Recipes

For ever and a day (well, for the best part of a few decades) my go-to breakfast has been Weet-Bix. In winter I’ll have the occasional porridge, and in days gone by my summer input may have been Special K or Nutrigrain or Rice Bubbles or Weeties, but Weet-Bix was the norm.

Whilst we still have a couple of boxes of Weet-Bix (and All-Bran) in the cupboard (with a best by date of many months in the future) I’ve recently switched to muesli. And not off-the-shelf muesli, but home mixed muesli.

One of my stronger childhood memories is of visiting my paternal grandparents for the weekend, waking up earlier than mum and dad, going upstairs to where my grandparents were already up and about and being given a couple of pieces of bread with butter and tomato jam. Yummo.

Since we have a reasonable crop of tomatoes coming on at the moment I thought I’d turn some into tomato jam.

I did make tomato jam around 10 years ago but didn’t have the recipe accessible so went searching online…

We bought a new barbeque a couple of months ago and I spent a little time looking online for barbeque rub ‘recipes’.

Most (all?) recipes have added sugar, but we wanted to avoid that so we just leave the sugar out. That may affect the flavour and caramelisation a little, but it doesn’t bother us.

I narrowed down the choices to a couple of recipes and merged/deleted items to arrive at the following:

For the past nine months I’ve been the primary bread maker in the household. My standard recipe is a slightly modified version of Peter Reinhart’s light wheat bread from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. My up-scaled recipe makes two ‘one pound’ loaves.

Ingredients

• 667 grams breadmaking flour
• 333 grams wholemeal flour
• 40 grams sugar
• 20 grams salt
• 60 grams milk powder
• 10 grams instant yeast
• 60 grams melted butter or olive oil
• 540 grams/mls tepid water (around a quarter recently boiled water, and the balance cool tap or filtered water)

My Method

1. Use the KitchenAid on its slowest setting using the dough hook.
2. Mix the dry ingredients together.
3. Add the butter and water whilst mixing.
4. Mix for around 5 minutes until the dough forms a ball. Add more water or flour as necessary.
5. Continue to mix for another 5-10 minutes until the dough passes the ‘window pane’ test.¹
6. Remove the dough ball from the bowl, add a small amount of olive oil to the bowl, return the dough to the bowl and spin it around to coat the ball in oil.
7. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and leave to ferment (called the preferment) for around an hour or two until it has doubled in size. Time depends on the ambient temperature and the temperature of the water used in the mixing. Mine would be an hour and a half on average.
8. Degas the dough in the bowl by ‘punching it down’, remove the dough from the bowl, divide it into two roughly equal pieces and form into a rough rectangle shape. Fold it in thirds in both directions and form the dough into loaf shapes approximately 20cm long and 7cm in diameter.
9. Place these dough cylinders in two bread pans, again cover with plastic and allow to proof for an additional hour or two.
10. They again will double in shape and should crest the top of the pans by a centimetre or two.
11. Preheat the oven to 170 degrees centigrade (fan-forced oven here).
12. Remove the plastic!
13. I sprinkle the loaves with some water and ensure the tops are slightly moist all over.
14. I then score the tops of the dough loaves with a razor blade. This can be down with two or three diagonal slices across the top or some other patterns. This scoring allows the bread to rise into the scores during baking.
15. I bake them next to each other in the middle-to-bottom area of the oven for 25 minutes. I then switch and turn both loaves and bake for another 10 minutes until golden brown.
16. To test I turn out one loaf, flip it onto it’s top and tap the bottom to ensure there is a hollow sound. Turn out both loaves and cool on a cooling rack.
17. One loaf is kept for bread. The other is sliced (after waiting a couple of hours for it to cool) and put in the freezer.

Late last year I saw a quick-and-easy paella being made on a TV show. Thinking it didn’t look too hard, I tried using the same recipe and came out with a tasty bunch of chicken and chorizo with cooked vegetables and half-cooked rice.

My second attempt was to ditch that recipe and opt for something from somewhere on the www. There are about as many paella recipes as there are grains of rice in Spain so it was a matter of choosing one and running with it. This second recipe was an improvement over the first but I can’t remember where I got the recipe.

When I was young my parent’s house back onto bushland. This meant that the shortage of neighbours was more than offset by the availability of firewood.

Often on a weekend we would have a barbeque for lunch (generally on a Sunday, Saturday was golf day). Standard fare was steak, sausages, tossed green salad and sauce.

Almost invariably the steak was cooked to within an inch of its life - well, a few feet into death, really. My father had been taught that meat is only cooked when it’s very dark, and consequently fairly tough. Tasty, yes, but equally chewy.

One dessert I can distinctly recall from my childhood is bread and butter pudding. The best bits were the bread that had sat on top of the baking custard - they had the flavour of the custard but a more substantial texture because they had been on top. The sultanas were acceptable, but optional in my view. Those sultanas that had managed to breach the surface were quickly dispatched to the bin because, in my view, there is little that is supposedly edible that could taste worst than a burnt sultana.