Kitchen 101: Homemade Bread

I feel a little like I'm giving away a family secret in writing this but to be honest I think everyone should know how to make their own bread.  It's pretty simple once you get the hang of it (even easier if you have a bread maker!) and while no written post is the same as being taught in person, I'm going to do my best to share the basics of bread making with you now.

I've thought a lot about how to go about this and I think the easiest way will be to share my basic recipe and get to important technical things as they come up.

I use just one recipe, which I alter if I want to make something a little healthier or more exciting.  The ingredients list is simple and short and of all the recipes I love, it's the only one I know off by heart.

Knowing how to make bread is awesome if you are doing a pantry challenge since the ingredients are fairly standard and you can use the dough for things like pizza bases and lunchbox bread rolls.

Pantry Challenge: Milo Slice

The great thing about "slice" is that unlike cake or biscuits, there isn't really a required recipe or a formula - as long as you've got a good balance between fat, flour and sugar you're good to go.  A slice is a great opportunity to use up random baking stuff from your pantry since it's pretty hard to go wrong.

Pictured: random baking stuff

This was based on a recipe for a Milo slice from Lift the Lid which I adapted and altered to use up a few things.  The trick with any slice recipe is, essentially, that no matter what flour, oats or dried fruits you add, you add enough liquid (melted margarine usually) that it holds together and that you don't dry it out by cooking it for too long.

Pantry Challenge: Peachy Baked Chicken

As promised, I'm using whatever I can find in the kitchen to make inventive meals this week.  Tonight's recipe is a baked chicken casserole.  I was going for apricot and ginger but for some reason I have about five cans of sliced peaches so I went in that direction instead!

Raiding the pantry and freezer can be an interesting task, but in amongst the dead celery and year-old frozen pie, I found a large tray of chicken legs, a tin of peaches, some fresh ginger and a half can of chopped tomatoes.  With those ingredients, this meal was a bit of a no-brainer and I'm kind of nervous about what the rest of the week holds - I'm pretty sure I just used up all the hidden gems but we'll see...!

I cooked this in the oven since I also wanted to do a bit of baking, it took about an hour and a half so I think it would make a great slow cooker meal.  There is enough sugar in the fruit to provide a glaze for the chicken (which is slow cooked and soft with a yummy crunchy skin) and there's enough sharpness from the ginger and depth from the worcester sauce that the dish isn't too sweet.

Challenge Time

When I was completing my employee development thingee earlier this year, we talked a lot about setting SMART goals - targets that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely mean not only are your goals achievable, but you'll know when you have achieved them.  Saying you want to "eat better", "drink less", "exercise more" is great, but how do you know that you've reached your target?  General, long-term goals are awesome as they give us a starting place and a direction, but it's important we set smaller goals to tick off to keep us motivated and to help us see we're still on track.  Personally, I enjoy setting goals that are either very short-term ("eat three vegetarian meals this week") or very small ("eat one piece of fruit a day")(seriously, that has been an achievement for me!).  There's no harm in starting out small and I know I'm more likely to achieve a small and measurable goal like going for a short walk every day.  In the vein of setting and achieving SMART goals, I have a couple of challenges lined up for myself for the coming few weeks.

First things first, I'm doing Dry July!  For those who have somehow never heard of it, Dry July is a pledge to abstain from alcohol for the whole month of July.  It's something I've been thinking about doing for a while and my goal is to learn more about my relationship with alcohol while of course improving my health.  Having a red wine now and then is meant to be good for heart health, but it's hard to argue that alcohol in general does more good than harm, so (and I know I'm hardly the poster girl for sobriety just yet!) I'd encourage anyone to give something like Dry July a go.  I drink a couple of glasses of wine most nights and I think on average I probably drink the equivalent of about 2-3 bottles of wine per week which is definitely more than recommended.  I'm one week in already and I'm feeling good, although I seem to be super hungry which is not surprising since I've cut out around 2000 calories a week from my diet - equivalent to going a whole day without eating!

Speaking of food,

Did Someone Say Brunch?

The year before my family emigrated from the UK to New Zealand, we spent a summer over here staying with my mum's cousins.  Our first ever Kiwi Christmas, we were served up pikelets for breakfast.  New to summer Christmas customs, I remember Mum asking if a pancake breakfast was tradition and my 'aunty' Audrey saying, "It is now!".  Fast forward sixteen years and pancakes and pikelets have become synonymous with special occassions.  Every birthday, long weekend and Christmas morning we have a spread of pancakes, pikelets or waffles, hot berries, fresh Greek yoghurt  or cream and golden syrup.  Consequently, I love pancakes!  Not just for what they represent, but for the endless topping possibilities and my uncanny ability to eat my weight in them without getting full.

Mum's pancakes were thin crepes, designed to make a couple of eggs and a cup of flour feed a family of five, and perfect for filling with chocolate chips, rolling up and dipping in yoghurt!  There is no recipe in the world that can replicate the fun of sharing a table with family, eating pancakes with sticky fingers on a holiday weekend, but that doesn't mean there's no place at all for pancakes on a normal day.

Cooking for One (+Recipe!)

For the past few years, I've had very little motivation to cook nice dinners for myself.  Days spending eight, nine or ten hours studying or working left me unable to summon the energy to cook a meal "just for one".  Add to that that I've spent the last couple of years working in close proximity to a mall food court and my dinner favourites have gradually degenerated from colourful stir fries and rich roast dinners into alternating takeaways with lazy ten minute "meals" like macaroni cheese and tomatoes on toast.

Lately that has changed.  Making a real effort to eat healthier food has meant putting a bit of planning into my dinners, and while I can't always rally the energy to cook after a long day, rediscovering what it means to "cook for one" has been a total revelation.  As I've said before, growing up we were encouraged to eat a variety of foods but traditional meals always won out.  Winters were special for roast meals with pork crackling and crunchy roast potatoes as well as cakes and scones and home made bread with real butter.  Of course, these were treat foods and like anyone, my family does make an effort to eat healthily but I can't honestly say they're huge fans of brown rice, tofu and quinoa!
Cooking just for myself means I can take these not-so-well-loved but healthy ingredients and experiment with them without having to disappoint anyone with an inedible meal if things don't pan out (excuse the pun!).

And I'm glad I have been able to experiment because I was playing around with the usual suspects (brown rice, tofu, chia seeds...) and I managed to cook up a really yummy, colourful and healthy dish for dinner the other night.  I actually really like using tofu, it's like a little flavour sponge.  In this recipe the tofu is marinated in citrus and ginger which gives a yummy pop of flavour that really complements the beetroot.

Low Fat Pumpkin Pie

I promised in my last post that if I were to do any "healthy" baking I would come back here to share the results.  I have to confess that the pumpkin pie recipe I'm about to share with you is not what I would call healthy per se, and you'll see why soon enough.  It is however very low in fat, especially compared to recipes I have read online - that goes for the filling and the pie crust (feels like sacrilege to call it "pastry"!).  There are one or two simple changes I would make if I was going to cook this up again (stated below) and I think once tweaked with, this would make for a pretty healthful dessert or snack.

I've never made pumpkin pie before and usually I wouldn't attempt a healthy version of anything if I didn't know how to make it the regular way first.  I did quite a lot of reading to see what the pie filling is made up of and it's basically a pumpkin custard.  Most recipes call for a couple of whole eggs, and lots of cream and sugar although one or two suggested using mascarpone or even low fat yoghurt to create a more cheesecake-type filling.  Recognizing that I needed a mixture that thinned out the pumpkin but still set to a creamy texture once cooked, I used my baking instincts to create the below recipe. The resulting filling was creamy and spicy and pretty indulgent actually.

The pie crust is kind of a different story.  Real pastry is made up of one part white flour to one part butter; it's less of a "sometimes" food and more of a "birthday and Christmas" food. Don't get me wrong, I love pastry as much as the next person but if I think too hard about what's in it I get the health heebie jeebies!  With that in mind the pie crust below is an excellent alternative.  The recipe I used is from my trusty Healthy Food Guide magazine and was designed for a savoury pie that would be eaten straight from the oven. The pastry is pretty bland but it held itself together and served its purpose of holding all the filling in one place.  If I were to use it again for a dessert pie I'd probably add a bit of a cinnamon or maybe even some sweetener to give a bit more flavour.