A Lucid Moment

Someone mentioned pumpkin on mushroom caps and I had a food muse cascade and made all the things.




The mushrooms were simple but worked really well. A smear of pesto on the inside of a portobello mushroom cap, then stuffed with a mixture of steamed pumpkin and crushed hazelnuts. Top with a spray of olive oil, paprika and salt and grill. Win.

The polenta was cooked normally then had a generous amount of dijon mustard and honey stirred through it before being poured into a plastic container and put into the fridge to set into a rectangular block while I got on with messing about with pumpkin and hazelnuts. Smeared with a little sesame oil and sprinkled with sesame seeds and a little salt before going into the oven on the same tray as the mushrooms. They developed a bit of a skin to the outside of them which was pretty much perfect for me. There was some really good texture to these.

A red capsicum got my usual charring trick before being arranged on the plate with rocket and feta and then getting a dressing of olive oil and an amazing raspberry infused vinegar that I was given a while back.

No photo for this one although it wasn't the most photogenic thing I've ever made anyway.

Someone made mention of broccoli soup and with the weather just turning cool I sort of seized on it as a cosy idea. That may also explain the frankly ridiculous amount of dairy in this. Vegans should look away now.

This is what started my love of simmering spring onions in butter. Again, not sizzling, just a good sized slice off the long side of a block of butter in the bottom of my enormous Soup Pot of the Apocalypse™, barely melted and greedily absorbing the flavour of whatever you put in it. In this case, that was a good sized bunch of spring onions, garlic, thyme, marjoram, nutmeg and black pepper. Don't be too shy with the nutmeg. I let that go for quite a while. Them I gradually stirred in a litre (yes, I wound up just using the whole litre!) of milk a bit at a time so that it never wound up actually cold in the pot. As that simmered for a bit, a positively cheesy smell started to come up out of it. I mean that in a good way. From there it was just diced Pontiac potatoes and a chopped up head of broccoli simmered for ages and eventually made smooth with a stick blender.

Marinated olives, Montagnard des Vosges, camenbert, Shropshire blue, sourdough. Henney's Dry Cider. Utter indulgence.

This is really all about the bread. And the photo of omnomnoms.



So some of that is just plonked on a plate. I've done nothing with the bocconcini or the olives. The haloumi is just sliced and fried although anyone who's had it knows that there's no such thing as "just" fried haloumi. The rest of what's on the plate is some small home-grown tomatoes cut in half, some Swiss brown mushrooms, likewise just thrown into a pan with olive oil, black pepper, garlic and basil leaves, some of which were chopped fairly small but mostly torn into big pieces. I wound the heat up and waited until the garlic started to brown at which point it was all done. There's also one of my favourite things which is a red capsicum placed directly onto the gas hob until the skin is charred all over. I need to wind up the exhaust fan for this game or the smoke detector in the kitchen loses its shit completely. Once it's charred, let it sweat in a bag for a little while, After that the skin rubs off really easily if you run it under the tap. It gives the capsicum a wonderful smoky flavour and I love it either by itself, as it was here or as an ingredient in a dish.

The bread though...that was what I was really playing with here. I'd tried making herby bread and it was a bit tentative so I decided to try making it a bit more characterful. Basic bread is four parts flour to three parts water by weight, at least as far as mixing the dough to start with goes, so I put the requisite amount of water in a jug the night before, bruised a generous amount of basil and thyme and shoved it in the jug with a pinch of salt to steep. A day later, it looked like a swamp but smelt amazing. The water and flour was mixed up with another small pinch of salt, more fresh herbs (they were selling a packet of mixed fresh herbs at the supermarket that looked about right. Thyme, rosemary, sage and other things I can't remember) and a teaspoon of yeast and allowed to rise while I got on with shopping and otherwise faffing about. I'd ideally liked to have given this a couple of hours to rise but in the end it still worked out well. I kneaded it, divided it into four balls, put them onto a floured tray, let them rise just a little more and then into an oven at about 190° until they were brown and crusty and made bread smells. Butter for the bread, wine in the decanter. Decadent, slightly over-generous dinner for two.