Category Archives: Supper Dishes

Soup Construction

  • Tomato stock – from roasting tomatoes and garden herbs for passata
  • Chicken stock – from roasting chickens
  • Leek thinnings – from transplanting leeks
  • and a couple of big leeks
  • Sticks of celery – found in fridge
  • Carrots – ditto
  • Spinach – leftover from Ottolenghi chickpea and butternut squash dish
  • A handful of Cooked chickpeas – ditto
  • End of parmesan, grated

Sweat leeks, carrots and celery in a little good olive oil and butter, add stocks, throw in the chickpeas and spinach and sprinkle with parmesan.

Toast from strange sourdough that started out as being for pizza, (made with some of the tomato stock as above) but owing to major mistaken identity moment turned into this:-

Smile even though you have messed up!

Surprisingly baked up to make this:-

Look at you guys!

Close up:-

Not bad!

For the curious: the crumb shot!

Don’t you just love it when the dough forgives you?

Almost perfect Falafel (No. 2 in an occasional series)

falafel

Today’s packet mix is falafel!

Brian mixed up a batch of Dan Lepard’s perfect pitta bread dough from that seminal work, ‘The Guardian Guide to Baking’  24 November 2007 –  this is the recipe that almost qualified for the title of ‘the easiest bread in the world’.

If you haven’t read this it begins like this

Biting into a tender, freshly made and baked handmade pitta reminds me how stale and tough the shop ones are…

I was hooked neatly with that one sentence and I’ve been baking bread ever since. There’s no turning back once you’ve made your own pitta bread. So don’t try this at home, or you will unleash the daemon baker within. You have been warned.

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