recently cooked

[vaznetti]

It has been very warm in England recently -- around 30 C which is the high 80s and hot for us -- so since coming back from Portugal we've mostly been eating salads and grilled chicken. But then I went to the farmer's market, and A got about three pounds of redcurrants from a colleague, and we had Spartacus' end-of-school picnic. So since Wednesday we have produced the following:

1. Cake brownies
2. Redcurrant ice cream (and we may try home-made ice cream again)
3. Crayfish salad sandwiches
4. Gooseberry cheesecake
5. Red(?) snapper with tomato and spinach
6. A lot of salad

And now I am going to embark on making ALL the redcurrant jelly. We still have strawberries, raspberries and cherries to eat, too.

I am also thinking about making sourdough starter this fall, and making sourdough bread on a regular basis; I really love it, and good sourdough is so expensive here. But my only breadbaking experience is with the occasional challah. What do you all think? Am I crazy? Is it worht a try?

Comments

[adafrog]

Gooseberry cheesecake? huh.

mmm...sourdough...

[vaznetti]

I've posted the recipe just above. I think you could do this with any tart soft fruit, and amount of fruit you need is pretty much "as much or as little as you want"

[miss-porcupine.livejournal.com]

I say go for it with the sourdough. I made all of my own bread for a few years (not sourdough, admittedly) and I found the experience generally worthwhile, if not exactly my favorite thing to do in the middle of a heat wave. But you've also got Spartacus, who will probably find bread kneading and shaping to be fun to help out with or even just to watch, so there's that.

If you're looking for a bread book, I recommend Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice for a very technical (but understandable) approach.

[vaznetti]

I have a bread book, actually, which I'll use for the starter and the various sourdough recipes in it (Paul Hollywood, who is the UK's baking hunk of the moment). It's very step-by-step, which I need. I'm thinking of doing plain white bread a time or two to get started, before launching into the sourdough experience. I won't make all the bread, but sourdough is so expensive that I really want to give it a try.