It’s been a busy day in the kitchen. Just the way I love to start my week too. I have 2 loaves of sourdough on the rise (modified recipe which I shall post if it works well), frozen blueberry and raspberry yoghurt ice-creams in the freezer for the kids, homemade ice-cream freezing, sprouted spelt wheat in the dehydrator, sourdough starter feeding, barm brack and gem scones in the oven, both made substituting homemade date paste instead of sugar, mashed potato with salami and cheese in Thermy for lunch, banana milkshakes, made and I’ve made date paste too. Thank goodness for my Thermomix is all I can say.
I love baking. I pretty much hate cooking, the traditional way with saucepans etc, although I don’t mind it so much with my Thermy and I dread the usual “that’s yuck” I get before even tasting from my cheeky wonderful children. Dinner every night is a chore, and one which I must soon address too. 😦 Baking however, I can lose myself in. Even though the Thermy takes away most of the hard yakka kneading and stirring and most particularly so with bread, I still find I have to give it a hand knead or stir and then shape it in to the pan for baking. Bread making. It’s one of those old world jobs, performed in some form or variety, around the world and has been done for centuries. I feel a kin-ship with the women and men of ages past kneading and pummeling the dough with their floury hands. Inevitably Orik wakes and screams his head off right in the middle of the most floury part but apart from that it feels like my contribution to the art that is baking. And I am by no means an artist. I am merely a mimic of the greats. I may tweak and twist a recipe to suit my tastes and needs better but I lack that skill the greats have to recognise when I have created a masterpiece. I strive only to please the taste buds of my family and any friends who have inflicted upon them receive something from my kitchen. Apart from the healthful goodness of home baked and mostly organic bread, including the extra nutrients from freshly ground flour, the one thing that keeps me bread making on a near daily basis is the smell. In my huble opinion there really is nothing better than the aroma of freshly baked bread, piping hot from the oven, turned out of the pan to cool (except maybe the smell of that self same bread freshly toasted the next morning with a hot coffee;) ).
My house at the moment is bathed in the aroma of fresh gem scones, cooking barm brack, rising sourdough (it bakes in another hour or so) and the gentle aroma of harvest from the drying spelt.
What is your favourite thing to cook?
Rabid Little Hippy 