Wholemeal Loaf.

Our computer died.  Oh how I struggled without it.  I do a lot of work from home so it was a bit of a disaster.  It also means I am behind with my blogging and I missed two of the challenges for Short and Tweet. 

It's okay, though, as I managed to get up and running in time to post this wholemeal bread.  Now this is not a very exciting or flashy recipe.  But it works, it is easy, and it is wonderful.

Obviously this is a recipe from Dan Lepard's Short and Sweet.

I won't post the recipe but obviously you can find some of Dan's recipes on the Guardian website.

Now, this bread is made with entirely wholemeal flour which made me worry it would be quite dense.  It's not.  It is lovely.  It has a crunchy crust which contrasts with the soft and light bread inside.  I first had it with butter - perfect - then for breakfast with strawberry jam.  The lovely chewy and nutty flavoured bread is the perfect partner to sweet strawberry jam.  I then made ham sandwiches for my lunchbox and they were beautiful.  I much prefer wholemeal to white bread.  It has more taste and more texture and then there are the obvious health benefits. 

But are they so obvious?  

Wholemeal bread is a great source of insoluble fibre which pulls fluid into the stool and decreases the transit time of food through your digestive tract (doing exactly what many laxatives do - would you rather a tablet or horrid drink or just a great piece of bread?).  This helps to reduce constipation (and therefore things like anal fissures and piles) but also reduces the risk of colorectal cancer.  I know that I'm probably preaching to the converted but you would be amazed how many children I see in my surgery with constipation caused by a diet poor in fibre.  These children have all sorts of problems now - constipation is a very painful problem, some children then get encopresis which is an unpleasant leakage of faecal matter (imagine how much of a social problem this is for tired Mums constantly having to clean soiled pants to older children who are ridiculed for pooping in their pants or being smelly) and, of course, -  in later life they will suffer from the discomfort of piles and a higher risk of bowel cancer.

Sorry, I didn't mean for this post to turn into a big nag but it is so important to prevent these problems and so very easy.  I say easy but I am well aware of how difficult it is to get children to eat what you want them to eat.  I do think it helps if they see their parents eating a diet high in fibre and eventually you should be able to persuade them to do the same.  As you may be able to tell, I am slightly obsessed with getting my boys eating lots of fibre.  I'm not perfect at it but I am trying.  We very rarely eat white bread.

I hope I haven't upset anyone who wasn't quite expecting to be told about yucky stuff like this when they came to read about bread but maybe it is better that we talk about these things. 

If anyone is having any problems with their child being constipated or soiling - please see the fantastic resources from ERIC. 

And for another good 

Cake Slice Bakers 14 - Fail.

This month we were to make Creamy Pumpkin Cheesecake from our new book The Cake Book by Tish Boyle.  First off I notice it is decorated with ginger spiced pumpkin seeds and I don't do ginger but no problem, I can just leave that out.

Next I have to worry about getting the canned pumpkin.  I imported some for last year's Pumpkin-Chocolate Chip Pound Cake (my first ever bake with The Cake Slicer Bakers but I didn't really want anything else from the US so didn't fancy paying the delivery charge just for this one thing.  However, a friend let me know of a place that sells US things quite near by.  (Mains Of Drum for anyone local who is interested - quite a nice selection of classic American goods.)  So, I took the boys for a trip to get some and managed to get two tins of pumpkin.  All set to make the cheesecake.

Somehow, though, I just kept putting off making it.  There was always something more important to do.  I finally decided that I had to get it done and it dawned on me that I wasn't getting on with it as I didn't really fancy pumpkin cheesecake and wasn't sure that anyone else in the house would particularly want it either.  But I had bought the pumpkin.  

It suddenly became clear - I would use the pumpkin to make last year's cake instead as we had all loved it.

I made two of the Pumpkin-Chocolate Chip Pound Cakes.  The only difference from last year's one was that I changed the walnuts to pecans and I used a bar of dark chocolate chopped into rough chunks instead of the chocolate chips. Oh, and I had enough batter to make about 8 cupcakes too. 

I must say I would choose cake over cheesecake any day.

If you want to see the cheesecake, though, please go and have a look at the Cake Slice Blog Roll.

Cheesy Buttons.

This is my second recipe from Short and Sweet by Dan Lepard for Short and Tweet, the Twitter challenge by @EvidenceMatters.

The recipe was originally published in the Guardian in 2008.  I don't know why I didn't make them at that time because this is right up my street!  Anyway, I made them today and will take a box of them round to my friend's house for our book club tonight.  I think they are a really classy little nibble and they were amazingly quick and easy to put together.

These are rather moreish.  I'll have to leave for book club soon or there will be none left to take with me.  Dan Lepard says this is a great recipe for using up odd bits of cheese you have in your fridge and I can see me doing these quite regularly.  Certainly the perfect thing to take to book club.  Does anyone else have any good suggestions for nice quick easy nibbles for a book club gathering?

Munchkins!

I got some lovely munchkin pumpkins mainly for decoration for the house over Halloween.  I also meant to use them for styling for blog photos but didn't get round to it.  However, once Halloween was past, it came time to eat the things.

I saw this recipe from Eat Like A Girl posted on iVillage. 

The only thing I did differently to the original recipe was to scatter on some grated gruyere for the last 5 minutes of cooking.  Oh, and I made different sizes so put the bigger ones in the oven to start with and added the teeny tiny ones after 10 minutes or so.  The teeny tiny ones were perfect for the boys.

We loved this dish.  I really thought we would just eat it as a way of using up the decorative pumpkins but, in fact, I would buy the munchkins just to make this dish - it was yummy.  The roasted pumpkin had a lovely nutty taste and each one tasted slightly different to the others.  The cream and cheese were so comforting and then there was a lovely little kick at the end from the chilli. And how unbelievably cute are they to serve to the wee ones?  

Roast Onion Soup with Thai Spices (RR 10).

A bit of cross-breeding in blog challenge world has resulted in Random Recipes Does No Croutons Required or No Croutons Required Does Random Recipes depending on which host you visit.  So this month we all have to make a soup randomly chosen from our recipes at home.  This challenge runs to the end of the month so plenty of time to join in for anyone who fancies a bowl of warming soup.  Just click on either of the links.  

I opted to use random.org to get a number then counted along my cookbooks and landed on Real Cooking by Nigel Slater.

  

Look how young Nigel looks there!

Anyway, I went to the index and found that there are 10 recipes listed under "soups" so I used the random number generator again and it chose Cream of Roast Onion Soup with Thai Spices.

Nigel calls it "Sweet, sour, hot and creamy.  A soup to invigorate".  I have to agree.  This was absolutely delicious.  Amazingly easy to put together and tasted like it took way more effort.  I love the Thai flavours here (I missed out the ginger) and thoroughly enjoyed it.  It's a funny soup - both comforting and warming, and also refreshing and zingy - really hots the spot.  Glad I made this recipe.

Recipe - adapted from Real Cooking by Nigel Slater.

Serves 4.

Ingredients - 

4 medium sized onions

4 plump cloves of garlic

1 L of vegetable stock

1 tbsp Thai fish sauce (Nam pla) - now this recipe is supposed to be vegetarian for the challenge so you can just miss out the Nam pla unless anyone has any great ideas for a vegetarian substitute for me?

2 small red chillies, seeded and chopped

400ml tin of coconut milk

Grated zest of 1 lime

Juice of 2 limes

Method - 

1. Cut the onions in half vertically, skin and all.  Place in a roasting tin and roast at 200C/GM6 for about 45 mins, turning once.

2. Add the whole garlic cloves after about 20 mins.

3. When the onions are golden and soft, peel off the skin and slice into big chunks - whatever you think you can eat without making too much mess!  Nigel doesn't slice his at all - just separates the layers but either my onions were too big for that or my mouth too small. 

4. Drop into a deep saucepan.  Add the roast garlic, squeezed from the skin, the stock, the fish sauce and chillies.

5. Bring to the boil, turn down the heat and simmer for about 20 minutes.

6. Stir in the coconut milk, bring back to simmering point, then taste for seasoning. Add salt or soy sauce if needed.  I added some of my posh soy sauce for the depth of flavour and a little sea salt for an extra kick of saltiness.  

7. Add the lime zest and juice just before serving.

Short And Tweet.

I have joined the world of Twitter.  Still finding my way but enjoying some of the chats between my fellow food bloggers and meeting new ones.  I have been following @dan_lepard who writes the "How To Bake" section in the Guardian Weekend.  I also noticed that a few of my fellow bloggers were raving about his new book, Short and Sweet  - ummm Vanessa, are you being paid by Dan for all the promoting you have been doing? ;-).  I bought the book a few weeks ago and have been enjoying flicking through it.

It seems to be a comprehensive baking book and has obviously come out at just the right time with all the news reports of a spike in sales of baking products on the back of The Great British Bake Off.  I believe Paul Hollywood's book will be coming out in about a year (yes, I follow him on Twitter too) so I hope that its release coincides with an equally popular new series of GBBO.  Knowing me, I'll probably get myself a copy of that too - will be good to compare the two books.

Anyway, I have joined Short and Tweet, a weekly bake challenge using recipes from Short and Sweet (obviously). This challenge is run on Twitter by @EvidenceMatters.  What a great way to get me using the book.  I won't be able to do it weekly but will join in when I can.  In fact, I missed the first one which was to bake Chocolate and Almond Fudge Cake but I managed to do the second and baked Olive Oil and Potato Flatbread.

I did this today.  Dan says it is a focaccia-style dough and the method involves a long rising time with intermittent stretching and folding which should give you those lovely big open holes in the dough. (Remember how keen on those Paul Hollywood was in GBBO?)

Unfortunately, I just didn't have the time to follow his schedule exactly so missed out some of the rising and folding.  However I still ended up with a lovely focaccia-like bread.  I had some medium sized holes in my dough and the bread was quite chewy with a crispy, salty crust. I did struggle to get it out of the tin - it was a very sticky dough - and even with plenty of olive oil on the tin, it stuck a bit.  I may have made the dough too sticky.  I sliced it up and got on with making my soup for Random Recipes which I'll post in the next few days.  This was a big mistake.  I couldn't stop eating it as I worked in the kitchen so by the time I served the soup to my family, there was only about half the bread left!  I suppose that shows that it was a great bread!  Or maybe just that I'm a greedy pig.  Steve and the boys enjoyed it too.

I might try it again some time when I feel I have the time to do the recipe properly but it won't be a bread I make very often.  Will need to stick to my quicker, easier every day loaves while I have such young children.  Mind you, if I was in for most of the day, it only means a minute or two of attention every half an hour or so - maybe it was just trying to get it done today to be on time for the challenge that was the problem.  It certainly is a very tasty bread, though with a fantastic chewy texture and I am extremely pleased with it.

Halloween Party.

I have mentioned my group of friends from our antenatal class before.  Well, I have to say, we throw fantastic parties between us.  We share out what needs to be done so we all bring a dish or two, someone brings drinks, someone else does party bags, someone does the games.  We have had so many brilliant parties over the last 4-5 years.  Here was last year's Halloween Party. 

This year's Halloween on was at our house.

I made savoury pinwheels and meringue ghosts with forest fruits and cream and Steve made a pumpkin soup.

Others brought a parsnip and apple soup, spooky jellies, home-made toffee apples, spider biscuits, hot chicken dip, vegetable crudites, hot spiced cider and other bits and pieces.  We ended up having a real feast.  All the kids were so cute in their costumes.  We also had fun and games for several hours and then finished off with brilliant party bags.

This is such a fab time in my life.  So much fun. 

Okay, so my meringue ghosts I copied from a cut out from a magazine that I saved from last year.  I can't now remember what magazine it was.  I did try searching the net for the original but didn't find it.  However, there are loads of recipes on the net and videos showing how to do it too.  The Art Of Being Perfect did them this year too and she has a recipe on her post.

I got the idea for my savoury pinwheels from this post.  I thoroughly recommend Utterly Scrummy Food For Families. I get loads of ideas for easy meals here.  I recently made her pumpkin pasta bake too and may post about that later.

For my versions of the pinwheels, I made one with pesto, olives and parmesan and one with a tomato pasta sauce, sundried tomatoes and cheddar.  They were very easy to assemble and made a lovely little party dish.

So, off to another Halloween party today and it's not even Halloween yet.  We like to stretch celebrations over several days.  Hope the ghosties don't get any of you tomorrow night.