Elizabeth David maintains that dried active yeast doesn't need any sugar to reconstitute, and that letting it work slowly gives you better bread. I'm not entirely convinced by it, but Elizabeth David is one of the people with whom One Does Not Argue if one is wise, and I'd really rather not use any sugar if I can avoid it.

It's certainly clouding nicely, though not producing any perceptible froth (it's had about five minutes so far - one with the 1:1 mixture of yeast granules & sugar that the tin recommends would have a small amount of froth). If it hasn't done anything after another half hour I might add a pinch of sugar to kickstart it.

Tags: bread, cooking, food

( recipe )

Tags: cooking, food

Tonight's dinner-of-sorts (odd sleeping habits mess up mealtimes, sadly): roast red pepper stuffed with rice seasoned with fresh ginger, tarragon, and chopped apricots. Will have to remember this mixture for later, it works well.

( Edited to add the actual recipe, in order to preempt requests from Certain Parties. )

Tags: cooking, food

Looks like nou has been a good influence on me, at least in departments other than the going-to-bed-early one.

This one's terribly simple, I got it straight out of "A Wolf in the Kitchen" by Lindsey Bareham. Quantities, as always with my cooking, are approximate.

Potatoes, some. I used eight medium-small ones, boiled (slightly too much, I thought, but it seems to have worked out).
Eggs. Half a dozen.
Onions, one and a half large red. Diced.
Salt & black pepper, some. Chervil, dried, lots. The recipe says tabasco, but I didn't have any, so I just grabbed the first thing from the cupboard that went with eggs.
Um. That's it.

Boil the potatoes. Start the onions frying, then when they're about half done tip in the potatoes.

While they're on, crack the eggs into a large bowl (I used a ceramic casserole dish for these quantities) and whip them up with the seasonings. Leave to stand, then when the other half is edibly done tip it into the bowl and mix them all up a bit.

The oven should be warmed up by this point, at 150 Celsius or whatever that is in Foreign, and the dish (naturally) goes in there for ten or fifteen minutes. It's largely comprised of egg, so you'll be able to tell when it's Done.

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I ended up making it by the standard soup methodology, ie. bung it all in the pan and don't let it boil. Works out pretty well, though I made far too much (and now have all the Nigerian pepper soup in the world ever) and it would've been better if I'd actually had a blender.

Tags: cooking, food

(Edit: bad typing redacted.)

This was prompted by remembering the international food fair from my days at Cranfield - it was about 85% foreign students and at the beginning of every academic year they rounded up as many nationalities as possible and induced them to do ethnic food stalls. We had Russian borscht (with Hellman's Mayonnaise) which didn't impress me much, thin & watery, but thickened up a bit it would be lovely. Iraqi applish semolina, French apple pancakes, African stew (the gentleman apologised profusely for not having been able to get goat for it. Bit hard in the middle of nowhere, Home Counties). And a rather gorgeous Nigerian fish soup containing approximately three kilos of black pepper.

Googling around, it seems to go sort of like this - the lady who made it wasn't all that interested in explaining it at the time, she just liked having people eat it.

FISH. Lotsa fish.
Pepper. All the recipes I've found say chilli peppers or even ahbaneros, but I distinctly remember black pepper so I'll use that. All the black pepper in the world ever.
Tomatoes.
Onion.

I'm figuring on pan-frying small chunks of fish in large quantities, then just doing a long slow tomato sauce stew thing with the pepper and some previously fried onions, and then seeing whether it worked and what else I need to do with it.

Tags: cooking, food
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