horn another indulgence in. I know - I shouldn't have, but I had just the spot for it - beside Ab. Fab. It was a special offer in Lidls', thus just affordable.

The Oriental Poppies in the intake area are just starting to bloom now, a couple of weeks later than their parents in the main herbaceous borders.


A few more flowers and lots of buds on my Albertine climber.

Words

Sometimes, words just come to you. I always have a pen and paper in my handbag, and in the car, and quite often when words come to me, unbidden, I have to pull over and scribble them down before they are lost forever.

In having to tidy up here before yet another agent passed through our portals, I found some scraps of paper with scribbles on. Here are the words on one scrap of paper.

In the still of night
The moonbow glitters,
Arching its silver bow to earth.
Myriad silver droplets forming
Reflecting a moonbeams'
Glance at Earth . . .

If I've posted this before, raise your eyebrows and shake your head - I'm having one of those weeks. I was so bejeebered by teatime yesterday that instead of pouring the milk into the cheese scone mix , I tipped it into the mince and gravy . . . Lord knows what I shall be like if we ever get a buyer . . .