Culinary
Saturday breakfast rolls: brown apple with sultanas and some ginger instead of cinnamon etc - but even though I added a little ground pepper as I thought this might bring out the flavour, any gingery taste was v fugitive. Or just drowned out by the ginger conserve I put on them.
Today's lunch: fillet of wild Alaskan salmon baked in foil oiled with sesame oil and the fish brushed with tamari, served with sugar snap peas roasted in pumpkin seed oil and drizzled with balsamic vinegar, steamed broccoli florets in a tamari, rice vinegar and minced ginger dressing, and a warm new potato salad: boil the potatoes and cut them into thickish slices (still in their skins), then saute in a little olive oil, when they are nicely browned splosh on some tarragon vinegar and let it evaporate.
This week's bread: (as although there was plenty of last week's baking left, it was developing whiskers) the rice bread adapted by Elizabeth David from Eliza Acton, in which you cook 3 oz/half a cup of rice in 3x the volume of water, fairly briskly and covered, until water is absorbed and holes appear in the surface, then while it is still warm, mix it into 1lb 2 oz/500 g of flour (I used a mixture of strong white and wholemeal), add yeast creamed in a little water and then rather under half a pint/1 cup of water (well under, I found) in which you have dissolved the salt. This makes up into a soft dough. Leave to rise. On knocking back, you may need to add more flour as dough can be quite soft and sticky. Put dough into greased loaf pan and leave to rise. Bake for 15 mins at Mk 7(425F), then lower to Mk 6 (400F) for another 15 minutes, then take it out of the pan and turn it upside down and bake for another 15-20 mins at the same temperature. I forgot to set the oven timer for the final 15 mins* so it got rather longer, so crust is rather dark and particularly crisp and crunchy. This is a very nice moist loaf and makes good toast.
*The heat is frying my brayne, I also left some tissues in my washing, or rather, forget to check searchingly enough.