Jess left home recently and I failed to cancel some of the milk in time. She is a big consumer of full cream milk. I buy the unhomogenised type with the cream on the top. We do also buy semi-skimmed milk, but research a few months back convinced me that full cream milk is healthy and full of goodness, more so than milk with the fat stripped out! She was enjoying it on her porridge and we always had a bit of fun with breaking the cream so that you could actually pour the milk! I discovered a while back that with traditional milk, you can turn the bottle upside down without losing your milk. However, the bottle in the photo above was past its best. I do use the full cream for cooking, and in particular when I am making cheese or white sauce. Today I decided that I really had to do something with the 2 and a bit pints of milk that were about four days past their sell-by date.
I had a funny conversation with Paul. I told him that I was trying to use up some milk, so he suggested rice pudding. I said ‘no that would taste disgusting!’ He was surprised and commented that my cooking is not that bad! I then realised that I had left out the vital information about the milk being out of date! Scones are great made with out of date milk, but I had far too much milk for scones, so I decided to have a go at cheese-making. You can make ricotta or cottage cheese with sour milk (health warning! you don’t want it to be completely rancid! I’d say no more than a week out of date probably).
Colander lined with a jelly bag for straining my cheese
I looked at a couple of recipes and found that the method is really very simple. You just boil the milk, add some lemon juice or vinegar and take it off the heat. You then stir it and it clumps into curds.
Cheesy curds draining
As I had really very little cheese, I decided to add some salt and cream to it to make it into cottage cheese, as this also gave me a bit more bulk to my cheese.
My finished cheese is in the picture below. I had so much whey left afterwards that I have decided to use it in my sourdough bread that I am mixing up at the moment. It won’t be ready until Sunday morning though, ie the day after tomorrow. I found all sorts of other ideas for using whey, including making smoothies, putting into cocktails, as a marinade for meat and even for adding to the dog’s breakfast! As we don’t have a dog, I shall not be trying that out. I am really looking forward to eating my home-made cheese on home-made whey sourdough bread on Sunday!
I have baked my own bread for a long time. I started doing this long before it became fashionable and so talked about. I like home made bread, in fact all home made food. I like to know what is in my food; the number of additives that go into the average loaf that you buy is alarming. For many years I was happy with using dried yeast. It is easy to purchase, works well and we don’t have any allergies in our family. I had experimented with sourdough bread a few years ago, as I like a challenge and the idea of a purer product. However, the results were not good enough to convince me. My loaves were heavy and too stodgy to want to eat on a regular basis.
In the intervening years, I have seen photos of others’ successful sourdough bread and been a little envious. How difficult could it really be? In addition, my brother Matthew visits on a fairly regular basis and we share lunches and dinners. He much prefers sourdough, as it seems to be better for his digestion and well-being. Many people say that sourdough is more easily digested. If I make bread as part of a menu, it would be great to be able to produce sourdough for Matthew.
The situation all came to a head recently when I, like many, found that my yeast supplies were running low.
I started to look up recipes online as well as study my books with sourdough recipes. I also of course consulted my helpful friends in my Archers Chit-Chat group on facebook! I came to the conclusion that I was just not being patient enough and that maybe the first time round I did not get the starter going properly. I have read many times that making a starter should take up to a week, but that it can take longer. One suggestion from Chit-Chat was really helpful, that maybe I could make life easier for myself and try making a starter with a lump of yeasted dough which I could then feed and develop. So in the end I tried two starters, one completely from scratch with just flour and water and the other with a lump of dough that I have added more flour and water to. Okay, you could call this cheating, but actually Doreen Dough has been growing so well that she cannot possibly have any commercial yeast left in her! Dotty Dough, made from scratch, was not as successful; I could have tried again, but decided that life was too short and I had made a working starter, albeit not one for the purists!
I decided to use my trusty friend, BBC Good Food. I am lucky enough to have a gift subscription to this magazine. I also make use of the online recipes if I cannot find quite what I want in my hard copies (I keep them for about 2 years and then throw them away apart from a few treasured ones which have particular recipes in!) After all the advice and links suggested to me, I went for the recipe from Barney Desmazery, with the slight variation that I put a small lump of yeasted dough in with the first measures of flour and water. After that I followed Barney’s instructions to the letter. As I have become more confident, I have known where I can miss out a step or not knead the dough and rest it for exactly the number of times suggested. Here is the link to his recipe: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/sourdough-starter The full instructions for turning this starter into a loaf are here: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/white-sourdough
Here are some progress pictures of my starter and dough waiting to be turned into delicious bread:
Making the starter into a loaf… Dough ready to be baked
It is testament to the popularity of sourdough right now that Barney’s recipe consequently turned up in the May issue of the BBC Good Food Magazine. The recipes had been in the magazine last summer and earlier this year.
I had a few disappointing moments with my first few loaves. In fact my first completed loaf was pretty good! I did as suggested in all of the recipes I had seen and baked my loaf in a cast iron casserole dish. The dough is pretty wet and baking it in the dish seemed to help. However, it did take a long time to cook. The second time I baked a loaf, it was a complete disaster and I ended up turning it into breadcrumbs. It was heavy and quite unpalatable. I am convinced that the dish was to blame! See the picture of my unsuccessful loaf below:
Stodgy, inedible sourdough loaf!
Despite having had success with the casserole dish method, I was not prepared to risk another disaster, particularly as I was now having trouble getting regular supplies of flour. I then had the great idea of trying to source flour from a traditional mill, and I have bought quite a few bags from this place on the Isle of Wight: https://www.calbournewatermill.co.uk/product-category/isle-of-wight-flours/ Anyway, to go back to my baking disaster, I took the plunge and just baked the next loaves on a baking sheet, free-form as I usually do with my yeasted loaves. Although the dough was really wet, it rose to the challenge and my bread was a success. The picture at the top of this blog piece was one of the loaves I made by this method.
I did consider buying a proving/kneading gadget from Lakeland, my favourite kitchen shop, but decided in the end to save the expense. The idea of this silicone bread maker is that you can bake an oval or round loaf in it. I was advised though that it only makes a very small loaf. I have also in the past given up on proving baskets. I bought one of these a few years ago as I liked the idea of making loaves with those very professional looking spirals on the top. However, despite using plenty of flour, my basket just kept sticking! So my equipment is really very basic. I use a very big mixing bowl, as I generally make two loaves at the same time; we do seem to be eating more bread in lockdown! If the situation changes, I can reduce the quantities or put a loaf in the freezer. I also knead the dough on my granite board. This board is not designed for the purpose at all, and in fact was purchased for chocolate making, which Jess and I both do on occasions. The reason I use the board is that sourdough making involves kneading and folding for a few minutes, then leaving the dough to rest. I do follow the advice and do this 3 times before putting the dough back into the bowl and proving it in the fridge for 18 hours. I just find it more convenient to not have my complete worktop sticky with bread dough. With the board, it is nice and portable should I need to move the resting dough and get on with some other cooking.
I had a few e-mail discussions with my brother Matthew to see how he was getting on with his sourdough experiments. He found that using a proving basket worked for him, and I believe he also bakes the loaf in a casserole dish as suggested.
I am now so happy and confident with my bread making. I usually add some spelt, rye or granary flour to my dough and I sometimes make sourdough pizza. I can also offer a loaf to my mother, as she enjoys my home-made bread. I am happy to say that Jess is now more prepared to eat home-made bread. It is probably partly to do with being kind and considerate during lockdown, and making limited visits to the shops, but she did used to insist on having a loaf from the supermarket for her sandwiches – she now happily eats the bread I make and I like to think that this is because it tastes so good!
Here is a picture, hot off the press, of today’s loaves. I shall be making some sandwiches for lunch. Oh, one further word of advice. Do try to resist the temptation to cut your loaf too soon. Hot bread squishes and goes rather doughy if you cut it too soon. It is best to wait at least a couple of hours before eating it! After a couple of days, sourdough bread is perfect for toast.
You are never too old to enjoy the fun of a large box!
I cannot understand the concept of being bored at home. I just love my home and my family and am in danger of getting too used to not having to go to work. I am very fortunate in having a job as a school librarian. This means that I am able to work from home, albeit in a limited way. I am also on the rota to go into school and support our vulnerable students; this happens once a fortnight. I was able to help with our school holiday club too.
Sarah in a box!
I am very lucky in being so close to my immediate family. For Paul and me this is our second marriage and I was very careful not to make a mistake the second time round. We have always spent a lot of time together during the week. Paul works from home; he has not done anything but work from home in all the time I have known him. With my driving phobia, he has often had to take me to work or to the railway station. Then there have been times when I have worked from home or taken time off, for instance on both of the occasions on which I was made redundant. So being together for much of the time during lockdown has not been a big change for us. My work in recent years has been part-time, albeit nearly full time in my current post. Jess and I have always been close, partly because, well that is just the way we are; we are lucky in having some similar interests. In addition, I think an only child naturally spends more time with parents than children in bigger families. I was close to my parents, but grew up as one of three, so spent much time playing games with my brothers. Add to that the fact that Jess’ father is not with us as part of the family and it all adds up to many hours and indeed years of doing craft activities and playing board games together. I am by nature, I like to think, a fairly creative person and did not need much excuse when Jess was younger, to buy craft kits, science experiment sets and fun toys such as a rocket operated with a bicycle pump! In this time of lockdown, it has been very therapeutic to do more of these activities together. Before lockdown, Jess and I used to enjoy shopping together; she came to love Henley, the beautiful town where I work, and we often went to the shops after she had collected me from work. We also made many trips to the cinema and theatre as a a family. Another interest we all have in common is a love of walking and the countryside; it was inevitable that Jess would come to love walking, as although over the years she has lived in quite a large number of houses, for the past 15 years (so since she was 7) we have lived in our little rented cottage in the woods.
So now we spend time together playing games, painting furniture, clearing cupboards and walking along our many local footpaths. Cooking is another interest that Jess and I share; she works as a chef in normal times, so that is something else that we can enjoy together. These activities have to some extent replaced the shopping and visits to the cinema and theatre, as well as our trips to the leisure centre in Henley. We also just enjoy eating meals together and sometimes just having a laugh. Witness the climbing into boxes episode in the above pictures. Today Jess received a parcel; she had ordered an Oodie online! An oodie is a bit like a hoodie and, to my mind, much nicer than a onesie. You can see us both modelling this in the following pictures:
Jess showing off her new oodie
Does the sloth oodie suit me?
I think that really I just manage to fill the time that is available with activities, and that I don’t always want excitement in my life. I love looking out of the window whilst I am writing; the trees change their colours with the seasons and I can see the results of all that hard labour in the garden, mainly Paul’s hard labour. I have never watched daytime television, although I can quite happily put off a task which requires complete concentration and no background noise by saying to myself: ‘I’ll just listen to 2 hours on the radio and then I’l make that phone call or write that article that I need to do.’ I also love doing domestic tasks such as hanging out the washing and watering the pots in the garden. At the moment I also have to do a certain amount of cleaning in the house, as we have paid our cleaners not to come for the forseeable future.
We do have a new weekly event in the household, which is Friday film night. Each week one of us will select a film and we all settle down to watch it at about 7:30pm, accompanied by whatever dinner I have decided to cook. Friday is usually fish night, but there are endless variations on that theme. The first week, I did make a selection of tasty snacks and canapes, but it was hard work clearing it all up and having everything safely back in the fridge afterwards (I always cook too much when it comes to snacks!) so now I just make a regular meal such as fish pie or fish cakes.
Although I always do a lot of cooking, I can happily do more when I have more time. This inevitably means more washing up of course. Jess says I bake too much. I like making cups of tea for everyone in the afternoon and asking what kind of cake or biscuits they would like with their cuppa. I have always made our own bread, but somehow we are eating more at the moment with us all being at home. I have finally perfected the art of sourdough bread, having run out of yeast recently. I shall tell you more about that in my next blog piece! For the moment, I am a little apprehensive about the announcements to be made on Sunday. There is bound to be some news about schools and what will be happening for the rest of the term. Much as I love my job, I also love being a domestic goddess and am wondering how I shall readjust to this next phase….
A walk on Maidenhead Thicket – some beautiful lichen
Friday was a beautiful sunny day so we decided to go for another family walk in the afternoon. Every day I am thankful that we live where we do and that we can walk freely without worrying about meeting too many people. Fresh air and inspiring views can lift the spirits hugely. I also have to be thankful that we are all fit and healthy and can walk without aches and pains. When I was a child we always used to go on long walks in the countryside; the joke was always that my father had a knack of finding the muddiest paths imaginable. Hence I have got into the habit of wearing wellies for walking. Jess has developed the family love of walking too and is in the habit of heading off on her own for quiet rambles. I think at the moment the three of us are happy to be together and share these moments of freedom. As usual I took my trusty camera for capturing the sunlight on the trees. I was very pleased with these photos, with light and shadows making them atmospheric and magical.
Friday night was also film night! I spent quite a bit of the day preparing our special TV dinner. I can quite happily spend hours in the kitchen preparing food. Sometimes the amount of preparation I do for one simple meal, and the number of times I run the dishwasher would truly astound people! On the menu was:
Nachos with bacon and cheese
Crispy Squid in batter
Squid cooked with chilli
Spicy dip
Crispy baked salmon slices
Potato skins stuffed with spicy chicken
Chocolate Pots topped with crushed mini eggs
I have a gift for making a simple recipe more complicated. So for instance the chocolate pots were meant to be made with a carton of fresh custard. No, no, no! Much more fun to make proper custard with cream, full cream milk and eggs. They did turn out very well. Recipe was courtesy of Tom Kerridge in the April edition of the BBC Good Food Magazine. It was meant to be a recipe for Easter, but well worth trying out early!
Here are some pictures of the food that I prepared. Although I have a chef daughter, she was not in the mood for helping on Friday, so all the food was made by yours truly:
Spicy Chicken for the potato skins TV Snacks finally ready!Chocolate Pots
We had a most enjoyable evening watching our chosen film ‘Five Feet Apart.’ I mentioned this in yesterday’s diary and the significance of the title and why I chose it. The film is very close to the book, with no major changes. In fact, the film and book were released at about the same time, so the book was in fact partly based on the film. It is definitely a box of tissues film, but highly recommended! Jess and Tigger enjoyed the evening very much!
What an amenable cat! If you pick him up, he usually stays put!
You know how they say you grow to look like your spouse? Well, I do not look much like Paul, apart from the fact that we are both very fair-skinned. He is slim and does not have much hair; I am not slim and have lots of hair! However, in terms of our taste in food we embrace many of the same likes and dislikes. Even when I met him, we both expressed a preference for fresh, black coffee; we both like breakfast tea in the morning and earl grey in the afternoon (the only difference being that I like my tea with a ridiculously small amount of milk in). He had to come to like my way of eating, as otherwise he’d have to offer to help in the kitchen. It is good that he is happy to let me get on with it, as I am very particular about how I cook food, and also love to have Radio 4 on most of the time whilst preparing meals. Naturally there are a few types of food that I do not like – mainly dried vine fruit,glace cherries, candied peel, pickled onions and green peppers. Paul is not keen on squashes, although I can get away with them in soup.
One issue that we agree on is that raw onion is vile, an abomination! Onions have to be cooked until they are sweet and melting. I never put raw onion in a salad (not even a little bit finely chopped my mother would ask?!) and am amazed at how popular it is both in recipes and in restaurants. Luckily Paul dislikes them as much as I do, and it is the only time that I come across as Mrs Picky; I will happily sit in a restaurant fishing pieces of the devillish food out of my salad. The pile that you see in the photograph above grew to about 6 times that size by the end of our activity! It is one reason why I really prefer to make my own salad. Having said that, the salads in Croatia have been really good and imaginative; there are options for just having salad for lunch, whereas in some restaurants in Spain and Italy I have come across, you would feel rather hungry just eating salad.
Anyway, enough of this negativity! Our holiday apartment is really beautiful and well-equipped, but I had not taken in that the cooking facilities would be quite basic; my own fault really for not checking more thoroughly beforehand. We have two electric rings, a kettle and a microwave. There is also a barbecue outside, which anyone in the 3 letting apartments is free to use. Our host family also uses it I believe. It seeems to work out fine. We have in fact only used it once so far, as the weather has been too hot for cooking outside even in the evening. Happily the temperature dropped from the mid 90s to the mid 80s a few days ago! The barbecue is built in with a chimney, and the fuel provided is paper and olive wood – both kindling and logs. I managed to get a roaring fire going and cook some chicken thighs (marinated in honey, mustard, olive oil and rosemary) and squid – marinated in chilli, rosemary and olive oil. I did cheat with the squid and just plonk a frying pan on the barbecue. See the pictures below of our small scale barbecue:
Cooking chicken, squid and a whole red peppper on the barbecue
Roaring barbecue burning local olive wood
To go back to the subject of salads, I love them in all shapes and forms, whether they be for a side dish or a light lunch. I am rather sceptical of people who say that they do not like salad. There are so many thousands of variations and recipes that I really doubt that anyone could dislike every single one. My own daughter is not a salad lover, but I can devise a salad that she will eat – it is just a question of picking ingredients that she likes, and steering clear of raw salad leaves, tomatoes and cucumber! I have made various salads in our apartment including the Italian bread salad in the picture above. I have actually made it slightly Greek too, by adding some chunks of feta. The salad is otherwise a simple mixture of stale bread broken into chunks and sauteed in olive oil (you could bake it if you have an oven!), fresh tomatoes in big pieces, rocket and fennel dressed with good olive oil and balsamic vinegar. If you have time to leave it to soak for a bit and for the bread to take up the tomato juices and the dressing, it will taste even better. Whatever you do, don’t put it in the fridge as it will not taste good when chilled! For this reason I always advise making this salad and indeed any salad containing tomatoes, soon before you are going to eat it; you don’t want to risk your salad festering in the warm weather! It is also therefore logical not to make a mountain of salad that you are not going to eat all in one go. Of course you may have to refrigerate the left-overs, or you can do as I sometimes do, and turn left-over salad into summer soup!
Sort of Salad Nicoise
I am quite flexible when it comes to adapting and changing recipes and embrace new flavours. There are lots of different toppings you can add to a pizza, some of them more successful and tasty than others of course. However, a dish that has a name that means something should, I feel, stick more ridgidly to the original recipe. For instance, I have a huge problem with the way that Caesar salad is presented in restaurants, but I’ll leave that for another time… (mainly because I don’t have the equipment for making the dressing in Croatia).
Another salad that I like to keep traditional is a nicoise. I think that the basic recipe should be along the lines of: new potatoes, green beans, lettuce. boiled eggs, tomatoes, olives, canned tuna and anchovies. I am not doing a huge amount of research into this, and there may well be slight variations, but for me the above ingredients work well. The above dish of salad is lacking in green beans. Should it traditionally have onions in it?! I have no idea, but it goes without saying that I’d leave them out anyway!
Other dishes that I have made in our apartment have been blackberry spoom (a great recipe I found in the Waitrose magazine for the month of August). It is a sorbet with added beaten egg whites. I used that for making some ice-cream sundaes, by layering the sorbet with bought vanilla ice-cream (too difficult to get the ingredients for that and I could also have done with a whisk!), fresh strawberries and blackberry liquer. See the picture below:
Ice-cream sundaes, but not in sundae bowls!
For lunch today I made a Spanish omelette and some Italian bread soup – another great way of using stale bread. I cooked fresh tomatoes, red onion, fennel, canned tomatoes, dijon mustard, fresh basil and rosemary and some chunks of stale bread. I added some water by filling up the tomato can a few times. When cooked I bashed it about in the pan with whatever implement I could find in the drawer. I served it warm, as there was no room in the fridge to chill soup. I think that warm soup is really pleasant on a summer’s day. The trick with limited cooking facilities is not to get carried away, and only aim to cook two different dishes for a meal. I am not used to using a microwave, but I have used it for cooking apricots and plums quite successfully. I have also heated up Paul’s morning pastries in it, although not entirely successfully. I did try heating them in a frying pan, but that seemed to be a rather slow process!
My passion is food and for years I have been creating amazing food for my family and friends. I decided not to pursue catering as a career, taking the view that the hours would be anti-social and unless you have your own business the pay is not good and it could also take the pleasure out of cooking at home. So for over twenty years I worked as a professional librarian and enjoyed coming home and cooking after a long day at work. I have worked full-time for most of my career, although I took 3 months maternity leave and worked term-time for a couple of years. Now I have come full circle and I work part-time and, more surprisingly for me, I actually cook as part of my job. But it is not full scale catering in a hot, pressured kitchen. I work as a housekeeper and my job includes housework, companionship and cooking a proper lunch. In fact I eat lunch with my employer, as that is in the nature of the job and I don’t think it would work as well otherwise.
What amazes me is the number of cookery books and television programmes there are based around preparing meals very quickly. To be honest, I’d be lost if I only spent 15 or 30 minutes in the evening cooking dinner for the family. After all, cooking a meal is also time to listen to the radio and (some evenings) enjoy a glass of wine. If I have a left-over meal in the freezer I am often reluctant to use it, as I always prefer to make something fresh.
But what is fast food? For me it is definitely not a take-away. For a start, most take-aways are pretty bad to eat and bad value. I think that pizza is particularly bad value, being comprised mainly of dough with a very small amount of topping. And for me, a take-away is more inconvenient than a home-cooked meal, as we live miles from any shops and restaurants. It would be quicker to make an omelette or do a fry up. So really on both counts most take-aways fail to be either ‘fast’ or ‘food’ for me. I make an exception for Indian take-aways, for which I do have a weakness (but this does not make them any more convenient to buy).
And at home quickly cooked meals can be more difficult to plan and get ready on time. Think of steak and chips or the simple cheese on toast, or perhaps scrambled eggs for 3 people. When I make scrambled eggs I quite often have to enlist the help of my daughter for watching toast and buttering it. And then I have to assemble everyone before actually cooking the eggs; otherwise they will probably decide to have a shower or make a long ‘phone call at the crucial moment! And hey presto, one runined pan of scrambled eggs!
Now a casserole may take several hours in the oven, but the preparation time can be quite short, depending on the recipe. And then all that waiting will be rewarded with wonderful smells and a dish that will not mind if the diners decide to make a ‘phone call, have a shower or be late turning up if invited as a guest. Just add mash and you have a meal fit for a king!
But as Paul my dear husband once said to me, to him all food is fast and convenient, because he knows that if I cook it, he does not have to worry about a thing and his dinner will be on the table at the required hour.
