Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

I recently purchased Paul Hollywood’s book on bread. My white bloomer went okay, but I swiftly moved on to the rye and ale bread. I carefully followed his advice and made a nice sticky dough. turns out it was too sticky. In the proving stage, the dough just spread out horizontally until it was a cookie.

In my second attempt I cut down on the liquid I used and dusted the work surface with flour instead of oil and this time it worked out well.

Bread baking is currently in vogue in the Worfolk household. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall assures me that once I start I will never go back. I’m sceptical, because I actually do really like the supermarket bread I buy, but I thought I would give it a try.

This was super-easy to make. I made a quantity of Hugh’s magic bread dough, put it in a tin and baked it in the oven (where else would I bake it?) for half an hour. It probably would have been even better if I had let it rise more in the tin, but I have places to be.

Focaccia has turned out to be a real winner. I bake this regularly now and take it to work in pieces to eat – it’s tasty enough to eat by itself. Pretty simple to make as well.

I’ve had soda bread from the Briggate farmers’ market and it was quite good, but mine turned out rather disappointing. It was too hard on the outside and the flavour inside was too strong.

The jury is still out on the sour dough. I spent a week feeding up my starter so I am reluctant to give up on it but it has far too much flavour. Elina quite likes that, but I like the tastelessness of white bread. I have started feeding it with white flour instead of wholemeal to see if that makes a difference.

I have not been that impressed with River Cottage Every Day. The rabbit stew was bland and the Bloody Mary burgers fell apart. The home-cured bacon chops did work quite well though and mean that you don’t have to worry too much about the meeting going off as you can cure them then store them for another week.

Why Not Eat Insects? is a 1885 book by Vincent M. Holt. Surprisingly enough, it is a book advocating the consumption of insects. And why not? They are nutritious, tasty and plentiful.

He starts off by tackling the prejudice against eating them. We think it is a weird yet people all over the world do it. We worry that they will have fed on the wrong stuff, but this is unfounded. Most insects are vegetarians. Compare this to pigs. They will eat anything. Lobsters too. Lobsters are often caught wild and so you have no idea what they have eaten; putrified dead fish being one of their favourite meals.

He then goes on to suggest how to catch, prepare and cook a variety of insects including snails, moths, woodlice, caterpillars and others. He even concludes with some sample menus you could use for a dinner party!

It’s quite a small book; I got through the entire thing in about 45 minutes. It is also a reproduction and suffers from some flaws in the process, so is perfectly readable.

We recently had dinner at Bannatyne Hotel in Darlington. Thankfully, I do not write the Darlington Restaurant Guide, as they would not have scored too well in it.

The menu was tediously short and unimaginative. If you did not fancy a steak, then you had four options, one of which was also beef. There was one vegetarian option and that was risotto, so vegans may have been completely out of luck.

The terrine starter was tasty and came with an excellent chutney but the accompanying leaves were so bitter that found them inedible. My medium steak arrived medium-well and came with more of the same leaves. Elina described her beef as thin and over-cooked. Finally the cheesecake was so airy and flavourless you could have probably called it a meringue.

The meal was not without its redeeming features. The steak was good, despite being over-cooked and the terrine was good too. However, for the price you pay, which is substantial, it is not somewhere I would recommend dining at.

Success, for once the end result actually looked like the book. The dish is tasty but fiddly. You are supposed to put the meatballs inside the pitta but in reality you need to cut them up before they will fit in, and then try and cram everything else in with them.

This one came from the One Put 30 Minute Meals book and was actually fairly close to hitting the 30 minute mark. Excluding the time it took to make the dough for the pittas, but it assumes you have just bought those. After all, who makes their own pittas and then uses a quick-food recipe book…

Rabbit stew from River Cottage Every Day gets the thumbs down from me I am afraid. The end result was a rather bland and tasteless tomato-y liquid with some tough rabbit that was difficult to get off the bone. Slow cooker next time I think…

Breaded fish fillets are a good dish to represent Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Every Day philosophy – it’s pretty simple and could potentially be done every day. Despite the simplicity, I managed to mess it up.

The breading worked really well. We used brown grouper of the fillet though, which now seems a bit of a waste because it is such a nice fish on its own. I also failed to adjust the cooking time for the fact that we were using a thicker fillet, so they had to go back in the pan for a few more minutes.

Another problem was that the fish had not been de-scaled. I didn’t even think to de-scale it as you would expect it to be done already when you buy a fillet.

All was well in the end though, especially with even more soy sauce mash.

Al fresco dining has returned to our household for another year! Actually, it was still mightily cold out on our balcony, but not cold enough to keep us inside any longer. We celebrated with a sea food day.

Fried cuttlefish with mixed leaf salad and cajun fries. That ink does not come off your hands. Luckily, it’s edible, so it doesn’t need to.

Elina also knocked up some awesome milkshake slash smoothies. They were milkshakes, but so heavy on the strawberry and milt that we couldn’t actually fit much ice cream in.

Dinner consisted of a dover sole that I was mostly successful in gutting, alongside some soy sauce mash (an accident, but turns out to be awesome) and freshly prepared sea urchin.

Turns out that sea urchin tastes pretty horrible. Slimy and salty.

Turns out, that the three bird roast isn’t the only “thing of a thing” roast you can do.

This is an east coast red mullet, inside a mackerel, inside a halibut. It does not work as well as birds, because you cannot get as a big a cavity. The other problem is that it is difficult to get the stuffing (which I made with sausage meat, breadcrumbs, salt and pepper) to cook as quick as the fish. I felt it was rather uncooked, though Elina thought it was fine, and we haven’t died, so it seems to have been okay.

Elina thought the haddock had a rather defeated look on his face.