Blog posts

For the dinner party last night we had one guest who won’t eat cooked vegetables!  What to prepare that he will eat?  Pulled pork sandwiches as the main, along with coleslaw.  For appetizers I served pork, shiitake mushroom and Napa gyoza that I made a while ago and froze.  These are great to have frozen so you can save prep when having a dinner party.  The pulled pork was made using my Instant Pot.

We had guests over last night for dinner so wanted to make a pie for dessert.  As you might know I love sour cherries and love rhubarb so decided to make a pie with both but this time with a streusel topping.  For pate brisée recipe look at this previous post.

Admittedly, I am aware and I have spoken emphatically about the importance of calibrating pH meters. My training in the wine lab has instilled the habit of calibration each and every time prior to use, in that environment.

Why then have I been so lax with my bread and dough meter! Perhaps it is the domestic setting that gives rise to such a laid back approach. Then again, even in the work place I have been deemed as a 'laid back' kind of guy!

A variable section for each recipe, nothing too intricate needed as mainly guidelines.

• Adding details, real times, rating, extra notes, methods, links,

No real need for the full recipe method, just the highlights are enough to be getting started and nudges as the day progresses. Extra baking notes for the actual bake sitting with timings, for those final stages.

Conversions to save searching for them each time, initially started off as a set of links. But rather than adding a link to elsewhere (although quite a few have been included) for some basic information. Thoughts dictated that it should be more of a one-stop shop for:

Still doing some test baking of the Sweet Lupin product kindly supplied by David from The Lupin Co here in Western Australia,

 During the 1960’s a very clever man named Dr John Gladstone from University of Western Australia (UWA), developed one of the first commercial lupin varieties especially for the Australian environment.

I'm really enjoying making this style of pizza.  It is quite filling and one pizza makes two dinners for us.  This time I didn't have my usual all purpose flour so used bread flour.  I also used whole wheat flour this time instead of either spelt or kamut just to try something slightly different.  I don't find that I can taste much difference between the pizzas made with the different flours since the toppings really are the most prominent flavour of the pizza. 

So I needed a dessert for brunch so decided to bake a cake.  This recipe interested me because 25% of the flour is whole rye (the recipe calls for medium rye but I used whole rye) along with olive oil.  Both gave this cake more complexity than straight AP flour and a neutral oil would.  Also, in a nod towards making it lower fat I substituted Greek yogurt for the sour cream.  This is still acid enough to leaven the cake, although a bit more acid might have given it just a bit more of a boost.  This cake delicious and will keep for days given the olive oil in it.

We had friends over for brunch this past weekend and decided that a savory strata was going to be served.  So of course, I needed to make a challah for this, but didn’t have enough time for a sourdough challah due many other things happening.  So here is my recipe for a IDY fast all in less than a day delicious challah with some whole wheat.