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.
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 Use the KitchenAid on its slowest setting using the dough hook.
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.
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.
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.