Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Stephen Fry's Oasis soup joke

After reading Nigel Slater's recipe for spelt rolls, and being intrigued about using fresh yeast, I tried to find some. Not easy, actually, even in a capital city. The interwebs found it for me.

I picked up this book in Oxfam last Sunday:


and liked the cheese rolls recipe. Of course I changed it. Weirdly, we had no mousetrap cheese (well we did have a cubic inch left, but not for long), and I'd run out of mustard seeds, so I added Parmesan and tons of pepper, and some olives for good measure.

Fresh yeast smells great. Sadly, that's lost on a blog, but here's the lovely stuff anyway.



The rest went as easily as following a recipe:






It's hard to make uncooked bread dough look good in a picture. Especially when you're trying not to get flour down the camera switches.




This is easier, though:




And this is a John Lewis-style lifestyle pic. Warm, freshly-pulled-apart bread, piled artlessly in a ceramic bowl, with 'stuff' in the background. All these types of images have random piles of desirable stuff in the background, carelessly out of focus but looking clean, neat and like it belongs in the house that waits for you, when your salary has octupled and you have a life transplant. In my case, it's the focus of the shot that's out of focus.



Better not employ may camera skills for Union, then. But the bread skills are not that bad.

These rolls were gorgeous. And even better the next day, toasted for breakfast. The Parmesan was strong the next day, and fabulous. For future ref; needs more olives, it does need the damned mustard seed, and we really need to wait until the bread is less than nuclear before ripping it apart.



Stephen Fry's Oasis joke was, of course, "You gotta roll with it."

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Setting up the setting up stage

Right now, I'm playing. And that feels great. I'm tinkering with my business plan, which means I'm doing all the fun descriptive bits and avoiding the harder, demographic analysis and marketing bits. I'm looking at crockery online, and considering colourways. I'm looking at packaging solutions which I freely admit even now that my wants are likely to be waaaaaaay beyond my wallet. But I'm playing, so it doesn't matter right now.

I have a domain name. I have ordered fresh yeast and when that arrives, I'll start trialling bread recipes, even though I have no intention of making my own bread. But this blog will be, I think, my own record of my experiments in the kitchen, at the PC and in research. Hopefully, it'll wind up being the gleaming shop window from the Union of Genius kitchen onto the world outside. Even if it turns out to be a tiny, filthy garret window with a restricted view of cracked slates and urban pigeons, though, it'll be a fun process.