I bake all the things!

[labellementeuse]

So, last night I pulled a horrendous all-nighter in order to finish my book design scrapbook - I am much better at cutting things out using crop than I am using scissors, so I did mine on the internets and you can see if you are interested in knowing what (other than the usual) has been making me crazy for the last week: bookdesign_project.

I must be getting older, because the last time I pulled an all-nighter I was basically a bit slow the next day but nothing too serious. Today I was like, becoming hysterical with laughter-verging-on-tears at the drop of a hat - e.g. I started telling one classmate about the folios (page numbers) in Knitting Rules I was so ANGRY and yet so AMUSED because they are BAD but in a FUNNY WAY, so I was like, LAUGH SHOUTING. It was fucking horrible. (It didn't help that I hadn't eaten since about 3am and then it was like, salami and camembert, not exactly a full meal.) I was taking those folios really damn personally.

So anyway, although I had been going to go and hang out with ex-English-classmates Matt and Sarah in our regular Monday gig that I have missed for the past month and it was even my turn to pick the movie (speaking of which:

Poll #3991

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 5

View Respondents

What should three former English students watch next Monday night:

View Answers

Heathers
2 (40.0%)

Mean Girls
0 (0.0%)

The Princess Bride
3 (60.0%)

Something else!
0 (0.0%)

NO NO YOU SHOULD WATCH THIS:

View Answers

) But instead, I went home. I thought: I have to finish Wolf Hall for book group on Wednesday. I thought: hey, I have two volumes of Scott Pilgrim to read and return to caramarie. I thought: hey, I have fic I'm in the middle of writing. I thought: hey, how about cleaning some of the things?

Well. I did manage to put on a load of washing. But otherwise, this is what I did between 4 and 8pm today (not in that order):
1. Gave senri a lot of probably ill-thought-out advice in what would have been high-pitched tones if we were speaking IRL but instead just lots of caps and swearing
2. Baked a loaf of white bread, a loaf of cheese bread (but I forgot the paprika so it was dull), and giant nutella chocolate chip cookies; prepared and froze World Peace Cookies for my next biscuit emergency, but I forgot to put in the chocolate chips so they probably won't do their job; and improvised Almost Vegetarian Spring/Summerish Rolls for dinner.

Y'all, I don't live alone, but my flatmates are in Japan right now. That's a LOT of baking. What was I THINKING? (It's not actually that crazy: I'm pretty seriously broke right now and I need to get back into the swing of packing lunches, and baking is awesome at making me actually want to do that.) BUT ALL THAT IN LIKE FOUR HOURS. Less because of my time out to shout at sushiflop (and confidential to you, bb, we are friends on DW! But will I call you Senri or Sushiflop now? SO HARD.) SO MANIC. SO SO MANIC.

Anyway, I have this whole resolution that I can't remember if I told you guys about or not, but the resolution was: I am tired of having to google and regoogle every time I want to make the same recipe twice or having to re-make-up the same dish over and over again. I'M WRITING THIS SHIT DOWN. on my journal because have you seen my handwriting? So here have some recipes.



Cheese Bread
- This comes from the Edmonds cookbook, which is ubiquitous in New Zealand kitchens. Many people have learned to cook out of this book, which is a shame because it is very limited in its approach. However, what Edmonds does - classic Pākehā tucker: custard squares, boston buns, quickbreads, jams, pikelets, Shepherd's pie, dubious "Chinese", "Italian" and "Irish" foods and, of course, curried everything (including salmon curried eggs) - it does with, well, it does it with a lot of nostalgia value. And there are a few good recipes. I happen to think Cheese Bread is one of them. Stodgy, though, is definitely the word.
- The Edmonds bread recipes are actually very limited - they have many more jam recipes than they do bread, and many of the bread recipes, including this one, are quickbreads rather than yeast breads. This is actually a good thing, because you don't have to wait for it to rise.
- Consequently, I've often used this when I've realised that I've made soup and forgot to make bread to go with it. I usually prefer a nice herby yeast bread but, especially with tomato or leek soup, this is nearly as good.
- The cayenne (or I often use paprika) is vital, and although I dislike Tasty cheese, it really is better than Edam in this recipe.

1. Preheat oven to 180 C (350 F or standard cake temperature). Grease a loaf tin unless you have a silicon pan like my flatmate does in which case we're all away laughing.

2. Sift together:
3 C flour
1/2 t salt
3 t baking powder
pinch cayenne pepper.

Add 1/2 C grated Tasty cheese and 1 T sugar.

3. Add 1/2 C grated potato and enough milk - about 1 1/2 C - to make the mixture form a soft, smooth dough. Place in loaf tin an bake for 40 mins - 1 hour, or until the bottom of the loaf sounds hollow when tapped (NB: this has NEVER taken me an hour!) Wrap in a teatowel until cool OR, alternatively, flout the Rule of the Edmonds and eat it hot and buttery. I ate two pieces lovely and warm and the rest is sitting in slices in the freezer now. I have never tried freezing it before, but I'm not too worried.


Look kids, I'm always on the lookout for a good, cheapish recipe for a nice sandwich and toast bread, something that I can pair with marmite and with nutella, with cheese and with jam, and yet something that is tasty. This bread is not quite there yet - it's just a little dull - but it has a crackly crust and a lovely soft texture and that's what I like in my sandwich bread. Plus I can fix the taste, the problem is just fixing it so that I can eat it with everything - add herbs to it, sure, it turns into herby bread, but can you put nutella on it? Or even peanut butter? No. So this is not the perfect bread, and I am taking recipes, but I like it for now.

Ingredients
5 C flour
1 t sugar
1 t salt
2 T active yeast
3/4 C cold water
2 T oil
3/4 C boiling water
Small quantities of oil and water and egg or leftover egg yolk or white or fuckit just use milk for the egg wash.

1. Combine 2 C flour, sugar, salt, and yeast. Add cold water and oil and immediately add hot water, stir til a paste forms ad leave for 2-3 minutes. Gradually mix another 2 C flour into the mixture.

2. When flour is mixed in turn out and knead until the dough is smooth and elastic, adding flour as appropriate from the reserved 1 C. Oil a large bowl, cover, and place in a warm spot until it has doubled in size - around an hour, I guess?

3. Punch down and remove from bowl, kneading again for ~5 minutes (Note: I did about a minute, 5 seemed like a lot, and so I had a very fluffy fairly dense bread - it's possible that kneading more here would produce a firmer bread? I need to take a bread class.) Divide dough into 2 lots and shape into a ball, then place both balls inside one prepared loaf tin, one at each end. Cover and rise in a warm place until doubled in size or up to the rim of the tin, another hour. Preheat oven to 200 C (400 F).

4. Brush surface of dough with egg wash (an egg, beaten; or an egg yolk and a tablespoon of water, beaten; or an eggwhite, beaten) and, optionally, scatter with poppy seeds, sunflower seeds, etc. (I do poppy seeds cos I love 'em.) Bake for 30 minutes or until the loaf sounds hollow if you tap it on the base. I slightly undercooked this, I think, and then I cut into it too soon, so half of it is in strangely-shaped slices and the other half is sitting there waiting too cool down and have a starring role in a freezer bag.

I'm skipping the nutella cookies because I've now been working on this post for an hour and a half and that's DUMB. (I was doing other stuff too plus still tired.) And I want to sleep. Got the recipe here on youtube and the woman says nutella in the FUNNIEST way. I can't tell if she's being ironic or not.

But I do want to put down what I did with the Weirdo Rolls.

Tui's Lazy-Ass Vege-Based But Not Actually Vegetarian Dinner: Egg and Carrot Rice Paper Winter Rolls

Serves... 2-ish, I guess?

1 onion, diced
1-inch cube of ginger, chopped finely
3 cloves of garlic, ditto

2 eggs, beaten

3 carrots, peeled and grated
6 (or so - your judgement) leaves of crinkly cabbage, sliced finely
1 spring onion (scallion), sliced

Soy sauce
Oyster sauce - why this recipe isn't vegetarian
Sweet thai chili sauce
Chinese 5 spices (not from China or, I assume, in any way related to China, that's just the name of the spice packet here. not sure what it's got in it except definitely anise.)

Rice paper roll wrappers.

1. Heat a little sesame oil in a pan. Toss in onion, garlic, and ginger, and fry gently until onion is soft. Turn up heat and pour in scrambled eggs - try to make it a thin stream or pancake, let it sit a little while on the pan, then start scraping away. It doesn't have to look pretty.

2. Toss in grated carrots, cabbage, and spring onion, and stirfry to taste. I personally like it so there's still a little crunch in my cabbage, but everything (especially grated carrot) is soft and tender.

3. When veges and eggs are ready tip into a bowl. In another bowl mix soy sauce, oyster sauce, sweet thai chili and 5-spices together to taste to form a sauce. Pour over vegetables and toss.

4. At this point I suppose you could eat this as a sort of hot salad. It's quite charming if everything is sliced finely enough because it has a soft noodly effect without actually having noodles. However, instead I rolled them in summer rolls style with the rice paper and ate them like that. When you get started this might seem like a little bit of an effort but once you get used to it it's no trouble and the results are really cute!

Comments

[eight_demands]

Wow, you're reading Wolf Hall for a book group? That is ambitious. When I ran a book group I couldn't pick any books with more than 300 pages or so, because no one would finish them.

(Wolf Hall is fantastic, though.)

[labellementeuse]

Well, keep in mind that this is my publishing course's students' book club, so this is a group of people who are
- studying to work with books professionally
- planning to have most of their job be reading
- really super busy because the course is intense and
- really poor,
and still said: hey, what we need is a book club! So we're all a bit mad for one thing.

And for the other thing, because we're poor we're not committing to all reading the same book every month - instead we're having themes. This month is the last ten years of Booker prizewinners. Now, I could have used my brain and just re-read Life of Pi for the Xthousandth time, but no! Instead I said I'd read Wolf Hall! and it is really super long and heavy and I am finding it pretty rough going, to be honest (I have 120 pages to go... yikes.) Like, her style! And the way it's been written... if she wasn't so good and interesting I would have thrown it against the wall, and I am enjoying it, honestly, but I think she was just a bit too clever, tbqh.

[katarik]

Chinese five-spice powder iirc is in fact based on traditional Chinese cuisine, though Mandarin or Cantonese I could not tell you for sure, but most commercial versions don't make it right because they don't use Sichuan pepper, and some versions use "Chinese cinnamon" (cassia) instead of straight-up cinnamon. Whether cinnamon or cassia was used first, I also couldn't tell you, but it's basically Sichuan pepper+cloves+star anise+fennel seed+cinnamon.

[labellementeuse]

How interesting! thank you for the education :)

I could definitely smell the anise, but yeah, the other stuff (esp. fennel) makes a lot of sense too. Thank you! :)

[katarik]

I like five-spice and found a couple recipes to make my own, if I, you know, felt like working that hard, so! I, uh, remembered what tends to go in it.

[labellementeuse]

Oh, neat. I always mean to make my own spice mixes - I really should make my own curry mix, for example - and never do because I don't have any bottles or jars to put stuff into (or places to put them in my flat's kitchen). Always sounds like fun though!

[katarik]

My problem is I rarely feel sufficiently invested to toast and grind the things -- I tend to carry a lot of tension in my shoulders and thus have horrible tension headaches, and do not want to work them that hard. And the old-fashioned coffee-grinders that can be used for spice-grinding can be hard to find, so one resorts to a mortar and pestle. And I will do it for a meal which I will then devour! But I won't do it for a spice mix to use in future.