Since assessment has finished, I’ve found myself on a cooking rampage. In the last week or so, I’ve made (apart from normal breakfasts and dinners and things); mushroom ragout with soft polenta; gnocchi; hot cross buns; rhubarb cake; plum cake; scones; and two semi-experimental loaves of bread, which turned out a bit like damper after I couldn’t find any bread flour and the shops and decided to just make them with the soft-gluten kind.
The bread and hot cross buns were the standouts, in terms of small accomplishments; I’ve never baked with yeast before. I’ve been lucky enough to have a lovely housemate who’s a dab hand with an olive and rosemary loaf, and even when she went away, I found that I had kind of assigned bread baking to her arena of expertise. However! It turns out that yeasty things are just time-consuming, not particularly difficult, and the hot cross buns turned out exceptionally well with the last-minute addition of some mandarin peel.
Frankly, I’m not sure how I even decided that Bread Is Hard. It’s a bit like how I never cook rice, either, because I got it into my head that rice takes a long time and is a very delicate operation. Oeufs a la Neige? Tarte Tatin? Easy. Rice? Freaks me the fuck out. It took me a very long time to realise that you could just boil it.
I also learned how to make my Nagyi’s super-top-secret chicken soup recipe, which I will now use to combat all and any illnesses that come my way. Oh, and kneydl too, as part of a weirdly hybridised Seder meal that ended with (non-leavened) tiramisu. What else? A couple of very boozy dinner parties have me thinking I might need to give my liver a rest, there was too much cheese, and I wrote this for a very cool new food website. I’m beginning to think, given the amount I cook and eat, that food writing might just be my calling.
Either that, or morbid obesity.
1 Comment
May 9, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Congrats on this piece, BTW. Very much enjoyed it.