Recipes

Inspiration from the interwebs – July edition

For this inspiration post, rather than link to mouthwatering recipes like I have done for these posts in the past (here and here), I wanted to highlight a few new (to me at least) blogs I bookmarked recently: 1. Pink Patisserie – not only am I in love with the look of Maria’s blog, I also love her beautifully photographed posts and intriguing recipes (Compost Cupcakes anyone?). 2. Noisette – I first came across Sarah on twitter when we started exchanging tweets on possible flavour combinations (I feel like our tastebuds are very much on the same wavelength). One day I hopped on over to her blog and was floored by all the beautiful shots of mouthwatering baked goods (have a gander around her blog and tell me your chin did not hit the floor when you saw her take on ‘croquembouche’ using hot cross buns). 3. Chantelle Grady – a photographer and stylist who probably does not need much

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No Knead Bread

This is the recipe published in the New York Times back in 2006 that got me really into baking my own bread, and it is so simple, so tasty, I really cannot praise it enough. My mum has been baking her own bread for years now (using a homemade sourdough starter that must have reached toddler age by now) and always emphasises how easy it is. Yet, however easy or tricky the recipes my mum uses are, the one thing they require which I am lacking is time – time to prepare a fresh sourdough starter and keep feeding it until ready (my last starter, offspring off my mum’s starter, died a slow death as a result of a few hectic weeks of work and lots of travel), leaving the dough to autolyse (i.e. letting the flour hydrate before kneading etc), letting the dough rise once or twice (not for a set time but usually until dough is doubled in

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Making every meal count

Making every meal count. What do I mean by that? Well, I have a busy job, I travel a lot and I like to cook and bake. However both my bus job and the amount of travelling I do mean I find myself less often in the kitchen than I would like. So whenever I do have the time to be in the kitchen, I try to make the best of that time, by trying new recipes (or perfecting old ones) whenever I can and by trying to make sure that every meal I eat at home is something special. This does not mean I shave fresh truffles over my scrambled eggs (though I certainly would not say no to that), but rather a wish to create something for eery dish, to work with whatever I have to hand and turn it into something delicious, something I would happily eat again. And that is exactly what I did for lunch

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