Detail from the background of a wartime family photograph, of which more later. A Google search reveals that the poster;
Your Inner Man warns you
Meat needs Mustard
dates from 1940.
Category: Food
Howgate Wonder
It’s been our best year so far for our Howgate Wonder double cordon. I pruned off all the extraneous growth early in the year and I’ve just given it a summer prune, leaving two or three buds on each twig to encourage fruit buds to form.
Freshly Baked
The sourdough from the Flour Station kept us in bread for a week and it’s inspired me to get back to breadmaking so I made this farmhouse loaf today, using a multi-grain flour along with the strong white and strong brown.
I drew it with a .25 Rotring Rapidoliner then added the bolder lines with a .70. My great hero amongst Victorian art critics, John Ruskin, is emphatic that this illustrator’s trick of adding variety to a drawing is always bad practice. Sorry about that John.
Wheatgerm Levain
We can make a wholemeal loaf in a few hours, so why would you want to take several days over it?
Here’s the answer; this wheatgerm levain sourdough has been made by the artisan bakers of the Flour Station, Borough Market, London, the slow way using a culture of wild yeasts, giving it an extra depth of flavour. It’s got an individual character – old fashioned and rather malty – compared to with loaves made with sachets of dried yeast that we use.
Many thanks to Amy Appleby of the Flour Station for giving us the chance to sample this robustly rustic loaf.
It arrived just in time for lunch so I couldn’t wait to draw it before we cut into it. Later I brought it up to my studio to draw and it now smells of homemade bread in here.
It makes toast with attitude; a robust compliment to the honey I spread on it. Goes well with piedmont peppers, for dipping and mopping up the juices. It made crunchy croutons to sprinkle on a salad and we’re just about to use it as base for a bruschetta . . . or will we try a roast veg toastie . . .
Link: the Flour Station; ‘The Flour Station story started in 2002 in the kitchen of Jamie Oliver’s award-winning Fifteen restaurant in London . . .’
Rhubarb Festival
We’re settling down again after a weekend promoting my walks booklets at Wakefield’s Rhubarb and Food and Drink Festival, although Barbara works in a bookshop so it’s not such a change for her! We were guests of Trinity Walk shopping centre.
As it was a food festival, in addition to selling books we couldn’t resist doing a bit of bartering and we exchanged a copy of Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle for a box of four muffins from the next stall! But we spent most of our profit on takeaway lattes from Cafe Costa to keep us warm as the breeze funnelled around the precinct!
Robin Hood’s Wakefield
Saturday proved to be the best day, when Morris Dancers created a suitably festive background. It conjured up an impression of what it must have been like when Trinity Walk was a part of the town known as Goodybower, ‘God’s bower’, where statues of saints from the parish church, now the cathedral, were paraded, displayed and decorated with ribbons and flowers and where some performances of the town’s guilds’ cycle of mystery plays took place.
Mystery plays of course had a religious theme, although the second play in the cycle, Cane and Abel, could claim to be the world’s first murder mystery.
Cursed by God, Cain taunts his fellow men to capture and kill him;
And harshly when I am dead,
Bury me at Goodybower at the quarry head
The quarry was approximately where Trinity Walk had set up the stall for us, later the site for Wakefield’s market.
One of my booklets retraces the steps of a Yorkshire Robin Hood, a Robert Hode who lived in Wakefield but who found himself outlawed after the battle of Boroughbridge. There are several walks exploring the town’s connections with the story, at Sandal Castle and Pinderfields for example, the latter associated since medieval times with Robin’s great rival and supposedly cousin, George-a-Green, the Jolly Pindar of Wakefield. Then there’s a walk around the battlefield site itself at Boroughbridge and a tour of Brockadale, including the look-out post at Sayles, mentioned in the earliest Robin Hood’s ballads and still overlooking both the ancient Great North Road and its modern dual-carriageway equivalent.
The book ends up at Kirklees Priory, long associated with the death of Robin and supposedly the site of his grave.
Rough Patch
We were pleased that we sold as many Robin and Liquorice walks books as we did the Rhubarb, which was good considering theme of the festival. It’s so encouraging for me when people have done all the walks in two of the books then they come back for the third in the series. I feel that I must be doing something right.
Because of the local food connection we were also selling my sketchbook from the wilder side of the garden, Rough Patch.
It was good to meet up with several of our friends, including people we haven’t bumped into for several years, who had spotted that we would be there and come along to see us. I saw my junior school teacher from 1960 and an illustration student of mine from my days at Leeds college of art, then part of the polytechnic, from 1983.
Shopping malls aren’t my natural habitat but, as there’s a ‘Walk’ in the name of this particular shopping centre, perhaps I’ll get a chance to link up with them again.
After three four hour stints at our cart I have enormous respect for retailers and all the hard but unseen work that they put into to making shopping a seamless experience. They make it look so easy!
Don’t mention the rain
As the dark clouds whipped themselves up on the Friday morning, the street cleaner who regularly patrolled the precinct kept our spirits up;
‘Don’t talk about the rain and it won’t come!’ she advised us.
She was wrong, the shower came through just the same, but at least she made us smile!
Link; Trinity Walk
Pan Rustica
IF YOU want to make a pan rustica you need to start 24 hours ahead. This rustic Spanish loaf uses a yeast starter to give extra flavour; dried yeast, a little sugar, warm water and, when it starts frothing, flour. Left in a bowl covered with cling film overnight it smells slightly of fermenting beer in the morning.
It’s half way to being a sourdough, so when I’ve tried this recipe a few times I might feel ready for the week-long process of developing a sourdough starter.
You add the starter to a straightforward bread mix, plus a little more yeast to give it some extra rise.
This results in a sticky dough. I’m following the recipe from The Hairy Bikers’ European Bakeation television series and they advise you to resist the temptation to add extra flour, which I would have done by the fistful. As they emphasise throughout the series, the softer the dough, the lighter the loaf and the slower the process, the more the flavour develops.
The advantage of having watched the series, rather than just reading the method, is that I remember that even the hefty Simon King struggled with this dough. It sticks to the worktop but I remember his action of pushing the gloopy mass forward with the ball of his hand and pulling it back in with his fingers.
This pulling back helps trap air in the dough. After the first rising you gently stretch and fold the dough back on itself three times to trap more air in it.
I was surprised how much it rose during its 20 minutes in a hot oven, 240°C.
I’ve always wanted to get this variety of texture in a loaf, with a variety of bubble sizes. The loaf that I usually bake has a regular texture.
It’s softer and not as nutty as our regular farmhouse loaf which has more wholemeal flour in it and mixed grains. But it has a pleasantly rustic flavour . The fermented character doesn’t dominate but it’s there in the background.
Link Hairy Bikers’ pan rustica recipe.
Soda Bread
I FOLLOWED Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s Family Cookbook recipe when I first made soda bread yesterday, halving the ingredients as there were only two of us. We didn’t want any leftovers as it’s best eaten warm from the oven but even half quantities made a substantial little cob (left).
So today I cut down the quantities a bit more so that we had just enough for three small scones (above). Doing it this way you get more of the rough crispy crust and you can be sure that it’s baked all the way through. The centre of the larger cob had turned out a little bit doughy, although it’s supposed to be soft and moist on the inside, so that’s what you’d expect.
We decided to add chopped fresh chives and a couple of tablespoonfuls of grated double Gloucester cheese, saving a sprinkling for the top of each scone.
Yogurt provides a mild acid for the bicarbonate of soda to react with, producing the bubbles of carbon di-oxide which makes the bread rise.
Cheese & Chives Soda Bread Scones
- 50g plain flour
- 50g plain wholemeal flour
- ¼ tsp salt
- ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 90ml plain yogurt
- 2 tbsp chopped fresh chives
- 2 tbsp grated cheese
Turn to oven to 230°C.
1. Seive the flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda into a bowl.
2. Add the yogurt and stir.
3. Using your fingers bring the mixture together into a smooth dough. If it turns out too sticky add more flour. Add the chives and three-quarters of the grated cheese and mix them in too, but don’t overwork the mixture. No kneading is necessary.
4. Divide the mixture into three balls, place them on a non-stick baking sheet on a baking tray. Score each of them deeply with a cross to allow them to rise and press the remaining grated cheese on top of them.
5. Put them into the oven for 5 minutes then turn the oven down to 200°C and bake for another 5 minutes or so. They’re ready when if you turn one upside down (being careful to avoid the melted cheese!) and tap the bottom it sounds hollow.
Great with homemade tomato soup. We’ve got a bit of glut of tomatoes at present and, thanks to my inconsistent watering in the greenhouse, many of them had split their skins so soup was the best thing to do with them.
Guilt and the Good Life
SHOULD I BE spending more time at my desk? Well of course . . . but there are other things in life.
We fitted in a session weeding the onions when we got back this afternoon which I can’t say was urgent but it’s one of those jobs that, if left, leads to bigger problems later on. The onions get 
swamped by the competition and you run the risk of damaging their roots as you remove the by then established weeds.
I have to admit that I prefer weeding, at least when it is as easy as this, to the fiddly business of sowing and planting out crops. No decisions to be made, a fairly mindless activity. It’s the first time I’ve used my little hand-held onion hoe for the job that gives it its name; weeding the narrow spaces between the rows of onions.
A spoonful of honey
After that half hour in the garden I took time out to bake a farmhouse loaf, again not strictly necessary – we could easily have picked up a loaf on the way home – but it’s such a pleasure to do. Being pressed for time after everything else we’d fitted in today I went for a recipe which doesn’t require knocking back and a second rising, saving 30 or 40 minutes.
This recipe includes a couple of spoonfuls of honey which gives the yeast a bit of a boost, helping speed things up. The hint of honey works well with the country grain and rye, which I add to the basic mix of white and wholemeal flour.
Rye Loaf
AT LAST the frogs are back, well two of them, but when I spot them this afternoon they’re actually making their way out of the pond. It’s warmer today but it’s likely that it’s going to turn cold again so perhaps it is as well that no spawn has appeared as it could still at this late stage run the risk of getting frosted.
Two pied wagtails flitted about on the terra cotta tiles of the house roof opposite in this morning’s sun, which must have been enticing overwintering insects to emerge from the nooks and crannies. The wagtails briefly mate, or attempt to mate.
Today’s loaf is my attempt at at Paul Hollywood’s ale and rye bread. It proves quite a workout as the dough, to which you add a couple of teaspoons of black treacle, proved to be stubbornly sticky. Perhaps the froth on pale ale caused me to underestimate how much liquid I was adding.
But it’s got lots of character and flavour and it looks more or less like the one in the book.
Bloomer
THE PROOF will be in the tasting but this bloomer is the best-looking loaf that I’ve baked so far. It gets its name because it ‘blooms’ in the oven and I admit that I was concerned that it looked a bit flat and floppy when it went in. You start it off at quite a high temperature, 220°C, so the steam must give it an extra rise.
We couldn’t resist the new Paul Hollywood Bread book and we’ve already tried the pitta bread and his twisted wholemeal cob (which isn’t in the book). I think that I’m now ready to move onto the malt loaf and the rye, ale and oat bread.
When we cut into it, it had a good crust and even texture. Nothing wrong with the taste but I prefer the nuttiness of wholemeal and multigrain loaves but it does make nice toast. I cut down the suggested salt by two thirds so I’ve got to accept that I’m going to lose a bit of taste there for the sake of being marginally more healthy.