Tag Archives: food

So last weekend I got out 100 Great Breads and made an English recipe called farl bread, or bottom bread (because it’s made on the bottom shelf of the oven). It’s a simple white bread recipe with the top slashed so that as it rises, you get deep cuts in the loaf.

I think it came out looking good, yes?

I’m pleasantly surprised by the results. I bake a lot of breads that have some sort of slash on the top (irish soda bread traditionally gets a cross), but they rarely shape up this well in baking. I don’t know if it’s the recipe, or the solidity (it was a very firm dough) or just random chance, but I’m quite pleased with myself. Tastes good too; just a basic white bread, but the texture is distinctive.

I shall make another bread with slashes soon; if I’m actually getting better, I should be able to do it again, right? Wish me luck.

#SFWApro. Photo is mine.

Because while it was tasty, a sandwich on a baguette just looks like every other sandwich on a baguette (the photograph below is from Wikimedia). But it got me thinking about the way I change recipes when I cook.

I found this one in an issue of Vegetarian Times. It looked tasty but it included three ingredients I hate: olive tapenade, eggplant and green beans (okay, I don’t hate them, but I’m kind of “meh” on them). So I substituted, respectively, mango chutney, portobello and peas (the vinegar-based marinade, garlic powder, hard-boiled eggs and red peppers in the recipe stayed the same). Obviously the taste was very different than the original concept, but it was still tasty. And I liked it a lot, as did TYG.

Mushroom for eggplant is a standard change in my cooking. So is swapping either peas or some sort of bean for corn, because I loathe corn. As TYG hates yogurt, I find substitutes for that, too, which is trickier; if it’s just a topping rather than a sauce, I’ll use goat cheese, which we both like.

The thing is I don’t need to do any of that. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a lot of cookbooks. There’s more than enough recipes with no “problem” ingredients that I could save myself any efforts to swap stuff out this way (the exception being when I run out of ingredient A and have to dig up something that will work as an alternative). Yet some recipes just click with me when I read them in the cookbook or recipe magazine or wherever, even though they have an ingredient that makes me go “yuck!” Not all recipes; some just don’t substitute naturally. I can’t stand sauerkraut but I can’t think of a good substitute, so vegetarian Reuben recipes are a no go.

I honestly don’t know why I can look at a recipe and see it as something different that I’ll like better (not that it is better — it’s a matter of personal taste, nothing more). But it expands my range of options and gives me some delicious meals, like the baguette. So why not?

#SFWApro. Image by Nicola taken from Wikimedia under Creative Commons license

It was my friend and fellow writer Ada Milenkovic Brown’s 65th birthday party. As it happened, I’d bought ricotta for something else, then not used it; looking through Vegetarian Epicure I found a recipe for torta di ricotta. Way high on butter and (obviously) cheese, but I figured it was a good way to use up the ricotta. And it actually came out looking good.

Tasted good too. I had a great time at the party and learned Ada’s actually mentioned by name in Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice (second edition and all subsequent ones). It’s in the “Looking Glass Insects” chapter, in one of the footnotes, as Ada Brown. Dang I have cool friends!

I also walked our friend Celena’s dogs Lily and Tito as her family were out for the day. They were very excited to see me, especially Tito the toy poodle. Lily likes me too but she’s way more laid back and Tito’s a bundle of energy.

Saturday, after completing a ton of shopping errands (dog meds, dog and cat food, other useful items) I got a call that the replacement battery for my laptop was in. Out to the mall! And happily the Apple Store got it fixed that evening, so I picked it up Sunday. It’s sooooo nice having a full twelve hours of power again, and not worrying about whether it’s going to run down before my writing wraps up.

#SFWApro. Images are mine.

When I picked up 100 Great Breads from the library sale table, it became the ninth bread book I own.

The first time I baked bread, I used a recipe from Recipes For a Small Planet, an early vegetarian cookbook. I was very, very serious about it. Checked the kneading time down to the minute. The water on which I sprinkled the yeast was exactly the right temperature. It seemed so unbelievably complex, I didn’t want to take a chance.

That was close to forty years ago. I’m a lot more relaxed now. I know hot water from the tap will do for the yeast. And I stop kneading when the bread feels right. That’s part of the fun of baking bread; it’s much easier with practice but it’s never something I can do without thinking (and when I do, something bad happens, like forgetting to mix in salt.).

I acquired more bread recipes when I added a couple more vegetarian cookbooks. The first actual bread book I owned (a gift from my sister) was Beard on Bread by the chef James Beard. It covers a wide range of recipes, including a couple of basic white breads, potato breads, fruit breads, salt-rising bread (made that once. Not quite worth the effort), whole wheat and rye breads.

I could certainly have stopped there. I’ve been baking for myself most of my life, and I don’t bake bread every single week; it’s not like I’d grow bored if I just used Beard’s book. Really I’m still baking for myself, because TYG isn’t a bread person. And several of my general cookbooks include bread recipes. But I kept finding books that had enough different recipes (there’s invariably a lot of overlap) to be worth buying. Hollywood’s book above hooked me with a recipe for Stilton-Bacon Bread. I love Stilton cheese and I like veggie bacon, so that was a snap. I also made the book’s recipe for Irish soda bread; odd, more like a biscuit than other recipes I’ve tried, but a very nice, light biscuit. So what’s not to like?

That said, most of my books are actually inherited from my grandparents, my mum or TYG (one of her old roommates left an excellent bread book behind). I usually work through them all over the course of a year, looking for recipes for each in turn. Finding time is sometimes tricky, but the results are always good, unless I screw up. Trust me, lack of salt is a baaaad thing.

#SFWApro. All rights to cover image remain with current holder.