Author Archives: Joanna

Dan Lepard’s Olive Oil Flat Bread

I baked a wholegrain version of Dan Lepard’s olive oil bread from The Handmade Loaf: Celia’s recent Weekend Sourdough post had reminded me about how good this flatbread can be for a quick lunch.

It’s an easy dough to mix, fold and stretch intermittently for a couple of hours while you get on and do other things. Dan Lepard describes the technique in The Handmade Loaf and I nearly always use this method for dealing with soft doughs like this. The Handmade Loaf is much more than a recipe book, it teaches you a whole way of thinking and dealing with doughs and bread. If I could only keep one bread book from the pile on the shelf that one would be it and the binding has lasted too!

I’ve always run into trouble with this bread sticking to the tin in the past and for the first time ever, I remembered this, and thought, ‘Line the pan, that’s what you said last time, Jo, do it for once! ‘ and it worked.

A sheet of baking parchment in the bottom of my brownie tin, I patted the dough out on top of a layer of olive oil and then flipped it over, it tore a little but I just worked it a bit more, paddling away like an old cat kneading someone’s tummy and it all fell into place.

The cupboard yielded up some dried onion flakes, I braved the garden to grab some rosemary needles from the bush, and I had some fine Cornish sea salt to sprinkle over the top. I dimpled away some more, put the tray in the boiler cupboard for a while. The oven had been on already with the stone in for some wholewheat breads so it was too good an opportunity to miss. It was lovely and golden in 20 minutes at 220 C. I took it out, and cut two squares for lunch, topped those with the remains of a ball of mozarella and some cherry tomatoes, and returned them to the oven – this time with the grill switched on. I think I had it a bit hot, as the corners started to catch as you can see. Still….

…sizzle sizzle, and out again. Salad leaves, sloosh olive oil, scrunch black pepper, dribble of white balsamic. A soft and fragrant bread, hot from the oven, cheered us up no end!

Bread falling apart

Bread Jeffrey Hamelman Look at the state of this book and I’m only half way through the recipes! It’s falling apart. Publishers please note, cook books need robust bindings!

The Magic Glove – Searching for childhood treasure!

The Magic Glove

This is a page from a dimly remembered childhood picture book called The Magic Glove (or The Magic Mitten). It is based on a Ukrainian folk tale and was translated into English by Irina Zheleznova and illustrated by Evgenii Rachev.

The story begins…

An old man was walking through the forest one day with his Dog. He walked and he walked and he dropped his mitten…

A mouse comes along and makes his home in the glove, and, one by one, ever bigger and bigger animals turn up to join Crunch-Munch the mouse who welcomes them all in to the cosy interior of the mitten.

The glove mysteriously manages to accommodate them all, their common need to be warm and hyggelig in the cold winter overriding their natural differences.

I always thought of this magic glove as being somehow like my parents’ bed, where we would climb in on cold mornings and get toasty warm together – we probably read this book there too, reinforcing the connection in my mind between story and family.

I looked for it on and off over the years in secondhand bookshops and then one day came across the Booksleuth forum on Abebooks, a wonderful place where you can go and post messages saying ” I read a book which had a magic glove and it has characters called Smily-Wily the Fox and Hop Stop the Frog” and someone, somewhere knows, or has a good guess at what that book was. It’s a great game and test of your memory too, I found myself making suggestions at the same time.

Once you have a good idea of the title and author then you can post a ‘Want it’ on Abebooks and if it turns up in a secondhand book store or if it is listed on their huge site, you’re sorted! I’ve found all sorts of lost book treasure that way in the last few years. The Internet at its best is the most amazing Magic Glove! I found the cover of my Moomin book for the Piima bread post through the Internet and people are in general so helpful, even though we are strangers to one another. It’s as if we are all enthused with the magic of the connections offered to us in this extraordinary way. This post is beginning to sound suspiciously like Thought for the Day, so I think I’ll stop now…

Have you got any search tips or absolutely favourite sites that have helped you find something special?

Edit: I’ve looked up the illustrator, Evgenii Rachev – there’s a retrospective of some of his work here and if you go to this lovely site created by his son-in-law you can read the whole story and see all the illustrations, not just the ones I’ve scanned in here from my copy and two other stories online. There’s lots of information about Rachev here whose illustrations are in museums now. It’s amazing what you find when you start looking!