Sourdough Bread

Whilst I was researching ginger beer plants, I learned more about microbiology than I expected. A proper ginger beer plant is a symbiotic organism containing a yeast (saccharomyces pyriformis) and a bacteria species (brevibacterium vermiforme) living together in a mutually cooperative culture. That's pretty neat.

There are other symbiotic microorganisms which humans make use of. For example sourdough bread is made with a "starter" which contains wild yeasts and lactobacteria, instead of shop-bought yeast. Just like the ginger beer plant, you keep your starter and feed it so it grows. When it has doubled in size you can take part of it to leaven some bread. As well as making the bread rise, the starter gives the bread a unique tangy taste.

As far as I know, there is only one authentic ginger beer plant. But there are many sourdough starters, with different qualities. I am trying to get hold of a couple to compare them, but I may try to make my own from scratch later today. Watch this space.

Soda Bread Recipe

This is the bread recipe for people who are scared of breadmaking. That's because it's not actually bread at all, it's really more like a great big scone. It's quick and easy and really pretty foolproof.

Soda Bread

Dump about 1lb of wholemeal flour (not strong bread flour, just regular baking flour) in a large mixing bowl, add 2 tsps of bicarbonate of soda, 2 tsps cream of tartar (or you could add 4 tsps of baking powder instead of the bicarb and cream of tartar, and if you don't have any cream of tartar, don't worry about it just go ahead and make the recipe anyway with bicarb only) a good grinding of sea salt and 2-4 tsps of brown sugar if you have it.

Mix it all together with your hands, and then add about half of a half pint of milk, stirred yogurt or buttermilk (who has buttermilk nowadays? If you have it, use it, but otherwise just use milk. Oh, and if you didn't have cream of tartar or baking powder, be sure to use buttermilk or yogurt at this stage. If you just have bicarb on its own and plain milk then your bread won't rise. It will still taste good, but it will be very dense and chewy). Mix the flour and liquid together and add more liquid until you have dough. Feel free to add a bit more liquid than I said if that's what's needed to make dough, and if you overdo the liquid, work in a bit more flour. It's not a fussy recipe. As long as you have a ball of dough you're doing fine.

Shape it into more-or-less a ball and plonk it on a greased baking sheet. Sprinkle a few porridge oats on the top if you like (you can add a couple of handfuls of porridge oats to the flour next time if you feel like a change). Make deep cuts in the top, as if you were thinking of cutting it into quarters but changed your mind. Then bake it in a moderate oven until it is done. It will puff up and come apart at the cuts you made, which makes it easy to tear into chunks with your hands. Soda bread cut into neat slices with a knife makes me laugh. I would look at it after about 30 minutes, and take it out and tap it on the bottom. If the top looks cooked and the tap sounds hollow I would call it done, but if the top looks pasty and the tap sounds dull I'd give it another 5-10 minutes.

Ginger Bread Men

When it comes to keeping kids happy for an afternoon, you can't beat baking. The secret is to let the kids do as much of the process as possible. The other secret is to be very relaxed about the mess, the appearance the finished product, and how long it's all taking. After all the object of the exercise is to have fun for an afternoon, not to produce picture-perfect cookies in a hurry.

We made gingerbread men. The kids did the weighing and measuring, stirring, rolling, cutting and decorating. The only thing they didn't do was putting the baking trays in and out of the oven. They helped me clean up whilst the gingerbread men were baking. And they also did the eating, of course.

Recipe - Cheesey Number Sixes

... or sevens, threes, thirty-fives, or anything else.

This is the recipe I use to make cheese straws in the shape of numbers for birthday parties. Kids like them, the dough is easy to roll and cut with novelty cookie cutters, and being a wholefood recipe it's even moderately healthy, for party food.

Cheesey Number Sixes

Rub 2oz butter into 4oz self-raising wholemeal flour with some salt and a pinch of mustard powder. When it is the texture of breadcrumbs, add 3oz grated mature cheese, and a beaten egg. Bring it together with your hands into a lump of dough. Roll out and cut into numbers with shaped pastry cutters (we got a set of 99 pastry cutters from Lakeland and it's one of the best things we ever bought, I use them all the time), or make a paper template and cut around that with a pointed knife, or cut long strips with a knife and shape them into numbers. Place them on a greased baking tray and bake in a moderate oven until they're golden (about 10 minutes).

Tea Time

Mel's Muffins

Sift 10oz wholemeal plain flour with a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of baking powder. Beat 2 eggs, half a pint of milk and 4oz melted butter together in a large bowl then fold in the flour gently. Add 3oz sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla essence and something else, such as:

• chocolate chips


• chopped apple and mixed spice


• lemon rind and poppy seeds


• fresh berries, such as blueberries, raspberries, chopped strawberries etc.

You can really make it up as you go along.

Drop dollops of the mixture into cake cases or holes in a muffin tin. Bake in a moderate oven (about Gas 6/200degrees C) until they're done (it depends on the size of your muffins - 10-15 minutes for little ones, 20-25 minutes or so for huge ones).

Rich Scones

Sift 8oz organic self raising flour with a pinch of salt. Rub in 2oz butter and stir in 1oz sugar and 2oz sultanas. Beat an egg in a measuring jug and add enough milk to make 1/4 pint of liquid. Mix the liquid with the flour and butter mixture until it forms a stiff dough. Roll it out and cut it into dinky little circles. Brush the top with the leftover egg and milk mixture and bake on a greased baking sheet in a moderate oven until the tops are golden (about 10 minutes). Serve warm with Steph's homemade hedgerow jelly and extra thick double cream.

Serve on your beautiful home-made recycled cake stand.

Recipe: Lemon Meringue Pie

Here it is, as promised - a recipe for the best ever lemon meringue pie. I know it looks long but trust me, it's really easy.

Step 1: The pastry shell. You can use your own shortcrust pastry recipe, or ready-made pastry or a ready-made pie shell. Here is my favourite shortcrust pastry recipe for when I'm really pushing the boat out. It makes the best ever mince pies, for example. Sift 7oz plain flour into a bowl with ½ teaspoon of salt. Make a well in the centre. Add 4oz diced softened (really soft) unsalted butter, 2oz caster sugar, 4 egg yolks and ½ teaspoon vanilla essence into the well and then rub in. In fact I usually heave it all into my food processor with a dough hook attachment and let it run until it looks like pastry. Bring it together into a ball and knead it lightly, then wrap it in clingfilm and chill it for at least half an hour before using.

Roll it out, but it's a b****r to handle, so if it falls apart when you try to line your greased 9-10” pie tin with it, don't panic. Just smoosh it back together with your knuckles, and feel free to cover any holes with leftover bits of pastry and work them in until you can't hardly see the join no more. Stab the bottom with a fork a few times, put a sheet of tin foil inside and fill with blind baking beans, dried chickpeas, or whatever you can find to weigh it down evenly. Then bake at 200°C, 400°F, gas 6 until golden brown and set aside to cool. Turn the oven down to 150°C, 300°F, gas mark 2 whilst you sort out the filling.

Step 2: The lemon filling. You can use a jar of Hedgewizard's lemon curd, but if you're making the lemon filling just for the pie it's more economical to use a slight variation: separate 3 eggs. The whites will become the meringue, the yolks become the lemon curd. Put the yolks in a pan with the juice of 2 lemons, 3oz sugar, 2oz butter and a tablespoon of cornflour. Heat over a moderate heat whilst beating all the time until the mixture thickens. Then quickly pour it into the prepared pie shell.

Step 3: The meringue. Whisk 3 egg whites until they form stiff peaks. Gradually beat in 6 oz of caster sugar, then spread the mixture all over the lemon pie filling. It's important to spread it right to the edges and seal in the filling. Don't be too neat smoothing down the top - I like quite a spiky meringue topping. Bake at 150°C, 300°F, gas mark 2 (you did remember to turn the oven down, didn't you?) until the outside of the meringue has turned sort of beige in places. It takes quite a while - meringues dry out slowly in the oven rather than bake. We're talking at least half an hour, perhaps more.

The meringue will be squidgy in the middle. It's supposed to be. Those meringues you get at the shop that are crispy all through like styrofoam, they're made differently with boiling sugar syrup and all kinds of messing about. Don't pay them no mind.

Eat your pie hot or cold. I prefer it cold. It doesn't need cream or ice cream or anything else. It is perfection; complete just the way it is. My sister, Steph, used to make individual mini lemon meringue tarts and they were really nice. The recipe is exactly the same but you'd cut small circles from the pastry and bake them for a shorter time in a jam tart pan (don't worry about the blind baking beans, but do prick the bottoms or they might puff up), then fill with little dollops of lemon curd and meringue mix, and bake them for a shorter time, until they turn beige.

Swedish Lemon Angels

Swedish Lemon Angels
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a small bowl or 2 cup measuring cup, beat an egg until foamy. Add 1/2 a cup of buttermilk (or 1/4 cup milk and 1/4 cup vinegar) and 1/2 tsp of vanilla essence and blend well. Add 5 tbsps baking soda, one teaspoonful at a time, sprinkling it in and beating until the mixture is smooth and the consistency of light cream. Add 1 cup of lemon juice all at once and blend into the mixture. Stir, but do not beat (you want it creamy, but without a lot of air). The mixture will congeal into a pasty lump. Scoop it out of the bowl with a spatula and spread it on a floured surface. Sift 7/8 cup plain flour and 3/4 cup of sugar together and use the fingertips to work it into the egg- lemon mixture. With a floured rolling pin, roll the dough out as thin as you can and with the tip of a sharp knife, cut out 'angel' shapes and twist the edges up to form a shell-like curve about 3/8" high. Sprinkle on more sugar. Brush each 'angel' with melted butter. Place the angels one inch apart on an ungreased baking sheet and bake for 12 minutes or until golden brown.

Frugal Mindset

One of the most difficult things about becoming more frugal is breaking out of the mindset that you must have the right product for every need. For example, it is possible to crush garlic without a garlic crusher, by using a knife. It is possible to liquidise soup without a liquidiser, by pushing it through a sieve, although it is laborious. It is possible to mash potatoes without a potato masher, by using the end of a rolling pin (in fact this is a better way of making e.g. swede mash which is tough to do with a potato masher). The kitchen seems to be a particular place where manufacturers like to sell us gadgets we don't really need.

I remember years ago making a measuring jug out of a 1 pint milk bottle. I filled the milk bottle with water, then shared the water between two milk bottles until the levels were the same. Then I marked that as my "half pint" level. Repeat the process to get a "quarter pint" level. Add a quarter pint to a half pint to get the "three quarter pint level" and so on.

I wrote this post because yesterday I tried out a method for making bread in the microwave. Of course I needed a microwavable loaf tin - or did I? I could have bought one from the Lakeland shop a short drive away. Or I could look in the cupboards and find a variety of rectangular plastic containers, including washed margarine and ice-cream tubs, which would do a good job. In the end I opted for yet another solution - I made a cottage loaf instead.

It's rewarding being ingenious, and once you get in the habit it gets easier to think of creative frugal solutions to problems. I thought it would be fun to pick your collective brains and see what lateral solutions you can come up with to the following situations:

• How can you make a recipe calling for 2oz butter, 4oz flour, 2oz sugar without weighing scales?
• How can you make macaroni cheese without a cheese grater?
• How can you dry clothes with a clothesline but no pegs?

Pumpkin Cake

Do you remember the monster pumpkin we were so kindly given at the beginning of November? I'm sure it was left on our plot for Hallowe'en, but we didn't pick it up until a few days later, so it was too late to carve into a lantern. Did you ever wonder what happened to it?

We kept it - pumpkins store very well as long as they are not damaged and are kept cool and safe from rodents. Ours stored on top of the fridge for over 2 months, and then one day last week I cut it up and made it into lots of pumpkin puree and froze it in batches.

What will the puree be used for? Well pumpkin soup is an obvious possibility. There are lots of good recipes here - my favourite is the coconut chili and pumpkin soup. I also make a cracking pumpkin pie. But recently I've found some more surprising uses for pumpkin. For one thing, I found a recipe for a delicious moist cake made with pumpkin (pictured) which all the children will eat! It has vegetables in it, but they eat it anyway. God bless Harry Potter, that's what I say. And I've invented pumpkin griddle cakes. They're scrummy. So scrummy in fact that I'm quite relieved the kids won't countenance them - that leaves more for Ed and me.

Pumpkin Griddle Cakes
Simmer 1lb pumpkin pieces in a little water, strain and lightly mash with a fork. Make sure you strain them well, squeezing a bit if need be to remove excess water. Melt 2oz butter into the mashed pumpkin and mix well. Mix salt, pepper and grated nutmeg into the buttery pumpkin mash, then stir in 4oz wholemeal plain flour. This makes a sort of sticky dough. Heat a frying pan and grease it with a little butter. Using your fingers make a few walnut-sized pieces of pumpkin dough and drop them onto the frying pan. Fry until golden on one side (only about a minute if the pan is hot enough) then turn over, and squash them down a bit with the back of a spatula to make flattened cakes about 1/4" or so thick. Fry until golden on that side, then remove from the pan and keep them warm whilst you cook the remaining batches of pumpkin griddle cakes. Serve hot.

Pumpkin Pie

Pumpkin Pie

Step 1 – Making the pumpkin puree
I usually make this pie on Hallowe'en using the scooped-out centre of the pumpkin I carve for the children, or you could buy a pumpkin for the purpose (or a couple of butternut squashes), in which case you'll have to peel it (the skin is quite thin), cut it in half and discard the seeds and the stringy material around them, then cut the flesh into chunks. Either way, boil what you've got with just a little water until the flesh is soft. Line a colander with a clean tea towel and let the cooked flesh stand until all the excess water is drained off. Then puree the pumpkin, either by rubbing through a sieve, with a food processor or hand blender, a ricer, or with a potato masher. I find that one Hallowe'en pumpkin usually yields about 2lbs of puree, so you could make two pies, or freeze some to make another pie later in the year. 2 butternut squashes makes 1lb of puree, just enough for a pie.

Step 2 – Making the pastry case
You can use your own shortcrust pastry recipe, or ready-made pastry or a ready-made pie shell. But this is my favourite shortcrust pastry recipe for when I'm really pushing the boat out. It makes the best ever mince pies, for example. Sift 7oz plain flour into a bowl with ½ teaspoon of salt. Make a well in the centre. Add 4oz diced softened (really soft) unsalted butter, 2oz caster sugar, 4 egg yolks and ½ teaspoon vanilla essence into the well and then rub in. In fact I usually heave it all into my food processor with a dough hook attachment and let it run until it looks like pastry. Bring it together into a ball and knead it lightly, then wrap it in clingfilm and chill it for at least half an hour before using.
Roll it out, but it's a b****r to handle, so if it falls apart when you try to line your 9-10” pie tin with it, don't panic. Just smoosh it back together with your knuckles, and feel free to cover any holes with leftover bits of pastry and work them in until you can't hardly see the join no more. Stab the bottom with a fork a few times, put a sheet of tin foil inside and fill with blind baking beans, dried chickpeas, or whatever you can find to weigh it down evenly. Then bake at 200°C, 400°F, gas 6 until golden brown and set aside to cool.

Step 3 – Making the filling
Turn down the oven to something lower, because the pastry is now cooked, and all you want to do is gently set the pie filling. Beat 1/2 a pint of cream lightly with 3 eggs, the grated peel of a lemon, and 5oz caster sugar. Stir this mixture into the pumpkin puree and add 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of ground ginger, 1/2 a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and 1/2 a teaspoon of ground cloves. Combine thoroughly, then spoon the filling into the pie shell and bake until set and brown.


Serve the pie cold with something creamy. It looks nice with whipped cream piped on top, but it tastes even nicer with a generous dollop of extra thick double cream on the side. Or I like it with something a little bit tart, like crème fraiche or Greek yogurt. Enjoy.

Experimental Baking

My sister Steph is visiting, and we had an experimental baking day. The cherry oatmeal ginger cookies were good, as were the baked custards, but the best result was finding that butternut squash makes delicious pumpkin pie. Squash are also cheaper than pumpkins and available all year round (you can pretty much only find pumpkins at Hallowe'en in the UK).

I Feel Like Quiche Tonight

Tonight's dinner, vegetable quiche. Photo by Eleanor Rimmer.

What, you want a recipe for vegetable quiche?

Oh, go on, then.

Vegetable Quiche

Sift 6oz wholemeal flour (chuck in the bits that won't go through the sieve) with a pinch of ground sea salt and rub in 3oz butter until it goes like breadcrumbs, add iced water and mix until it turns into a soft dough, roll out and use to line a quiche tin. Chill the pastry whilst you make the filling. Get a selection of vegetables (I used half a cauliflower, a couple of carrots and a leek), cut them quite small and boil for five minutes. Strain and put them in the quiche case. Beat 3 egg yolks with 4floz double cream and 4floz of full cream milk, season with ground sea salt and freshly ground black pepper and plenty of freshly grated nutmeg and pour over the vegetables. Top with a handful of grated cheddar cheese and bake in a moderate oven until set (perhaps 20-25 minutes).

Make a couple whilst you're at it. They freeze well, and anyway, it's Ed's favourite.

Bakin' a train, high on cocaine

Part of adopting a more self-sufficient lifestyle has involved considering what I am throwing out, and what I am buying in. For example, every now and then I used to buy a pack of sandwich bags for lunchboxes, freezing food, crafts and other uses. At the same time I used to throw out dozens of plastic bags a month - bread bags, the inners from packs of cereal, bags that fruit and veg had come in. When you stop and think about it, it's crazy. So now I have a cupboard stuffed full of assorted plastic bags waiting to be reused.

On the other hand, you can't hoard everything forever or your house would become unliveable-in, so you have to throw some stuff away. Or better still, give it away to someone who wants it. That's why I subscribe to freecycle, a free mailing list that puts people with stuff they don't need in touch with people who want the stuff the other people don't need.

It's one of those wonderful win-win things that give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside. On the one hand, someone came and took away my old chest of drawers for nothing, to go and be loved and used by someone else. And on the other hand I have collected some things I needed, like a huge chest freezer, or a vacuum cleaner, from people who didn't want them any more.

In the last few days I picked up a 3-dimensional train-shaped cake tin
and a large array of Grateful Dead cassettes. Now I suppose I need to find some stuff to give away, in order to rebalance the cosmic karma. Or just to stop myself from being crushed by my own clutter.

Home cooking

My first ever entirely home-produced meal. Chive omelette, steamed baby courgettes, three leaf salad with radishes, and peppermint tea. Every ingredient grown by us. I didn't even add salt and pepper, and I have to say I didn't need to either. It was delicious. Why don't you come over for lunch sometime?