This, That and the Other

I had this idea you see, that I would take the blog to the boatyard and sort it out, make it all tidy and organized, fill in the cracks, redo the varnish, stare at the many blog themes that WordPress has to offer, tweak this and that – after all I have been chucking posts on here for nearly three years now. I was going to write an Index and organize all the posts into neat little categories but…

guess what?

they don’t fit into categories

and it will take me days

and I just don’t want to do it

but people are wondering why I made the blog private, well, that was so I could mess it up in peace and quiet, because if you, dear reader, are reading it while I am trying to sort it out, it runs slow at my end

so anyway

I am just going to leave them as they are. I feel a moment of T S Eliot coming on. You know that bit about not being Prince Hamlet, but a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the sea bottom? That’s me.

My tip if you are desperate to find something on this blog, do an internet search using the blog name as a term i.e. zeb bakes plus the name of the thing you want and a search engine like Google will find it for you better than the search box on the blog does. That is what I do, yes, I use the net to search my blog.

i.e. Zeb Bakes rye bread will give you …..

Very simple and quick!

The old definition of a blog was a weblog. Like a diary, not a cook book, not a website, not a content producing factory, not a source of free images for people to stick on to their Pinboards. So that is what this is, an old-fashioned blog, where the tides of words and images rise and fall, sometimes big, sometimes small, following my rhythms and my energies. The world is full of stuff, the internet more so. I have no image to maintain, no hidden agenda from blogging, no book waiting in the wings or small business opening.

On Pinterest and similar sites

Thanks for reading. I really, truly thank all of you who read this drivel but to those of you who don’t read, who are just busily scavenging away this is addressed to you….

Please don’t pin my stuff on Pinterest ever. Please do not copy my stuff onto your sites without asking me explicitly first. I have an irrational hatred of Pinterest. It just plops me in with a host of other stuff and devalues my work. Makes me feel like I am part of some huge online shopping catalogue. No one has ever come and left a commment, saying, oh I saw your photo on Pinterest and wanted to get to know you or chat to you. It does nothing for me in the least.

Call it vanity, call it what you like. I don’t need traffic driven to this blog or whatever other justification you put on doing it. I am more than happy for you to copy stuff to use at home, you can email it to your friends, print it out for a class or whatever, just don’t copy it and plaster it all over the net with some link back and assume that I will see it and be OK with it, because I am not. As far as I am concerned it is the height of bad manners.

If you want to stare at bread photos all day, then copy someone else’s who wants to be copied, who buys into the whole Pinterest thing, there are lots of them out there who love it and welcome it. They have buttons on their sites saying ‘Pin Me, please pin me’. I don’t.

Sourdough Mashed Potato Pancakes

25th March 2013

Sourdough Potato Pancakes

I thought I would contribute this small brunch dish to the ‘what shall I do with my old starter’ conversation.

Not everything in life needs a recipe and these are a prime example.

I had some old starter in the fridge from when I had been away and when I stirred it up it had a bit of life in it still. I dipped a finger in and had a taste, sour but not unacceptable.

It was so cold yesterday that I thought we had better have something warm for lunch.

So I dry fried a couple of slices of Lindsays of Cockermouth’s best dry cure middle cut bacon, no nasty white stuff coming out of this like the supermarket rubbish, and not very salty either, a little black pudding for Brian and a few tomatoes with a splash of balsamic vinegar to give them a bit more taste than they have at this time of year.

I then found a small bowl of mashed potatoes from last night’s supper in the fridge and thought oh why not…

So here is the method. Forgive the quantities.

In a large bowl

Pour in your old starter
Add a couple of large spoonfuls of cold mashed potato
A glass or two of milk (skimmed is fine)
A couple of spoonfuls of flour
Two large eggs
A pinch of salt

Whisk it all up, but don’t worry too much about the little lumps of mashed potato.
Heat a small pan on the hob.
Put the oven on a keep warm setting and pop a plate in.
Chase a fingernail’s worth of butter round the pan once it is hot.
Tip little ladles of mixture into the pan and swirl them round.
Cook on one side, till nice and golden brown, flip and cook the other side.
Stack on the warm plate in the oven.

Sourdough Mashed Potato Pancakes with Brown Sauce

Serve your sourdough mashed potato pancakes with optional brown sauce and toppings and a large mug of tea.

That’s it. No added sugar, no added fat. I can’t believe that this is particularly bad for you, but the food police might say it is. I don’t care.

Soft and fluffy and just the thing for a hungry gap.

Hills, Cheese, Snow, Cake

Grasmor from Harris Park, Cockermouth

19th March 2013

As you can see it is pretty wintry still in England this week. This view of the fells from Harris Park in Cockermouth gives you a feel for the raw and unsettled weather we have at the moment.

Windfarm on Cumbrian fields Today we drove in search of Dad’s opthamology appointment to two different hospitals as he wasn’t sure which one it was in, which added a certain frisson to the proceedings, but all went well and we had a lovely drive over the fells, waved at the sea at Whitehaven, and passed the windfarms on the fells as the snow and sleet gusted around us.

We returned via Thornby Moor Dairy Cheese Farm (as recommended by our friend Andrew Auld of the Loaf in Crich) where we sampled and bought some wonderful cheeses.

Thornby Moor Dairy

Cumberland Farmhouse Cheese from Thornby Moor Dairy, Carlisle

Cheeses made with unpasteurized milk from shorthorns, delicious goat cheeses and artisan farmhouse cheeses.

Before being unwrapped and cut

We admired the timeline of cheese on the shelves and then returned to Cockermouth for lunch. Edit: In view of some of your comments I will try and add a bit more here – I may not have understood this in its entirety but the cheese maker who came out to help us expalined that the rows of cheeses on the shelves were all the same cheese, the small version of the farmhouse cheese at different points between 0 – 3 months. The mould gathers on the outside of the cloth the cheese is wrapped in, which is removed before being presented for sale. The dairy produces a blue cheese but this wasn’t it. I apologise if I haven’t got this quite right.

Maturing cheese at Thornby Moor Dairy Cheese Farm

This afternoon we popped out to the New Bookshop for coffee and cake.

Coffee and Gingerbread

The New Bookshop alone has sold more than 200 copies of The Cockermouth Poets, which I think is pretty impressive for a poetry anthology!

The Cockermouth Poets

Zeb has been not very well but we hope he is finally on the mend. He loves it up here usually and he has been very miserable. We love the out of hours vets who gave him pain relief on Sunday night at 10 30 pm when he couldn’t stand up without twisting and turning. Yesterday he managed to produce part of the bag that he ate 12 days ago which has somehow managed to travel through his digestive tract and re-appear as a gigantic Cuban cigar of rolled leather. So lets hope that he recovers fully. He slept in the middle of the bed last night.

Now it’s time to cook supper again: roast vegetables and chicken pieces I think, and maybe sharpen the kitchen knives before I start.