J has two volumes of a cookery book published in 1901 that belonged to her grandmother. Fascinating reading - “The past is a foreign country” really takes on meaning looking through this. So - suggestions for your next dinner party of family meal menu. Three courses, of course: Fish - Cold salmon [...]
Friends have asked and I have been working hard on the methodology as well as doing a course at a pro-bakery. As a result I have revised some old material about making basic and tasty sourdough bread at home. If a simple way to make tasty sourdough breads interests you then you can find [...]
Learning More About Bread I have been making most of our bread for over 30 years. Originally I used to use yeast as the raising agent but since Breadzilla (another post about her sometime in the future) came into my life a decade ago, gifted by an American colleague who really knows her [...]
We are in the depths of winter hereabouts so we are wandering off on a parallel path this week to talk about bread instead of gardens. The garden is under a couple of feet of snow and ice and there’s only so much you can say about feeder-birds to engage one’s audience. When I [...]
A Seasonal Service for our Friends That title is perhaps not entirely honest as the shrubs in question are not quite what you were expecting if you come here for gardening news. However, the Winter Solstice approaches, followed by Christmas and the New Year with all the jollifications those three dates imply … and [...]
In England last week I happened across a book for sourdough bread bakers ("Do Sourdough - Slow Bread for Busy Lives" by Andrew Whitley who runs, quote, one of Britain's leading organic bakeries). What's nice about it is that the methods are born of real life commercial practice with a healthy leavening of serious science [...]
We purchased an Iranian flat(ish) bread recently that was so excellent I tried to reproduce it. What I managed to come up with - and this is a work in progress that has to be refined - was a perfect simulacrum of the original in all respects except that it was most decidedly not flat [...]
Today was the first day at work of the new year and not much happened other than everything got very cold as the temperature plummeted ... still very little snow though. One small item of interest found in the press - you thought there was a recession on at the moment? Wrong, sales of Bentleys [...]
Now the snow has come we have seen more activity at the feeders, including this Downy Woodpecker with brown feathers on he wings instead of the regulation black. We had one a couple of years ago but this variation is not at all common and worthy of mention ... It also counts towards by quota [...]