Last Okara Ploaf!

It was so nice to be sat at work and know that my little oven womb was working away making me a beautiful loaf, and the thought of coming home to that fantastic smell of baking bread. YUM.

Well, this was the last time that I will use okara in bread. I have tried, and tried, and tried. I have made about 6 loaves of okara ploafs. I will make no more ploafs, or at least of the okara variety.

For whatever reason, substituting some of the flour for okara isn't working. Perhaps it's because the okara isn't milled fine enough, it could be that the substitution is throwing the gluten content out. Most likely, it's because the moisture content is all wrong, to start with my okara is damp. I am far far FAR to lazy to dry it out in the oven. I'm sure that because it doesn't absorb water at the same rate of an equivalent amount of flour thats the problem.

Perhaps finer grinding would help, but oh well. Easy come easy go. I saving money by making soy to start off with, so a little wastage isn't w big deal. No wastage would be fantastic, but thats not going to happen at this point.

So there you have it. If someone tells you that you can make great bread using okara, they are most probably not telling hte truth, or they know something that I don't.

Green Turkey Curry

So last night Totty decided that he would make himself some Green Curry for dinner. He took some of the Curry Paste out of the freezer and away he went.

1 meduim yellow onion
300g Raw turkey Breast
2 medium carrots
1/2 can Coconut milk (about 1 1/4 cups)
1/2 pint stock (from cube)
1/3 cup green Curry paste (see recipe from 7/1/07)

All of the really complicated work was done with the curry paste, so this is a nice and easy dinner, and with rice this would serve two polite people.

Chop the onion roughly. Think chunky here. Fry that off with a little sunflower oil, don't let it get colour, you just need to start the cooking off. Throw in the peeled and chopped carrots, cook for a few minutes.

Put in the stock. Now Totty used half a pint, and later on in the cooking he said that everything was a little watery, so I would guess to use about half, and adjust for taste.

Add the Turkey and the Green Curry Paste at this point. The reason that I say to add now and not to fry it with the onion is this; the turkey that I bought was VERY lean, no bones no skin and I didn't want Totty to have dry turkey. I went out and bought some fresh turkey, you could certainly use leftovers, or a different meat for that matter.

Perhaps it would have been fine fried a little, I don't know. It's been such a long time since I have eaten meat, I've kind of lost an idea of when some things are good.

Add the Coconut milk, turn the heat down and let everything simmer for a while. Totty had a bit of a taste and said that everything was a bit mild for his taste, so he added a couple of small chilies finely chopped. By the time the rice was done, the curry was. So simmer time was about 25 minutes. Just enough time to play a little Runescape.

Verdict from Totty "Bang on". So this Curry paste is worth making.
I'm planning on making myself a vegetarian version this evening, and I am really looking forward to it.

One thing that I really liked about this was that it didn't stick to my stick to everything pans. HUZZAH!

**Bread Recipe Update**

I have made a bit of a tweak to the bread recipe that I have been using. The quantities previously have been a little unreliable. It's surprising how small tweeks can make such a big difference, and that's why accuracy in measuring is so important.

Brown Bread Machine Bread

1 1/2 cups water
2 tbsp + 2 tsp sugar
2 1/4 tsp salt
2 cups white bread flour
2 1/2 cups brown bread flour
1/3 cup rye or oats
1/4 cup + 2 tsp oil (I use plain olive oil sunflower)
1 tbsp + 1/2 tsp yeast

Put everything into the machine in the order listed (unless your bread machine tells you otherwise), so that the yeast is sitting on the top of the ingredients dry. Use the wholemeal cycle and choose dark crust if you have that setting.

As I said before my machine advertises itself as making a 1.5kg loaf.

Green Curry Paste

Now, I got a goo on to make some curry powder. Seeing as I had just gone through my cupboards and checked what spices I have, and that there was a nice bunch of coriander sitting on my counter top. It was only fitting that it turn into a green curry paste.

I have no clue if this is how green curry paste is made. And quite frankly, I don't give a hoot if this isn't the way that it should be made. Experimentation is a fantastic thing. So this curry paste is a bit of a work in progress.

I hope that this tastes OK, because the quantities seem to have got away from me a bit. That's not uncommon though. Often I will start off in the BIG pan because sooner or later I will end up using that one.

So here we go.

Ingredients
2 tbsp Coriander seed
1 tbsp Fenugreek (whole)
1 tbsp Whole Black Pepper
1 tbsp Black Mustard Seeds
1 tbsp Yellow Mustard Seeds
Ginger - Pealed amount about as big as your thumb
4 fat cloves of Garlic
1 Bunch Coriander (use everything, the leaves, the stalks and the roots if you are lucky enough to have them!)
1 Green Finger Chili
2-3 Small chillies (the ones that I have are about an inch long)
Sprig Mint
Oil

I toasted the spices in a dry frying pan, shuffling them around on the heat. I declared them done when I heard them pop. With the mustard seeds I used a splatter guard because the mustard seeds jump out of the pan.

After partially grinding this up in the pestle and mortar, my arms were aching. So, I tried adding a bit of sunflower oil to see if that would help. Which it did a little, but not enough to make much the job to hand much easier. Then I decided to use a much easier method and used my stick blender, to make everything into a pulp.

I think that I must have used about a third of a cup of sunflower oil, I didn't measure it. Instead I kept adding it until there was enough for the blades to make a nice paste.

The aroma was fantastic. My little house was smelling lovely and the nice mellow smell of the spices stuck to my pestle and mortar. Yum.

The only thing that I can't give you is a good photo of the end product. I tried, and, tried and tried. I just couldn't get a dark green paste to look appetising at all. Here it is anyway!

Seeing as me and the lovely Totty had already had dinner this went straight into two small freezer bags, all ready to pull out and use as and when.

Properly Back and on Track

Hello, and I wish you all the happiest of a new year. I hope that you all get rid of the extra padding that you have aquired over the festivities, unless you got a boob job, then I hope that they stay pointing the way that you paid for them to point.

So back to business, back to food!

My laziness over the Christmas and New Year meant that I took photos of people and not food. Ahh well, I'm sure that you don't all want to see the pictures of comedy Christmas presents, and comedic pictures of Christmas drinking. Needless to say, I am still making small trips to the bottle bank. Next year I WILL buy cans because Dublin City Council has a recycling scheme that will pick up cans, but not glass, or plastics for that matter.

Anyway! Cooking thought the book.

I made Polenta, Page 278 in Fields of Greens.

Now Polenta is new to me, I've always been a bit aware of it, but I've never eaten it, and never really seen it, so I am flying blind here.

I spoke to an Italian friend of mine about what to do with Polenta. Her advice was that it is very demanding visually, meaning that you shouldn't take your eye off it. And to put something really tatsy with it, because it is quite bland.

Now the recipe goes as such:-
6 cups water
1 and a half teaspoons salt
1 and a half cups coarse cornmeal
Quarter teaspoon pepper
2 Tablespoons butter
Half a cup Grated Parmesan

Now what you do is this.

Boil the water, until it is at a nice rolling boil, and whisk in the cornmeal. Add salt and keep on a low boil for 20-25 minutes stirring frequently until the grains are open and the Polenta is smooth.

It is at this point that I was pleased that I had not really thought much when I was buying the cornmeal and luckily I had bought the quick cook variant that advertised itself as ready after 3 minutes. Phew, that means a lot less stirring and less scrubbing because I am not the proud owner of nice pans. My pans are NOT to be trusted unattended and in charge of small children.

Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the cheese and pepper.

Anyway, here is the resulting goop.


So that wasn't bad, about 6 minutes whisking, yes I did it a bit longer than the pack recommends. I then left it to cool covered in cling film.


Now when it came to eat, yes it was just to bland to contemplate, and I couldn't put something that dull into my mouth. So I put a bit of uncommon sense into action and ground up some black pepper and garlic in my pestle and mortar with some fairly nice olive oil, put that on top of the Polenta in a fairly hot oven and cooked it until it was a little crispy round the edges.


Now I can kind of see what the fuss is about with Polenta. I will admit to more additions to this dish.

With the worry about it being just too bland, I made a quick tomato sauce, and had that and a bit of aubergine antipasti.

All in all, not a bad dinner and a recipe ticked off.

A tiny bit of a PS. I really didn't follow the recipe too well. Now that I have finished cooking and now that I have eaten, I distinclty remember not putting in the butter or cheese. Next time I will try hard to put lots of good stuff in the actual mix.

Bready bread Goodness Me!

Hello, so here is the recipe that I promised you yesterday.

It’s a very modified recipe that I got from www.allrecipes.com. The instructions that came with my bread machine were rubbish, I did pay only €35 for it, so I can’t complain too loudly. I didn't mind having to look around for a good recipe.

I like the bread machine section there, because it has a very handy function that allows you to scale any recipe to fit your machine. It was a bit of trial and error and then some success, just like life.

The fluff about my machine says that it will make a loaf of 1.5kg and, at allrecipies.com I use the recipes scaled to 19 servings. Something that I will say about some of the recipes on allrecipes.com, and indeed a lot of American food sites, is that they are very heavy handed with the sugar.

That's my opinion, and you are very welcome to it.

Bread for the bread machine

INGREDIENTS
1⅓ cups water
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
¼ cup and 2 teaspoons oil, sunflower, groundnut, grapesead or olive oil.
2 cups strong white flour
2½ cups wholemeal bread flour
½ cup whole rolled oats
1 tablespoon and ½ teaspoon active dry yeast

DIRECTIONS
Place water, sugar, salt, oil, bread flour, oats and yeast into pan of bread machine.
Bake on wholemeal bread setting with dark crust selected.

As you can see from the photo, the bread is a little lop sided and sunken on one side, I am still tweaking the quantities. I will let you know of improvements as they happen.

Last night when Totty came home from work, it was sort of late, and there wasn't anything ready to go in the fridge. So we were quite naughty and went to the chip shop. So we had chipper, chip shop sandwiches with fresh bread, and a big mug of milky tea each, to wash it down with. Of course we spread real butter on our bread.

I would have taken a photo, because this is real food porn of the highest degree. I didn't because we scarfed down the lot, far too quickly to even think about sharing!