Fast food, and bread

Well, I was a busy bee yesterday evening. After that humble cheese sarnie lunch I posted about, there was dinner to take care of. As I'd just come back from a tedious and frustrating meeting at S's school, I was in no mood for fancy cooking, so I bought a French stick from Shephard's in Boston.

When I got home I took those sausages from the mixed grill and squeezed out the meat from inside them. Once they'd released a bit of juice into the frying pan I added some beaten egg and cooked it all together like this:

Meanwhile, S was buttering the bread and chopping up some of those tomatoes and cucumber, so in the space of about ten minutes we went from zero to this for dinner:

Now I defy you to tell me how a ready meal could be as tasty and wholesome as that! Sorry about the rotation, I can't be bothered to investigate the HTML to find out why it's un-rotating pics that I rotated on my computer before uploading them to here.

After I'd gotten that down me and had a bit of a sit down and caffeine fix, I felt more like doing some more cooking. So I got tomorrow's bread sorted - did I promise in another post to show you how I make bread? I might've done, but in any case here's how... 

First I put half a kilo of bread flour in a bowl with half a teaspoon of salt and then, because I'm using flour from the windmill, I use twice the amount of yeast (3tsp) and a teaspoon of sugar to help it get going. This is because it's local wheat, and English wheat can't make as strong a flour as the stuff you get in shops, which is mostly Canadian and has a much higher gluten content than our humble grain. English wheat needs a bit more of a helping hand to get its rise on. This I know from working at a windmill for years and watching Fay's amazing demonstrations. 

So, we start off with this: 

Then add in about 300ml of warm water - I find if I run the hot tap until it's not quite hot enough to hurt if I put my hand in it, that's about the right temperature - so you get this: 

Which I start off mixing with a fork then pull it together with my hands and knead it, sprinkling more flour on if necessary to stop it sticking. You want to keep kneading it till it's soft and stretchy (though it probably won't be as stretchy as dough made with Canadian flour) and can roll around on the worktop without sticking, but only just. Then put it back in the bowl, sprinkled with flour so it won't stick to the sides too much as it rises. 

Leave it in a warm place for half an hour to an hour (an airing cupboard is ideal, but in this case I just left it on top of the stove as the oven was on underneath) and it doubles in size to this: 

Then you want to prise it out of the bowl and knead it again to knock as much air out of it as you can. I tend to be a bit lazy at this stage, so there's usually the odd little air pocket in my bread when it's cooked, but that doesn't overly bother me. Feel free to go for it though if you want perfection! 

Once I'm done with kneading, I make a sausage shape and put it on a lightly floured baking sheet with some expansion cuts like this: 

I have sometimes used a loaf tin, but I tend to avoid them because of a) total and utter confusion over the sizes of tins viz the amount of dough that goes in them, largely due to the annoying habit of recipe writers to call them things like "a 2lb loaf tin" and - well, I've said before how I feel about imperial measurements and b) when I've Googled these arcane terms to find out the actual sizes of the tins in centimetres, and realised it's the same size tin I've got in the cupboard, the bread has only stuck in the tin anyway and I couldn't get it out without ruining the loaf. I do intend to work this out at some point, but right now I can't be bothered, and just use a baking sheet. Which means my loaves have a tendency to do this: 

Which some more expert bread maker will no doubt tell me how to correct if I can ever ask for one's advice without fear of coming away overloaded with extraneous info that I'll never remember. I suspect it might be partly to do with my oven not heating evenly, which is because it's not level, which is because I haven't been bothered to pull it out and adjust the height on the legs at the back (are you detecting a theme here?). It doesn't matter anyway, as it still slices okay for sandwiches and toast: 

So I'm not fussy. 

I also did some pumpkin purée, but I'll put that in a separate post or this one will get too long and data-heavy to load. See, I'm thinking about you folks on your tablets and smart phones :)