I feel like Paella tonight....

IMG_6183, originally uploaded by SimonButlerPhotography.

Here is my meal tonight - Chicken and Chorizo Paella. And even if I say so myself, it tasted blooming gorgeous.

Jonny Botham!

Jonny has been cricket-mad for the last 5 and a bit years.  He has loved playing the game with both me and his Grandpa but in the last few months he has joined a local team to hone his skills.  Yesterday I took along my camera to one of his nets sessions to try to capture him practising.  I soon discovered that I really need  a 70-200 f/2.8 IS but my Sigma 70-300 APO would have to do…

Jonny also did quite a lot of bowling but because I didn’t want to get other kids in my photos I didn’t take any of him steaming in.  May be next time if I get all of the parents permissions!

Stop! Hammer time….

This month in the AVForums photo competition the theme is “Song Titles”.  Having wracked my brain for ideas I decided to go down the literal route and have chosen a song so cheesy that you could grill it on bread and have it for lunch.  This is the photo – can you tell what the title of the song is?

Yes, that is right, I’ve based this on possibly one of the best songs of all time from the genius that is the Hammer:

Unfortunately because I have taste I don’t own a pair of Hammer pants so you had to make do with my boring outfit instead.  But I believe as Mr Hammer says, my outfit is still word.

A day of alternatives

Yesterday I cooked two of my favourite things using methods that were different to my normal, tried and trusted methods.  Why?  Well, I fancied a change.  The things I cooked were a no-knead bread loaf and roast chicken.  And unfortunately the new fancier methods didn’t improve either.

First off, the no-knead loaf.  For over a year now I have been baking this bread in a casserole pot with a lid on.  It struck me a couple of days ago I could use my pizza stone instead with the casserole pot up-turned on top of the stone to cover the bread.   Tried this yesterday and although the resultant bread was a pleasing shape (and I found it was much easier to slash the top of the dough) the bread itself wasn’t quite as nice as normal.  The base wasn’t as crunchy and neither was the overall crust.  Don’t think I’ll be repeating this and will be going back to my normal method.  Anyway, here is what the bread looked like:

The second alternative, was the roast chicken I made last night.  Instead of my tried and tested Nigel Slater method – his classic, unmucked-about-with roast chicken – I followed the supposedly revolutionary Beer Butt Chicken recipe.  This method is a bit of a Ronseal method as it involved putting a half-drunk can of beer up the butt (as the American’s put it) of a chicken and then roasting it.  Apparently the resulting chicken is to die for so I was keen to try it.  So I cracked open a can of Becks Vier, drank half of the can (was a tough job!), stuffed it up the bottom of the chicken and placed the chicken in a roasting tin with some garlic and celery.  I had already covered the chicken in a little olive oil, salt and pepper.  By the way, it was a corn fed chicken hence the yellow colour:

I then roasted it for 1.5 hours and this was what it looked like at the end:

And this was what the final meal looked like:

So how did the chicken taste?  Well, it was very nice.  But was it nicer than my 10 year old tried and tested method?  No.  The breast meat was a little drier than normal and didn’t justify the more fiddly method.  The chicken fell down a couple of times during the cooking so I had to stay in the kitchen the whole time listening out to check it didn’t fall over again.  So although the method appealed to the Neanderthal Man lurking deep within me – beer and chicken, what an amazing combination! – I don’t think I’ll be repeating this soon.

So the moral of this story is that if you get consistently great results using your normal methods, there is no need to change them!

No-knead baguettes

Last weekend I when I blogged about baking a Dan Lepard bread recipe I mentioned that I had bought myself the Jim Lahey book called My Bread.  Today I tried out one of the recipes from the book – Italian baguettes called Stirato.  In the book the recipe makes 2 large Stirato but I decided to make 5 smaller ones so I could easily freeze them and use them for both my daily work sandwich and also Jonny’s school lunch box.

The dough is identical to the normal no-knead bread dough except I replaced the usual 1/4 tsp of yeast with a 1/4 cup of sourdough starter that I made for the Dan Lepard bread.  This dough was started yesterday afternoon and left to ferment overnight. 

This morning I separated the dough into 5 pieces and created 5 long sticks.  I proved them for 30 mins and then baked them in batches.  To bake them I placed the sticks on a baking tray pre-heated to 250 °C covered with an over-turned clay baking dish I had lurking unused at the bottom of a cupboard.  I had pre-heated the dish too.  Putting the dish on top of the baking tray enclosed the sticks in their own little steam oven so the finished Stirato were extremely crunchy on the outside.  I baked them for 16 mins enclosed at 250 °C and then 9 mins uncovered at 200 °C.  And this is how they turned out (with the clay baking dish in the background):

The Stirato  were perhaps a bit rustic looking but I think that adds to their charm

Here you can see what the Stirato looks like once sliced open – very airy with large aeration holes, a bit like Ciabatta:

And here is my lunch, a cheese and ham sandwich with added orange pepper so I could at least claim this was a healthy snack!

More snow

Like what seems like the whole of the UK I’ve had a lot of snow these past couple of days.  This is the view out of my bathroom window this lunchtime after the latest batch of snow.  It is a stitch of 20 photos joined together to make a very wide angle scene.  Unlike most of my panoramas I decided to leave it showing the joins as this has a Hockney-esque quality to it….

Best viewed large on black by clicking here.

New Year, New Bread

This Christmas I was lucky enough to be given Dan Lepard's The Handmade Loaf book. And an excellent book it is too.  Dan was a keen photographer and he then got into baking.  As well as writing all the recipes in the book he also took all of the photographs – and excellent they are too.  A photographer who likes bread baking -  that sounds familiar!

I have been getting a bit bored of the one no-knead dough recipe that I have been using this past year so I fancied a change.  So I tried Dan’s White leaven bread recipe and was pretty impressed.  It is not a short recipe because I needed to make the sourdough starter first and this took 6 days!  And once the starter was ready it took almost all of yesterday to make the bread.  In his book he suggests starting the bread at 8.00AM and baking the bread at 5.30PM.  As yesterday was New Year’s Day the 8.00AM start didn’t happen!  So at approx 11AM I started and had the dough in the oven at about 9.30PM.

Once it came out of the oven approx 30 minutes later it looked like this:

I then left it overnight to cool and sliced it at lunchtime today to make a sandwich.  The crumb was certainly airy with lots of large holes:

And this final photo shows what the sourdough starter (what Dan calls the Natural Leaven) looks like after the 6 days of fermentation and one refreshment:

 

So how did the bread taste?  Very nice although it had already started to go a bit stale having been left out for over 12 hours so I don’t think I tasted it under the best conditions.  However, I am encouraged and will try out some more recipes from Dan’s book.

As well as Dan’s book I also spent some vouchers that my Niece Izzy kindly gave me for Christmas on another bread baking book.  This second book is by Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery in New York, the inventor of the no-knead recipe that I have been raving about in the past year.  The book arrived today so I will look forward to trying out some of the recipes. So look out for some more bread photos in the coming weeks and months!

A month in review….November 2009

A bit late with this.  I had meant to finish off my review of the year before the end of the year but failed.  So I’ll complete the review of 2009 early in 2010.  Here is November with December to follow.

November was a month of fireworks, karate, a trip to Germany and my dinner.