Skip to main content

Earning a Crust


Today, unlike any other day of my pampered life, I made bread. Neccesity, of course, fuelled my desire to partake in such a fool-hardy venture, even though I was well aware the odds of success for the first-time bread-maker ran to approximately one meeellion to one. My hunger was deep, my lament obvious, my absent daily loaf a bitter reminder that I maybe wasn't putting quite enough effort into this diet of enlightenment.

Indeed, Sarah, to emphasize beautifully my point, has been conjuring butter from cream on an almost daily basis this last week, in a way that is both mesmerising and utterly gorgeous.

Alas, I had to make a stand.

So I decided that if I couldn't find bread in the UK made only from ingredients found within our 100 mile barbed-wire fence, then I would have to instead make my own bread from legal ingredients found within our small and cluttered London kitchen.
Fealess, I proceeded to mix the Hampshire flour, the Berkshire yeast, the Essex sea-salt and the tepid Richmond tap-water into a fine, delightfully elasticated, goo-ey dough. I then kneeded it for ten minutes, greased the tin and and cling-film with sarah's butter and left my messy sculpture to rest for an hour while I went for a walk to get chocolate out of my head.
On my return, with chocolate harpies still tormenting my every step with their teasing dances, I popped the expanded dough into a hot oven and waited for the impending moment when all my endeavours would come to a predictably tragic end.
It didn't happen! The bread came out fine! I cut open the middle, still expecting some sort of hideous mis-hap, an un-cooked centre perhaps, or some terrible facial scarring caused by burning, bubbling, spitting dough, but all was calm around our flat. The kitchen smelt of H.E. Bates!
I sniffed, tentatively, at my cooling masterpiece, and purred. It all gave me a huge head-rush. At least it would have done if my head hadn't already been full to burst with catarrh and the unctuous remains of a charmless cold. Yet there was still room enough to give rise to the wonderful feeling of connection with the food I would soon eat.
Next, I am going to grow my own cocoa beans.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Anonymous8:52 pm

    Cocoa??? When? Where? Bring it on ... NOW!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. spider11:19 pm

    I found this nice fact about bread:
    "Despite the huge diversity celebrated in Bread Street, approximately 80% of the bread sold in the UK today is sliced, wrapped, and made from the industrial Chorleywood Bread Process. Just two companies provide more than half the bread we consume." from London Food Link.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Life Returns to Notment - and my soul

It has been such a long time, we had so much cold and rain and snow this winter that I have hardly been down to the notment at all. A couple of weeks ago I did go, and collected some baby Alexanders , which went down very well with the family. They are very herbal, like fennel, aniseed or celery but stronger and with a distinct flavour. They work very well chopped up with mashed potato or in an omelette. Then yesterday I went back for a propoer look at the spring life. Many of the fragile little seedlings planted last year in their fleece-poo blankets are still alive if not exactly thriving - including a sage, some fennel cuttings, a feverfew and calamint. Sadly though, the huge ants nest has gone since the breeze blocks were sold to alocal builder who has been able to reuse them. I had been hoping to provide a new home for the ants, but failed to act in time and so now just have to wait and see if they managed to survive or not. I am fairly ignorant about the habits of ants, but
5 comments
Read more

Water, Water, Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink

Water, water, everywhere, and it's all a lot of poncey crap from Italy and France, beautifully packaged and carefully marketed, that wends its way into the receptacles of Londoners who use it as prop to help them make believe their city is chic like Paris when it is nothing of the sort, it is just the grubby old capital of a country that obtains its water from across the sea. The point I am trying to make, through this un-dignified rant, is that water is indeed everywhere and it all tastes the bloody same. Perrier, for instance, though I could have easily picked out Badoit, Barisart or Pellegrino, arrives on the shelves of our abundant supermarkets in sexy looking, stylish bottles that are pleasing to the human eye. There is little wrong with this, beauty has its place. The home should be filled with gorgeous things. But it's the human tongue that counts here and mine says the only dissimilar thing its buds can gauge between the continental waters and our very own mountain spri
3 comments
Read more

Snow and Honey

Monday was a day famous for Snow, but for me it was also about honey. I visited Linda who has recently started keeping bees. We processed some honey and she very kindly gave me a pot of golden sweetness at the end. I learnt about mites, and deaths, and bee dancing and pollen and nectar and propolis (the red stuff in the pot - very sticky and it stains the hands, the bees make it from tree resin), and how the bees tenderly care for the grubs and feed them bees milk, and how the worker bees come out of the growing chambers and do housekeeping first for a few days, and then nursing, and then they guard the entrance, and then they start foraging only after all that. The pics show how we scraped the honey out of the combs, avoiding letting pollen and nectar into the honey, and let it drip through a net to separate it from the wax - collecting the was crumbs for melting down and further separation from the honey that is left; propolis; and the honey pots that were filled. 20 in total, from a
4 comments
Read more