Cooking up a Storm

I’ve been spending lots of time experimenting in the kitchen over the last few weeks. I’ve discovered a couple of new vegetarian cookbooks (River Cottage Veg Everyday and The Global Vegetarian Kitchen – and no I’m not a River Cottage groupie LOL)

I’m trying to cook with a greater focus on seasonality especially where veg is concerned. Summer I find easy but with winter, I want to branch out from the normal stews and soups we make.

I made the most delicious Cauliflower Soup with Garlic Croutons last week, and this week hope to make a Chickpea and Cauliflower curry.

 

Also my other aim has been to move Little B away from just toast for breakfast. He was recently diagnosed with hypoglycaemia after fainting at kindy, so it’s low GI all the way. But this has been a bit tricky because he has so many allergies (rules out eggs, some kinds of dairy, nuts).

But some new ideas have been:

:: Buttermilk Pikelets with stewed pears

:: Home made Baked Beans on the obligatory toast

:: Frijoles Con Queso

:: A breakfast smoothie (using Quark instead of yoghurt) with a low gi muffin

I’m trying to get him into some sort of breakfast routine in preparation for school next year. This may seem odd but Little B likes to know exactly what breakfast is, whereas the rest of the day he’s a go with the flow and adapt kind of boy. But with breakfast he is shall we say rigid in his ideas!!

Fabberdiculous Bread

I love making bread :-) It’s one of the things that I really enjoy doing and love to experiment with.

But bread making can be temperamental and moving to the new house, I found that our bread wasn’t proving properly (due to temperatures). I resorted to putting it on a heat pad which worked but the bread wasn’t as nice (I now know I was overstretching the gluten). I even resorted to using the breadmaker to make the dough and then baking it in the oven, but still not as successful as it used to be.

So what to do?? After seeing an episode that River Cottage did on bread, I borrowed the River Cottage Bread Book from the library. And voila – I had my answer. This book has 30 or so pages dedicated just to the process of making bread and on reading this I could plainly see what was causing the problem.

A few tweaks here and there and I’m making beautiful bread again. In fact, I’m prouder of my bread now than before. It looks and tastes like it came from a bakery.

I also like the fact that this recipe makes 2 loaves at a time. I’m all for time saving at the moment in the kitchen as I have to cook so much. So spending half as much time to make twice as much bread is simply wonderbubble**!

** Faberdiculous & wonderbubble are lovely made up words courtesy of Mr Mentor the Inventor (from Grandpa in my Pocket)

Going retro LOL

After his last preschool bug, Little B has been decidedly off his food. Apparently air and pureed fruit icypoles are food groups of their own :-)

So today we decided to go retro and make.....pumpkin scones!!

I actually found these great to make. And not only did pumpkin go in but the night before I made a swede and brussel sprout puree with a touch of potato to make it white. So this was added with the pumpkin and Little B was none the wiser. And the end result? They taste great and Little B has been eating them for lunch with a bit of soup on the side or a touch of chicken (read: mainly just the scones *sigh*).

But I've decided that next time I'm going to use this scone dough to make scrolls. It's such a beautiful soft dough and since Little B cant eat cheesymite scrolls I thought I might experiment with some vegies, perhaps some chicken and wrap them up into scrolls.

Dough

When I first started making my own bread, I received Dough by Richard Bertinet as a gift. It was a really good introduction to bread making.

Bertinet is a Brittany born bread-maker, and has a few different ideas on the general breadmaking process. He kneads his bread very differently to traditional methods (more about getting air into the bread) and "knocking back" is done without pounding the dough within an inch of its life.

I moved to a breadmaker when Little B was 2, due to his constant dissatisfaction (read tantrums or unhandy fingers) with my breadmaking by hand. But I have gone back to breadmaking by hand recently after finding out all breadmakers contain teflon (read toxic poison ;-)

And it's like coming home. Gosh I love it it - there's something so satisfying about getting your fingers all grubby!! Also I find the method in Dough really quick to produce a pliable dough.

Bertinet also believes that even young-ish children can make bread. This meshes with the advice given by a Greek friend who was learning at her grandmother's knee from the age of 4. So now I get Little B involved in the process. He's become a dab hand at kneading. I give him his own small section of dough to knead, rest, knock back and prove. He's actually very gentle with the process.

The other thing is he enjoys it immensely and it's become an easy part of our morning routines on the days when we require bread. I hope as he gets older and older, I can get him to make larger portions on his own.

We are slowly moving our way through different recipes in Dough.   We've been making pain de mie and next up is fougasse.

** I love taking pics for this blog but I always seem to forget the end result. The rolls were lovely and tasty and are now residing in the freezer - all without a pic taken - whoops!! **

Calling all breadmakers

I've been making my own bread for nearly 2 years now, but in the last week all my loaves look like this:

Mind you, this would have to be the worst of the lot. But I'm not actually sure why. I thought it could be either the water ratio or the yeast. So I borrowed some scales that weigh water and had another go (and the result is in the pic).

So I'm assuming it's a yeast issue. Does anyone know if you can get a bad batch of yeast? I've always used Simply No Knead and never had a problem. Things got a bit hairer when I moved to a Biodynamic bread flour but came good again.

My next step is to replace the yeast, then try it in the oven and not the breadmaker. It's also encouraged to get a move on with trying sourdough bread.

**UPDATE**
Looks like it was a water issue. I reduced the water by about 40ml and had much better success with my loaves. I also increased the flour after Belinda's suggestion which helped a lot as well. I'd say I have a bad batch of flour more than anything.

Gingerbread Cookies

One rainy morning, one sick child, one sleep deprived shouty mummy = gingerbread cookies J 

We had great fun making these this morning. They cheered us up and we have so many left over we took them as afternoon tea to a family shindig this afternoon.

Days for Cooking

I read a book recently written by an Italian woman, who in turn was writing about her mother and grandmother. Their approach to cooking was to have a day that they made their weekly bread and a day that they made their weekly pasta.

I love this idea. I might adopt it myself as we make at a minimum 2-3 loaves a week, plus rolls, muffins, biscuits, pasta sauces, soups, jams etc that we need to have on hand at any one point in time. It would be nice to plan ahead for specific days, to free up some of our other days.

To give you an idea of a random cooking week at the House of B (outside of dinner):

• Sun -- Loaf of Bread, Vat of soup, Pumpkin pasta sauce
• Mon -- Muffins, Custard
• Tues -- Gnocchi, Stewed Pears and subsequent Pear Icypoles
• Wed -- Batch of rolls, loaf of bread, baked beans, custard
• Thur -- Biscuits, Sausage rolls
• Fri -- Custard
• Sat -- Loaf of bread

Of course this doesn’t include the weeks that I make jam, cordial, or anything bigger and more time consuming.

We recently swapped upright freezers with Granny B, so that she had the little one and we have the big one. Our predominant reason for this was so that I could bulk cook and freeze things like bread to have on hand.

At the moment, all the constant cooking is fine but it’s a process that would easily fall down should I fall sick or something else gets thrown into the mix (something my recent broken nose has made me seriously think about). Having a child with multiple food allergies means that we cant just duck down to the shops and buy something to eat.

So onwards with the bulk cooking methinks!!

A baking we will go....

Little B and I have been baking up a storm today ☺ What better way to spend a lovely Thursday morning…

Pear Muffins

Our trusty Grandma Poss cookbook from when I was 8 years old ☺

Yummy scrummy Anzac biscuits as a treat for Mr B

Our beloved bread maker making our daily bread (well every 3^rd day LOL)

And finally Pear Icypoles (no pictures for this one as it’s a mad scramble to get them into the freezer before Little B eats the liquid – in his mind its still an icypole whatever state its in ☺