As a home baker, your job is to produce one perfect loaf which you photograph and wonder if your slashes could have been more assured and if you could have got slightly  better oven spring if you’d lobbed a couple more links of red hot chain into the water tray at the bottom of your […]

My latest kitchen toy is a dehydrator. So while the starter was been being built, this has been put to use drying out slices of apple from the tree – mainly the good bits of damaged fruit. Having dried them they were rehydrated in Weston’s finest Henry Weston cider which also made up about half […]

Right, all bets are off (see previous post): That was after about 28 hours. It rose nearly to the arch in the glass before I went to bed. By morning it had fallen back and has now been refreshed at 1:1:1 (starter:water:flour by weight). To be continued.

Remember Woolworths? A lot of years ago I bought Sue an apple tree as a valentine from Woolworths and brought it back on the bus from Bangor. Produces lovely sharp Coxes some of which we keep till New Year to use in Faisin a la Normande. Our neighbours provide the pheasants. Anyway, Marcus was recently […]

Sorry it’s been nothing but barbies but I’ve been been moonlighting on egullet http://forums.egullet.org/topic/149435-baking-bread-from-scratch-in-france/ for the past five weeks. On a whim I thought I would make a starter and see how far I could get with it on holiday and then when we got back a little action feature on reviving my real starter […]

… is another mans bollocks. But, you know, after all this fishy stuff, we had to go for some macho red meat: I know that doesn’t look very big but that is a T-Bone steak weighing just over a kilo and, as I had to admit to Sue, it cost 26 euros. It wasn’t really […]

Well, technically it’s not fish porn but it’s a definite seafood orgy. Paella on the barbie: Prawns, mussels, squid and crab. Never coming home.  

Especially for Stig’s daughter Eve, a little fish fetishism: A handsome sea bass as arranged by Sue. The finest fish and chips this side of Dover. The batter could be regarded as a very thin sourdough.

A visit here: means I can have a couple of days bake free (although I do have a batch of pizza dough ready to go in the fridge). This has been the year of the barbie. I managed to persuade an incredulous Sue that I really did want a big Weber for my Christmas (and […]