I got all excited last night and cooked up a feast. Boccolini with Kecap Manis, Stir fried mixed vege’s with chilli and hoisin, lemon chicken and chicken teriyaki, with rice and prawn crackers. I was full as hell at the end of all this. All the vege was grown in the garden. About as close to self sufficient as we can get.

Take a buttload of passion fruit.

Add another buttload of sugar and the juice of a lemon and boil the crap out of it for an hour.

Bottle in some sterilised jars and consume when cool.

None of this 2min packet stuff, ramen should be a good and healthy meal. Not that this is a traditional ramen in anyway, its made with chicken stock, from the bones of 4 chickens i broke down into pieces rather than pork, its got chicken breast rather than rolled pork belly, and its got vegetables in it, because how else can you make tasty food taste like sad LOL and some of that sad is kale and spinach. Anyway, it was yummy and filling, just what you need during winter.

When life gives you cucumber, make cucumeraide 🙂

Step 1: Grow more cucumber than you can eat.

Step 2: brine overnight in a strong salt solution.

Step 3: put clean jars in the oven at 100 deg c to sterilize and place the lids in boiling water with sterilizer.

Step 4: Select your spices.

Step 5: prepare picking solution, 1 cup sugar to 1 cup vinegar and bring to the boil

Step 6: Spiced go in bottom of the jars, 1/4 tsp pepper corns and mustard seeds, 1 heaped tsp of dill.

Step 7: Pack the jars with the cucumbers, pour over the hot pickling solution, remove as many air pockets as you can and seal the lids up.

Eat them in a couple of weeks time.

 

We don’t eat beef all that often, but when we do, you might as well go big or go home. Locally grown beef and potatoes with some green stuff LOL

Locally produced thick cut bacon and free range eggs on toast with espresso coffee.

 

Cooked this bad boy apply pie up this morning 😉

Check out these bad boys, fresh out of the oven.

And a before pic, before they went into the oven. Cant wait to fang down on one of these. They are mighty tasty.

Final product. And yes they are yummy LOL

 

Now that I have plenty of time on my hands, I have been playing with high hydration break making. This took all day in prepping and just came out of the fireplace oven.

Good bread making is all about technique. So for this loaf I started with 500g flour, 350g yes grams of water, this gives about a 60% hydration ratio, a teaspoon of salt and the same of yeast. I weighed out everything and put it in the stand mixer and kneaded it for 5mins.

It was then left to rest for 30mins and transferred to large tupperware container for proving. Every hour i returned and stretched it out and folded it into 3, that went on for 6 hours, before it was shaped and placed in a rattan bread mold for the final proving and cooking in the fire at bloody hot degrees C.

Now i just need it to cool enough so that I can cut it open and see if i have nice air bubble formation. It should have some, but it really needs to be done overnight and be closer to 24hours before it would get nice big holes.

Edit: I am going in the right direction with this. Nice chewy texture.