Cheese on Toast

I'm afraid I can't remember why now but on Tuesday (18th) I had cheese on toast for my tea. Obviously just not that hungry!

Real Bread English Muffins

Some things are born out of awfulness and these muffins were one of them. When we were staying at the B & B in Ilfracombe I went for a toasted muffin with beans and scrambled eggs for one of my breakfasts. The muffin was awful. It was white and claggy in the middle and completely tasteless. 

This brought me to the recipe in the River Cottage Bread Handbook for muffins. 

I made the dough using a mix of wholemeal and white flour and then let it rise.

I shaped the muffins as directed in the book and left them to prove until they were double their original size. 

Once they had doubled in size they were very delicate. I didn't want to knock the air out of them while transferring them to the pan but it was very difficult. As a result some of them became quite funny shapes. 

I was a bit worried that they weren't cooked properly but actually they cooked just fine in about 15 minutes in a pan on the hob.

The muffins were put to the ultimate test and were split, toasted and topped with scrambled eggs.

They were great! I was so pleased that the recipe had worked. The muffins were a great texture and actually tasted of something - yipee!

I love making my own bread, it is such a simple yet satisfying thing to do. I'm now taking my bread research into greater depth and have begun reading Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley which is a very detailed book on what exactly goes into your supermarket loaf. It's not pretty reading. 

Veggie Mexican with Real Bread Tortillas

This is one of the meals that has developed over the years. I got the idea when we were at uni and the boys in Mr VST's flat made us a Mexican meal one evening. 

I've always done the usual veggie mix but I used to use old el paso spice mix. Now I just use my own cumin, paprika and chilli powder.

I also used to buy the same brand of soft flour tortillas but since I started making my own bread I thought I'd have a go at these as well.

This time I used 50/50 white and wholemeal plain flours, I managed to make eight decent sized ones, not too crunchy this time, not too thick and easy to fold.

Real Bread Cheese on Toast

After a weekend of eating good food and stopping by Kingsley Village and partaking of half a Rowe's cheese and onion pasty and half a vegetarian cheesy Scotch egg I didn't feel much like eating dinner. I went for a snack instead, two slices of cheese on toast made with lovely home made granary bread. 

The cheesy scotch egg was made with a mix of mashed potato, spring onion and not a lot of cheese instead of the sausage meat. The breadcrumbs had obviously been deep fried and as a result were light and crispy. The vegetarian scotch egg was an interesting item, definitely worth a try. A cheesy overdose last weekend it seems but it was gooooood!

Chips and Real Bread Butties

We were heading down to Cornwall on Friday and so picked up some chips on the way back from work. 

 We had real bread butties which were nice but somehow I usually end up regretting buying chips. They're never quite as nice as you think they're going to be.

White Bread but still Real Bread

As I explained in my previous post my brother came to stay over the weekend. He's not much of a brown bread fan so I thought I'd make some white bread for him. 

It was quite strange making a white only dough. It felt kind of wrong and looked very pasty.

I made six plain white bread rolls, a tin loaf and a 'free style' loaf with a mix of seeds on it.

The bread rolls were lovely and soft as was the loaf. I think Mr VST managed to demolish five of the rolls in less than twenty-four hours! I put the seeded loaf in the freezer and made some cheese toasties for lunch with the tin loaf which were lovely. Haven't had a cheese toastie for ages. I'm going to use the rest of the white loaf to make a bread a butter pudding. The white rolls were a bit plain tasting compared to my usual white/wholemeal mix but they were still a million times better than the cotton wool rolls you buy both taste wise and texture wise. Great post on the difference between two here.

Veggie Mexican with Homemade Tortillas

This whole making your own bread thing is a real work in progress, every time I make it I learn something new and these tortillas are no exception. 

The first time I made them they were made with strong bread flour instead of plain and I made them too small.

The second time I experimented with different sizes and thicknesses and this time I made them with 40 per cent wholemeal plain flour. They were pretty good this time. Some a little crispy where I had rolled them too thinly but mostly they were good.

The veggie mix is still the same old recipe though, whatever vegetables are in the fridge mixed with some quorn chicken style pieces a tin of chopped tomatoes, some chilli powder, cumin and paprika. I have been slowly increasing the amount of chilli as Mr VST's tolerance increases!

Granary Bread

The week before last Mr VST and I had fluffy, tasteless, cotton wool granary rolls with our Quorn burgers and as they were so tasteless I agreed that I would make some of my own.  

 Last Sunday we went to Otterton Mill and picked up a bag of their granary flour.

 I followed my usual River Cottage bread recipe and made eight rolls and a 750g loaf.

 The loaf was bigger than the ones I usually make and took quite a bit longer to bake properly. In fact it probably needed even longer than I left it but it still tasted lovely. 

The rolls were great too and I had one for my tea with cheese and sun-dried tomato chutney that my Mum had made last year. Absolute perfection, even if I do say so myself.

The granary flour smelled amazing from the moment I opened the bag, right through the dough stage and course the baking stage too. It is a really warm malty smell and taste too, the crust is especially tasty on these babies.

Big Veggie Breakfast with the Family

My Mum, her partner and my little sister have been in France for the last two weeks. Their ferry got in at 7.30am this morning and our place was on their way home so they popped in for breakfast. We started with Mr VST's home made granola, which went down very well and then followed this with some potato waffles (I'd like a recipe to make these myself), home made baked beans, real bread toast, scrambled eggs and Linda McCartney vegetarian sausages. It all went down well with a pot of French coffee and several pots of Earl Grey tea.

 

After that lot we were quite full up. We had a nibble on some delicious orange dark chocolate the Mum had brought back for us and went to visit Mr VST's brother, wife and our new niece. We went for a lovely stroll with them and had lots of cuddles and an ice cream. When we got back I had some cheese and crackers and Mr VST made himself easy macaroni cheese, cooked pasta with grated cheese mixed in, both lovely. 

Real Bread Success!

We managed to eat the last batch of real bread in about two weeks and so we needed some more. On Tuesday evening I made some more. 

 This time I used the all in one mix method from the River Cottage Bread book as I was concerned that I wasn't able to mix the yeast in properly and wasn't distracted by any call outs and it came out really well.

Real Bread Chip Butties

On Tuesday evening we were both late back from work, 6.45pm for me and 7pm for Mr VST. When he came back from work he was starving and couldn't wait an hour for me to cook dinner so he offered to go to the chop shop. We had some delicious real bread chip butties too. Lovely!

Bread, Crackers and Cheese

We had run out of bread earlier in the week and so I decided to make some more on Saturday. I mixed as usual and kneaded before leaving it to rise. Mr VST and I went out shopping and then had to go out on a call. I called Mr VST and asked him to knock it back before leaving it to rise again and then I continued with the proving and baking of it later in the evening. I had forgotten to shape it properly during the process and the cuts didn't work as well as they had the last couple of times. I put the bread in the oven and it didn't rise dramatically as the previous loaves had. I thought that this batch wouldn't be as tasty as the last ones had been. I cut open one of the loaves and had a few slices and to be honest it wasn't that different from the last batches and it was still a hundred times better than supermarket stuff. I had some cheese and crackers while I was waiting for the bread to cool down.

Chip Butties (made with Real Bread)

Mr VST and I were planning to be healthy on Friday and have some of his home made pesto and pasta with salad. Sadly the pesto had gone mouldy and we resorted to the chip shop instead. Even the chip butties were better with real bread and this surprised me because I've always been a white, plastic bread kind fan for chip butties.