yonmei

09:23 am: Wednesday morning lists
1. Bob's home! Yay.
2. Have important meeting to prepare for tomorrow.
3. Made rye bread with cocoa nibs.
4. Also made more rye bread without cocoa nibs.
5. Saw Star Trek and Wolverine (not the same evening). Star Trek is better technically but Wolverine is more fun. Both have ( spoiler ) Also, which is not a spoiler, Nyota Uhura was a good-lookin' woman at any age: she was not Walking Skellington. Also - Skellington though she was, I could believe she was The Best Xenolinguist Anywhere: she had that attitude. But the other fubsy li'l Baby Officers, who kept appearing while I said What? WHAT? WHAT? (silently) - they did not.
6. Also, lack of chemistry. If they want to expand the franchise from now to eternity, they've really, really got to look for actors who feel like they're comrades and friends and lovers.
7. Also, help my baby cloud dragon not die! Give clicky! Thanks.



Tags: bread, lists, star trek, work

10:52 pm: Dopey little dragons


*yawns*

Didn't leave the house today. Still tired.

Baked some pretty splendid rice bread, and finished off the dough by kneading in the last of the Arran canembert I got for half price three weeks ago. Yum.

Tags: bread, dragons

11:27 pm: Mmm, cheese bread
I found a wrapped soft cheese at the bottom of the freezer, so I cut off the crusty rind and kneaded most of the rest into the spare piece of dough (there is always a spare piece of dough: it never quite works out trying to make exactly enough for 24 rolls: the difference between flour and yeast in each baking always changes the dough, and this is why the French Revolutionary Government declared it a scientific heresy that bakers were responsible for short weight loaves, and why you can buy bread by the gramme or the kilo in France today). I formed it into four rolls, topped each with a piece of the remaining soft cheese, and baked in the oven till brown and crusty.

OMGdelicious. It was really difficult only eating one. The other three will freeze nicely, though.

I finally got to see The Devil Wears Prada. The novel was an interesting example of "fiction for women", the kind that makes you think about how this culture is for women, and how skillful writers can play on the edge of what-we-accept/what-we-resent to create the best of what we unfondly call "chicklit". I'd heard the film substantially changed the novel, and it does - I suppose they couldn't bring themselves to make Meryl Streep play a woman as dislikable as Miranda in the novel, a woman with no redeeming characteristics. There were a handful of other changes - Miranda pays much more individual attention to Andi in the film, instead of barely noticing she's there, and Meryl Streep delivers the best Miranda lines in style. It remains utterly unrealistic about the fashion industry, with much more prurient gaze at women's bodies: the best part about "chicklit" is that it is unabashedly aimed at women, which films are not.

I finally succumbed and bought the first season of Cagney and Lacey on DVD. There won't be any more after that and this makes me sad: please sign the petition, if you haven't already.

Tags: baking, bread, cagney and lacey, cheese, feminism, films

08:47 pm: Injera; and crumpets
Injera is a griddle-cooked bread made in Ethiopia from teff, the primary cereal crop in Ethiopia. (I checked: teff flour is buyable in the UK, at a cost of at least £4 a kilo. I think I shall constrain my curiosity about what teff tastes like yet a while.)

Injera is made by mixing up a thin sourdough batter, about the same thickness as pancake batter, and pouring it on a hot griddle, or a skillet. Traditional meals in Ethopia are served on a large injera, with folded injera used to scoop up the stews and salads, and at the end of the meal you eat the injera that served as your plate. All of which sounds great.

What came to my mind was - having a tub full of sourdough starter that wouldn't take half an hour to wake up with some hot water and and more white flour - could I try using the method with my basic sourdough starter?

So, I took the tub out of the fridge, added some white bread flour and some hot water (I'm usually quite relaxed about the temperature, but in this instance, wanting the starter lively soon, I added just enough cool water from the tap to hot water from a just-boiled kettle so that the mix was as hot as you can get and not kill yeast - if it's too hot for a bare hand, it's too hot for yeast to live in). Then I waited half an hour or so till the starter was lively with bubbles. Found my griddle, put it on the gas, greased it with ghee. Took a ladleful of the starter to a separate bowl, to which I added a large pinch of salt and then whisked it smooth with my plastic whisk. (Picked up only a few weeks ago for moments like these - sourdough reportedly doesn't like metal, and I'm superstitious about it now.)

Then I just poured half the mix on to the griddle, and waited: you can see griddle cakes, any kind, cook from the bottom up. Injera is not supposed to be cooked on the top side: I just waited till it was cooked through, lifted it off the griddle to a plate, and ate it almost immediately.

Yes, it was very good. The slightly sour flavour came through much more strongly than it usually does when I make sourdough bread - very immediate. It left me wondering why I hadn't tried this before - though I suspect that, like most hot wheat breads that haven't kneaded enough/rested enough, it's not very digestible. It would have been a good base for stews and such, though for Ethopian-style dining I'd want a bigger griddle to make a bigger trencher. But it wouldn't have folded well for a scoop - it tended to crack.

Okay! Now I wanted to experiment with a mix of different gluten-free flours (and I also wanted to try out crumpet-making again, since injera batter suddenly gave me a clue what thickness crumpet batter is supposed to be...). The next cake I made was a mix of sourdough batter and polenta-grind cornmeal, and it didn't work - though a finer grind might. Next, buckwheat flour - which by texture should be more successful anyway, and also ought to produce something like a blintz in flavour....

Tags: baking, bread, griddle cakes, injera

12:45 pm: Being known
Today at the farmer's market I walked briskly through the market, as usual, noting which stalls were here and which were not, and stopped at the coffee stall at the far end (I usually do: the Torchwood coffee stall at the end nearer Princes Street is always the one with the longer queue). There was only one person ahead of me, and by the time I'd bought a copy of The Big Issue (Doctor Who! Captain Jack!) there was no one. The woman looked at me thoughtfully and said "Double latte, skimmed milk, medium size?"

I was slightly gobsmacked, but pleased, and nodded. "Yes."

She didn't remember whether or not I liked chocolate sprinkles. That was a relief. (I'll drink coffee with chocolate sprinkles, but I prefer it without... er, unless they're the really really posh sort that are just grated chocolate, in which case, yum.) It would have been somewhat disturbing if she had remembered even that. My last coffee till Monday morning.

I bought autumn oak leaf wine and elderflower wine, and the Arran cheese stall was offering 4 cheeses short-dated at £10 for 4, which is a total bargain so I bought them - which meant not buying a round of their chilli cheese, since although the cheeses will be good into May, that's definitely as much as I need probably until I leave for Germany. That's life. I did have a bag of the Crisp Hut's crisps with chilli-and-lemon, and ate half sitting down with a horseshoe cake from Falko and the remainder of my coffee. The horseshoe cake was delicious, almondy and chocolate: you can buy a markedly inferior drier version in packets, but this is how it's meant to be. Well worth it.

I also bought kamut wheat flour from Real Foods - a small batch of kamut sourdough is rising as we speak.

We drank autumn oak leaf wine at my sister's birthday dinner - I brought the bottle to share, and it was good. (We ate at the Coconut Grove at Tollcross, a Mexican restaurant I didn't even know was there, but it was delicious - recommended.)

On the way back, I took photos for my planned project of documenting the Leith Walk Themed Obstacle Course.

Tags: bread, coffee, eating some delicious food, nonphotos

09:21 pm: Three things for Sunday evening
1. As you may have noticed, Google is broken: it can't find www.greatestjournal.com any more. If everyone points this out to them (click on the "Are you dissatisfied?" link at the foot of the Google page) they might fix it. (They might not: I've been complaining for over a month now.)

2. Can anyone suggest why a memory stick that was functioning in the sole USB port in my laptop (and that port is still functioning for other things) won't function there any more? I've tried re-installing the software, rebooting, refreshing... nothing works. The memory stick itself is still functioning: I've used it on two other machines today.

3. I was given the best bakery book in the world today as a late birthday present. It is altogether lovely. It has recipes for three different sourdough starters in it, including San Franciso sourdough starter. Now we'll see if that's makable outside San Franciso...

Tags: bread

10:52 pm: Rant the third: Breadcrumbs
For shadowspinner: ( Breadcrumbs )

Tags: bread, rants

10:35 pm: Rant the first: Bread and Butter Pudding
For broin: ( Bread and Butter Pudding )

Tags: bread, eating some delicious food, rants

12:02 am: On human genius
I have several times encountered the idea that the invention of bread is a marvellous and astonishing thing. It's not, though. The essential step - the notion of cooking a paste of flour and water - required several leaps of original thought: the idea of grinding the grains to make flour, the idea of cooking the flour to make it more digestible, the idea of mixing the flour with water to make it hold together as it cooks. But almost everything else to do with breadmaking has been the result of a series of add-ons, some of which may have been discovered by accident: leavening the bread was almost certainly an accident by some early cook who kept the flour and water paste too long, and discovered that when it was kept too long it actually made the bread taste better and lighter. ("Too long" can, under the right conditions, be less than a day: an Israeli friend tells me that it's unheard of in the desert to bother keeping sourdough starter on hand, since a bowl of flour and water, mixed in the morning, will be frothing by the evening.) There are many other inventions that we take for granted that seem to me to be absolutely astonishing - far more astonishing than breadmaking. Who first thought of cloth, for example? And how did they think of it? What astonishing leap of genius went from the fleece of a sheep or a goat to twisted thread to woven cloth?

Tags: baking, bread

12:31 am: Dad's bread
I make good bread myself, but my dad makes - and has made for the past thirty years or so - the most reliably fabulous bread you ever tasted. With typical modesty, he claims it's all in the flour, but while as a baker I know the flour is important (I am currently savouring my way through bread made with a dark brown Belgian flour called Waldkorn that makes a wonderful loaf) the technique matters too. My dad wrote this recipe down for someone else, but I snaffled it and am reposting it here without his permission. Nobody tell him, okay?

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( Recipe for the most reliably fabulous bread in the world )

Tags: bread, family stuff, flour, recipe